WHAT THE SERPENT TOLD ME

Tags

death, Life, poem, poetry, serpent, Snake

WHAT THE SERPENT
TOLD ME

in the beginning
there was anger

fire and
water

a million
kinds of venom

every colour and
colour combination

out of the
premise of death

first slithered
life

FORTH

Tags

Humanity, Life, poem, poetry, wordplay

FORTH

so the Creator bade us
“go forth and
multiply”

so we
multiplied and multiplied
and multiplied and
multiplied and
multiplied
and multiplied

but did not go
forth very
far at all

ANNULMENT

Tags

dark, death, Life, Light, Metaphysical, poem, poetry

ANNULMENT

death be
not divorce

be more
annulment

of all
you ever were

but wait, the air
so cold

cold as the bleakest
darkest spot of
the Universe

sub-zero breath of
your new lover your
new true partner

finally, yes,
the perfect ice
of this embrace

it gets to last
for all eternity
(there
foreshadowed

in every word
dark muse

of life itself, all
its poetry)

BENEATH K2

Tags

death, K2, Life, Mother Earth, Mountain, poem, poetry

BENEATH K2

I kiss your breasts
am
in free fall

no rope
no umbilical cord
linking me to
the Mother of
Heaven

only the rich, really rich
get to climb K2

breathe the roof of the world
as bottled oxygen

only the dead
get to write their names
on the mountain
bind their tin-plate plaques
to the rock

time, wind, snow and ice
will efface, erode,
swap away

THE JOY

Tags

energy, Fire, Humanity, joy, Life, Nietzsche, pain, poem, satire, star

THE JOY

you struck
a match

in the
darkness

but
burned your
finger

the pain
the pain

the
joy

sheer
joy

fiery
as a
star

LAZARUS

Tags

death, Life, limbo, poem, poetry

LAZARUS

it is strange in limbo

one can wait for centuries as if
eternally frozen

but then
move fast as a meteorite
or thing verging on light speed

let us, for purposes of this poem.
interrupt Lazarus
stop him dead in his tracks, about
to munch a life/death sandwich
(you can imagine the artistry it takes
in baking such as that)

he who was saved, brought back
but is now in the crosshairs
no one will believe anything he says
about the afterlife
neither dystopia nor
utopia, yet
pretty surreal place

and being there even a brief instant
changing viewpoint, perspective,

the light so
merciless
pulling him backward

he says
he will never look up into the Sun again

RETURN

Tags

Creation, death, Life, metapoetic, poem, poetry, Shakespeare

RETURN

there is a poet
in the cemetery
writing

as if
on cure
things

take
a dark turn

for is it not
this literary machine thing
devolved to pen
and paper

life’s deepest resistancew, death’s
finest achievement?

I mean — check out these stones: so many have poetic couplets
some of them epigraphs
no space for odes or even sonnets
still less
Iliad or Odyssey

this I muse whilst
graffiti on the chapel wall
pictures Sam Beckett tumbling
from birth to grave
signs too
that Nietzsche is back
back with braveface to live a return

Sun going down: convenient metaphor that
for how everything recycled

like these very words, some of them
(like “Caesar”, “dust”) dug out of their fertile grave
back from the worms that
we imagined owned them
still something of that a little less than
ghost attached that once
we might have given a name to and
that name Shakespeare’s

words
inadequate, not doing justice
especially to such names which
deserve not
to be dropped

so I
break that solemn wall

do you
openly address

restore with
heart and
with light

the death and life in all I have said
need your insight to connect

together to make
this accomplishment
(small small jewel being
our return)

LIFE

Tags

death, Life, poem, poetry

LIFE

I cried
my friend had died

like his father,
mother, before him

his infant daughter, baby son
and wife

this planet
teeming with life.

ICU

Tags

Ending, identity, loss, love, meaning, philosophical, poem, poetry, transformation

ICU

there is on-off switch
there is
reset button

there is new you
liberated from hard memory
surviving
the frailty of
the flesh

intricacies of
the mind

so seeing you plugged in
safe and yet so vulnerable

me wondering
if when you
spoke to God, crawled
your way out that darkness
He got
your details right, you
got your details right

would have given so much
to be afly on the wall
for that conversation

what fly?
what wall?

yesterday the machines you were
meshed into (pipes and tubes
everywhere I looked
leading in
every direction)
toldme so many
basic truths about you

and about me
both of us at that moment
craving nothing so much as
the light the light

ELMIJACK

Tags

death, Life, poem, poetry

ELMIJACK

escaped my white sepulcher
my Egyptian tomb

and now they
are bringing students there

hopefully with the life
to resist that doom