Tag Archives: truth

YOUR TRUTH

YOUR TRUTH

for so long
I swore by your truth

you must
have laughed

saw
me coming

led me
by the nose

and as totally
misleading narratives go
yours was a
beauty

reality, truth,
totally flipped
on its head

and what power
you now marshal
what wicked schemes
imaginations
     you do recruit

to save
that lie (fountain
of ever fabrication
that flowed their after)

your
    divine line

and here, frankly, I must
confess I am
        terminally disappointed
            

POTATOES

POTATOES

potatoes
are no ways
hypocrites

even if
hiding the meat
beside them

cabbages
do not plot
against constitutional
free speech

rhubarb grows tall
neither by
virtue of
disinformation, nor
by spin
or misdirection

they take the world as it is
do not cater to its functions
and fictions

are there
    to be eaten

VARNISH

VARNISH

he vanished
because he lost
his varnish

the gloss
fell off

end of the licence
afforded to clown face

debate now raging
openly, covertly,
between
    reflect
and refract

pitting the opaque
up against
the transparent

no space in this world
of everything hidden,
full disclosure

for the serious serial
beauty of the translucent

the mystery if the word as
it conjures killer fact

hard to
     live
         where condemned
to reflection, purity
of copy
     completeness itself

EDITORS

EDITORS

the editors called
them in
hectored them

told them that
to keep
the people down

we need
to keep language

he we she it all
they them

need to kill
the words
kill
   and liquidate
kill
   and paraphrase

topple words
from their throne
strip poetry
to the bone
(reduce it to a
sweet
    bare rhyme)

down
down
down

   kill and devour

reduce all
words to spit
and spume

our few
      true words will

hold all power
              and so
the unthinkable

can
   be made to think

and think
the death of truth to power

HOW

HOW

how shall
all this remembered

find its way
into the the books

be retold
by the old folks

taught
in the clsssroom?

will this desperate spin
you are Hell-bent
on manifacturing

find its way from
your dizzy life-ignoring,
image-igonoring
brains onto
revered pages?

or will history be
your bitch
    as truth is now?

BLOOD

BLOOD

I whitewashed
my poem

silly me
I got all my facts wrong

good job
the mainstream
media was
on hand
to correct me

poet nobody
cleans up his act
at least now
I might make
some kind of
headline

worth the whitewash
restoring the page
to its pristine blankness

worth
all the effort picking
up the body parts
mopping
    up the blood

WE TOO

WE TOO

we love to
play the language
game
     we two do
come at greasing
the signifier
not
from different
poles  entirely

my games with sound
and sense
more about
      foregroundimg other,
difference, perhaps
a touch
     of deviance

yours
      (if I might
proffer
this distinction) about
what is established, believed,
holy ordinary,
  sacred same

how we can get
          the narrative to
go full
python
    swallow the facts
(crush in its coils any
                truth inconvenient)

and of course, after my little
pointless spiel
       boredom, dismissal
the worst I get

the guilt that comes
              with bad poetry

not, as in your case, if I
dare suggest

         every kind of sick and
unconscionable paid-for
complicity

that
     shades us into dystopia
thence living Hell

SPECIES

SPECIES

time travel back
to ancient Athens
they made Socrates
drink hemlock
on the grounds
of corruption
lucky for us

the charge did not stick
we saw
through thst
slander, laughed
at that spin

not that we have
the capacity to do that today
when we revere our leaders
for the lies
that they tell us
buy into the fake narratives
as our matter of
life our death

refuse to believe anything
that is not illogical
and ittational
    as testament to the devotion
with which
  we contrive our decline

time travel back to Ancient Athens
like an alien planet now
so distant in
       space and time