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

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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

ROOMS

so many rooms

some crazy
some uninhabitable

some with secret extra dimensions
which lead you to believe
simple lines will
never align

secret boxes of
extreme curvature
you leave but

why
are you still here?

ANGEL

Angel asked me to compile a list
of all the paradoxes of time and
faster than light travel

but before she
asked

I had
finished it.

INSIDE THE ZEN DONUT

INSIDE THE ZEN DONUT

The Master held up an iced donut. He twirled it around in front of the class as if it were some kind of alien spacecraft.

He asked: if we were donuts, and yet still had souls, would the location of the soul be in the icing, the hole, the space (air) surrounding the donut or the donut itself. Knowing his penchant for arguing one’s way through theological and philosophical paradoxes and connundrums, we immediately set to work, thinking, writing and debating within ourselves. And still more writing.

The Master beamed like the Buddha himself as slowly his table got covered in, and then began to groan under the weight of our productive output (the class was just short of thirty in number). Soon he became hidden behind three huge paper skyscrapers (which occasioned at least one bad-taste quip about 9/11).

The day was reaching its close, and so, with a rather imperious grunt and gesture he curtailed proceedings.

As we were filing out if the room he bade us adieu, smiled devilishly, and in one titanic, tyrannosaurus-like gulp, basically swallowed the whole donut.

STRANGE THIS

I break apart

the very moment
it all comes together

strange this

the paradox
of bliss

at the quantum level

WHAT WE TOLD THE ALIEN DELEGATION

WHAT WE TOLD THE ALIEN DELEGATION

we keep
our sacred image
in a box

called
“paradox”

it has
no

lid

ON THE PLATFORM

the study
of philosophy or
social theory

does not make for
redemptive figures, or
great Romantic heroes;
this since Socrates,
whose student Alcibiades
turned traitor, fought
for Sparta
out of pique, or
on a whim

and then Althusser, whose
wife (sadly),
the recipient of ordinance
that does not flow
logically from his theory

Oh, Descartes, Voltaire
and Wittgenstein (we
will not even presume to
speak about Nietzsche)
how is it
the words are powerful, will
reshape, reconstitute, and
yet disconnect

like the train you
have built –seemingly
perfect for the moment in
how it handles the rails

leaving you
behind,
on the platform