AS THE BOAT CROSSED A RIVER

tried in
my poem (like
Homer)

to lasso Proteus
made

every effort to
panel beat
my metaphor
into shape

went down with Odysseus
to see the shades

our faces gaunt for
all the vaunted
poetic chitchat
as the
boat crossed a river
way darker than wine

ABOUT ACHILLES

ABOUT ACHILLES

in poetry
as you might expect

after a few
light-speed metaphors
Achilles

runs out
of things to say

whilst tortoise
goes epic, Homeric

took him
many decades
but here is the
opening line of
his massive saga
about Achilles

CIRCE

wherever there
is binary
there too, shadow

she sits
out
of the Sun,
under the lotus tree
smoking all
in the world
there is to smoke

waiting for me
to make love to her
please her

it is my function, no
escaping this Circe
in my Odyssey

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.

FIRE LIKE HOMER

no one does fire like Homer

nor do flames
move better

than through
dactylic lines

here is where myth
was burned into consciousness
as heroes, towers fall

GRID LOCATION

draw me
to your grid according

into
your Isis Horus hierarchy
simply insert me

everything
is predetermined

as above
shall be below

though
I may be a little
too Achaean in
my inclinations
— still
fancying my chance
with Aphrodite

burnt by the very thought
that in knowing
this goddess
her sexual fire might
melt mortal flesh away

GALACTICOS

GALACTICOS

As I walked down
the colonnade the
trees sprouted snakes

their coiffured heads went Medusa
for lack of transcendental gel

and I laughed, finding precedent
for this in the chaos book
I was reading

skipping between imaginary tackles
putting the curl on a boulder to
bend it round the wall.

HE THOUGHT

he thought of
turning the Universe pink

he thought of
helping Homer compose
the Odyssey

he is a
great believer in
mind over matter
the power
of thought

new
disturbance in
the quantum vacuum
stretching back
to the
beginning of time

DEVOUR

And the sirens sang to Ulysses
about things post-apocalyptic
about eternal cities
dissolved in sheets of flame
their voices so
agonizingly beautiful, the
poetry of the sung ending
so perfectly sublime

their teeth pure white
sharp as knives, ready
to cut like industrial razors

yet
in killing much ritual
keen to
read the auguries
in all the torn organs they
feel compelled to devour.