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.
Larks at NoonWe get these larks coming up over the trees,
They’re black birds, and they come up over the trees.
Dark like black coffee. Well, black.
Against the sky, I mean. Like shadows,
But really black. Like, a– A, um– S–
There’s a word beginning with S. I always think of serviette.
Anyway, when they come up, over the trees, it’s like there’s a pull,
You can see the wind, you can see them resisting the wind.
I guess it’s hard to put into words.
Have you seen the wind catch a sail?
I guess you don’t get that in the city.
I don’t just mean it’s windy, I mean– there’s a pull.
It pulls them and they– the light, like, catches them.
They flash, I mean. You can see their feathers and their bodies,
They’re not just serviettes anymore, they’re shiny,
Shiny black. Like with the wind on the river.
Do you have a river? There’s this sort of light,
When there’s wind on the river. The light catches them, I mean.
I suppose it’s one of those things that
You have to see to know what it looks like.
If you stayed for the morning.
That’s all I meant to say.
And I’ve rambled my break away!
But, well, I mean, sometimes, when I’m, y’know, busy,
taking, y’know, orders, I just,
feel, well, a pull. I get pulled away and
something about you, something like you,
a flash, crosses my mind.
Ha! Hm, well, I’ll see you!
“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.
Emily Dickinson Gets DizzyShe 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
ContiguityThat Memory implies ‐
Then ‐ By her Blood returning ‐
Her Knowledge Stood to meet her ‐
An Ache the only Echo of her
Fleeting Incognita.
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.
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…
“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.
WOMAN KNOWS WINDOW-SEAT-PEOPLE-WATCHING-TRICK[3]
Our reflections stare at each other but
our bodies just look out the window.
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.
To Step Twice in a Whirlpool
I brandish my life-trajectory
like a long, heavy tool
held from the very end,
rarely taking a step
from the pivot of
my clumsy swinging.
Read more
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.