SO-CALLED MEN IN BLACK

SO-CALLED MEN IN BLACK

I was enjoying a mocha latte
on the dark side of the Moon
watching aliens prepare
for Earth invasion
from their so-called
secret bases.

The name of the coffee shop
escapes me right now
but I think it is
connected to space, stars and
such like
by deep semiotic resonance
at a metaphoric level.

And anyway, much in the news,
since they threw out (or had
the aliens arrest) four
huge, manly astronauts
for wearing suits of dark colour

talking zero gravity, but
that’s enough to get you killed
if you
don’t stock up on sugar
and take your coffee black.

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THERESA, I LIKE YOUR GRAMMAR

Theresa
(as in
may leads
to
might)
I like your
grammar

it is thing
right out of
the pages of
Barthes
or Saussure

such careful care
along the axis of
selection

to Hell with
the combinations
that might ensue.

BETA VERSION

nothing the ad
men can do

can give me
a gram more daring,
male sophistication

my face
not alpha enough
to bounce off
lustrous duco over
carbon fibre

I do not
even look good
soaring in sixth gear

OMNIBUS

OMNIBUS

sat
next to
Nietzsche
on the bus

which was
cool until
he got into
an argument
with Freud
and Hegel
about the
meaning of
the word
“ticket”

entirely
in German
much to the
consternation
of the troupe
of French
post-structuralist
driving or
perhaps
not
driving
the bus

MODEL T

every horizon
speaks to
transcendence

to
locate you
correlate you
I will
have to
go through
one-
eighty

see ourselves as
ninety, bisecting
each other’s angles

equilateral, bilateral
(and how!) intersecting

paradigm and
syntagm

endlessly
syntactic

come-
in-one-colour
Model T
(in the end she
asked is
this
poem
about me?
this poem

about
me?)

NEITHER

do not
look
for me
in this poem

you will not
find me

inquire of
Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault

where I have gone
(might I
not
be lurking
in Paris
left-banked
for
all time?)

do not look
for me either
even in
the flesh you
will not
find me

neither
here

nor
out there

LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS ADMIT DECONSTRUCTION

SNAKE SIGN

SNAKE SIGN

sometimes I drink far too much wine
(feel the purple-red liquid lapping
my brain’s inner ceiling)
that’s when
verging on the presumption
that I might be insatiable
demon King of Lust in
this shabby Professor body

that’s when usually decrees it
is time for my
exercise in
human grounding

dragging me across stones,
through thorns for every
stinging and
toothed creature to
have its wicked way with me

until away I slither in
my viper alter-ego

negotiating every little bump with
my poor little coils

my magnificent coils
and eyes that
see
every wave length, tongue
to taste every molecule

relishing my capacity to
shed every
bad human predilection
like an old sheathe of skin

POEM FOR UMBERTO ECO

POEM FOR UMBERTO ECO

there are no conspiracies
beyond what the style
and form an age dictates
it’s narrow parameters
the box it
has to think it

but which, great master of signs,
long ago shook yourself free of

and now, who would
argue against me, dispute
with me rhetorically, in
the Classical manner, if
I were to say

there you are with the
Roman poets, the Greek
historians, the Medieval
scholastics
looking down

which, as Einstein postulated,
is also looking
backwards, looking
forwards in space and time
envisioning (from position
of Olympian vantage) how
it looks at this point
at that point

the great game, the universal
fiction we mere
mortals have
only seen the horizon of
a single square page of

and you now
(this perhaps the
one true conspiracy)
closing the circle
of hyperreality

before (perhaps)
impulse to travel

ON THE WALL

the writing was
on the wall

but you rubbed
up against it
so abrasively
that it
was effaced

for which
you would now
lay the blame
on me
and my forcefulness