BET YOU

BET YOU

bet you
you read this wrongly

take it
the wrong way
to a wrong place
against
the grain

exult in your power
as supreme
bad reader

sorry to
point this out
rain on your
May Day parade
of tanks
and workers

but everybody
misreads me
it is my fate,
the flaw
in my system

story
of my life
that gets blocked
at the school
board

denounced
in the praesidium

even though
it is all
so unreal

a game,
a mystery within
a mystery

one of those
far-fetched, trying
to push the envelope,
post-
modern, self-
reflexive tales

recounted by the most
untrustworthy of
openly
unreliable narrators

way too
metaphoric of its own
good

mirror image
of the stupid sublimity
of all
cosmic creation

FRESH FRUIT

FRESH FRUIT

On the farm
I wonder

about the ideology
of a tree

the entire tree:
roots, leaves, branches

cannot
escape asking myself
what haiku currently
courses
   through the flowers

Of course
    this is (dear reader, I
do recognise) a
category
   mistake
of the first order, and will
no doubt, none too late,
be brought
   to my attention amidst
much
  wild snarling

and thus forgive me
my contextualizing in a poem
how much theory
pervades
        everything (truly
it is in
its nature
    to be an invasive species)

and Fall and Autumn and
all those mellow feelings
much
   written about

some ode or other
      that leaf to dead leaf
is
  remembered

all the wherefores and whys
as to how
  this system getting greener
came
   not just
    to be but
into conscious being

ruthless and polite both
stuck in a rut this day whilst
supposed
    of infinite variety

and my voice
     estranged, coming back

to me alien

as if
   freshly arrived, in awe of
all capacity to
shift the
      word of perspective

see things differently.
   

SILLY ME

SILLY ME

silly me
how silly could
I be!

all the ills
of the world
I do allow
to make
me
sickly

so please
do not simply
condemn

if in this
fall
   from grace
I do

maybe
vomit up the odd
poem
    or two

perhaps
quite hideous

possibly
outright
               sublime

silly not to factor
all that is genius into
the chaos
          of big picture

EMILY SYNDROME

EMILY SYNDROME

stuck some poems
in a folder
    ready for revision
(Oh,
     happy day!)

left them not
so long but
long
   longer than
intended

albeit without Sun
or air or
indeed watering
at all

so imagine my delight shock
and horror that
day of
   days, moment
of reopening

when found the little bastards
to have thrived
and multiplied, some

even grown in size
to embrace the gamut
from
     split little
atom through to
       Pandora of expanding universe

poem growing up
prophetic,
apocalyptic
      
            whispering, screeching
to the Universe

their
    primal truth as mirror
and
testimony (dear
reader)

to all
   expanding size