MOSAIC

Tags

narcissism, poem, poetry, Universe

MOSAIC

He wanted the Universe
to be his instrument

wanted the galaxies
to dance to his tune

hoped that all of space
would be his mirror

not caring much
for the talk of probabilities,
multiplicities

that the mirror reserved
for his perfect, cosmic image

was but
a tiny, tiny reflective piece
in the infinite proliferation
of mosaics within
mosaics.

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TWO-SLIT

Tags

poem, poetry

TWO-SLIT

my little
words

smaller than
atoms

so small you can
put them through
a two-
slit experiment

watch them
interfere

wave
back at you

OUT

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

OUT

we are not what
we thought we were
not

what we assumed
surprise surprise when
we get down
to our
subatomic level

all the seething possibilities
in patterns of myth

only here we find
the absolute uncertainty
to figure
it out

KILLING ME

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

KILLING ME

It is killing him
writing so fast
to change
the world

erasing inhumanity, injustice
and suffering
things moving so
fast it is
a blur outside

just colours, shapes and
forms flowing into each other

and this, as he loses
any sense of anything individual, sees
nothing but the complexities of pattern,
must be
he realizes

how God sees the world, and beyond
that the Universe, Himself writing
everything at blistering
speed
the speed

of evolution, of
thirteen billion years
collapsed into a second

of this moment
in my poem, his poem, whoever
is writing
whom
at this moment

strung across the fabric
of space time
stretched out
to infinity

and yet
here we all are, twenty-four frames per second.

FIGURED

FIGURED

was watching Arrival
when I figured they would need
police to patrol every
two-slit experiment

untangle every entangled
human and alien soul

who together, unbeknownst
to each other
are writing stars in collusion
on a massive plasma screen

STUCK

STUCK

and where do
these “alternative
facts” come
from?

from the parallel universe
in the cookie jar

being mindful that when
you quantum leap
in there to grab
an alternative
cookie

you do not end up (as in
the great Simian joke)
with your
fingers (small
as they
are) stuck

SAYO NARABA

SAYO NARABA

let me leave
to find a
new world

those who
wish to follow
can follow

forget, unlearn,
learn again

still in my memory
echoes of what was before
in the Sengoku Jidai
the war of Empire

how much consciousness
atomized at
Nagasaki

and would the Universe
care to recycle

let my
atoms blow
and if the consciousness go
or follow

it is no
great tragedy, kabuki
dance or
mime-show

I told you I loved you
and meant it, that
is enough for
one life

wrong to ask, to
expect more

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

THE JOKE

he was going to
make a crude
punning joke
about the two-slit
experiment

but his brain
became entangled
some messages lost their way

heard stories
about how their creator
father-mother did
not love them, never held them
left them doomed
to always just
be single molecules
never wavefronts, waves

SET SQUARE

take a set square
see if the
angle will
do

the one from which
you measure everything as
if you yourself are
not part of
the picture

as if
looking out from your box
like Schrödinger’s cat

not even
brushing the glass
with your whiskers