NIGHTCAP

Tags

death, poem, poetry

took my deadly
nightcap
💉💉💉💉💉
each drop
an ending
in itself
a denouement
that perfectly fits

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (4)

Tags

death, poem, poetry

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (4)

A LA CARTE

since love
was not on offer
I ordered death

the waiter came with
pitch black food
on black plates

the colour
fading
with each mouthful

****

MAXIMUS

throw me in
the Colosseum

let the tigers, lions,
guys with swords
and tridents
tear me apart

let me blood
enrich the sand and
the favour
of Emperors

let me
put up a show
one truly
horrific fight

****

THE BILL

let the bills
the writs
all the
paper shit
pile up
like so
many dead
leaves

the wind will come
won’t come
blow them away
they go
they stay
what do I care
I am in a place
beneath concern
beyond
responsibility

no fear hear
and my eyes will not see
the sun bear its offspring
in your cities and your gardens

your eyes melting
in the beauty
of that light

and the shockwave like
God smacked the Earth
with a uranium hammer

and the Earth beyond repair
humanity
beyond salvation

what
do I care

it means nothing
here to me

****

FREEZE FRAME

mylast thought was of you
but
when I thought
of your face
something missing
from that picture

and I wished
you well, so well

for what
awaits

the world you
must make

will have
to do its best
without me

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (3)

Tags

death, poem, poetry

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (3)

BALD POET

contesting reality
not a reality contestant

searching for
the widest of lagoons

your little boat
a barely inflated inflatable
(not a murmur of this to any
passing swordfish, sawfish,
stingray or shark)

suddenly mud island beckons
but offering nothing
in the way of sun relief

at this point reader
is quick to realize ocean imagined
is really a river
right at its estuary

but no crocodiles here
or floating bodies
regimes
that terrify
or scandalize the eye

stuff gathered there though
to be beached on the sandbanks
or,
as is the nature
of the plan, purposed by the stream
to be taken out to sea

****

IN ALL INNOCENCE

I sat in Hell
waiting for my case

some really really
good lawyers down here
I thought

hoping for a
suspended sentence

hanging
above the fire

not
in the fire itself

****

POEM AND LIBATION

you buried me
in your back garden
under an apple tree

as you
expected no
one suspected
and in truth
no one really
missed me

except you
after a good few years
the good started to
outweigh the bad
in your memory of me
or perhaps it was
you were looking
for redemption

and so the songs sung
the poems recited
the wine
libations

all I would like to
affirm gratefully received
were I the omnipresent
authorial consciousness
in my own story

****
BRUTAL FRUIT

I looked at beauty
but beauty warned:
“do not
look at me”

for head must
be held askance, eyes averted,
where it is
impossible to
simply turn away

my mistake
forgetting this dictum
viewing full on

beauty
scorching my skin
with acid
ripping out my
eyes
with a red
hot needle

screaming
“not today
not today
not for
anytime
but especially
not today”

****

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (2)

Tags

death, poem, poetry

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (2)

CUT KEY

lost my keys
haven’t got
a clue

don’t know
what held of
those keys open

how many doors
there are
need to
be
opened

how many must stay closed
for all time

****

GLOVE

snake strangled me
her skin fit mine
like a glove

Oh, as the light disappeared
I imagined my life
not as fast-forwarded film
but five act play
with props and curtains

and scenes where
the protagonist wrestles
with a beautiful python
only in death
as denouement
bringing catharsisss
could their tragic
romanssss mean anything

****

RENDEZVOUS

meet me
the other side
if you can, if
it’s
your determination

no need
for immediacy
we can
wait some time

since not
that we have
a full life’s programme
extended to
eternity

for what is time
now?
what
time is there
to speak of

no difference between
a day
and a billion years

****

WITH SYLVIA

let me please
sleep forever

hang a do not
disturb sign
on Morpheus’ door

and
never let me
wake

but allow
dream
to continue

let Sylvia appear
calling to me from
the tangled blackberry brambles

those coils of wild thorns protecting
such brutal black-blooded fruit

and the taste there
one to match that plants savage beauty

even as
the scene gives way to
another poet’s theme

and the clouds of
green chlorine and brown mustard gas
begin to envelop us

but this landscape changing
before we die
a soldier’s death

from one
moment to the next
a kaleidoscope of tableaux
ceaselessly changing
every one
a thing that
before it begins
meets its end

hope would
be squashed if this
were
anything more
real than
fanciful sleep-image

thing
without winner
or loser thus
easy to abide

let
the projector roll
camera unroll
hologram rotate 360

each archetype unfold as it
always meant to do

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (1)

Tags

death, poem, poetry, suicide

POEMAS DE UN HOMBRE MUERTO (1)

.45

here he is
taking his final
selfie out
on the patio

and I know
how this
will go down

the women will
wonder why he did
not shave before
posting this picture

and the men
argue

whether the Glock
he is holding
is 9 mm, .40 caliber or .45

****

MCCALL

they have not told her
about his death

choose to leave her
sweetly uniformed,
living the curtailed life
that life curtailed for her

nor have they told her
of the poem he wrote
a supercilious, narcissistic piece,
in which,
to put it crudely, he
did speak all of this

and she
whose memory is broken
Is only moment
to moment

under the shade of a
tree in her Mother’s village
Tlhabalogo

sees the sky blood crimson on the horizon
feels it will
augur well for a blissful morning

all can be at peace
in her world

****

EXTRAMURAL

I am
outside of
time

how far outside?
think
your furthest relative

the one whose
bones they dug up
in the outback of Oz

and
time

can do
nothing to me now
not its reasons and rhymes
quotas and deadlines
its entire project
management since
universal Big Bang

so what
do I care if
its straight or
curved
sacred
or perved

chiscut or
permed

whether it rushes
like a tornado, swims
like a penguin
or rolls
on its back
like a
cat

creature so wondrous
but entirely lacking in patience

****

RIP TIDE

I am surfing the
sharpest angle wave
from crest down
to trough

Oh me oh my
how good that will look in red
on my progress report

so inclined to decline only
the irresponsibility of wordplay
keeping me up

and there we
are

wave passed, near tsunami
that bastard

see now
so calm — must have flatlined

DADDY DADA

Tags

anti-war, death, poem, poetry, War

DADDY DADA

went to the war
had
no voice

came
back dead
I had no choice

and there that’s me
number twenty million of three
on the side
that wore gray;
or was it khaki?

RETURN

Tags

Britain, British, Consciousness, death, Eat Coker, Ending, Heaven, Humanity, identity, Life, Liverpool, meaning, Metaphor, metapoetic, philosophical, poem, poetry, Reader, river, River Mersey, River Tame, spiritual, THE BEATLES, time, TS Eliot, Universe, Water, William Wordsworth, wordplay, writing

RETURN

a command came
from the brown god

which left me
under no illusions

and there I was writing
deep into the night
through sleep
through dream
following that river
my river

as we made
our course
to the sea.

****
Oh, the disregarded
divinity
of this labour
words are
cheap
are below
us
I hear you say

in the voice
your words commandeer for you

****

river of life
what songs
do you
have for me?

what songs from
my childhood
for I was born
beside a tiny river
a trickle of
a tributary
that
on its way
to the ocean went
Strawberry Field, became
full Sergeant Pepper

not that
those that bore me
much cared, knew at all

and last night I dreamt myself
crossing this river in your victorious city
finding my
way

finding my way
and now everything
that I write
you must view
through this prism

must write what I wrote
through this prism

river of life

celestial city
surreal little lanes and streets
of which your
four troubadours sing

****
deep
into the night

how deep
your inquire
and
what the depth
of this river?

really, such questions, interrogations
that I should be forced to
made to answer

for I know not of depth
beyond absolute abyss, the rest
relatively speaking
I only know flow
this
a poem of rivers

river of
my birth
river of my dream, my death,
rivers to which
I will always return

as the poet in the ninth prelude
speaking of
waters doubling back
finding ways
back to memory

I will just shrug and
smile

be your village idiot
not spiritual professor

(for what did we learn
not under
revision
in eternal state of advisement?)

as the night
gathers shape

and the fire of the spirit boils
the water of the soul

and the air
lifts up rain
caressing that surface

and the earth will wait
as the earth is wont

the earth has me booked
and placed
will find space
for my body

and the poem
being done

what left for its fate
but to fold into
ship shape

return
to the brown god (damyatta da)
give
back to
that source
set adrift on those flowing
never ending waters

SILLY LULLABY

Tags

death, Humanity, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, police, power, satire

SILLY LULLABY

sleep sweetly my child
the police not gonna come
arrest you
for your silly hair
(far too silly
they swear, swear)

sleep sweetly my child
no one gonna come
shoot you
because you did not
cotton on
told the truth
and shamed the Devil
(we know
how much he don’t wanna
be shamed
that one that one

sleep sweetly
my little baby
though we
behind bars you
still in my arms
gonna be
fine

they not gonna
tear you away
for some time

TOMB

Tags

Birth, death, Life, poem, Poet, poetry, Reader, transformation

TOMB

poem
is tomb

poem
is womb

he’s gone
who wrote this
felt
born
to write this

and by gone
you know I mean
really
dead and buried

yet
as I said earlier
poem is
also a
womb
(repeating
myself here
in case
you didn’t hear me
in case
some problem
with my voice
my strange mixture
of Northern British
and South African
accent
and as
a consequence
the words
failed to register)

as womb
there is life
to be found in
the dust and the death
of all that
is here written

stuff to
being into
the light
(strange is it not
that you
here to
birth it?)

CRAZY IDEA

Tags

creative, death, Life, philosophical, poem, poetry, viral, writing

CRAZY IDEA

everything is alive
even the
dead
are alive:

who in their right mind
would give you
such an idea?

perhaps
you meant
just motion

yes, let’s just
backtrack, reach
for compromise

next you will say
this poem
isn’t just words
in digital space or
on piece of paper

that somehow
it’s alive, has
life and
human feeling

what on Earth, on Earth,
would give you
such a crazy idea?