Tag Archives: war

SO SURREAL

SO SURREAL

O (for black hole)
it has become so surreal
so much
   tunneled under I no
longer feel the ground
to be
   safe
       under my feet

no place to shelter
no place to hide

they sow fire and death
from above, supersonic vampires
(must give our
    instant mistrust to
mythology
        of eagle)

so
  messed up and mixed
the blood that God (so you
tell me)
wants
   to keep apart
        churned together so thick

and who can
demarcate, who can divide

madness from reason, demonic
from divine
     Heaven from Hell?

and you don’t
   have to read up on rapture
to know we are
in Hell

except that place is pure evil,
unmitigated by
                this stupidity
                              that we
see all around us, bombarding us
from all screens

definitve of humanity (no not
science
    or philosophy)

and there are
        chasing the white rabbit
wondering why

no sign of Oz

just bad stand up politicians
so horrible at comedy

should say

              truly terrible
and leave it at that

O for black hole
(this Universe not going well)

ON MARS

ON MARS

do not breathe the air
the atmosphere
will scramble your brains
more than
they have already
been
scrambled

this is the red planet
getting redder by the day

planet of war and
hard masculinity
in human mythology

sister planet; brother world
look into this glass
and see our world, the one
you left behind
collapse into chaos

the Martians, though, are
ready for you
     have read that story
by Ray Bradbury

are about to lull you into
the belief that
there can be a place
in this Universe to
find or build
equivalent to Heaven

will strike and destroy
when you are living that
dream
     threatening to
destroy their civilization, colonize
them out of existence

sometimes ones salvation
lies in the strategy
     most insidious of all

SUREFIRE

Ah, yes,
social Darwinism
be your inclination
pitbull terriers —
      they
are your thing;

but would you pit, against
a tank, this,
or some other poem

without ceramic armour,
without armour-piercing
depleted uranium shell?

For all
       poem got going for it
is knowledge of shadow, and
pulse of humanity

and that is
sure-fire defeat, on
hiding to nothing,
as a Nobel Laureate does suggest
himself suggest

Oh, if only tanks could be
stopped in their tracks
by bloke
     with shopping bang

barrels get so stuffed with
gorgeous flowers things
might
       misfire; shells
and bullets simply melt

in the face of all
         that sweetness and light
(and
     metaphor, let
us not forget)
the antennae
   of the species
       wrote on paper, in clay,
on the digital universe

who dare order?
         what dare fire?

but then, who has ever
really talked to the mind of a tank?
               


LOST

LOST

all quiet
on the poetry front

bards on both sides
scrying down telescopic sights
in the crosshairs
here a sonnet, there
an ode
scribbled rap lyric
way before its time

let us not forget
hands and fingers that
could not be more creative
traversing self-
loading wespons that fire
ten to
twenty rounds per second

whole volumes complete oeuvres up in thin air
biting
the dust (death by
industrial warfare such
a monstrous cliche)

not much space here
for cross-
pollination, seminal
influence, collusion

even less
hope for free

translation (whole
generation
of the not-yet-
lived-yet
lost)