University – poems 2 die for

AT THE UNIVERSAL EMPORIUM (OF UNIVERSAL EMPORIUMS)

too many stick-legged statues
things on plinths

it is not
as I remember it
nothing like my old haunt

unless the harbingers
of universal emporiums
within universal emporiums
are not
statues at all

far
from it

here I am wandering
between the chapels and stalls
following my nose
hunting down
hints of
imperium

calculating
how much cement
and marble
it will need
they will need

how many rolls
of fabric too
to craft
a tapestry

tapestry wide
long enough
to record everything

cement-coloured people
springing up
out of nowhere
animal,
vegetable, mineral

once they had
hoped to, promised to
evolve,
become transformational

the dream of thinking
the dream of making

hard to believe
it was once centered here

epicentre of focus
sweetest cosmic algorithim
all disappeared

EDIFICE

let’s start with the cliche

we used to drive past
your supreme campus
buge, lofty bukldings

and I used to dream
of being here, battling
my way against
the odds
tp achieve some
sort of degree

taking two trains
to ger here
and the climb
up the mountain

red gown red wine
one glorious moment
standing in the sudden
sunlight
outside of the Hall
my very lazt dsy

and you
your last day here too, twenty
four years earlier
younger
that previous graduation
(already becoming
part
of the furniture)

and thinking
here in this place doomed
blessed to always
keep crossing paths

quantum entangled, caught
in the same
fine-
spun web

not really not really
empirically verifiable
falsifiable

just two names once spoken
in the same passing
oblique sentence

two names
to conjure with, before

they
headed off in different directions quite
diametric

and me long before this
floating past the University
in my father’s car
making
a wish

MAINSTREAM NARRATIVE

MAINSTREAM NARRATIVE
(for the students)

the great locomotive
steamed out of the station

built up
momentum
determined to cross
from
ocean to
ocean

but
ran out of track
and crashed

unable to
hold up that weight
on its cardboard wheels

SPRING CLEAN

wish I was young enough
and close enough geographically
to join you in
your protest encampment

a swatch of colour, a carnival
vibe, foregrounded against
the grey architectural
ersatz imitation of things
Athenian that marks
your alma mater’s
mode of academic being

the joy of community,
diversity
and alternate, far more
utopian
student perspectives

is not a thing to be tolerated
by a militaristic, utterly confused
and confounded, imperialistic regime
you just so happen
to call home

you are subjecting to a fantastic
targeted spring cleaning

throwing out the old
that you do not need
that all
too painfully
does not fit in

POEM FOR THE PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

FREEZE-DRIED

fudge soft
was my brain at my
first philosophy class

Plato’s dialectic wholesome,
why should not the State be
good and strong
and solid and true?
why should I not be
thinking axiomatically
working my
way slowly
towards great gnosis
at the cave’s entrance

why should this not all be,
even in a philosophy class,
some desert of
the real shadow show
programmed to
amuse
this unspecified
superior intelligence?

But these are questions for
later
not for poor white boy
at mountainside university
refugee from
all that Christian National
Education might teach
true
to apartheid

and so, face-beaming, I
did drink it, savour
swallow
every joyous scrap of
the fat one via
Professor Obi Wan’s
interpretation

the Jewish boy in the corner
(so slightly older
reading his way into
territory
full-on genealogical, beyond
good and evii

scowling at my
naivete,

having not
become my friend

Nietzsche not yet
my philosopher of choice

outside, of course, outside
the theatre down
the slopes
beyond the steps

something stirring
something
at a different pace,
with a different
dialectic

about to explode
about
to rock to the core

but this
down the line

from up in this high place
easy to calculate
work with
established truths,
historical certainties, clear
percentages

down there
as bra Chris wrote

its all
in graffiti, still
yet in code

soon
world going to
go full on punk, class-war
deconstructive

defeat in Vietnam

meaning
power
of powers

determined to determine
we think how they say,
are
so subtly, subtly
forced
to do as we are told

mind put on hold
fast-food fried down
to the last algorithm

brain
freeze-dried, feel
free to liquify

fudge soft
back then

but maybe
Plato was right

BACK TO

I was back to
the futured
to my
old university

one of those ribald
dreams where
the basic narrative comes
courtesy of
capitalist content creator

and there I was
both ancient alumnus
and yet feeling
the total freshman

all my higher degrees
revoked
on grounds of
relevancy

struggling in the climate
contrasts to make
my way both
upstream
and downstream

intellectually frigid, frozen
broken
desperate to
if not remake
at least
reshape
the wheel

whilst the Sun scorching brains
leering contemptuously
through
the stratosphere

protoype for every
      god Emperor, every golden
King
    and, yes, indeed
I am afraid to add, every
trivial
    trivial Dean

as I made my way through
the panoply of departments
renamed
where not structured entirety

every theory
so local, limited, narrow
yet
same same-same

not of the intellect
but of ideology

servile, appeasing, without
a mind
to contemplate thought
of difference, thought
of resistance

triumph of appearance
and death of shame

back futured, back dated
limbo lateral
shifted
what else should I say?

ALIGNED

ALIGNED cannot escape it this recurrent nightmare wandering lost around a campus looks like every university I ever taught ever studied at looks nothing vaguely like any of them at all and where is my time-table, my course guide, my GPS nothing in this scary dream line working like clockwork siderial-aligned and my classroom, when I get there, terminally empty an easier death metaphor would be so hard to find