SHINING

Tags

Humanity, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire, value

SHINING

On the table a gold sovereign
for which I would sacrifice
everybody, everything

start the war
to end all
wars

so much death
and bloodshed

my sovereign
still shining.

CONUNDRUM

Tags

Humanity, Paradox, poem, poetry, Twist in the tail

CONUNDRUM

I woke
to the world
my head
splitting
with a
question

so I asked the
creature that knows nothing
but has
all the answers

told me to
look

within.

WITHOUT IRONY

Tags

irony, poem, poetry, satire

WITHOUT IRONY

have run
out of irony

they say
irony is either
dead or
it is everywhere
like the air

we just
taking it
for granted

anyway
will run
down to
the shop

which is, paradoxically,
on top of
the mountain

but it’s a
Catch-22 because
no way
to summit

without irony

SUBTRACT ME

Tags

death, Ending, female, Fragmentation, identity, irony, loss, love, mathematical, Mathematics, meaning, Metaphor, philosophical, poem, poetry, power, Pythagoras, Sexual, Unity, wordplay

SUBTRACT ME

would that you would
subtract me, retract me

not divide
nor subdivide me

so divisive when
you do so
whether long
or short

or all the way down
to the absurdum of
lowest
common denominator

assigning
minus sign

my neck hung around
like dog in the proverb
taking my preordained place
in the negative
column

this negative space
what
in my
case
could be
more iconic?

where better
to split hairs, split atoms
balance
the equation?

countermand the stridency of
ego as infinity
absolutely plus one

though if we were to
deconstruct, go descant
suddenly
sing a tangent

from cheap
seat in the margins

(for which always the poetic risk
of becoming drawn, and quartered)

full-throat the love
that is such a
tough customer
when it
come to quantification

that sweetest voice
not always disembodied

even if
counterintuitive, counterfactual,
beyond definition

and yet
still mathematical

as it carves me up
as you
carve me
up
as you always do

me and you together
not a simple matter of
multiplication or
addition
thing in my
brain
going back to Plato
back to Pythagoras

my hand on
your hypotenuse
saying it
“does not compute”

PYRAMID FALLS DOWN

Tags

objectivity, philosophy, poem, poetry, quantum, science, University

PYRAMID FALLS DOWN

you call it “objectivity” but
in effect you are torturing the life out of things

yopu scrawl an equation on a board not with a chalkstick
but an icicyle
sending the Universe into grotesque
wave-collapse from sheer exasperation

see: on it way, a telex it is sending courtesy
of an ancient relay system in a neighbourhood spiral galaxy

informing whoever does not deign to lend an ear that
that it has a serious bone to pick with you
and your crew, whole lot, entire bunch of you

who as you stand present
something much akin to a perfect random sample

but enough of this mathematical exposition
let me, in all poetic narcissism, get round
to talking about me

hear me self-mythologize as I concoct a narrative
in which I slew the philosopher who seriously confounded me
skewered me on a dilemma (classic knight fork
if you think chess metaphor), trapped me in a paradox
whose nature seemed to me
to be hoplessly insoluble

Oh, there I was hoping I would grow up
with that kind of mind

the one that is not all too obviously out of place
in the ivied colonades (if they still have them)
of a university

tore a page out of the one that loomed up imperiously
at the top of the beanstalk

thinkers standing on the shoulders of giants but
then the pyramid falls down

AND YET

Tags

poem, poetry

AND YET

I have
many many books

and yet
can fit
will fit
into
a small, small
box

ain’t that
the paradox
ain’t that
the truth.

THE ALIEN POEMS: WHAT THE ALIEN POET TOLD ME

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

THE ALIEN POEMS

WHAT THE
ALIEN POET
TOLD ME

an alien poem
is like
your Earth
football all
about first
touch

setting you up
as you
are seduced into
the soft dialectic of
inner and
outer
high and
low
beauty
and
terror

same
and other

for what is this poem
to you but impossible other?
(so much
you miss
as you
scoop the surface)

and what is
terror of the other
to this poem but

you its
reader

who should not
probe it’s horror
to deeply or

it will mimic your shape
become a terrible mirror

for what you
dare not face

your
exact self

BEE-LINE

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

BEE-LINE
“… but just Ourselves
And Immortality.”

I thought I saw a bee
flying
to infinity
and in a race
with Ms Emily

who was in a horse-
drawn carriage or
perhaps Europa-
style on the
back of
a bull
or

between the operatic
gull-wings
of a Italian
devil,
an insane
Diabolo
of internal-
combustion power

and yet,
classic Achilles and
Tortoise, could
either
ever win

so much in this
true tableau
we
cannot tell,
must wait
and see

the picture shifting
this way
and that

so much in this
physics not
mass times
acceleration
times
what-what
(measured against
time which
we

now know
is not real

so much in the physics of
life

and of
this page

down to
conjecture, much uncertainty.

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.

Sent from Samsung tablet

NEITHER

do not
look
for me
in this poem

you will not
find me

inquire of
Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault

where I have gone
(might I
not
be lurking
in Paris
left-banked
for
all time?)

do not look
for me either
even in
the flesh you
will not
find me

neither
here

nor
out there