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

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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