MELT

Tags

care, Humanity, ice, loneliness, love, poem, poetry, The World

MELT

that was.a cold prayer indeed
ice
in my mouth
struggling to get
the words out

but determined to
have my say
as the temperature
nosedived to
absolute zero

asking for
the preservation
of the warmth
and beauty
of your world

but you
didn’t, couldn’t hear me
had forgotten about
my very existence
as my body froze
and the great glacier
of our time
took me

of which it would take
even a warmth and love and humanity
strong and pure as your
centuries, several lifetimes to melt

FREE VERSE

Tags

Censorship, Humanity, irony, Life, meaning, North Korea, Nuclear, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, power, satire, War, wordplay

FREE VERSE

“Traditionally, the scenes on the arena floor take place against an ever-changing backdrop, made up of thousands of children turning the coloured pages of books in sequence to create giant images rippling across one side of the stadium.” Justin McCurry in The Guardian

the Book of the People
is multi-
dimensional

there is gold out there, by way
of alchemies
if you would only stop, just
so much as
care

to read
between the lines

and as you do say, do faithfully report,
across vistas of dancing children:
eager rainbows, the pages ripple

swirl like golden spirals
which can be translated into
harder synonyms

the whole here read
for convenience across rank, down file

words single-filing silently, acutely conscious
how, according to the simile that is
collapsed metaphor they
are but bullets loaded

cliches of critical mass, whose
aesthetics may
well confound but

the sun of their meaning tots, adds up
every little mind so
nicely calibrated
for simultaneous fire

GRENFELL ALBUM

Tags

poem, poetry

GRENFELL ALBUM

I scroll through your names
read each snapshot of your lives

think of the human pity that
there is no mitigation, no
quiet book-closing fatalism
to let us, your readers, your
imaginers, down gently
no soft euphemism
to kill the horror
recoil from
terrible truth of fire

Oh little children, Oh lover
of song and
of dance

and saint-like altruist, hearts of
poetry, minds of philosophy
we see
now exactly the loss

it’s balance with cost
and wonder why the Universe
would be so
heartless to
Insist that price was paid.

***

Oh let us never forget this album
and what
pain and
love
learnt with every page.

PLACES TO CHILL

PLACES TO CHILL

a homeland
for poets and artists
and people who
would walk to
walk around naked
seeing infinity and all eternity
etc etc

and cops armed with feathers
and open-air
prisons which are
just
places to chill

INFINITE SPACE

the road into Joburg is
first Diepsloot then
gated community
after gated community

each so alike, each
a fairy-tale Renaissance city
state bereft of
any sense of society

here in Mafs with stark spiked
palisades we must make do:
just two shades: moldy green
or brutal maroon

but these we need to protect each place
yet someone
living in a
yard, in a caravan

I suspect some
local Hamlet in a nutshell
with the withdrawn intellect
to think himself
a tyrant
of infinite time, and space

AND SO (HAD TO FORGO)

and so
I had to forgo
the pleasures of
Playstation
immersing myself
in Sims or
Age of Empires

all to get
this shabby poem down
and airwaved to you
(you singular and
indeed you
plural

across that shared boundary
that is neither me
nor you and
yet both us two (too)