THE GREAT STRAWBERRY DIALECTIC

Tags

erotic, poem, poetry, sexual symbolism

THE GREAT STRAWBERRY DIALECTIC

let us not argue
over who
gets the last
strawberry

let us simply
divide it
down the
middle

you get to
eat both halves
if I get
to divide
myself

into
you

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ANTICS

Tags

poem, poetry, wordplay

ANTICS

decided
to add up
ants

one, ten
a hundred,
a billion

there little bodies swarming
over my abacus

showing me how
to carry one

(not insurmountable once
you figure it out

more difficult
with bees)

INSIDE THE POEM

Tags

metapoetic, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, poststructuralist

INSIDE THE POEM

inside the poem
(there is
an outside?)

time is relative
space

deceives

things thought big
are really size of
a molecule

what you believed microscopic
contains universes of its own

and time here,
you may feel,
does what
it wants, as
it feels

tick tock
chocolate block

look here we have a sonnet by
the supreme Master
cajoling time, on space
putting pressure

as if last two lines could précis, summarize
give us the gist that is eternal sonnet

SPARKLES

Tags

poem, poetry

SPARKLES

I asked the
poet
(much-
travelled)

can
rooted
be
cyclical?

but he just
handed me
a bag
of sparkles

I asked the poet
is shape-
shift
alchemy?

told him to keep
his sparkles
should there be
another bag

SUCH A BEAUTIFUL CONCEIT

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire, Water power astrological

SUCH A BEAUTIFUL CONCEIT

who cares about whether
it was Elizabeth or James
when Hamlet
was on stage?

ditto today
who cares about
Britain and Brexit
and all
her travails?

who cares? is there
anyone around
left to care
how so badly-led
the country just sank
and fat, greedy
corporate politicians
trod water but
then drowned?

(what were
those words in The Wasteland
T.S. Eliot said?)

deep under the lie
all the cities that died
who gives a toss
what was lost, what
little survived

we cannot imagine what
they thought, nor
should we wish to

but the words, those few
writerly words that
cut to
the core

sometimes we hear them
carried by the air, borne
by the sea
sometimes

we hear them
(or we
think we do
think we do

such a
beautiful conceit)

NO ROOM

Tags

poem, poetry

NO ROOM

no room left
for it
wherever it
was lurking

it has found my surface
and now
threatens, promises
to break through

the slightest mistake,
or encouragement
could allow it to happen

perhaps a line from
a Rumi poem
or a beautiful haiku

and my skin will be shed
my shell broken

and
there on the ground
in serious fragments
all that I was
not what I
did not think to be

WITHIN

Tags

poem, poetry

WITHIN

I have a box of mirrors.
It is full
to the brim
with nothing
but images

the stuff
that Shakespeare’s
Hamlet would
have called
shadows and
ghosts

each one a
reflection of
a reflection
of something
that could not be
has never been.

And yet the
out of the box
thinking cliche

still haunts
the shapes within.

CIRCUMFERENCE

Tags

poem, poetry

CIRCUMFERENCE

I tried to
calculate you
circumference

but fell into an abyss
of imaginary and
irrational numbers

tried to
plot your path but
you were moving through
too many dimensions

I thought about you laughing,
smiling, breaking bread,
drinking wine
whilst part of your brain
was Oh so many light years away
thinking the
physics that would
bend space time when

we rose to the occasion, found the
crazy grace to imagine it would

and yet
dark countdowns

in those equations
as prophesied, as the figures
stacked like soldiers
in their love columns
did
not foreswear, as

they said they would
(all our human history pretty
much such a Möbius strip).

THOSE METAPHYSICALS

Tags

poem, poetry

THOSE METAPHYSICALS

Oh those metaphysicals
they knew how to tickle
a poem out of
an abstract idea

knew how to
stimulate
intellectually and
sexually (but always
so sweetly and
judiciously, the one
dove-tailing
with the other)

look: here’s John Donne
drafting his blood-
biting flea sexual conspiracy
in which he will
(shades of
Houdini) compress
all his lust inside
a flea carapace
to go down
on his love
know her
microscopically

and here’s Marvell
threatening Armageddon
what seems like
green nuclear annihilation
(talk relativity and
quantum mechanics
to these guys and
see what happens!)

green shade my arse! you
are thinking
of deconstructing culture, reducing
it to bare Nature

as in that other poem
where you stopped the Sun
just to get laid

it’s the sky turning green, dimwit, the
sea going fawn and rising to
swamp the land which
has already
gone desert

if you
are thinking like Descartes of
negating our existence (new
Paradise in
the making: make way! Make way!)

perhaps you
could do us the favour (barest
minimum) of
a three-minute warning

whilst you
and your Coy Mistress
make hay
make sunshine

(so glib
with our future, this supposed
“man for Parliament”).

DARKNESS APPERTAINS

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

DARKNESS APPERTAINS

darkness appertains
it is still stapled
to the very first page
hitching a ride on
Einstein’s light-beam
to the first “let be”

letting not a single
black hole singularity
deflect that
trajectory
to infinity

and so
snake-like but
not quite it
punctuates the rest

adding the slithery vital
subtext

without which
no sense