DRIVE THROUGH

Tags

Capitalism, commercialism, consumer society, Counter culture, dream time, fast food, poem, poetry, satire, THE BEATLES

DRIVE THROUGH
“he hadn’t noticed
that the lights had changed”

life is
fast food

life is
a drive
through

life is
man
dressed like
a machine
flipping
a burger

was
meditating on this

when
clock stopped
and I just could
not get it
started again

upon which note
a philosopher of note
stepped
up to
the plate

pitched up to
give me time’s
brief history and
footnote to Plato

having reassured him
that from this inconsequential event
I did not, could not,
infer
time
was
dead
(albeit in a poem)

at which he gave me
that graven-faced look
(like Medusa
had set
eyes on him)
freezing all his ideas
into books of stone

ah, but
we will always
have the
dream time

to escape
contingencies of concrete:
not the
kiddy meal
dream time of
Wonka sweet rainbow
sprinkle and
sugar sparkle

everything in
primaries or pastels
creamy
or soft-centered

no, here I’m contemplating
the real Lennon-McCartney McCoy
of yellow Lucy submarine
in the sky
with diamonds and
a strawberry walrus

day in
the life

revolution number
nine
kind
of thing

MR LENNON

Tags

Hamburg, Inagine, John Lennon, Lenin, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, poem, poetry, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, THE BEATLES, wordplay

MR LENNON

I thought you
were a
lowly insect

but now you tell me
you are the
Working Class Hero
interred in
Red Square

my brain
reeling from this, and
from smudge of
Hanoverian in
your saucy scouse accent
gone turned
pink and white
and bubble-gum blue marshmallow
(top ingredient in the pies
rocking-horse
people like)

yes, I read of your death
browsing the backseat
in a newspaper taxi

“imagine that!” the taxi-driver cried,
they were all
in dress uniform
waiting for outbreak
of war
or some vaudeville event

and Alice, through the mirror, out
in one of your deftly landscaped gardens
wondering, as we
we will
all be
wondering forever and ever

as aliens
in distant galaxies will be wondering
what
it all
meant

what “Day in
the Life” might have
done to our heads.

POLYPHEMUS

Tags

Game of Thrones, philosophical, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire, television. mass media, TV, wordplay

POLYPHEMUS

three-eyed
raven

one-eyed
television

smartest man
in Westeros
is only a
few feet tall

but don’t
knock intellectual
or force them
into consensual

just
let them be
finding answers where
you didn’t
see questions

K99B

Tags

Capitalism, Consciousness, cyberpunk, Dystopia, erotic, Humanity, identity, Life, meaning, Metaphor, philosophical, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, satire, science fiction, Sexual, Sexual innuendo

K99B

“buggier than batshit”
Philip K Dick

downtown Tokyo
(not sure if it was TOKYO B66
or TOKYO C67)
a drug-addled psychic
grabbed me
said “listen, bitch
godda gedda grip”

then disappeared
(magic being the
art of
pure distraction)

and so
they were throwing Jesus bombs
up and down the street
would like to say
that for you, my dear,
I caught and saved one

but it wouldn’t be true
not even
mythologically
certainly
not spiritually

and as for me and you, is
there any truth more questionable
than ones we
presume sexual?

(Nietzsche and Bukowski’s ghost-like grins
signalling approval
I shoe them away
no time for dead prophets
or
homeless people)

before long they had latched onto me
sex-selling Androids, because I fit the profile
(nothing capitalism cannot do
when it finds its
imagination)
and of course, retina-scanning my memory
then all
shapeshifted accordingly, enterprisingly
into form quite like you

same eyes, hair voice and
obviously skin colour

but as for
more intimate details, well
then I’d have to
ransack my account, push up
debts payable

and what fun is it really
what joy in the afterglow

cuddling with steel and fiberglass framed
as binary equation?

advertisements for this that and the other
as room-sized holograms, projected, freely given

somewhere someone
having had a huge brain-wave
regarding those on the edges
margins of
the system
how they
might be brought home, brought in
to the centre, the heart
be perfectly aligned

this
in downtown Tokyo or
Detroit or
Johannesburg

Johannesburg D55
or K 99B

UNITED

Tags

Failure, football, loss, Lost, Manchester United, poem, poetry, satire

THE WALL

Tags

Drogon, fourth wall, Game of Thrones, HBO, media, Narrative, Night King, poem, poetry, postmodernist, TV, whitewalkers, Winterfell, zombie apocalypse

THE WALL

seven days
waiting for
news from
the Northern front
is too, too long,
too interminably long

we wait in icy uncertainty
second guessing tactics and strategy:
is it right to place faith
in Drogon and
dragonglass, to
sacrifice to the lord of light,
that nothing on the field
burn like firesword, cut
like Valerian steel

we watched but eight score
hours ago as they drank, spoke in the winter dark
were reunited by torchlight
looking for the foreshadowing hand of fate

losing you who we have
so long travelled with will
bring such sorrow, such tragic pain
and yet the
sacrifice will be
remembered, will not have been
in vain

our memories a memorial for all who fall
protecting our hearth, for who
in this time of
philosophical trick, narrative subterfuge
can be sure at all

the whitewalkers, their Night King, so
nihilistically victorious
might not
zombie us
as we sleep, in our mindless media uncritical beds
pouring through our television sets
mocking the very frailty
of our fourth wall

SEX SWORD

Tags

katana, Kill Bill, love, poem, poetry, sex, surrender, sword, Zen

SEX SWORD

sex with you
Hattori Hanzo sword

sexual with you
gold and
black katana

synthesis, antithesis
life and
death in
this dialectic

perhaps the Zen
realization would
be surrender

not just
forgo
the sword

but give it to you
let you cut me

let our lovemaking
get really bloody

SUDDEN IRRUPTION

Tags

1950s, aliens, poem, poetry, popular culture, science fiction

a sudden irruption of 50s science fiction
saucers full of secrets and rockets sprouting
titanic thruster fire

Heavens! the sexy fetish of Flash Gordon’s
well-hidden lust for Ming’s daughter
and invading Martian Jezebels
just too much for all our men

So let’s go Area 51 and hide everything as joke fiction
let’s skew the entire fantasy and
speak classified FBI files

time travellers from the 50s shocked
by philosophies bottled like our water
and the lack of fins on automobiles
how so might you drive
imagining flying to the stars

IT IS ALWAYS SO

Tags

Australia, culture, District 9, film, Mad Max, poem, poetry, South Africa

IT IS ALWAYS SO

It is always so:
history changing the moment
something
smashes
through the screen

my friend told me
how it was they were
all down in Sydney
drinking beer at
the barbi
watching the footer
on the telly

when Mad Max
Rockatansky came
crashing through
the screen

and I myself
was busying myself
buying ChesaNyama
when the District 9
saucer floated into view

parked itself over central
Johannesburg

changed that
skyline

changing us
forever

almost killing me: such
a shock to my system
I nearly choked on my meat.

AND IN THAT CAVE

Tags

Alice, Alice in Wonderland, gold reef, philosophical, philosophy, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire, Star Wars, Universe, Witwatersrand, wordplay, Yoda

AND IN THAT CAVE

“that is why you fail”, Yoda
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back

was writing a poem
but then
the Earth caved in

and in that cave
(deeper than Western deep)

Plato teaching
his pupils how
to negotiate, differentiate,
abstract a pure philosophy
from all its
metaphors and myths

and me
falling fifty, sixty
eighty floors
like some express elevator
whose link to
Heaven broke

feeling like Alice on speed
Alice in a Ferrari, on
a Kawasaki

don’t get me started
on how in that

holy confusion
my poem I almost lost