STYX

STYX

it is good that
ink is black (as
if scooped up
from the Styx)

what colour could be better
for the death-like
numbness I feel
now I discover the truth
about you

colour for the sadness
deep as that river
and as bleak

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THE BOOK AND THE LOVE

THE BOOK AND
THE LOVE

after the guided
tour of the cosmos
God demanded of Job
that he write
his tale

getting everything down absolutely
as it
happened

remembering to include
the Love

SAFE

nothing prepared me
for the sadness of
losing you

I put my hope away
in a cardboard box
not one of
gold with
intricate lock

as if hope were a thing
you have to keep closed
and safe

HAIKU LIKE YOU

wrote you a haiku
slender, lovely, thing most
in the world like you

UNDIVIDED

her heart
is undivided

and showing trust
I do not ask
for visual
confirmation

just a
little peek

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.

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IN THE EVENT

we are friends
but I cannot deny
responding to you
as man
to woman

your touch, your care,
the delight in your
eyes when you
speak of your lovers

and me
there, so there,
in the event
of any overspill

LOVE ( AS FICTIONS GO, SUPREMELY REAL)

if it is all
a simulation

and can
be shaped by
consciousness

then the
fiction of it
all

overrules evil
insists that
it should
all be
love

ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

we talk, drinking coffee

desperate not to see
the elephants in the room

having sex

which is
bad enough

except for the clear, crazy
intimations that
they may be
so deeply
in love with each other

EURYDICE

Eurydice
did not look as pretty
as he remembered her

so much time had elapsed
since she first disappeared

yet he had come
to plead for her return
longing to be reunited

yet
the dice of
life were

already rolling their
tragic numbers

and when
does the Underworld
give up its final claim?