cannot count
out repentance like
a clip of coins
say 100 times or
write on a blackboard
just let
them take your heart
weigh it
cut out a slice
hold it
for safekeeping
30 Wednesday Sep 2015
cannot count
out repentance like
a clip of coins
say 100 times or
write on a blackboard
just let
them take your heart
weigh it
cut out a slice
hold it
for safekeeping
24 Thursday Sep 2015
ON MY PLANET
I was catching an X-ray tan
on my planet
(planet that is
exclusively mine and
mine alone)
when news of your film reached me, Mr Kubrick, and
I did long for a screening
for you
to tear away the shutters from
my black box of light
doing stuff to my head
that the row of gray-haired executives who left the theatre in droves
before the Clavius Moonbase, let alone
Voyage to Jupiter
could never understand, no matter
how many monoliths
descended on them
took them through stargates
to be here
where I am
on the other side of the darkness.
23 Wednesday Sep 2015
Aunt Josephine and the Gestapo
A panther waits patiently
under the street-lamp for her fate
upon which
depends the fate of others
and why should what is
so clearly built to, born to
please
have such a sharp conscience,
know the humanity of
her politics
so intimately, nothing there to
be argued away, be
second-guessed?
In her mind she rehearses
a few old jitterbugs, figures she
can assemble the Sten gun in
her bag in
next to no time
if they who
have turned the very idea of the human inside out
ever wish to make a
fiery rendezvous of it
(her French so impeccable, just
the slightest trace of
Mississippi drawl, sweet
Southern slang)
as our
nearest thing to panther her eyes
pick out everything, read the street
as if she wrote the novel
and in her (well-manicured) claws
nothing could be safer
if freedom
were a flower who
might harm a
single petal?
23 Wednesday Sep 2015
Posted historical, Poem, poetry, War
inAlong the Somme
(for my grandfather, John Duckett, Military Medal)
My brain
is bolt-action
is exhausted of ideas
a clip at a time.
I stand by this river that no
military historian has ever enthused over
yet, in my own way,
I carry enough guilt to
have it filled to the brim
I call
it guilt, find it
heavy as a
millstone, as
a backpack filled with
huge holy rock
you, looking
from a
slightly different perspective
call it angst, perhaps
schadenfreude
and here we meet
in a place of neither
victory
nor defeat
are not death’s ghost creatures meeting
across the wire, in lethal
chlorine mist, to
enact a little fable, just a
line on a page in a chapter of
a volume of the saga of hatred.
Ever slow, the river flows.
It flows like time greased in clinging unction
enough time then
for you to tell me
that the clouds in your town
are set in stone, will
stay there forever
as we make our separate ways, up
the line, follow the trenches, grooves
dug deep into memory
hoping — as we strain for
sound of stray shell of
cluttered machine-gun burst —
that there is place
and
there is time
for
roadside redemption, quick
resurrection. Stain of
old sin to drain like fresh blood.
22 Tuesday Sep 2015
Posted death, literary allusive, mythical/mythological, Ocean, Poem, poetry, The ocean, the sea, Water
inSTARBOARD
Over again I feel the finger and find thee
Gerard Manley Hopkins
That is the side of the ship
you should throw me over
ask me
to swim out
until I, no
shore to strike out for, get exhausted
must needs
do a Hart Crane
reciting the Brooklyn Bridge poem whilst
I feel myself sinking
guzzle
on a few stars together with
so much water
take them
down with me (for
sure this is
place they have never been, whose
depths have always escaped them
so much
down there to
behold before their
fire
finally squelched, the
light forever
extinguished.
22 Tuesday Sep 2015
what the
trees
tell
the lumberjack
is lost
not in
translation
but
abbreviation
21 Monday Sep 2015
Posted metapoetic/metafictional, Poem, poetry
ina flower was lodged in my body
each petal
like a piece of shrapnel
having to be
dug out
until the blood ran
and the ink, too
21 Monday Sep 2015
Posted Language, metaphoric, Poem, poetry, wordplay
inSpeaking Metaphorically
In love
I would always
fail her
when she wanted desire
I gave affection
when she needed caress
I gave care —
sometimes less
where she
longed for
metaphor
finally, I could only find metonymy,
metonymy, metonymy,
bare, unravelled, from beginning to end.
21 Monday Sep 2015
Posted Intertextual, ironical/comic, literary allusive, philosophical, Poem, poetry
inAlice in Wittgenstein
Huge sky
tiny head
whoops! silly me
letting
that thought slip
which you might think is a rabbit but is
actually a duck
strange bedfellows
your being, my nothingness
and
me the male, the one
who (I am just surmising) is
supposed to fill
ogf what we cannot speak
bettter keep silent especvially if, sexually speaking,
mouth is full
and now you chastise
my logic as if
earlier begging for
your body
was begging the question
(I can do tricks, I can
put on a frill and do
clever doggie)
two birds without feathers (one more bird than the other)
clamped together under bag of feathers
trying to
get the old machinery to
humour us
to work (and there, just mentioning
labour we see
Marx and his much German progeny
speculating at the window
hard
to make out whether it is (Mum’s the word)
mode critical analysis or mode standing ovation).
21 Monday Sep 2015
Posted Desert, Poem, poetry, South African
inWithout Parallel
Husks so hard to crack they make the sky bleed.
The moon
languishing in current state of disrepair
envies you
for the stoned soundness of your sleep
I shall not tell her (or the man whose face she has rented )
how rough your nights are,
how your dreams
fail to set sail, never
learnt to fly
are set in
places that this
essentially landlocked, desiccated, dry.
Tomorrow the sun
will steal up upon us, having already decided
whether to play generous despot of heat and light
or raging tyrant, determined to kill us
with temperatures that
soar
but at least something soars: I see
the swat seeping through your dress, and
with it
the outline of your breasts
and wonder if we
shall ever soar, take flight,
perform a range of manoeuvres to
astound the world with the
bravado of our
aerobatics
even emulate Daedalus, Icarus in their
duel with the Sun
even as
thousand feet below
beauty mushrooms: six petalled umbrellas burst like
strange oriental flowers
spreading shade
and shade is a commodity we can well do with
ditto for (even more microcosm) a troop of red-brown ants
marching up a steel sluice
but you and I
looking from the outside (not
taking the time to perform
ant-ethnography, ask
them how they feel) will
assume them to be blessed in
being so
heat-unhindered
but we might broach the matter with them
ask if they have
heard how far this semi-desert stretches beyond
the border hard into Botswana
a legend of dryness
whose only voice a
fire monologue, whose
only music
blank nocturnes when
Sun is swallowed once more by Eastern horizon
(give praise, give thanks for
the jaws of that
dragon
we shall, you and I
taking cool evening water to wash
away the terrible allure (allure
without parallel) of the full day’s sweat.