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.

F IS FOR FAST

“Would anybody tell me if I was gettin’ stupider?”

 - Faith No More

OMFG! Meerkats surfing search engine tsunamis!

Darting about to sip every squirt from the dyke.

Tools make their users and

dog saved by cat blood in rare inter-species transfusion

plastic brains

their deeper channels

shed L

superficially

skilful

dollar down against greenback

brighter

but less

iPHONE GIVEAWAY!

intelligent

the individual

dies in

one last

shining

burst

do I have your attention?

of

narcissism

shoes J  

1812

A fuse is lit.

The city echoes silence

                             as though

her sounds had fled

with her people through

                   the Kolomna Gate.

Down in the square

a riot that was yesterday

la Grande Armée

mimes a torch-lit fair

trading

ordered safety for

looted furs and brandy. High

above them in a palace window

two deliberate candles

testify

the Emperor

works toward the dawn.

Redingote grise and little cocked-hat

          flung across

a stupidly rococo

and un-martial chair;

arsenic numbed and swollen legs

useless now for pacing

                    he lies

waiting on the captured bed

of the Tsar of All the Russias.

Waiting.

A week ago

at Borodino

massed artillery tore a hole in time

and eighty-thousand dead

groaned across a century at the Somme.

Now

thrust and counter-thrust

realpolitik

and pride’s rationalisations

probe each other’s entrails on the ceiling

 – the hollow calculations

of Pyrrhus’ triumphant vigil.

Stasis. Mute cacophony

of footsteps longed-for in vain.

Burnout – drained

by wrangling a machine

whose levers

shop-worn

jump no more at his touch.

Sleep

 – retreat

into an ice-lashed nightmare

groping in the blizzard

for a peace that will not come.

A fuse is lit.

Beyond the guttering tongues

                   of his propagandist candles

Moscow starts to burn.

(Seventeen Syllables About) INSOMNIA

Counting-down in French

staring at a stand-by light

                   foetal in the dark.

(Seventeen Syllables About) GOOD INTENTIONS

Friends denied Pushkin

          bleeding out on a couch his

                   merciful bullet.