AT YOUR PERIL

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry

AT YOUR
PERIL

The book
is full of
evil energies

dripping
with dark imaginings

do not
open it

but now
you have read it
cover to
cover

how do
you live
with the truth
you have learnt?

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COMICAL

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire

COMICAL

burn all
the books
there is
too much
to read

starve to death
irony and the
other figures
of speech
(let’s reduce
every fat image
to a
stick figure!)

only thing to
leave
after the fire
has raged global

Plato, the great
religious texts and
perhaps
some poetry

(thinking here of
the entirely comical, rather
than the serious kind)

RICH

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, Universe

RICH

the aliens came
gave us copies
of their sacred texts
to house
in our libraries

but we didn’t
have any: all had been closed
the buildings sold, some
demolished

the fate of our species being
intimately and essentially connected
with cutting all taxes
for the super-rich

AND YET WITH SUCH GRACE

A busload of writers
did steam into our town

but no sooner had I
written “steam” than
they lined up to correct me
gave me a
fat thesaurus to digest
so that in future they
would not have to take me
so directly to task
my lexical poverty
getting them so
hot under the collar

and then they re-embarked
having just disembarked
without the requisite
style, animation,
or that thing
called “panache”

whereupon they scattered as if
to take over the town
set to do the Devil’s work
as writers must do
pinning down
foibles,
interrogating dreams

thinking how each commonplace
lies shadowed
in nightmare

sustained by the fodder
of every paltry mistake
done
without thinking
thought
without doing

and in this
secret carnival of words
they have
our souls penned
committed to paper

our portraits
so perfect and
yet
we might not
think so

as transformed we
strut stages, talk with
rare freedom
mouth
ironies and
insights

dissected as
if by
surgery and

yet with
such grace

A WORD

let me
have a word:
I love poems in books
with a picture of
the author
on the cover and
a blurb that tells us
what important
poetry it is
before we
have even
read a
word

have you
read a word?

THE BOOK; THE PAGE

his book was ripening

in his head rather
than on a tree or
on a shelf

the thoughts were coming
together, richly mellowing

the page crying
out to
be written on

TAKE YOUR GOETHE

take your
Goethe

you know what
you can do
with
your Dante, Cervantes
and Dumas

we have
our Shakespeare
which personally I have not
read but do
believe

is printed on softer
two-ply paper

CASTLE

he used his books
to build a castle

arranged all his books
into a mosaic

made a giant stairway
leading up to
Heaven

as in a
Borges fairy tale
or
the Led Zeppelin song

POEM FOR UMBERTO ECO

POEM FOR UMBERTO ECO

there are no conspiracies
beyond what the style
and form an age dictates
it’s narrow parameters
the box it
has to think it

but which, great master of signs,
long ago shook yourself free of

and now, who would
argue against me, dispute
with me rhetorically, in
the Classical manner, if
I were to say

there you are with the
Roman poets, the Greek
historians, the Medieval
scholastics
looking down

which, as Einstein postulated,
is also looking
backwards, looking
forwards in space and time
envisioning (from position
of Olympian vantage) how
it looks at this point
at that point

the great game, the universal
fiction we mere
mortals have
only seen the horizon of
a single square page of

and you now
(this perhaps the
one true conspiracy)
closing the circle
of hyperreality

before (perhaps)
impulse to travel

WE

We, 1984, Fahrenheit 451:
they are burning all
the great dystopian books

O.K.
not burning
just

raising the temperature
a little.