writing – poems 2 die for

HATCHLING

by no means
profligate
or ultra fertile

I have fathered
(just to offer
a conservative
estimate)
around twenty
thousand children

or perhaps, being
somewhat elapid
in my nature,
I should call
them hatchlings,
think of them
as true
to type, reflections
of my serpentine, often
venomous demeanor

not brown
like the Aussie
brown snake
nor black, death-velvet
mouthed like
our own
dear black mamba

but up with this gang
whose wisdom so far
exceeds what
I can barely
achieve posing
as human

twenty thousand offspring
(and maybe some change)
so don’t
ask their names,
their achievements
and titles
where and how
documented, perhaps
preserved
no hatchling of mine
has any respect
for all yout acadenic hypocrisies
and concerted double dealings

trying to live
their lives, make their way
slither into
your consciouness, root out
rodents and such like

many
killed on the spot
victims of crude misunderstanding

so many
already disappeared, barely
seeing light of day

the odd one, perhaps
even this one (for what
ever rational, logical,
critical, aesthetic reason),
destined to remain

DUCKED EVERY MODULE

“The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, and from without.”
 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

ducked every module
on Romanticism
during my
English degrees

and yet maybe
that is exactly where
my antipathy
to the movement
must have
originated from

kind of imagining myself
a poet, sort of poet, or
something not
too far from that
as I wandered down
towards the River Tame
(tributary of
the far more
famous Mersey)
stretched out
to the East and West
and South
the Pennine Moors
Bronte territory,
roughest, toughest, most desolate
part of England

still
a ways to walk
to get there

and me for now
meandering riverward

slipping through my neighbour
crazy Gordon Shelley’s
immaculately
mown garden

passing the tiny glade
of wild narcissi
(dangerous lure, that
purity)

and down into the hollow
graveyard for one single
completely
broken piano

its innards spilled, everywhere
rods and hammers
and scattered keys

leit motif
for someone’s life
if not mine entirely

try to duck things
and they still
get to
nail you
one way or’t tother

RHYME MINE

turned over a stone
was expecting
a scorpion
found
a solipsist

expecting
a scorpion not
my totem
or taboo

in which case
should have
thought fish cusp
with ram
and asp
would have been apt

but as sepent kind go
I do like to flatter
myself imagining
I must, could
be a mamba

a syllabic or alliterative few
metres of snake

claiming you as mine
as soon as cobra eyed you

swept
you into my coils

bade you, forced you
to teach me
couplets
ever-steady rhyme

turned over a stone
not expecting
to make
acquaintance

DEMOLITION

am
playing the game
DEMOLITION

not to be confused
with the poem
or the sometime-
to-be-finished
novel
of the same name

have so far today
clocked up
millions of kills, soon
to break
my own record

expect
globally, out
in the real world,
people lining up
to get
inserted into
the game
assume the identity
of a key character

as for me, however,
being just
your run-of-the-mill
addict

could not go
so far, invest all that, make
that level of commitment

live
total fight or flight
from
shockwave
to shockwave

beyond my mental
emotional capacity
to play
dusk to dawn, dawn
to dusk
(possibly for all eternity)
from a first
person perspective

right now right now
as we hit
the last stanza

I am somewhere in my mind
playing the DEMOLITION game

LITTLE FRIEND

here
we are

facing off against
each other
across
unwritten
white spaces

no idea
what to expect

and me taking
the initiative
weaponizing
this encounter

(taking
my cue

from Pacino
in “Scarface”)

demanding you
get
into the poem

say hello
to my little friend

TECHNICAL

let this
be a breeze

a zephyr if you will
whistling around
your ears

better use
this term respecting
your
preference for
the physical

wish
to be technical

perfect weather for kite
and magic carpet alike

swing-
wing metaphor

exact
careful prosody

plotting your flight path
to the end of the page
(unless
such velocity

you escape
to deep space)

EASY

poetry is easy
you
just write it
and there it be
it is there

look at these
lines for example
nothing here
of note
what
could be easier?

everything open
totally transparent

complete absence
of the overly complicated,
tricky metaphor
hint
of theory

stuff that might
mask, deflect, expose,
distract,
misdirect

present you
with who knows what
confusion, dissonance
about
the nature of
your world, the world,
and who in this
world
in fact you
thought
you really are

get you to stay
from what you
know
to be true

were
told to be true
in heart and
soul
battle of
hearts and minds along
strictest of lines

between which
should not read

so easy to
read these lines

miss yourself
falling between them

there

you

have always been
there it lies

BLESSING

I chiselled this poem
out into stone

laborious work
but it
felt worth it

wrote the whole thing
with a stylus cutting
markd into
clay tablets

spray painted
a whole stanza
in plain view
on the side of a building
in the middle of the night

daubed
it in blood
desecrating a flag

keyed it in electronically
pressed send and
believed it
published instantly
bouncing across the ether

whispered it into
your soft
ear

typed it out with suddenly
agile fingers
observed it flow
across your body

taking
it
to the house

point of truth where
you are at your most receptive

most fully conscious
of how
transcience here
comes into play

poem
be both blessed and
doomed
to disappear

UNTIL

poetry is
the easy way

simplicity itself
line

of least
resistance

a quantum wave
of words
about to
flow

no huge
necessity this
be

in any structured
shape, size
or form

any
particular direction

in your head
mon lecteur acad-
                 emique
length
     of line
geometry of page
                slice and dice
of caesura
stanza

and here
we have a bitch of a poem
that refuses to budge

your fingers hovering above
the page
a picture of frustration
portrait of
inertia

nothing ever seemed
so impossible
until it didn’t

nothing even
beginning to flow until
it would
not stop

poetry is difficult until
it isn’t

poetry
is no way
easy

until it is

until
(out of nowhere)
it writes itself

COMPOSITION

pass me your pen
and I shall note down
those distances

the chalk on the blackboard
having list its imperative

the writing
on the wall changing
the moment it
gets written

the truth of relativity
not yet board-dustered off
yet already
done and dusted

and how many tiny white
flecks
look like motion-
captured stars, galaxies
in their movement?

at if
squeezing
the truth out of us,
pinching our analogies

the Universe were
writing us
writing the Universe itself

putting us
into, pulling us
out oh the picture

trying to figure out
which composition
works best

which
makes the
most sense