POEMS INSPIRED BY A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, death, Dream, Humanity, love, philosophical, poem, poetry, sexual fantasy, sexual symbolism, Shakespeare, wordplay, writing

POEMS INSPIRED BY A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

SONG FOR TITANIA

I play with words
for you
Titania

I play
with your name

mouthing it
getting my crude
tongue around it

until the sense of sound
is drowned to
wet echo
it disappears

but not the sound itself:
ah yes! cobbling, weaving
the shaft-shuttle
regulatory of
good industry

supply, demand,
I am artisan
who (despite
all appearances)
takes such care to
deliver
good service

whilst as I pun
my way to a
perfect entendre

I see
something there mirrored

in the
solid nature of your
rapture

enchantment of your poetry

*****
*****

GOODFELLOW

that juice
that misguides

messing with
the truth that is youth
in its
absolute
love

slurring word sounds to
fit that
shifty, narcotic
sex-dream picture

Oh
I do not hear
what I hear

do not see
what I see

my brute body far more
beast that it has ever been
your
fairy bower so

exquisitely
kindly

your words dripping with
the wonder of your
mouth, lips
parts I might
list
if I had
time to

Oh the love you have given me
too much for lifetime, enough
for one-night stand (more
might drown me)

that juice, my Queen,
so translated, brought
base to gold
great
alchemy

beyond the perfume trick
of simple chemistry

we must have bathed in
must have flowed, rolled
over our bodies
like a river

at which sight
Puck so
deeply impressed

*****
*****

AS DERRIÈRE

she has
an assignment
on A Midsummer
Night’s Dream

perhaps she might
venture in the
woods to
write it

where
again she
may or may not
notice

as in the Guillermo de Toro movie
the insects grow to the
size of fairies

give their
circumscribed hive-mind to
a confederation of not-
yet revolutionary-
minded rude mechanicals

but what of the
transformative magic of desire
will she see me
transformed, so wistfully
witty and erudite in
country matters when
in the
Queen’s bower hammocked

enslaved
to each other

until morning, when all
is restored, Dawn dispenses nonsense
again enthroned propriety

and my beauty wakes to see
the memory of her love
lies not
(as she thought)
with her
soulmate, her hero

but
far lesser being

her
puppeteer

her
man at the strings

ventriloquist
who had her speak so beautifully
with such strange, strange
beauty

(layer upon
layer uncovered in

sweet repartee
and yet, as Bottom did say, no
solid ground there

flat as
a pancake

curved
as derrière

*****
*****

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THE OTHER JACQUES

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Language, meaning, Metaphor, metapoetic, philosophical, poem, poetry, postmodern, poststructuralist, wordplay, writing

THE OTHER JACQUES

there is
a

philosophical
elephant

in the
room

bigger than
a Dali rhinoceros
or a
kangaroo

but
not a

horse in sight
outside the
text

no taxonomy
to speak of
all

this
difference
to arrest

DOWN TO

Tags

alienation, Apollo 13, art, charcoal, industrial, metafictional, metapoetic, poem, poetry, punning, Reader, sex, writing

DOWN TO

someone charcoaled
my picture
of the world

after which
things quickly
Went retrograde

found myself Apollo
thirteening through
industrial gray atmosphere
trying to
get back

thinking
if I flame out
here it’s all down to
my failure to exorcise what
they call magical thinking

this you and I discussed
at length in bed
which was strange in itself
you being a
character in
my novel

or me in yours

who is exactly in
whose head
difficult to negotiate
when
speaking of re-entry
couldn’t be
less metaphoric

your bed, my bed,
our bed

so full of charcoal
easy and hard (as
homonym would
have it) not to
exaggerate or
simply lie in it

down to you
lover, reader
to
ménage with us
masterfully, mistressfully
help us out of this mess

NEITHER

Tags

erotic, identity, love, Other, poem, poetry, power, Race, Sexual

NEITHER

either
neither

neither
either

trying to chip my paint off
but it’s difficult — no,
impossible!

the logic of binary
imprinted on my skin
creased into my brain

and yet
I am what
I am (forgive
my antique French)

no archetype me
I do not encapsulate
embody either

and so
I look into your otherness
to escape dilemma, dichotomy
of dead alternatives

your body
different beyond different

and yet
my fingers enter you, these
aforementioned, paint-stripping, absolving fingers,
find you
— as far as it goes — the almost
perfect mirror to
my touch

THE SKY BUCKLES

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Consciousness, Creativity, Humanity, Language, meaning, Metaphor, Metaphysical, metapoetic, philosophical, philosophy, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, power, Reader, semiotics, time, wordplay, writing

THE SKY BUCKLES

The physics Professor
cabled the poet, said

you writers have no insight
into the nature of things
(once the great Lucretius passed
that great understanding gone
sadly lacking)

told him off sharply for his deployment
of preposterous verb after preposterous verb

dragging the no sense
down into nonsense

dim place
without true knowledge of processes
(“the sky buckles
the Earth speaks

what nonsense is
this”)

such false pride, devious ego assumptions,
same as with the climbers who
stumble in the death zone descent
die like flies
(not that flies can reach them
or decay ever

the minus sign that withholds
the fair redistribution of their atoms

so great an outlay on
the right to die without real dignity

whilst I can (here we go with these verbs again)
sink into the soft demolishment of self
the loosening, untethering of all memories
that the
winds might take them blow
them from the summit like
freshly-fallen snow

subtract me from that consciousness
that is little more than
delusion of matter, philosophical
abstraction

deploying to this end all
your verbs rigidly Newtonian, constitutionally-approved,

there to
beat all the sympathy, empathy
out of me
hard Nature in

that the course you have charted (calculating
mass as opposed to energy)
might bring me to
the mirror of the truth that
governs all
seemingly evolving

get those selfish, time-denying atoms, to speak
only when
spoken to

adamant in their madness
that they
are here (voicing as collective)

to
speak what
needs to be spoken

and so will,
must speak

perforce express

(and if the sky buckle fearing the
fake power of this medium

let these verbs have
their way

let each
do its worst)

LIKE A LANGUAGE

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FREUD, Language, poem, poetry, psychoanalysis, semiotics, Unconscious

LIKE A LANGUAGE

the unconscious is
structured like
a
language

is deus
ex machina

is reductio
ad absurdum

is fee fie foe
words and verbs

is a
tree with
infinite roots
exploding into
rain forest

Oh your
shadows and demons

on your breath they
suppress me

slipping in and
out of your speech

wrapped around participles
and gerunds like snakes mating

and so
to the poem

that thing
of slurred nonsense

that leaf that fell on the back
of psychoanalysis when
in dragon’s blood
it was bathing

QUITE FOUCAULT

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Counter culture, Foucault, hair, meaning, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Poststructuralism, semiotics

QUITE FOUCAULT

“When the moon is on the Seventh House”
“Aquarius” (from the musical/ film “Hair”)

some years ago
it was
happened to lose
my rock star hair

but it didn’t go entirely
now seems to
be growing
inside me

more forest or
indeed jungle
covering everything
that was
transparent
obvious and
clear

hard to find
that faith again

in things just
as they appear

SUBTRACT ME

Tags

death, Ending, female, Fragmentation, identity, irony, loss, love, mathematical, Mathematics, meaning, Metaphor, philosophical, poem, poetry, power, Pythagoras, Sexual, Unity, wordplay

SUBTRACT ME

would that you would
subtract me, retract me

not divide
nor subdivide me

so divisive when
you do so
whether long
or short

or all the way down
to the absurdum of
lowest
common denominator

assigning
minus sign

my neck hung around
like dog in the proverb
taking my preordained place
in the negative
column

this negative space
what
in my
case
could be
more iconic?

where better
to split hairs, split atoms
balance
the equation?

countermand the stridency of
ego as infinity
absolutely plus one

though if we were to
deconstruct, go descant
suddenly
sing a tangent

from cheap
seat in the margins

(for which always the poetic risk
of becoming drawn, and quartered)

full-throat the love
that is such a
tough customer
when it
come to quantification

that sweetest voice
not always disembodied

even if
counterintuitive, counterfactual,
beyond definition

and yet
still mathematical

as it carves me up
as you
carve me
up
as you always do

me and you together
not a simple matter of
multiplication or
addition
thing in my
brain
going back to Plato
back to Pythagoras

my hand on
your hypotenuse
saying it
“does not compute”

OUT

Tags

Alien, art, poem, poetry, Reader, text, transformation

OUT
“we have learnt nothing”
Picasso

text he
downloaded

being alien
and a masterpiece
was incomparably
advanced

to read it we
had no
option
but to
become it
ourselves

love it, hate it
what does that matter
when you
are metaphor?

for final verdict, place
in the supreme
absolute canon

the jury still sitting
the jury still out

IN SIN

Tags

erotic, love, Metaphor, Metaphysical, poem, poetry, Sexual innuendo, sexual symbolism, spiritual, woman, wordplay

IN SIN

He was half awake the whole night
never fully asleep

wrestling with words, the right words
the wrong words, the good words, the bad words

words to put into the mouths of his
desires and his demons
and his angel suddenly
transformed, unrecognizable
different
her nails taking his skin, mouth

drinking his sweat, vampire-like in
being so suddenly
possessed by a
taste for everything inside, behind,
beneath those words
for every drop of his blood

and those eyes wild suddenly
like some kind of
shapeshifting animal

but at the heart of it all
conductor and queen of
this dark symphony
this epic revelation of
the flesh

she herself
transformed into
magician of
transformation, of the alchemy of
skin and
what lies within

of faster-
than light travel and Saint levitation

of tearing away dead words that mask
the veil of reality
until we find
the soul’s true revelation beyond
beauty, beyond sin.