DOWN TO

Tags

alienation, Apollo 13, art, charcoal, industrial, metafictional, metapoetic, poem, poetry, punning, Reader, sex, writing

DOWN TO

someone charcoaled
my picture
of the world

after which
things quickly
Went retrograde

found myself Apollo
thirteening through
industrial gray atmosphere
trying to
get back

thinking
if I flame out
here it’s all down to
my failure to exorcise what
they call magical thinking

this you and I discussed
at length in bed
which was strange in itself
you being a
character in
my novel

or me in yours

who is exactly in
whose head
difficult to negotiate
when
speaking of re-entry
couldn’t be
less metaphoric

your bed, my bed,
our bed

so full of charcoal
easy and hard (as
homonym would
have it) not to
exaggerate or
simply lie in it

down to you
lover, reader
to
ménage with us
masterfully, mistressfully
help us out of this mess

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FACTORY WAS

Tags

industry, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry

factory was a dream
like smoke, like cloud
it dissolved, did evaporate

wistful how the future we dream
is turned on a denouement
even as we wake
(nothing sharper than shards
of daylight
nothing harder
to wish away)

FACTORY WAS

Tags

poetry, satire

factory was a dream
like smoke, like cloud
it dissolved, did evaporate

wistful how the future we dream
is turned on a denouement
even as we wake
(nothing sharper than shards
of daylight
nothing harder
to wish away)

SCALE INDUSTRIAL

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry

SCALE INDUSTRIAL

I scuttle across the intersection
like a arthritic crab thing

somewhere up there
blotted out by daylight
the monstrous beauty
of the Crab Nebula

this not occurring to me
until I have safely crossed

the stream of constant lethal metal
traffic having resumed its interrupted
daily course

comes to me
then, shuffling before
the specter of life and
death on scale industrial

strikes me
(forgive the pun from
one dodging work for
much of the morning)
that between
day and night, the latter
more real

between dream and
real the
latter so infinitely
less eternal.

THIS NIGHT THIS DAY

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Universe

THE NIGHT THIS DAY

right now
the Universe is
experiencing
runaway inflation

lucky we got electricity
so no longer need
to gaslight our lives as
if it were a street

under these orange sodium
fuzz-balls of light

I stagger home a
little drunk

I say home
but these are

University flats built on
the very spot where Engels
hosted Marx
there is

a plaque

still something Victorian in the air
and the ghosts of those
two old dynamos
worshipped, hated there

when those
graves were dug, they thought “finally”
but let’s go deeper if needs be
err of the side of safety

the high-rise shapes of the
Institute of Technology

North of
England can get so cold

these words
coughed, fizzed,
spluttered

shame
there is no flame
cold
as a gaunt Cathedral

let’s not talk architecture
design so removed
from the night this day

MAY DAY

MAY DAY

May Day
May Day
send as many Morse
code messages
you like

the workers
will have
their
way

you can
try to
exclude them
try to
deny
robot them
out with state-
of-the-art AI

but a man needs
his bread, and
woman too, and child

no Blake’s
Jerusalem perhaps
but a place to
thrive

until the machine
goes genocide
as it
always will.

MAGIC CARPET

Freud
is
alighting from
a steam train
at Saltzburg station

a minute ago
it was chuffing in

to meet him
there is Jung

who came by
horse-drawn carriage or
perhaps, magic
carpet.

SEA URCHINS

what the dickens!

the sea urchins have
asked for more

it is their bed
and they
will have to
lie in it

their niche that uncle
Scrooge evolution
says they
will need to be schooled in
for millennia more

AND YET