CROSSROAD

Tags

books, poem, poetry

CROSSROAD

Aha! crossing my path
the walking library

I wonder how many forests
were chopped to feed
his vanity

and now
what of this
ravenous appetite now

books are no longer
published, are
not on the menu?

how absurd his very being when
we no longer read!

JUNG ON JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Tags

Carl Jung, Consciousness, Creation, Creativity, Humanity, identity, James Joyce, Language, meaning, Metaphor, metapoetic, Modernism, philosophical, philosophy, poem, poetry, postmodern, power, psychological, Reader, Universe, wordplay, writing

JUNG ON JOYCE’S ULYSSES

he fell
into the maelstrom
or maybe he plunged

heroic, invulnerable as Achilles,
nothing about words
did he fear

and yet
the Sirens, his own Sirens,
when they sang to him, they tore
at his humanity
and Scylla and Charybdis
pulling at him
from opposite directions

threatened to tear
soul from self, author
from man

and so
to Homer

a beginning

and a time
before words

from there
fast forward
to a lost time
a divided time
a time
split from itself, savaged in the jaws of Empire
(no hope
of restoration on
the horizon)

but still
the words flow, the pages
begin to tower
up from the floor

flow like rivers mythological
(both Greek
and Irish

Liffey, Lethe

Shannon and
the Styx)

Oh little
Everyman
figure who
incapsulates us all

embodies our
broken, fragmented
common
humanity

swept aside
by tide
of the times

bobbing in an ocean of
self-
generating words

wine-dark empty, kenning free

this is not
the poetry that
proclaimed a civilization

every
moment iconic, as
if tempered bronze

no
this is the dance that goes
around and
around in
symbolic circles

this is the dance
of the cosmos

sleeping, dreaming, forgetting
emptying itself

until
not a word
not
a whisper

nothing speaks
beyond itself

nothing
says everything

so might as well
cross
every horizon
write
the life
to be
endured
forever

write until
there is no more space
to fill

write
the light
write the shadow

eighteen chapters, seven
hundred pages

and still there is space
place for more

Odysseus navigating the Mediterranean
sailing round in circles, prisoner
of conscience, convenience,
prisoner of love, of
the dark arts, by
virtue of
offense to Poseidon
extreme political prisoner

the words
hounding him
every step
of the way

on the return to Penelope
that will never
happen
can never happen

Penelope long gone
unfaithful to the core

****

no moment where
in supreme Catholicity
the cosmos
comes together

sub specie aeternitate
where it
all supremely means

maybe
an echo though

things seem silent but
are echoing out to infinity

everything so tired, outworn,
exhausted,
overdetermined

the mirror
in which we
first
saw things, composed
the image of the self

shattered
frozen in the moment
of shards scattering, pieces falling,

a razor-
sharp rainbow of a
zillion fragments

as images of creation
go
pretty
explosive
and extreme

no
arc of redemption, today at least,
for our great creator

driven
beyond all
limits

urged
to go demiurge

and this
our answer to an expanding universe
to the smoothness of steel
sharpening
all new technology

to
which

what dare the soul, overawed, say

how might it
speak truth to
final objectivity, absolute
science of meaning?

resist
the building of
such binaries as will

house
Western consciousness
in such
prisons of delight?

BY THE BOOK

Tags

books, poem, poetry, Reader

BY THE BOOK

my books call out to me
castigate me

demand that
I read them
it’s
“read
or
bust”

go all passive aggressive,
tell me how
I’ll lose out, miss
out on unexpected
treasure
after unexpected treasure

will have to forgo
finding the missing pieces
that will allow me
to fix
the puzzle of
life (or did they
say puzzle of
my life?)

of course, so spoilt for choice
and blocked by inertia,
for me
it’s hopeless even
trying to respond

should have come clean
moment that I bought them:
said, “look here chaps,
I purchased you for show,
as safety net
and security blanket

hopefully
when I’m gone
there is
a future

where the book
Is not closed

on
books
themselves

BETWEEN THE LINES

Tags

Chaos, Creation, Creativity, Fascism, Language, meaning, Metaphor, metapoetic, Nazi, philosophy, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, Reader, satire, War, wordplay, writing

BETWEEN THE LINES
“I read between the lines”.
Ricky Gervais, the Hitler/Nietzsche sketch

between the lines
between the lines

sometimes you can slide a whole book
edgeways through that gap

sometimes you can a squeeze a whole
book in there
every page and then some

maybe even
a library

once I ventured between the lines
(I did so in a poem that refused completion)

so much blank snow there
and green screen
was about to
say

perfect for projection
perfect for warfare

when at a desk
in a trench
a squad of monkeys opened up
on typewriters
bit by bit, autocorrect by autocorrect
old and new Shakespeare
folios began to spill out

then
as I rubbed my eyes to
get clarity and
scientific verification

same monkeys opened up
on everything that moved with
Maxim machine guns

seems after the folios they
had produced Mein Kampf
and super-race was the direction
their evolution
was taking them

all this in
the space between two lines
not even two stanzas

think of how terribly contested
a space that
would have been
forever stuck
between
radical interpretations

absolute
no man’s land

TREE OF LIFE

Tags

book, emptiness, library, poem, poetry

TREE OF LIFE

I have amassed a huge library
thought it was to
know the world, our minds,
the Universe

but it was just
to fill the hole your absence created

not that you sensed that
you have filled my life with
a terrible,
terrible emptiness

never
having read a book.

EX LIBRIS

Tags

book. library, books, poem, poetry, wit

EX LIBRIS

a library
is a collection
of thousands
and thousands
of books
beautifully housed

and
carefully arranged
so you easily find
the five
good ones

CUCKOO

Tags

afterlife, books, death, poem, poetry

CUCKOO

who composed this
mess of a cuckoo nest
thing
of books not twigs

Ah, but the cuckoo
does not make a nest toy suggest
I flash my lease: see
this is rented property

time ticking
cuckoo-clocking along
(what a beautiful song
for bird
that holds hostage!)

and with those
whizzing hands
not hard to infer
too much text
too much text

To stuff my head with all pages
and take the big wisdoms with me
along for the ride

(no picture of
saved or damned has them
weighed down with baggage)

does the name of that river
(what gets
lost in that
river?) depend on the exact
mythological tomes that you mastered?

the Universe looks fine and dandy
but we know
from Heraclitus no such
river flows slowly

inspect the
landscape closely
the closer
you get
the crazier it becomes

somewhere
there must be a library
of which all
libraries are part of, of which
they are part replica
the books
infinite in number
like slots for the dead
in ancient catacombs

there must be a word, an epithet
phrase worthy of Virgil or better yet
Dante or Homer
can sum up this place
catch its
warped sense of grace

serendipity suddenly perhaps
not the name of this game
(as if
I should really know
chucked out of the tree by
bird
that took my place
at a very young age)

THE READERS

Tags

books, children, fairy tales, Fantasy, poem, poetry, readers, wolves

THE READERS

the readers
want to
save the
children from
becoming
cogs in
machines
there in
the factory

they are gathered
at the library
for a read

the reader ghost
their way through
doors and
walls
in and out of
a book’s pages

they can pied piper
children away from
the horrors
of parents
gone totally insane

and here
all fairy tales with wolves
big bad wolves are
apt for consideration

since the
factory is predatory
wishes to
swallow the
library whole

but the children
are safe now
gathered around a
camp fire
our first camp fire

the readers here
crossing time
and space
to tell a story
the first story
story
number one
in their infinite repertoire
(Infinite variations on
the few, great
essential, life-giving
life-
sharing narratives)

stories
so good

even the wolves
outside the circle
become spellbound
break ranks
gather to hear the tale

BUTTERFLY

Tags

books, chaos theory, knowledge, poem, poetry, power

BUTTERFLY

was my mantra:
knowledge is power
knowledge is power

so went
on a Herculean read
before my brain
was fully formed

stormed
through book
after book
by day
and by night

but ideas kept
falling
out of my head
so much
slipping and forgetting

so I built a
massive library up
of authors living
and dead

but got
neither stronger
nor wiser
not
a thought
from head or heart
changing
the world

and so I
sat
and wept or
maybe
less dramatically
just looked
lost and uncomfortable

staring at page after page
of impenetrable text

until
from one of
those
tomes

one strangely
satisfying day

the image of a butterfly
got up
and left

flapped its
tiny wings and
simply
flew away

and there
in that
moment

the shape
of a parable

some
sense in it all
something
to say

IN THIS BUSINESS

Tags

book, poem, poetry, time, Universe, writing

IN THIS BUSINESS

there is a book
so complete
it will take
you all
of time
to read it
(no, not
“an eternity”)

reason for this being
time
does not
play fair
keeps shifting
the goalposts
in simple parlance:
cheats

is sly when it comes to
terms and
definitions
has had so
much opportunity
to play unfair
in this business

pulling a Scheherazade trick
extending each character’s
life in the narrative
pulling the
age old trick
of repetition
duplication

slipping the
extra pages in
when no one can see

stuffing and padding yet
nothing ever reads fatter
perhaps
since we are all
sold so deeply
on the idea

that ending deferred is
better
than rushed
denouement

and
ending withheld
is ending
truly worth
waiting for
— best than be