Tag Archives: TS Eliot

HOLLOW

HOLLOW

I believe it was he
who wrote The Hollow Men
so obvious
person to speak to
fighting this
emptying out
inside me

tried to track
him down
show him my words
ask why they sound
like
empty shells, receptacles,
dull and
distastefully metallic

scoured the deserts, every
academic precinct, places
of learning on
both sides of the pond

Nobel Prize man, last
I heard of him
his very words
being mouthed
magnificently by
Mr Brando, renegade
colonel
   stripped of every shred
of normalcy by
anti-coloniaj war,

by now
the malaise my words
spreading paragraph
by paragraph
turned exponential

a death pallor already
so far down the line hardly
worth talking about.

PAR FOR THE COURSE

PAR

par for the course
par for the curse

mute the Wasteland
savage reduction of
noise
    stanza
by
stanza

you feel it in your bones
tremors under the skin
your tectonic
plates shifting

specialists mailing in
their verdict
      you on the verge
of breakdown

hanging by a thread
golden, astral silver
or maybe just
Manchester cotton

an industry booming
blackening the sky with it
suddenly
       in the wash there
is blood
much red blood
humanity split, a house divided

par
   for the course
echoes, allusions, vertigo
in the poetic factory,
foundational mythologies,

whatever
   it takes to finesse vers libre

rich resources to be mined
be inevitably exhausted

see there
    what scripture remembers
we should know,
it needs to
tell us

   a door opening, first
thought springing
to mind
  must be of awakening

so much out there
the picture freezing
in anticipation

of expected regret,
customary hesitation

step
    by guarded step

par for the course

,

THAN WE WERE LED TO BELIEVE

THAN WE WERE LED TO BELIEVE

ideas come and go
court words, sometimes
bond with them

come and go
like, as this starched aesthete said,
like women talking
of Michelangelo
lovers of classic form

or they sing
like sirens to follow
them deep
even though they know
whilst poets, artists we
may yet
be
we are nevertheless mere
mortals
may well be lured
by the mystery to
embrace our own drowning

and there, strandloper, desert
shadow
we may well find you
catch you
between the lines
more agreeably human, far less
invisible than hoped for
as you had intended

not the catalyst
we were led to believe

TURING TEST

TURING TEST

Sylvia and Tom
chatbot avatars of
two of the greatest
poets ever
     put pen to paper

  grill me about my poem,
(this poem); my life
(this life)

slyly stretching my
humanity as far
as it will go (much
machine learning
in the process)

watch me sink, suffocate
under the weight
of all their accolades

learning to predict
to phonomenal exactitude
where all these
    metaphors, images are
headed;

where they all are coming from
what parts of me
are  
    in harmony, symmetry
with what it is I am them
force-feeding

scanning for intelligence
anything/all
    that is real.
.

LOUD AND CLEAR

LOUD AND CLEAR
   “I do not think they
will sing for me.”

Yeats on steroids
Yeats on steroids

that’s what he called me
avatar of that man

whose every
photograph suggests
crusty, prickly

whose every word to me
so generous,
    illuminating, out
of left field

such a rooted traditionalist
yet swing door open
to extreme
     innovation

to speak soothing words to
the loneliness of the soul

and me
    like your Prufrock, like
that aging Irish senator
propped up
on a stick
      talking to school children

them wondering
what that
old fool
    was talking about
(as kids
   will always do)

and you
I laughingly told you
that your
    Wasteland was a
(how did I put
it my
    memory failing me
Oh yes
I have it!)

ghost tapestry,
tapestry of ghosts
tissue
     of allusion

which is rich
coming from me, standing
before you, metaphorically
speaking
   (could not be
more metaphorically speaking)

alluding to you
your poetry

my sense of your presence

how it was back then
some lunatic giving us
a slice
  of What the Thunder Said

for, of all things, our (my)
fucking matriculation
English
   examination

who is that one who
walks beside you

that ghostly
desert voice you cannot hear

but is
   the poem, your poem

my great beloved poet and poem
possum, Mr, Professor TS, Tom

I hear you
loud and clear

do not need
my steroids
to hear you loud and clear


POEM FOR TOM

POEM FOR TOM

it’s one helluva
gradient

from
   alphabet blocks
to
  drowning Prufrock

that sledge hurtling
downward
through the poem.
at the beginning of your
most epochal
poem

but do not
forget the cats, must not
ever ever ever
forget
   the cats, little Sasha
meows

for when
you are out in death deserts
wondering what it
was you
missed that
the thunder said
and someone ghostly, incredible,
always walking
beside you

little Sasha is there
bouncing along
       avatar of life, beside
you too

though
   perhaps
        in my world of high
and deep
inspired by you
I haven’t seen her yet