FEEDBACK ON YOUR POEMS

If you would like constructive feedback on your poetry, you could perhaps send them to me somehow.

It would be a pleasure to read them and offer advice (such as it is) , and I do have Ph D in ENGLISH LIT (on Satire) and have taught aspects of creative writing.

Sometimes, with some small but significant changes, a poem can be more resonant, speak with greater depth and linguistic and emotional subtlety.

Regards

Damian

THE MAN

The man rants and raves.
What dare I do
but accommodate him
as the TV is doing
as the TV is designed to do?

Tweep! A message arrives
on my phone: it’s her
wishing to cheer me

but the words (as those so very different ones
spewed out on the TV)
have lost their lives, their power, their meaning
they float past me, before me,
devoid of anything that can help
anything to bring a positive change

O, my caregiver
what dream have we lost, seen collapse into
electronic whisper, media fantasy?

your beautiful face
floating before me
as I turn away finally
uncouple, unlink, detach
from your orbit

my paper though, no nearer to completion
writing on radio during apartheid
and the strangely challenging, alienating
alternate-sounding world
of the science fiction programme

otherwise mirror on that
abhorrent, obnoxious
dehumanizing world

where racial logic collapses
in the face of strange conjunction, limitless possibility

possibility that
I just walk through this mirror
(in which I so often
imagined
our worlds colluding, colliding, collapsing, combining
together, if not forever, then
but for a few
delirious hours)

away from her, away
from the single-eyed, raving
racist Cyclops god, nay demigod,
of the television

into a parallel, if not indeed
universe, then at least
some stable, ungenocidal, alternate realm

where someone is writing,
is writing me (as I stand ghostlike,
peering over his shoulder
her shoulder
reading my story
being written, my tale
being told

hoping against hope
he does it differently.

Sent from Samsung tablet

WHEEL

WHEEL

dream is the shaping metaphor

dissolves the boundary between
self and other
ratcheting up or
eliminating the fear

you
are

both the potter

and the clay
in the wheel

you are the space between,
vacuum between
idea and

its execution

ultimately,
you are the wheel

FIRST HE PUT

first he put
cling wrap and foil
to represent river
and ocean

then he commissioned
tiny birds to
impersonate constellations

telling them to fly
so very high

CHISELED

your tall skyscraper beauty
legs up to
Heaven with
the head that owns them
up on the roof of it

eyes big as Bambi’s but
ripple with
a fiery darkness

and me
just the mere
mortal who

chiseled
this out of you

BIRTHDAY POEM 3

powers are waning

but my brain still runs away with itself
thick with lurid Caligula fantasies
and I ask myself: what’s the location
of the grounded politics here?

oh this incessant sexual battle between angel and devil
why do they not just throw each other down from their
respective high horses, learn
to grovel a bit, fuck, cohabit?

what a great literary scene it would be of
these two in ( or on) a bed
getting down and dirty
taking time to negotiate
what is celestial,
poetic

in terms of bargain being
renewed: the one that started
this all, determined frame
of reference
how it would all fall, come down to our level
the great triadic enigma
of good, evil, and
simple lust for life, as pure energy of being

ABOUT MY NOVEL

So I bought myself
a writing pad and
set
about to

write my novel
(a Spongebob Squarepants writing pad
which features him surfing)

thought (back
in parenthesis) how
great it might be
if the writing
became like surfing

so
“go
with the flow”

but then I thought
“shark” and all the paddling out
in the direction of
immensity, and how
straining and
forbidding that
must assuredly be

Homer
blind as a
bat

he couldn’t see
his wine dark ocean
or ping through it
like a dolphin
but did he
not absorb every drop
of Mediterranean mythology

like a sponge
like
a Spongebob

and now I need narrative,
characters a story
because I can’t just slap
it down there
all theme
and metaphor

when Paris seduced Helen
you can imagine how
good (and what
a lie) that
story he did tell her

but quiet I hear my
story, rising
from the deep like a
giant whale
surfing the atmosphere
like a giant meteor

I bet Spongebob’s hang-
ten escapade ended neither
heroically
nor fantastically.

BLACKBOARD

the Universe
is the blackboard

upon which
is written

the formula
for poetry

AND YET

UNLESS

poets play
with words

I suppose the
next step is
the play with
worlds

unless the words of this world are
part of its play-creation