SLIP
sorry
I was writing this poem
and my pen
slipped
the text
spilled
all over
the place
ruining our
time together
wrecking our date
feel I need
to underline, bold font,
how
regretful it all
is
how embarrassed I feel
took out my
pen to write these words
construct
an apology
and the damn pen as
pens do
went all Derrida on me
DESERT DE ZERT
walk through the desert
calling things into being
wishing things into being
I articulate
but the words I pronounce
live on their own planet
sometimes
when you see
ocean you
write desert
sometimes when desert
you write ocean
this is how poetry works
how delusion words
which is the affinity
that allows me to gasp
with hateful admiration
see exactly what you are doing
X-ray specking your brain
as it processes
its a lie so deep, so
outrageous it cannot do justice
to your sacred spoken
mission to protect your
people
transparently transposed
from the
truth of the need
to protect yourself
NIGHT FLOWERS (PROFANE) night flowers vanished sunlight put paid and so it goes: desperate levity, quick fix beauty on social media aspects of your hot body (Aphrodite parts) jammed into my face a place to shine: her scent is there to tell us today she is ghosted by the thought of a lover, her lover not can get no satisfaction sorting her an instant poem there if not resonant then at least afterglow fine tune the world therefore whilst it is turning exactly for sleep and chemistry are apposite in dream (flood of words and, behold!, a ship sailing home on them) what is lost in this exchange: ancient joy to master or be enslaved always, even in the bleached church courtyard, something pagan, much that is profane
RANCH (BACK AT THE) here’s a tough thought for a tough time anarchy fresh from the UK back at the ranch we desperately playing scrabble to unscramble everything twisted out of shape fallen out of line as definition drifts; seems like we fresh out of tiles to tile subtle find our groove, roof liberty’s lexicon (defunct form roof) make what will stand outstand outlive this funk test of time (canary in a cage) as our mosaic now wakes (leave this here as my missive on our most ambitious take)
SUMMIT ten thousand candles a sea of flowers hundred bottles of fragrant oils and above all three stage booster . to launch our capsule summit of my romantic desires
SYNCH
“there is no try”
Yoda, The Empire
Strikes Back
should try to
hammer it into
my head
not to worry
what you think
take this
as it is
me
as I am
this my style, that
your style
maybe here’s where
they can
blend
dance in
synch
do much more
than co-exist
DALI BREAKFAST
nothing quite says
“Dali dream breakfast”
than a few octopus
tentacles and a
bowl of red squid
eaten inside
a divers
helmet
other octopi
and squid
swimming around
the helmet
peering inside
shocked,
horrified at
the
surreal shock show
yet by no means
as surreal as other reality TV
ALLOW ME
Oh let me
determine to
re-engineer
every paroxysm of
crescendo in
our
head-
to-head spectacle
be nothing if not
gorgeous subtle
in whatever word
interface
with all my
Sun and Moon,
everything of mine
tuned to
your specific sublimities
causal, yet Oh so perfunctory
and utterly lesser
in rapturous
capacity
as is
Shakespeare soliloquy to
shriek of delight to
close
drunken rant
superfluous as
expressed
BOOKWORM
(for MARK Z DANIELEWSKI)
a mysterious book
appears
what am I saying?
a mysterious collection
of texts appears
housed
quite compactly
in a mysterious bookcase
(in fact the fit between
books and
bookcase
is,
uncertainty theorem aside,
mathematically exact)
my fall from grace
was reading these books, taking
from this tree
though the fruit was gorgeous
waking up
from violently lucid dreams
and vomiting over
the bedspread
I figured there might be some value
in the sacred prohibitions
against the blasphemy
of writing
reading
but
who wrote these books
and who wrote the words leaking
through the brickwork
suddenly
manifesting themselves
on the walls?
I write down my dream
but then read further, find,
it was
already written
suddenly the term “intertextual” is no longer
just radical polyphony of meaning
but being stretched and pulled apart
by the conflicting
gravitational pull
of dramatically dissonant worlds
I burn
all I have written
the storehouse of my life
stacked in a pyre
having failed the inquisition
we are
all locked in a fiction, a forever
thread-creating, fabric splicing brain
stuck
in
either hemisphere
doomed
to tell our tale
leaves pages
things metaphoric,
synonymous
left
all over the place
poems 2 die for