TO BOOT

Tags

erotic, innuendo, love, Metaphysical, metapoetic, philosophical, poem, poetry, postmodern, Reader, Sexual innuendo, sexual symbolism, Shakespeare, woman, wordplay, writing

TO BOOT

I was reciting Elizabethan poetry to you
feeding you metaphoric fruit
for your tired old, enervated, postmodern soul

though our connection
was cerebral, and relationship Platonic

I wondered about the power of
the imagination to be truly transformative

and what
you might be led to by way
of reciprocal response
(or as it stands on the page:
“response reciprocal”)

for if we are working towards
a sudden juxtaposition driven
by conceit metaphysical

where the displacement can work
through idiom
most physical, metaphor
down and dirty

connecting us
every humour, every level
and
game-changer, to boot.

FORGET WHAT YOU HEARD

Tags

digital, love, Metaphor, Metaphysical, metapoetic, poem, poetry, wordplay

FORGET WHAT YOU HEARD

forget what you
heard about
quantum entanglement

our connection
could be broken
at any moment

though, yes, this poem
is indeed metaphysical
it lacks those sixteenth
and seventeenth century
crazy conceits

that speak metaphorically
of lovers linked
like centre-
point and
circumference

as if you, and I,
and the Universe itself
had a centre

where fortune
turned digital
can flash before your eye
faster, fleeter, than
the eye can capture it

ever
hope
of capturing it

sometime, somewhere:
distant galaxy or
billion years into the future

they may
take a snapshot of the Universe
that preserves things
as they are

you and I
here in this poem, in
a best moment

nothing more serious than
passing acquaintance
as things stand

subject to
the aforementioned

calamitously inconvenient
electronic separation

BEFORE THE POEM ENDS

Tags

Metaphor, metapoetic, philosophical, poem, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist

BEFORE THE POEM ENDS

before the poem ends
it cannot
not be

before closure it must
resolve the metaphysical
wrangles
it has with itself

and all this
concerns, believe
it or not,
a poem awaiting its final line
that someone left
lying around

Oh the fragility of this practice
all the things it needs and
is dependent upon!

and here you are
about to sign off, denying
me my final word

such stark refusal as
this entire debate now hinges upon

CAFE SANS OLE

Tags

apocalyptic, Chaos, Consciousness, Creation, Creativity, death, Desire, Ending, Global warming, History, Humanity, identity, Light, loss, meaning, Metaphor, Metaphysical, metapoetic, mythology, philosophical, philosophy, poem, poem poetry political moral, Poet, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, Reader, spiritual, Truth, Universe, value

CAFE SANS OLE

we drank tea
swopped mythologies
shared
what we could
across the table

noting up close
and personal
though our
toes once
did touch

perhaps forever destined
to look at each other
from opposite sides
two
parts of
a Hegelian dialectic
an
unwinnable chess game

on occasion we would
take a Hellenistic turn
explore the logos, and all its
vaunted -ologies

but try as we might
there was no
undoing of the done
nor the shutting out
of the looming demolition of the world
as pure hypothesis, abstract indulgence,
speculative fantasy

wistfully,
you did ask
(a note somewhat
off -key) whether
star is
etymologically embedded
in disaster

our contribution to the atmosphere
already heavy
already
all the barometers sensing
a downturn
towards the existentially fraught,
cosmically absurd

as if
the spirit of the place
feasting upon the dystopia
and apocalypse
in our eyes

or perhaps
just sipping, hellcat licking

hard to avoid this
since we speak as we write
act as
we are written

reaching the boundary, singularity,
event horizon of our characters

about to strip
and consume matter with

the weight
of our gravity

where once we might explode like a
Supernova, all light revolutionary

the last word
of our physics will
be very
dark I fear

***

and so,
talking of endings

here we are
already

quite beyond ourselves
our narrative
thread lost

two creatures
worth forgetting

Oh were
this meeting, this cafe
metaphor of something
greater than
fear of finality
of
endgame and
nihilistic creator

not
something you might show
up on a Sky Sports screen

(ending
of everything Plato
every
last Olympian dream)

ENDGAME

Tags

apocalyptic, Consciousness, Creativity, death, Ending, Fire, Humanity, identity, loss, meaning, Metaphor, Metaphysical, mythology, philosophical, philosophy, poem, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, relativity, science fiction, spiritual, thermonuclear, time, transformation, Twist in the tail, Universe

ENDGAME

at the end
we will be a fable
part of the mystery

that butterfly
that sent out a tiny
wing-wave
minuscule shift
in the cosmos
fleeting disturbance
in the force (it was)

will they know
how we laboured to learn
to find, explore
what frustrations
and what failures?

our planet filled with
electrical light — a beacon
in the galaxy, so
we thought
so we believed
until
it burned

and our mystics, surely they
of our race in some sense abide,
in some way
survive?

who saw this domed night sky as
if the speckled inside of an egg

waiting for the key
the code, the word to
crack it open

shatter that shell into a billion
star-pieces
stick your fingers (sexual
metaphor) into
the fire of
a star, Vega blue or
bright Sol yellow

then at last
for one brief moment
we can
be at the centre
of everything

until the tyranny of day night day
night
of absolute light dark binary
re-establish and restore

Oh the raw fusion energy of
Helium fire
secret to all

in this cold cold Universe
that knows desire

UNTO INFINITY

Tags

Infinity, Mathematics, poem, poetry

UNTO INFINITY

I said a prayer
to the God of Mathematics

to ask him not
to keep subtracting 1

by my reckoning
I was already way into
the minus digits

but the God
of Mathematics smiled
(unless that smile
was just
a sine curve)

said what if I’d isn’t
subtraction but
simple division

one divided by one
will retain its integrity
no matter
how often divided

unless
zero is the
number we are
aiming for

and before
I could speak
I had been
so divided

and now my
oneness is infinite
now
I am thing
that numbers
unto
infinity

JOHN DONNE WAITS

Tags

absurdist, John Donne, Metaphysical, poem, poetry, Salvador Dali, surreal

JOHN DONNE WAITS

having done the dishes John Donne waits
for knocking off time at the factory
to release Salvador, his mate,
nine to five slaving
at the conveyor belt
making
clocks that run backwards,
teapots that
seemingly straight
from Alice-land
flatly refuse to pour

who would have thought it, surreal
to go commercial, to really be big deal
and here
now the prospect
of Freudian dream-conceit

those tools mathematical
base of exact, intellectual comparison
softening in the Dali heat

nothing precise or
exact
any more
(no more
or less
all more or all
less)

backwards clock ticking
in fits and starts

John wondering why he
now centuries late

he waits and
waits

for Salvador Dali
(not Samuel Beckett
or Tom Waits)

THE STARS

Tags

Cosmology, Humanity, meaning, philosophical, poem, poetry, Stars, theology

THE STARS

always the same paranoia
that the sky might fall

humanity
screams so loud
the Universe shatters
like fine porcelain

so
I
look to the stars
to see
what I can see

see that some vaulted
as if in imitation
of some cathedral

observe them twinkle
hard to believe there
is not a message
there
or something

hard to believe
they should be objects
of such fear.

****
so you
listened to the stars

and yet
heard nothing

nothing and yet
I see from
these images how
your imagination
went wildfire

summoned objects of
deep familiarity and
yet such strangeness
out of that
vestry, that repertoire

images to
terrify
the mind
delight the very soul

turn us
upside down
inside out
stretch us to
the limits of
faith and belief

****
she told me
she reached out
touched a star once

did not grasp it, grab it
pull it down

nothing so
Faustian in any
bargain with that power

I touched her
looking for
the star inside her

asked her
if love
and desire were
things cosmic
and if cosmic
then pre-determined
perfectly symmetrical

told her
I had once deeply loved
a creature unsymmetrical
her eyes
slightly at odds
but her breasts
perfect
more perfect breasts
in the galaxy could
not possibility exist

she told me
my mind
worked like
that of Aquinas
but in the crassest
way possible

so I think
of what she said
am
haunted by
what she said

cannot sleep
can only think

feel
totally eclipsed

****

make way
for the stars

make way
make way

we read them
heard the sad tale
of their
final demise

and with it
our departure too

once they were
pure thought, abstract conception
in medieval scholasticism
just a
governing principle
a point of origin

and now
in quantum cosmology
how so
absolutely different

whose children
born of you
creatures of your furnace fire
subject to your great gravity
possessed of
your will, your dream, your
imagination

born to
in our own teeny-tiny
explosive biological moment

have not
heard the best

or worst

in what
you say, have said
still have
yet to say

TRICK POEM

Tags

meaning, Metaphysical, metapoetic, philosophical, poem, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, Reader, wordplay, writing

TRICK POEM

more than a trick
of postmodern reasoning

I am
writing the book
that I am reading

each word
on the page where

somebody’s pen
other than
my own

dipped into
my brain

dipped
into his brain

fusing us as one
never
ending two
for price
of one Universe
metaphorically speaking

BY THE NUMBERS

Tags

arc, Creation, Creativity, Divine, love, Mathematics, numbers, poem, poetry, Pythagoras, self-defence

BY THE NUMBERS

it’s a
simple life

wickedly simple
life

describes a near-
perfect arc
virtually complete

yet not quite absolute
circle of protection

but what
do you not already know
about
the logic
of prime numbers and
such sacred figures

I write
I compute

long
may be it be so
virtue of my
Pythagoras soul

and between
those dormant lives
far from
tragedy and
(equally) torture

I love
I fight
die
as no
man should

yet
back to back
we take our stance
assume
the position

the arc
of together
turned defensive tangent

against the world
for you and I
the radical being of
our difference
made it so

became our
configuration

who
serves to
tries to break

let him suffer
your, my,
razor-
sharp arc of self-separation

(priceless the
stupid look on
that most zero of faces)