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

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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

REQUIEM (FOR A BABY DADDY)

Tags

Patriarchy, poem, poetry, power, reality TV, satire

REQUIEM (FOR
A BABY DADDY)

It was sad his
passing without
suspicious circumstances

knocked out in the
first round of the
“Baby Daddy”
reality TV competition

his dancing, DJ-ing
and rapping up to
scratch

but only five kids
by a mere three women!

FIT

Tags

Alien, erotic, female, love, male, philosophical, poem, Poet, poetry, poststructuralist, science fiction, sexual symbolism, touch, Twist in the tail, Universe, wordplay

FIT

there is an alien species
swarming in my bed

their queen
whispering sweet
alien nothings
in my ear

telling me that
we are
made for each
other

her wings
are enough to carry me

and that, in spite
of the tricky
linguistic differences

we are
a perfect fit

CASTAWAY

Tags

poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire

CASTAWAY

castaway
on Love’s Island
without
love

you can try to
swim to
Devil’s Island

forgetting the sea
has a lust
for blood

or battle your way
through icy waters
back to that
garden island grown
cold,
so cold

following the camera
that believes
itself God

I READ YOUR POEM

Tags

poem, poetry, Universe

I READ YOUR POEM

I read your poem
like a goldfish looking
out from its bowl

everything in your world
so strange, uneasily shifting
yet, I suppose,
on its own terms needing
no second-guessing,
richly convincing

not the glass-
distorted curved
space that
I see
(sometimes the focus
almost on my
bowl itself
sometimes stretched out
to infinity)

little fish that I am
I have had my dreams
since small fry of
expanding my universe to
that of great white shark

though me and
my
tiny sea

have not travelled far, few countries visited
few worlds explored
— such a sad
self-
limiting fact

unless we include (and why not include)
all those trips, those horrendous swims
straight through the
ragged-toothed jaws
of Hell
and back.

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

DO NOT LOOK FOR ME

do not look for me
where just
a moment ago
I was sitting, we
were sitting

the seat is
empty, I am
long gone

there is no
forwarding address
since I am not
moving forward

in this sphere
all movement is illusion,
fiction

here is the
absolute relativity in
which time
does not exist at all

HOLIDAY HOLOGRAM

we packed
a hologram of
our lunch

to take on a picnic
in the hologram of the forest

which I believe
makes good
logical sense

we ourselves
being holograms