IN THE VANGUARD

time to
fill your poems
with weapon words

tell the reader that
if they don’t like what
you have written
this is PARNASSUS
they will have
to fight their way
out of the trap
you have set them

Oh we must use words to
lure in and surround like
Hannibal at Canae
let them stream in thinking
their social media power will
flatten all before them

at the end
we shall give them a couplet
where they can leave with
honour the Roman way
using the same sword they thought
mightier than this katana
I am wielding now
in my imagination

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ANYTHING BUT

INNOCENT

same old
same old

you could wind the clock back
until the spring broke
and nobody would notice

some people die long before they stop living
and the even-worse converse of this
statement is also true

look through the window and the
imagination insists that
the sky should be alien
and filled with flying saucers

look through a saucer porthole
and the same imagination insists
on replacing spectacular cosmic events
with rustic or pastoral green grass
and tree scene

you can’t win and
shouldn’t try to

too much gold always has the
intrinsic habit of looking in
spectacular bad taste

as vessels go: gold is so much better
at holding blood than wasting its time
on mere water

same old
same old

gold, the metal that does not tarnish, keeps
its luster, resists time

born in the fiery core of a star
pure, yet anything but innocent

that generation

fought the Nazis but
could have
equally been one

liberating the camps
seeing themselves equally reflected
in the prisoners and
in the guards

ECLIPSE

my father
is the history of
Empire
in a
shadow
nutshell

a Hamlet
who does
not speak
who has
no castle
who has not
read even
a pop-
up book

whose eyes
do not light up
when his feet
touch a place
of precious minerals

buried deeper
than his pain, his
childhood secrets

whose shadow
darker than any eclipse

NEVER TO

BE COMPARED

you are a
philosopher of
smoke rings
and bubbles
cartographer
of a postage stamp
geographer of
your back yard
physicist
of residue of
a Chinese cracker
chemist of
tiny household
speck

and why did you do you
find ideas so scary?
why do words
reduce you
to nervous wreck
you said you are my author
everything I am
due to you
thanks to your golden
sperm which
gave me life
son (as man) never
to be compared to
father (as god)

RINKHALS

who did
the cinematography
for my dream

tracking shots, zooms,
canted cameras, empty frames?

someone has wandered out at night
into my father’s garden
a rinkhals slithering its way
through the grass
more venom pound
for pound than
any, all,
his toxic flowers

SERPENT

SERPENT

you were shocked
to see a
front-fanged serpent
slither out of
my crib

those eyes burning with
ancient wisdom

how could you
be expected to make any
sense of this mythology?
you who never read
a single book
and so know nothing of
our human depth and mystery

and when I told you
to stand back, beware,
you did not listen
tried your luck in combat
with this gorgeous creature
whose camouflage not
less sumptuous than
his venom

who struck repeatedly with
his vicious poison
against which there
is no resistance
(at least none
from a poor excuse of
a man like you)

THERESA HAS PLANS

Theresa
has plans to
bulldoze Hogwarts
sow salt in the earth
to eviscerate
the magic

and then wings
for clipping
that flight not
be an option: angel, wren, starling,
albatross, no
more sky for them,
not on her watch

as she ducks being questioned
lest anything stick
regarding what
to the bone she
would strip, slash
and burn
greatest tribute paid yet by
mere confounded mortal
to the
great, great demigods
strength,
and security

THERESA HAS PLANS

Theresa
has plans to
bulldoze Hogwarts
sow salt in the earth
to eviscerate
the magic

and then wings
for clipping
that flight not
be an option: angel, wren, starling,
albatross, no
more sky for them,
not on her watch

as she ducks being questioned
lest anything stick
regarding what
to the bone she
would strip, slash
and burn
greatest tribute paid yet by
mere confounded mortal
to the
great, great demigods
strength,
and security

IN HIS GARDEN

he wanders through the garden
same garden where
for fifteen whole minutes
he taught me football

blue eyes blazing just a
shade shy of lunacy

and here I am standing
ten-year old (for
that’s what
I am in his eyes and
always must be)
writer and poet, Professor
of Communication and
literary Ph D

remembering the bad stuff but
striving hard to find the good

as I take shots at the goal
ten-
year old Denis Law wannabe
not having the power or
the placement to
beat the goalkeeper and

the smell so old, familial and
overpowering
streaming back to me
that green English turf that
deep, dark English earth

but
when I turn
around, spin
in my heels, ball
hitting the net

you
are not there
with me in the stadium, did
not see me at the lectern
holding forth with words
those things that
escaped you, you were
so singularly bad at

all there is now in this garden
memory of pink and purple lupins
flowers nick-named
red hot
pokers (really
phallic flowers beside trees
with no toxic fruit)