Monday 31 May 2010

An Elegy For The Brown Pelican


I
The brown pelican in sky azure
Flies through blue to be in a postcard
The turtle on pristine sand earlier
Now swims slowly in deadly black gold.

II
Should we and do we ever cry for
The life we exploit and we buried?
In mistakes that for them: a massacre,
So we can live our lives hurried.

III
As we rush to this Paradise,
To escape, to bathe, to burn, consume
We take flight from another place
So the same Terror can now resume.

IV
In the once untouched everglades
The alligator is held as a toy
By a kid wearing ”I am so cool shades”
To get the shot for his holiday.



V
We get from A to B rather quickly
These days, the car is a convenience
By which we can run down wickedly
rabbits, the toads and hundreds of mice.

VI
Each of these and they are millions
The military call collateral damage
Do we have to peel lots of onions
So as to cry, to reach that rare stage?

VII
Knowing that though some are innumerable
And they are defined as insentient
They can suffer and yet we are capable
Of seeing them only as inconvenience.

VIII
We clean our streets and homes of Life
Because they bother or irritate
Not once do we show any real grief
Because they are beneath our Estate.




IX
Of what is good and healthy for us
We term them pest and parasite
We splat, we spray, we so pious
Humans seek to destroy and decimate.

X
The logic of course is a species
Centred one, we choose the Select
The rest we treat like smelly faeces
As nature in the housefly was incorrect.

XI
We import our sense of objectivity
From the holy books and from Science
Thus we eat this fish in subjectivity
It tells us in the bible and has vitamins.

XII
We are persuaded by faith and reason,
To make decisions that are pure stupidity.
When it comes to intelligent design
We relax our guard and God in cupidity.




XIII
We believe the planet to be a garden
That it is our duty to manage
This little ball of land and water; Eden
In times of the current Carnage.
XIV
We put down our spades and look for blame
First we turn to the oil company
Which we cuss and call a terrible name
The we go higher to the Presidency.

XV
Never do we look at the Consumer
That’s the majority of us at home
We like to feel ourselves superior
As we guzzle oil, we play dumb.

XVI
We stand on the shore and pity the seabird
Tell big government and bankers to go to Hell
But we think saving fuel is plainly absurd
And we eat all the fish that they sell.





XVII
Never asking, whether there is a connection
In the Almighty scheme of things
Between the fact we never care or learn
About the Ecology and all these wrongs.

XVIII
We of course understand what is Beauty
How that is important for the tourists
How to have the beach looking pretty
For those who wish to slash their wrists.

XIX
You recoil at the shock of the non
Sequitar, having Beauty connected with Death
Yet when you watch shit on the Internet
You forget all about the Carbon footprint.

XX
Each time you download the ”beautiful”
Watch TV, drive, work, even breathe,
You are party to, in a way, an oil spill
No wonder you zap, turnover with relief.





XXI
You have blood on your hands by Satellite
Only you and I include me, do not care
Because it is not on the News, it is remote
All the consequences are in the future.

XXII
If you get involved, fairweather friend,
It is for the moment, knee-jerk reflex
You will shed crocodile tears at their end
But refuse to pay one cent in Green Tax.

XXIII
But the trade-off is political capital
You want money for the economic loss
So to make the hotel more hospitable
Or to increase the catch of lobsters.

XXIV
Those plastic mermaids in MacD
With long flowing hair and cuteness
Mean more to you than the Manatee
Which are dying there in this Darkness.



XXV
What is behind this devastation
but your reluctance to change habits
Oh yes that comes as a revelation!
You call for facts and for exhibits!

XXVI
You refuse to walk, you refuse transport
Unless it is of status and like a symbol
You refuse to check whatever you bought
Unless it is of course not a brand label.

XXVII
The stock of fish and all the natural wildlife
Before the spillage, were already in danger
By your indifference to their survival and strife
When you played the role of Park Ranger.

XXVIII
Cutting down trees, pouring toxic waste
Into the open sea and rivers, killing whatever
Whenever as if they were on some pathetic list
of the seriously deranged serial killer.




XXIX
Now I wish you to consider your complicity
In this crime against the nature you so love
By thinking about turning off electricity
And bringing yourself down from the point above

XXX
Where you took the high road to moralise
Without really caring about the brown pelican
And all the other forms of life affected by these
Choices you make like shopping on Amazon.



Saturday 29 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound XII


The mariners that we are, marinated

in the juices of the poets before, not a nice

image mind you Hart, though good for the pan

handler looking for a gem or gold in the course

of reading, like the excavation of the Mary Rose,

a fruity ship, like Peter the Pomegranate,

a shipwreck like carrack, done my homework,

they had hand held weapons and canons

no titters there boys, this is not your M or Loaded

Fire at will! Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh

Kebab, I could not resist that one Hart!

But seriously, on deck of the junk, we spot

anchored off shore, Herman Melville once more

In a tomb he is, probably written up in copy,

That is in shorthand, a poem by the Crane boy!

Floral tribute, we throw, anatomy of a flower,

sepals, stalks, calyxes, and the male parts,

Into the Sea, where the whale sports

with the love of Hawthorne, good old Nat,

A romance of unrequited passion, fruit

The whale, we have resurrected, it spouts

Defiance, fak you Ahab, fak you, fak you

It gulls us into remembrance of earlier reverance

Our Whitman bird, the Chekhov bird, mews

In our self reflexive mode, the funeral of a feed-back,

R.I.P. our anchovies, our sardines, our sea food,

the noise and clutter, time to get on board

the narrative, to move beyond the Twelve

at dinner, to the number of our reluctance

To the terra incognito,

Fire at will -

Jesus

Christ

Judas

Priest

Thursday 27 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound XI


hi

hip

hipp

hippe

hippee


hy

hyp

hype

hyper-s

hyper-son

hyper-soni

hyper-sonic


let us sail the hip junk, sail her to the

mid-east, at ease captain, sail her to

the hole

y land, no worries bro, we mean

the deposit

account

where they put

in the

mone

y and, no sorry sis, we are lean

the prosit

indent

ure, sneeze and the cocaine

and the dollars

vanish

in

the hole

y land

so you need more

it's a drag, you put in a request

for

more techno

logy

more equip

ment

hy

hyp

hype

hyper

hyper

hyperdermi

hyperdermic

needle in the ass

a camel through the eye

of a prejudice

the fly fast

whistle past

under an hour

but

in secs

the transfer

goes

off-shore

as the missive

is lost

in desertion of

duty.


Hart Crane Homeward Bound X


Sour grapes, they float like American

Idol comment boxes, it is crystal clear

that Hart and I will need to keep Lee side

of the husks, the purple-blue ovoids

bob and blip in the scudding overflow

of popular downloads, is this current

enough, are we on the Radio, you know,

Hart, we can do this standing on our heads,

Review the winners, who win by a stanza

in the TLS, pipe dreams pumped up by steroids,

and the Stench of the pussed stigmata, palmed

by the poet, alloy the words, mingle as Shelley

liked his lovers to do, join them at the statement,

it is easy peasy weasy sleazy, still the grapes

bobble and wobble in the bitter wind

up stream, the phrase book has a hook

it is Captain Birdseye, with his fishy fingers

in the sardine tin we call the closed society

where decisions are made, and clients laid

in optic fibre cables under the carpets

of the cultivated, who with a little wiley

publish their assets, keeping the truth off shore,

Hart and I , play pool, they sneak in the black,

We lose, we are lost, and still adrift, between

the rocks of before, we repeat the fall of the poet,

our selves lashed and torn by the comment

sour grapes

We are at our acrobatics, cart-wheeling on deck

the poets you see from an entirely new perspective

they tried, and were tried, they won, and are at one,

but Hart me mate, let's not descend to dialect

and the Latin tag, cos up table nu,

Pertusum quiequid infunditur in dolium, perit

especially, the feast of Saturn, the stew of fruit,

Wednesday 26 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound IX


Orphic choices allow us

to make headway through

the waves of INFO

along the Super Highway

as pop-ups, sound-bites,

as banners, as promises

play in the wind of the news

another soul put to rest

another

another

another another another

another another another

another

another

another

another

until all one hears

is the conch shell of white noise

pretending to be the Sea.

Tuesday 25 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound VIII


The log-book has us still adrift

between two rocks, with the green

astroturf of success on the one

and the snotty green slime

on the other, with the exclusive

I got my tailor made life on one,

and mine I found in the garbage

on the other, sirens on the one

are high-heeled, silver-spooned

dolce vita, diamond-studded,

on the other they are loud

ear-splitting curses and screeches

fak you fak you cry the seagulls

Hart and I look at each other

we change course

toward the snotty green slimed

rock, to the run-down, to the poverty,

to the I have a shit existence,

to the untouchable, to the unlikeable

to the meek and mild that do not inherit

to the perpetual crime scene on Saturday

to the people

we made a choice

as did Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes,

We will join the sirens, and blare and blare

from the top of the project housing

from the top of mobile homes

from the top of gravestones in the cemetery

fak you fak you cry the sea gulls.

Monday 24 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound (VII)


ADRIFT, cut off, separated, the dysfunctional child

in need of a Jean Harlow mummy and Harry's wet

blanket on a wire frame, the junk is directionless


in the me old china sea, like a tea leaf spinning on

the surface of a haiku


Don't worry me hearties, when all is done and lost

like after the volcano, after the holocaust


you can always have a cuppa cha.



Hart Crane Homeward Bound (VI)


We are getting by, quite nicely, with the Silver poets of España

doing the donkey work and with the puppetry of Federico Garcia Lorca

performing in the shadows of the rack,


Now that's what I call carrying the canon on one's back, reading

a bit too much between the eyes, still in the rough, common as muck,

in the back of a Cuban bar


Snogging sailors, snorkelling in the mirrored sea, swimming off tangent

off the junk, the dialogue dated, a simile


Pushing a zimmer frame, senescence in flagrante delicto,

the kind of Yvor Winters' jibe at Rexroth, "you are long in the tooth"

all the old "we want to screw...


You guys and gals, the f-ing Victoria out of your system, pull down

censorship, pull down the drawers and undies,

what's the nautical term for breaking your heart,



So I'll walk the plank, dammit if you want carpentry for poetry

the usual fruit market, where you assemble rhyme, metre, imagery

apples and pears



I'll go upstairs: Nature, God and Eros, done and wrapped up for

knock-down price, all for the cost of two over ripe

bananas


Hey, Hart, they prefer, rather, the tufted ducks

with their heads, black and white, with Daffy features,

buried in their backs


acast like fishing tops, the rings emanating from them

outwards, like the glass you find in hoity-toity old

fashioned windows


They want their f**ks too, have the wood pigeons

on lamp post above the rectangular pond

coupling like rabbits


then the female blackbird, in jerky movements,

two hops, head down, two hops, head down

then two hops


Mesmerised by the natural, you'd think the poem

was complete, though this me mate, is just a

fragment, a shard.


Let's change tack.




Hart Crane Homeward Bound (V)


The cargo, contraband, the treasure chest

of aphorisms from the Romans and Greeks,

Even the Byzantine and Egyptian, from the Book

of the Dead, from Tao, and from after your time

Hart, from Che Guevara, from Chairman Mao,

they are all from the culture of unreflected reading,

What Pliny the Elder warned about, gleaned from

T-shirt slogans, from the Couplands, from the Ellises,

from the stand up comics, from the Lenny Bruces,

It's in there, the Umberto Eco, "name that flower

in one", the thorns of sunrise from Ungaretti,

the masques of Ben Jonson, the persons of Pessoa,

the anus of Adler, the mouth organ of Byron,

the slender fingers of Swinburne, the snot

of the Jabberwocky, the end of all lists, all inside

the cargo, contraband, the treasure chest.

Friday 21 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound (IV)


Now that the whale is in its demise

used for a premiss, or an argument

Where the God is the true North of Compass,

Not, for I am an unbeliever, Hart,

I travel on this junk of ours, which incidently

is only figuratively, with the aim, of a poem

that has blundered its way into an epic,

What has passed, what landmarks did we spot,

A recapitulation seems in order, but it must wait,

So, this junk, with the Chinese characters ablaze,

Like the ones Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth

would approve,

猴子

Would it need an interpretation, a scribe, to take

an official examination, to study all there is to know

about the monkey,

the monkey on the back of a dolphin, on the
fly leaf of an Aesop's Fable,
We see it from the deck, the intertextuality
swimming alongside our junk, We the voyagers
into the obscure, toward the unwritten constitution
of the poet's rights, the right to poach, the right
to plunder, the right to take from mythology
and the right to become a mystery.

Thursday 20 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound (III)


Amast, a moist expectoration from the crow's nest

of imagination, hoist the sail Hart, allow its breadth

to cover and carry all the sins, in the absurd spit-fest

of wrongful indignation, foist this, the whale fart,

the fellow Melville, and an inclination toward taxonomy,

well this breach of conduct, born from going against

the metric rules, their ticker-tape, bunsen-burner

method from the laboured laboratory from the alchemy

of the poets of yore, demanding you click your shoe heels

to the tick and the tock of the iambic pentameter

The blubbery lines of the mock heroic, in padded cells

the poets maw at the classic, but let the sail envelope

the reading! We are bound for the jaws of Criticism

the long lurch of the lingering palm, sticky with

masturbation, Aye wanking off to the undercurrent

of the poem,

Avast, aghast, expectations in the Kurd's jest

of invagination, lost in the desert of delight Turkish

and Iraqi, the spoils of Empire couched in Ottoman

and English penchant for the halfspun pun, run on,

Caesura, abate, battle on, out of breath, the junk stills,

the abortion of the breeze, advocation of the cause,

instant coffee makes the convention for conversation

short, before it was darling be a hon and put the kettle

on, the analogy to poetry, here Hart, the true plainess

of the haiku rather than the wandering epic, it tells

us that a leaf is a leaf, an ant is an ant, oh the literalness

of the hexapodal philistine, the rule of mediocrity,

Welcome ! Hart to the 21st century, welcome indeed.

Tuesday 18 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound II

U-t-t-e-r-a-n-c-e
can't get a word in edgewise, as the junk sails out
of the Great Malvern pond towards the sunrise,
Fancy
the depth of poetics is measured not in decibels
but decanted
into leathered flagons of wine from the Rubyiat
You dig?
as the enterprise navigates through the language
on the game, hey pretty boys and girls, fancy a
trick
Ur
the race is on to cross the bridge, find Morty
and Agatha Christie, entombed in the promise
of the unpacked poetry,
there is no redundancy, no noise in this space,
only a dense field of imagery conjoined like a cigarette
to the lips of the sailor, We are on a roll man,
the readers can be thrown overboard.

Monday 17 May 2010

Hart Crane Homeward Bound I


The elective infinity of writing across the beams

of history, welcoming the pirate, me hearties,

as the physics of the colour selective vision

sails past the critics armed with dictionaries


So, Hart me boy, we venture forth in reams

of poetry, declaiming the first rate, my Cortez,

as the Americas of the follower defective is on

hails pissed the antics calmed those reactionaries


The fictive affinity of talking above the dreams

of society, alarming the irate, min Naughties

as the Englishmen of the shallower infective groan

fails pious the plastics farmed by kitchen dairies.


Well, Crane, the suture comes apart at seams

of piety, adorning the fate, mi familia

as the Saints of the hallower affective phase

rails at the fanatics harmed by loose caries.


The accusatave, I am sure, at mouth foams

of sobriety, bedecking the State, Мое правительство,

as the dispossessed of the billower enfuckive moan

pails of reactives formed by urchin Marys.


They, have no idea about the hearts of the poems

of fealty, for learning the prate, γλώσσα μου

as the limits of the callower interpretive drone

jails of attractives tamed by postmodern chemistries.


The instructive, I can tell, at the word gleams

of hilarity, impounds the Cantos, 我的河,

as the permits of the endower inflective koan

ails the restrictives lamed by ancient legalities.


I am, at the bridge, of this junk, Hart, as it steams

of obscurity, leaning to the grate, بلدي الملاك
as the geography of sense empower reflective isles

Gales of fricatives charmed by latent sexualities.

Saturday 15 May 2010

Almost imperceptible


Almost imperceptible signs of man's impudence

and cost, as I wait for the bus and in silence

take up in my hand a stone cold blackbird's

egg that once harboured within its shell

mornings of song and delight, and like in

Edward Thomas's poem, where men and

women went to war, their absence marked

by the effort taken to plough, now here

the abandoned nest, the lonely mallard

duckling, give testimony to the unceasing

War against the planet and Nature waged

by us, but who pays any notice except

maybe the guilty, MEA CULPA

Thursday 13 May 2010

rain


rain, don't we know and experience the rain

in so many extraordinarily different ways

did we not as children run and go paddling

in those browny gravy puddles, play splash

and without any compunction to correct ourselves

leap into the rain, then seemingly older and wiser

did we not hesitate, even avoid the rain, cold miserable

water, dirty, the polluted, toxic, poisonous pond

the lake upon which once our paper boats

sailed to distant shores, while we in rubber boots

steered them to their final course, toward old age.

Wednesday 12 May 2010

The birds and beasts of cigarette cards are from Eden


The birds and beasts of cigarette cards are from Eden
now inhabitants of the suburban back garden
Where in the midst of foreign plants and flowers
they make their home, their they past their hours


Domesticated by bulldozers and the pollution
Feeling safe and secure, the fox, badger and hedgehog
As the really wild growl and rage in presentation
Entrained like vine to demonstrate the Nature


Of man's good husbandry, the absent fathers
Leave tiny chicks and ducklings to the maw
of machinery, crushing the living daylights
As the early thaw of the wild, bleeds into captivity


The footfall of freedom only for the baby-headed
Some try to climb the ladder through appetites
changing, as fatty life, like porkers, decline
But then Africa and Russia leads the proclivity

For hunting and killing, wildebeest and zebras
Big game for big boys with small shoe size
On the sly, like collateral dolplins, the leopard
and big cats, for a few thousand, are extras.

Monday 10 May 2010

On Les Murray's "Performance"


a little chickadee, on the window sill, performs a ditty,
as a storm to the right, almost capsizes the composition,
On the left, a Madagascan orchid, if you will, open
to receive a reference to an American woman artist,
whose flowers were genitalia, the imagery cached in cachet
of prominance, as the bird of paradise from New Guinea
in jeweled plumage, manages to bring in the diy
bric-a-brac approach to poetry, as the black capped tit
by any other name, chirps to a vintage postcard of Tantiana
Whateverovich, whose countenance of disdain for revolution
Has the Chinese poem in calligraphic contortion
Somehow, the performance, holds together, a string of happenstance
then would you know it, the birdy won't stay still, and twitters
a satire of a nomenclature that needs a German-French dictionary
to translate, name that poem in one, then the gameshow ends. Finally.

Two Geese


Two geese flew in the azure and dark grey of the impending

rain, two honking grey lag, I guess, heading to the woodland

like two low-flying Lancaster bombers on a victory fly pass,

Their necks pulled out, like coat-hangers used to break in

cars before the fancy computers and electrics, sending me

for my mobile, to take a shot, but gone, bloody fast, piss,

I wanted so much in my Chinese Emperor way, as to nightingale,

to keep them in the sky, have them with the thunderous beat,

lovers, locked into the picture of nature on a May morning,

unseasonably cold, the breath of frost still in the air, while

the W. B. Yeats comparison comes out of the claypit so to speak,

They have had a starring role in a poem before, can't get enough

of this couple, the swans with heads in pond, look like supermarket

bags from the distance of the bus, the moorhen like flowerpots,

Would you come again, the climax of the moment, so I can get high,

With the conversation of morning, nature, poetry and well-being,

You two jazzed up my day, just by doing what any goose would do.

Thursday 6 May 2010

On Leopardi - For Lethe Bashar



Rain clouds amass above the reflective heads


of those who wish to ask and find the answers


to the cosmos or matters of love, and the like


The grey gauze of particles, the truth hides


For in the sphere beyond, knowledge we seek


The philosophy of poetry, written in infinity


Takes us to heights over the ordinary life


The Italian feminine endings seduce the ears


As the report of the rhyme scatters science


Of scepticism, the succulent grapes of Os


We suck and taste nature and the poetical


As the cold rain of poetry wets our fears


On the hill we view the tense, our past


Present and future, a rendering of Leopardi.

Picture from http://www.edward-weston.com/cara_weston_rain_clouds_3.htm

Wednesday 5 May 2010

A poem after the coffee

Unwound, unbound, the heart now beats a little out of kilter
like when I learnt to skip, never accomplished the feat properly,
The residual sweet taste of custard, and flakes of pastry
like the dandruff of a troll, a turnoff, and I hear laughter
in the head, no more like a silent smile of the flakey wit,
as you know enough, I shall soon, I swear, write shit,
The engineered precision of the bard of post caffeine era
has steered the conversion of the reader toward the flora
where Swinburne no less, in quick zapped read, has violet
with hermaphrodite in Louvre, in introduction "Dolores"
pained the Penguin editor by being like a Daoist orgasm,
Too long, so the flowers remind me, but first we take Detroit,
as on television last night, the no to low income have fled,
like the pair of wood pigeons who spent their days in prism
of sunrise love, cooing and collecting twigs for the future
but the cold May, unseasonable and unreasonable as debt
destroyed this destiny of nature, impeded the population,
Then the flower, the bower, the posy, the rosy rhyme
of Swinburne, in the pitter-Pater of delicate but precise feet
his petals, petulant, in the homosociality of the occlusion
of young adult men who decant their desires in secret
Victorian thoughts, which their Browning and Tennyson
would not broach, if they did, it was with the softest touch,
Algeron, on the otherhand, was all for mention of sex,
This comes to mind, the revolution of the 1960's gone,
Then to return, like the infant of my years long ago,
On the bus, with satchel too large, bringing the swear word
like the wafer of the Eucharist, tasting the C**** or F**ks
learnt through passive osmosis on the school playground,
The simile dragged longer than necessary, burdened
with the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foers Eating Animals
is Wrong, the grandmother, and the dog George, the chickens,
The tunas, the factual and the fictional, embedded in the flow
of the poem after coffee, the resistance, as Hugo Williams
would say, is middle-brow too, not only the diffidence
of Prynne, the connection of the moment, now at the barricades,
As decorum, and form, and patience, come down heavy
They shout and scream, if life were only a supermarket coupon,
or a, and the metaphor is stalled, the poem now complete.

Fifteen minutes or so before a coffee

Pre-coffee poetry, should be cranky and irritable,
something you would not want to clean with hanky
the coffee table. it is dirty and offensive, going
for the nutz of society, as the craving drives the line
forcing the unsavoury characters to come out of the
cranium, meet in conference of violence, like Mohawks
roaming the streets of eighteenth century Londonium,
So the brief encounter with female blackbird, she
fled across the road, on this May fifth when Wehrmacht
troops capitulated - Denmark's history races through
the arteries, as the coffee will come I know, the Baptism
of the neuromodulators in knowledge it will be, and
perhaps a custard pastry will in partnership with coffee
placate and calm the early morning rattled body
So the Pakastani American boarded without being stopped
So the guy who plotted to wreak havoc and carnage
on Times Square, could calmly catch a plane, now how
the hell did he do that? So now the questions and lapse
of security, fears like phobias, mate and come up with
terror-phobic tics, the three second glance will imprison
the Different, oh boy my time, the allotted time for the break
is soon, here then, I can briefly look back, like Ann Bradstreet
upon this poem, not book, see it is ragged and wretched,
But if I were like the Anglo-Saxons, to view the runes
and the ruins, then even here in this derelict form
I find the classics, as would Ezra Pound, not the 21st
century, unless I bring, as the Deuce up my sleeve
the ex machine, the product, the internet, and say
this was composed inside a box on a screen, remote
and cold, unlike the fountain penned Latin I once tried
to write, AMO AMAS AMAT, and we will finish at that.

Monday 3 May 2010

august

patricia highsmith's mr. ripley, talented
and a little cold for the liking, tad bit sadistic
ally to the decadent way of thinking, saw the
game and the original, then thought of the killer
slug, sliming along the blanched grass, it was
the moment of recuperation of art and nature,
a difficult mixture, a cocktail, a mindmade
elixir of imagery, the murderous mollusk and the
matt damon figured into one thought in early august,
executed while nothing happened, put my foot and
mouth in it, the silly season of rhetorical flourishes,
floral openings for the new generation of intoxicated
paris hilton mosquitoes to bite and bite, sounds like
we have nothing better to do than write, and write
against the garden of celebrity and fame.

It's all Greek to me

"It is all Greek to me"
It's all Greek to me, I mean the latest updates on the company, the future,
the pricing policy, costings, curves, yields, forecast, the very fate
of the office stapler.
It's all Greek to me, I mean the incessant information on the mobile,
the OK?, Where are you? What do you mean? You are definitely late,
the offence, the reply.
It's all Greek to me, I mean the bundle of feathers, the left earring,
the gold crucifix which is not, and between the lines of the Byzantine
pronouncements of the Pope, the free newspapers with dog poop scoops,
shite absolutely, the orifice, the supply.
It's all Greek to me, I am afraid.

a poem inspired by a 12 kr cup of coffee

A Poem inspired by having a 12 kr coffee while reading David Mamet's Writing in Restaurants 1986 Coffee, yeah, the brown stuff that after drinking one, realises its not quite enough, then one gets to thinking about poetry and the heart beat, tum, tum, tim, oh yeah coffee, sound of the tanoy: intercity to, platform number blah blah, is it Purgatory? This state of wanting to write in a station restaurant without a motive, just writing, shooting the breeze with A4 photocopy paper on a Formica table with nothing except a David Mamet book, and the connection, the retraction of what was written, Plotinus never went through his stuff twice, and I can fully appreciate this as it gets me off the hook, leave the poem on the edge.. of the table, Dansk radio in the ear piece, Kim Larsen old frog mouth, Big Fat Whitesnake, golden oldies, what's the goal, where is the depth, the metre, does it come upon you later, touch you on the shoulder when least expecting it, when you are reading in the free newspaper, metro express, a supernova exploded last September, how come no one ever told me about it? I mean who wants to know about the neighbour in the refrigerator, the mowed down kids in Sierra Leone, the the the, who wants to know, when a fucking supernova exploded out there, a few thousand light years I guess, like the Old Believers who still have to hear of Lenin, maybe we'll catch up, and it all kind of puts us, humanity, into shards of insignificance, then you recuperate from the shock of this astrophysical death, With a sip of coffee, now resisting, as you must keep it, it's an art, being able to have one cup of coffee in a city when everyone wants your table, so how does it go, the song of life, nothing like, remotely, a little piece of remembrance, back into the recess of your reading, in Hereford Art College of all places, where D.M. Thomas of White Hotel fame read Pushkin, you dust off the names dropping onto the cafe floor, Onegin walks out in disgust, so does Lorca, Cervantes, and Coombes in his literary criticism told you not to borrow from the thirties, none of those pylons and forced associations, but Auden god damn him was at Colwall, wrote of Malvern, And you wanted to see through with back of MAD magazine x-ray vision glasses King Arthur, and he, told you, no further, it was all done before, you roll up those metaphors and stuff them in the coffee, and failed your O level literature as a consequence.

rain

rain
oh yes rain
more rain
and no surprise rain
then what's this rain
and just when you think it is over rain
and like the doping scandals in the bike race rain
a few car bombs go off in iraq and sixty dead and rain
an earth tremor with a warning of a tsunami and there could be more rain
the simpsons movie is out and brad simpsons prediction a comet will hit earth and rain
rain

Hogarth's Dog

This gentle pug did cock-a-leg

over cruelty and beauty, and in reversal

of the print, made left a right,

and right a left, it's tight-butted position,

it's face full with fond lippery, teases out

through analyses cynical

the spoils of senseless slaughter,

Here now hangs a criminal

Here now hangs a whore

Here now hangs an animal

instructions for sentimenality

come with the Thomas Crashaw

watery eyes, then he this pug,

like his fore-fathers, ugly as hell,

did cock-a-leg upon the creaky

architecture of this future

seen through an allusion

to canine muse, sneakily inserting an enema,

for thosewho care less for poetic drama

:thus beauty and cruelty in the final

analysis lined up in against

each other on the ten o'clock news.

hippolytus


Hippolytus


Fay's behind the barwhile Goody-two-shoes

is shooting pool --it didn't seem

farback when Hippolytus

was in school now he has grown up into a handsome hunk.

Aphrodite is singing a soul number,

while in the corner, Artemis a Country and Western

preacher, tells him to save his virginity for a rainy

day --and it is a matter

of course that the Goddess Aphrodite should lose her

temper, call it divine jealousy.

Fay's husband, Theseus, is rather too

conveniently away on business --so out of sight, out of mind, Fay's

got it bad, got it hot, she wants to go all the way and her confidante

an old barmaid says well what's wrong, it's not as if it is incest,

besides in the nineteen nineties, who cares? People wouldn't blink

an eyelid if you jumped your step-kid.

So, she argues in a drunken slur,why not tell him?

Fay might be all hot and bothered, but she has her pride

and her dignity it wouldn't do for the barmaid to spread it around that Fay

is after Hippolytus's virginity.

But she did, and from then on life was ablur.

Goody-two-shoes was astonished,

and was on the way to confron this step-mum

was it true that she wanted to f**k her handsome hunk of a son?

Before he

could get

there, she had hung herself from the pub's chandelier,

Theseus came back

just in

time to see her on the sofa, a note in the hand, an incriminating piece

of evidence, of course he wasn't to know that his son had promised not to

tell,

he cursed him, swore at him, kicked him to hell, and Goody-two-shoes

took off on his motor-bike but didn't get far because he was under the

influence of alcohol ,

Poseidon beer,

Theseus arrived in the nick of time

at the hospital

and found Artemis alongside his dying son

she told him that

there

had been no affair he had jumped to the wrong conclusion and Aphrodite had

known all along what had happened an allusion to the tragedy had been in her

song.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

The Snows of Kilimanjaro
hmm, in a way,
you'd expect the snows to melt
in the calculations of the gin and tonic
mentality,
they like their glaciers to glide into
oblivion
watching it on discovery television
statistically the jury is out
and the sun seems to be radiating
another line of inquiry
science sleuthes slide into
perjury, and the outpecked
populace believe the tale
on account of the motor car
and creature comforts of the past,
how long do we swallow the
numbers of one more chart
will show how the ice melts
into turning a blind eye to
the satellite pictures of a handshake
under the table.

Go to comment

Got to comment on something worthwhile
trawl through the news and nothing
comes to the fore except a fire hydrant
and katherine hepburn bringing up
the simile like its the law in a
burmese drawl, you ain't allowed
to park your democracy here and if
you do, and the water forces
the allusion - when i just want to..,
I just go and crawl in the television
and say can we turn over to the late night
movie with all the charm of cary grant.

Carry on Tom Middleton

Carry on Tom Middleton - Kitsch and Classic Go Abedding.

The treachery of his tongue
beings upon the head of the knave
a smack which methinks emblematic
by deuce, this slave divorced from status
and pride, made his Mistress bedlamite
braying and wanton, the moisture of
dreams grows venomous to the heart
caught in a tryst, and with trust broken,
he falls back upon his lowly position
I was only making the bed, which he lies upon,
the grave error of his nature
is left to hang and dry, and there drips a tale,
to pore through with magnifying glass
exposing the borrowing from the Devil and
Benny Hill, now we can safely run round the
tragedy of the "You rung?"
m'lud

Al-Qaria


From the vents of opened seams

of the system of volcanoes, like the zipper

of Gaia, the steam and rage of heated

discussion, the chatterer, rumours

of the abyss, of the end, as ash to ash

spills particles of aggression in the plume

of revenge, the once calm and complacent

now radicals free to unleash violence

against mechanisms of capital ideas

the domino effect of media opinion

rushes through optic cables of dreams

of enrichment, of pensions and retirement

in sun-lotioned paradise, the exothermic

knowledge boils the crowd into frenzy

Épater la bankers

as cause and effect in laval tide of resentment

builds into wave of hatred against the cold

and calculating accountants that march to

memories of occupation and the resistance

smashes through the recipes and tidbits

on celebrities, like the unpronounceable

peak of Earth's dilating pore, then hearings

across the board of sunken wires, are

disconnected from the events incited by

misfeasance incorporated in the body

of government by the stock market

so they like moths on a summer's night

flitting between sparks of fire, are pests

of the tongue, those darn lazy son of bitches

never done an honest day's work, shirk

their duty to rob an Alabama widow of her home

The slurry of enslobbened peoples, besmirches

the moment of material existence, of the purchase

of a new pod or new friend, to ask the chatter,

is to invite the devil to tea, to work up a maelstrom

from misdirected anger, orchestrated by noise,

Would Profit and Value, two angels and demons

take for once, lock-stock and barrel the whole blame

Would they in the set of neurons wired to greed

Appear in the skies as misshapen clouds an utterance

of disfigured charity bloated by the puritan deed.