Poetry
Post-hula,
I stand in the hoop stupidly,
like it were a circle saying
“Look, here’s the idiot!”
Bound up.
Do you ever think about
that science experiment
with the two phone books,
from when we were kids?
[1]
Do you ever think of how
the chapters of our lives
have overlain so often,
even horses couldn’t part us?
Because, believe it or not,
the days we’ve shared,
humble as paper,
bind like steel.
Autumn night.
Shut(the blue lid of day is falling
on one side of the globe,
opening the night)ting his eyes,
a new opened, inward,
onto the sprawling
constellations of his mind.
He felt his body drif(a leaf
falls)ting do(slowly, gliding,
the tree floor floating toward it)wn,
beneath his bed, his str(coming
to rest on the grass among others
from the branch)eet another mind quieter.
“Help”
Cried James Bond
from the broom closet.
It was beginning to sink in
he would spend the night there.
James Bond fashioned a bed
out of rubber gloves and A4.
The skinny brunette
mop lay beside him.
Naked eye.
Self-consciously, I watch
the water in the hopes
an idea might drift by.
What do they say?
A pot watched…
A pot watcher never toils…?
I am Jeff Koons
and I pretend to understand
whatever’s going on in Yemen,
and in the 90s I had a love affair
with David Hockney,
and sometimes when I’m lonely
I sleep inside the balloon dog.
I know I am safe in there
because I keep the surface mirror-shiny.
“See this blood?”,
asks the dentist,
“It means you haven’t
been flossing until now”,
wiping the red mark of
my virginity from his tool
with disappointment.
I found following the poem, scrawled angrily on a napkin by Frank Jackson[2]
Physicalists.
In their black and white rooms
and black and white lives,
they think they know all
without going outside.
All
Smart, no heart,
their black and white and brains
never notice the colour
that courses their veins!
Their black and white books
and papers and scrolls,
no matter how
read,
cannot be
red at all…
Emily Dickinson gets dizzy.
She stood so fast her view went dark,
the world lost its
extension.
Before the blood began her brain,
it shed of all convention.
Proverbial and personal
significance depleted,
she saw the world a newborn, like her
knowledge were still seated.
She could not even see to see
the movement of her eyes
(time lost the
contiguity
that memory implies).
Then, by her blood returning,
her knowledge stood to meet her,
an ache the only echo of her
fleeting incognita.
I walk more fast than you.
I know ‘cause when I match your step,
I will pass you always.
WOMAN KNOWS WINDOW-SEAT-PEOPLE-WATCHING-TRICK.[3]
Our reflections stare at each other but
our bodies just look out the window.
Craning neck
to see if
bluetooth
or
just mad.
The long thing.
When you hold a long thing
by the end, the control is poor.
The load will sway all over,
just as much as your hands
will be fixed in place.
The effect worsens with longer objects.
like shovels or pool cues
or, worst, your whole life.
Unless you bend you knees,
put your shoulder into it,
you will stand as static
as your dreams are wild.
If you are a tin man
and your knee joints sing
when you walk.
And your tin tongue tings
when you talk.
And your tin mind creaks and squeezes
at the thought of your world…
Then, by God man,
go get yourself some oil!
Half of Charles Bukowski.
He has hard hands, hands that are hurt,
hands with a memory for bottles and dirt.
And a genuine eye, an eye for the honest,
a tired old eye with a fly in its bonnet.
So prose skilled hands they let a most morose drinker sail,
faultless to those who don’t notice those fingernails.
Nails so cracked and untrimmed it’s grotesque,
they act as a typewriter hindrance at best.
So focused an eye, for those moments it catches,
faultless to those don’t notice its lashes.
Lashes so heavy and blighted and torn
they down-cast the eyelids on which they are worn.[6]
Over his poems these harrowing things
hang like a pairing of shadowy wings
and no matter how far from the poems I stand
they’re as stuck as the nails on the ends of his hands.
Dark sacred night.
From the lawn
the night sky
made me forget
my wet socks.
I marvelled at the fact
I was able to take in
the whole heavens
with just my eyes and skin.
This fossilised far dark star of colossal size
should surely hospitalise me!
Such secret sacred forbidden skin
all in the tip of a pin? How absurd.
Surely this was a joke,
the trick of a
celestial jester,
lest I be going mad.
It was too profound, too old and
too deep in its blackness
for me to observe.
I felt like a giddy criminal,
sneaking out
with wide eyes
and clenched teeth
to not make a sound.
For a moment I thought
how odd I must look;
a boy in his underwear watching the night
somewhere between late and early.
Then I realised
there is nothing odd
about that at all,
and went to bed.
Bark
bark
bark
bark
bark
bark
bark bark
bark
bark
Annoying,
isn’t it?
He does this
every day.
He barks
barks barks
until he’s
let out,
then he
sniffs the air
and returns
just the same.
What
a futile venture!
a fool
he must be.
He goes out
just to come back,
achieving nothing
but wasting time,
he should use
his time better
like I do.
He should:
- Get a job and
- Buy a house and
- Go to work to
make money and
- Go back home to
pay his dog taxes and
- Go back to work to
pay his dog bills and
actually…
Maybe he’s
not such a
fool
anymore
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1^ By this I mean the phenomenon of two interleaved phone books becoming functionally impossible to seperate. You may have tried this or seen it on TV.
In fact, a short but interesting study (
Alarcon et al 2016) was conducted as a result of this experiment appearing on a French science program.
2^ Australian philosopher Frank Jackson is the originator of the famous “Knowledge Argument” (
1982), which
this video summarises. I satirise his argument as being overly poetic. Flanagan (
1992) explains its potential logical shortcomings well.