COGITO, ERGO SUM

Some have the gift

of choice –

which universe to inhabit –

moulding from their mantras

          worlds.

Some find it easier

to shatter a mirror

than look at a truth

          reflected.

Gathering the shards

they scrabble

a fractured picture –

a stained-glass filter.

This side, the altar

the other

          the seducer.

Delusion seeks an accomplice

in imaginary crimes

 – a scapegoat for desire –

admits to a vague complicity

          but

never responsibility –

rarely touched by

                             reality

of which

it nearly always

complains.

(Seventeen Syllables About) SEEING

Life in red and black –

          light and darkness dimly glimpsed

                   through eyelids screwed tight.

THIRTY-EIGHT (Certainty)

If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?

– Lord Byron

At seventeen a poet

fancies himself

                   Rimbaud

stomping on tables

and pissing in complacent coffee cups.

At twenty-one he’s Byron

trying out for size

                             his muse

on every caprice –

a madman shooting flaming arrows

never staying for the blaze.

By thirty Yeats and Eliot call

mystical, cynical, bewildered;

enamoured still of conceits

but

faithless in effect;

squinting through swirling sands

at a shadow that may be

a slouching beast –

or just

a marching line of afternoons

          and coffee spoons.

No sane illusion

survives to middle-age.

A poet ages faster

and more slow

digging

with the pen

for unsellable gems;

labouring

          not for an audience or

himself, but

the work –

certain as dying Keats

that his name is writ in water.