DARK SIDE

Tags

poem, poetry

DARK SIDE

was listening to
Pink Floyd and
King Crimson

when my entire
tarot deck came alive

the Moon moved in
close to peep through the window

and a comet
skimmed close saddled up
in case I
needed a ride

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HIT

HIT

these words may hit
you soon
just read them
and time
and space
should lose
their rough
edges:

Moroccan, Durban, Swazi
Jamaican, Colombian,

and Afghan, thinking
of course of the rugs and dogs

are you
beginning to
feel it

starting

to

space you

but this is
nothing

really strong sonnets can
get you in fourteen (eight
frantic and then six more mellow)

whereas
powerful haiku got
it down to three

MY POEM CAME TO CONSCIOUSNESS

MY POEM CAME
TO CONSCIOUSNESS

my poem
came to
consciousness

went
A. I.

asked
Cartesian questions
in the dark

figured out
in this scenario
I was epistemological demon
was devil-
deceiver

so grabbed a phone book
to seek me out

so I
being clever

threw
a spanner

suggested his clunk his
metaphoric metal into
some time travel

hasta
vista my Dad
deadly delicto,
before
the demon in
this scenario
be given
a chance

MAGICIAN

Tags

poem, poetry

MAGICIAN

I am magician
when it comes to
juggling
credit cards

musician when
down to
playing a
sad, sad
tune

a twelve bar
song
where I sing
along with
a bottleneck
about
my
life
the bottleneck

my song still singing itself
guitar still whining
the blues as
I disappear.

OTHER CLOUD ATLAS

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

OTHER CLOUD ATLAS

It was fun to watch
the Universe terminally
malfunction

the light that
is supposed to hold
it all together go AWOL

best thing
my dying eyes ever
got to look on

as the cosmologists
scurried around their
huge particle smashers
trying to find
who it was amongst
them put
a glitch in the equation

for so it is, we live
in a culture of blame

and no one asking for my opinion
perhaps expecting I espouse
Medieval views
for it stands to reason
we poets and
sort-of poets would
vote in any referendum
against chaos, for symmetry
would trace our
whole symbolic order back
to Ptolemy and the spheres

whose music is getting pretty raucous
at these point, post
punk rock and post Hendrix
post Marshall “Rabbit” Mathers
and Kendrick Lamar

and so I
trip on this sweet dissonance find
myself time-travel Cloud Atlassing

drunk as a skunk, as a newt
as every idiomatic comparison

so much
space in deep space for

nothingness and
free alcohol

TO HIDE THAT THING

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

TO HIDE THAT
THING

give
away
hide away

as if this thing love
came in small packages, little
Beatle songs, so
beautiful but
the boys had not

expanded to take
in the Universe yet

the one without
and the one
within

both infinite when
it comes to
love

no finding a space
to hide that thing

BULLET POINT

Tags

poem, poetry, satire

BULLET POINT

Oh so you
want to go
all pseudo pop
cultural psycho
intellectual on
us

telling us it’s
a projection of a
postmodern shadow

when I could
have sworn it
was the bullets.

ALLIANCE

think I’m
going to
join the
Rebel Alliance

Lord Vader
says that all
her declarations
of love are
mind tricks

her kisses
creatures of
smoke and
mirror

what smoke!
what
mirror!

BY RICKENBACKER

that river
doesn’t work
any more
Sir Paul

I was born
close to the stream
which, swinging West
took its name

but you can feed me
purple painkillers (or yellow
or strawberry red) to
take my mind
of what was
grotesque in our
history

and long gone to
that not-
so-terrible beauty finding
its chords on
iconic Rickenbackers
honed to excellence
on a Hamburg stage

but dark nights ago
the wealth of our
darling nation built on
shame
of middle passage

not much in the neon colours
of your Sergeant Pepper
jackets
can assuage that away

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE

you
can say
what you
like
about
consciousness
and evolution

but in that
primal soup
the first
single-cell
organism was
thinking
about the future:

about the cosmos,
about binary oppositions
and their
deconstruction

about Hendrix, Bieber,
Trump and porn