Bus Poem No.203

I'm no Plato, but this bus
is a moving cave
engineered by rationalists
to convey us to our homes
where we will fall into
our irrational selves.

But for now, we are bats
in the velvet light,
wings folded,
hanging like sacks.

Who knows who among us
is petulant, or who snaps
up every opportunity,
who has flatulence,
who sweetens their tea,
who dreams he is Cleopatra
and she is Antony,
who plays the pipe
and who can't read.

What we do know
is that for now we are
as we were initially -
travellers
hanging out in a cave,
ultrasounded,
contiguous,
as disambiguous
as barometers
in a closed setting,
mentally sketching
echoic schemes.

Last Train of the Day

Out of the blue,
grey, or whatever colour
in which you find yourself
beginning to lose yourself,

sleep will approach you,
always a stranger,
no matter how many times
you have met before.

It is prepared to take hold
of your ankle,
with a hand that rises
out of an asphalt lake.

Alternatively, it might kindly
seize your wrist,
like that wealthy blood relative
with whom you are not yet acquainted,
the one who says:

"Enough of this!
Before you can go any further
you must first recover.
Quick! Hop on board
my private train."

Sometimes you will go
without resistance,
buying into a sure bet
where every ticket
at least wins a pillow.

Sometimes you will be more reluctant:
When you notice the crows
alighting from the street lamps,
you will fall through the closing door
as the train is pulling away.

But sometimes you will not be so sure.
You will find yourself admiring flowers
through the window of a closed shop,

or persuading yourself that you can hear
a symphony being performed
just a few blocks away,
only to end up

back on the platform,
alone, and writing
on foolscap in your head
a lemon juice letter
to the sleeping station master,
hoping to ruin his day.

The Comic Tree

On the shaded side of the high rise flats,
below twenty floors of beige cement,
there grows a tree, threadbare and rickety,
superannuated, but still alive,
and roughly two stories high.

Who knows how it ever got a start.
To keep it going, God reaches down
every other year
and runs his invisible hand
through its prickly leaves.

This is a tree that does not play host
to a circus of birds,
nor cracks a quick joke,
nor sports a butchered and loopy trunk.

Quite simply, its raffish and comic streak
consists of catching fallen clothes,
chiefly blown shirts and gusted underwear,
racking them up for the world to see

until each item of this lingering lingerie
becomes like a piece of ragged fruit
and then weathers away, to sweet nothing.

Maybe you don't see funny side of it,
viewing the tree and all its razzamatazz
as a grim gathering of I-surrender flags.

Or maybe you look up to it
as a daring investment
in apocalyptic haute couture.

As for Le Corbusier,
that tree must be a bad dream,
designed to lampoon
the concept of a public washing line.

Irretrievable

You're trying to remember what was said,
but you're pulling away from that moment -
What was it?

Your foot is hard on the pedal
and you're in reverse.
What was it?

But you're going in the wrong direction.
You're looking backwards
for something in the past,
something that made you both laugh,
and so reverse is forwards
and away.

All of this not-remembering
is making you hot and bothered.
Maybe if you take off your jacket
and sit beneath those trees?
And so you do.

But everything seems to be working against you.
What was it?
Something is spilling its coffee all over you.

You try to wipe the coffee away.
You think of the things that were in the room at the time.
What were you looking at when it was said?

You hear someone walking past
conveniently speaking into their phone,
"Have you heard, they found something on Mars. . ."

You look even harder for it.
What was it?
And higher, too.
Almost to the horizon.

But you have spotted something on the ground.
What an odd seed!
Velvet at one end
and turning rough at the other.

The Real Star Wars

In the Real Star Wars,
not long ago,
in a galaxy not that far away,
perhaps even next door,
yesterday,
the real Dearth Vader
gets Alzheimer's
and manages to mask it
from the Imperial Council
whose evil bureaucracy
carves out its own living
by misdiagnosing even more
personal things
than the human condition.

In the real Star Wars,
Luke, the son,
encounters the capeless Vader
in a darkened room
experimenting with a light sabre
that has been switched
from incurable red
to a setting of UV blue.

Vader is flicking it back and forth
to make the smoothest fan possible.

He is misspelling his name
in sweeping letters of light.

He is performing the perfect sword play
with that ridiculous figure of evil
who resides in the mirror.

This is the beginning of Luke's sweet revenge.
It is time to become the parent.
It is time to assume control.
And, for the sake of kindness,
without his father even knowing.

It is time to keep that kitch death star glowing
while maintaining for Vader
the illusion of his own autonomy -

not a bad Hollywood version
of the science fiction we call life.

Eight

I am eight,
which could be a zero
contracted in the middle.

I seek diamonds and avoid death.

I have a bed.

I long for a dog
but I accept my loss.

I whistle when I'm on the toilet.

My shoes are reckless
when they leave my feet -
a family trait that counts me in.

Half of what I eat
are the sandwiches I make myself -
not bad for a person
who is not yet complete.

But incompleteness
also has its advantages:
I can still squeeze into places
where most people cannot go
and people instinctively take my hand
when I offer it.

You want to know more?

My fardel is monstrous to bear.
When my father takes it from me,
he always says, Who would fardels bear?

My mother cleans my eyes.

My trains are falling behind me.

My canary called Jack escaped last week,
and so I have left the cage door open for him.

My strawberries haven't yet learned
to ripen in the shade.

I am captivated by the local creek.

I farm and I dream
of electric sheep.
I rarely laugh,
I prefer to grin.

When I am nine
who knows how much of this will remain
and what I will have in my tin.

Structuration

The world shapes us a little
              and we shape it back a little.

The world acts on us a little
             and we act on it back a little

The world changes us a little

             and we change it back a little.

The world makes us a little

             and we make it back a little.

The world fights us a little
             and we fight it back a little.

The world hits us with a goat a little
             and we hit it back with a little goat.

The world never mistakes itself for us a little
             and we mistake ourselves for the world a little.

The world abandons us a little

             and we are not always able to abandon it back a little.

The world pays us a little

             and we pay it back a little.

The world pays us back a little

            and we pay it back for its little pay back a little more.

The world opens the door for us a little
             and we barge through the door a little.

The world constrains us a little
             and we hit it back with a goat a little.

The world makes us a little offer a little
             and we make it a little offer back a little.

Spam

If you like these poems, then you should know
that you have inherited 20 million dollars
which the poet needs to ship out of his country,
so please send your bank account details immediately.
Alternatively, deposit in the account below
enough money to cover the publication
of a small print run. Trust me, this is no more a scam
than it is an attempt at a radically old style
of poetry, designed to make you doubt
a situation for just as long as it takes
to fall in love, or to place all of your life earnings
on a single horse in wide-open race.

Epistemic Sonnet

What if all the choices that shape our lives
are poetry, as are all the words we have at hand?
Wouldn't that mean the social sciences were like sieves
and people the water that they try to understand?
We have a card for each thing we uncover,
but so often we are using the exact same card
for different things; and while this makes it hard
for us to make good sense to one another,
we do okay, and most of what we say
means little more than the clothes we choose to wear:
that man in the leather jacket still has his say,
that woman in plaid still gets to buy her pear.
Do words spring from the earth and obey the stars,
or are they in fact the flowers, and we are the vase?

All aboard

Insects are milling
on the cold fluorescent ceiling
of a dormitory.

It is Spring, and from their beds
teenage boys exchange
their kits of desire
along with quips
and spare pieces of philosophy.

Above them, a miriad forms
of filament, chassis and canister
are pinned out in an upside down
museum display,
a great mismatching
of thorax, legs, abdomen, antennae.

For now, this is an entomological worshipping
of human light.

Later, when the lights go out,
the insects will scatter
to who knows where,
to deal with
who knows what matter.

Who wrote this?

Poetry need not be true
to what you think, or even what you feel.
Authentic in the attempt, perhaps,
but who knows what waits inside
those words that arrive at the depot –
those brown paper packages
hiding their priceless china,
their ground bark, their reptiles,
even their explosives.

It’s a customs nightmare.
There is not enough time to check everything,
for the packages backlog
and no longer stack up.
"Just let them through. Let them through."

But this time, the poet says, "No!
We must examine them all."

And examined they all are,
those contents of another person’s life,
a teapot just like yours
but with an extra two stripes,
a lamp stand with a slightly different twist,
a rug that might have been
sprawled across your floor,
only now, when you look at it closely,
it doesn’t look like yours at all!

And from around the corner,
here comes someone
who wants to reassemble their life,
who resembles you closely
enough to be your brother,
an out-of-towner
with a different point of view,
perfect for a conversation
since they have been
through your life, too.

Pathology

Every last one
of my last thousand ancestors
survived childhood,
trusted in a mother
and was, in turn, rewarded
with their own child.

Now it is my turn
to set down the next domino
in this record-breaking attempt
at prolonging life.

Watching that blood race up
into that plastic rocket-shaped canister,
you would think that those little haemoglobins
had been on vacation
and were eager to get home.

Blood red, the colour of the sun
when fire is approaching,
and other untrusting thoughts, too:
Are the other children all in school?
Did I snib the lock on the bathroom window?
Has the laboratory technician
through whose fingers this destiny will pass
been up all night with a sick child?

Where life begins, and where it ends

Where does life begin?
Not between a woman's legs,
not in the oil and the pigments
of Gustave Courbet,
not with a surgeon, either,
but rather in the erect forceps
of a polished scorpion
found under an overturned stone,
or in the shining black tuxedo
of a cricket caught broadcasting
beneath a piece of dulled wood -
in either casing, a bright enough start,
if not quite a cosmic blast.

And from there, where does life go?
It runs along the unearthed tunnels
of an outsmarted mole
and from there, on to other networks
of even more shocking complexity,
like the workings of the sinus passages
of a lamb's head, severed
and with a sawn off nose.

Christ, Lamb of God,
forgive them their curiosity
and make them satisfied 
with the outward form of shells.

And where does life end
after it has followed this ineffable
mathematical formula
into clubs, down laneways,
along celluloid, along strings of type font
into strange hearts,
into the rubble of atrophied suburbs,
along government-funded
yellow brick roads,
and on into lively jungles
where we marvel at how the dying
survive deadly diseases,
and then, closer to home,
down microscopes
to where another life
begins in a living end.

So where does life end?
Not in a coffin, but rather in a closet,
not in a vault, but rather in a walk-in robe
puzzling over the little matter
of how that cursed clothing moth
managed to break into the body-bag
of the antique suit
that we save for funerals,
then eat a palpable hole
and knit a wrangling white opposite
in the form of a chrysalis.

That is where life begins,
where it goes,
and where it ends.

The rest is another story.

Carol

Christmas is a faded bauble
the size of an exercise ball
hung up in a shopping mall.

Christmas is a one-armed,
chipped-nosed,
chubby-cheeked
Napoleonic soldier.

Christmas is a matter of panem et circenses.

Christmas is plastic wrap
that each year stretches deeper
into the hungry throat of November.

Christmas is when it hurts more
to cop a fine for fare evasion.

Christmas is a middle-class window
into an African famine.

Christmas is polystyrene Victorian lamps,
fibreglass snow
and the smell of hotdog water.

Christmas is straight out of a Hogarth.

Christmas is a power saw wound.

Christmas is three wise men
with eyes popping out of their heads.

Christmas is a xenophobic story
about Santa Claus nailed to a cross
in a Japanese department store.

Christmas is a child getting a smack.

Christmas is a song on rotation.

Christmas is a song proclaiming that
the best things in life are totally free.

Christmas is a cynic
with a mouth full of cashews.

Crime Scene Investigators

The house opposite to where I live
has been a crime scene for as long
as I can remember. Like a song
that won't leave my head
it goes on and on and on.
When the investigation squad's
plastic yellow ribbon
(tied around the old gum tree
at one end and stretched
tightly to the neighbour's fence)
begins to fray in the sun and wind,
they replace it with the latest
chequered fashion in police tape.
And there is a constant string
of literary detectives
visiting the cordoned-off
carbon, oxygen, nitrogen,
uncut lawn, cement and brick veneer,
a fresh detective every day -
I've seen Woody Allen go in there
verbalising every suspicion,
and Camus, too,
who quietly sucked on a cigarette
and didn't reveal much.
Last week Maupassant turned up
looking for a lead,
and the day before that
it was Emily Dickinson
doing her thing in surgical gloves:
such wonderful minds
to have come up with nothing.
And you would think that the clues
would age and wither,
that the fingerprints would dry up,
that the forensic information
would pass its used by date.
But the scene of the crime remains,
seemingly as precious
as a miniature ship
shelved inside a bottle,
or a deep love
stopped up in a human skull.
By now, that unvexed culprit
could be a million miles away,
or just across the street
looking on.

Abel Defends Cain

My brother always held my hand, father-like,
when we crossed the arterial road on the way home.
From a status elevated by three colossal years
each year marking a more vigorous, more godly incarnation,
he still found it in his heart to hand me down
his outgrown T-shirts and his creased novels,
and not always without feeling a keen agitation.
When we swan together across the lake in summer
he would race ahead, and yet he always waited
for me to catch up to him before he raced ahead again.
On long journeys, he often vacated the best seat
when he grew tired, or when he grew too clever
for a monotonous roadside view. That big bully
in my dreams, the one who looked just like him
and who chased me around every dreamland corner
was just some wolfish imposter who couldn't be killed,
In the morning, the real him would be sitting there at the table
passing me the milk, once his own bowl had been filled.
When his blood-brother friends could not come over
he invited me into his carefully crafted world
where he allowed me to step into his beautiful traps
to put on the scariest mask, to try to uncover
his secret hiding places - places where even a tyrant father
would never care to look. And so, in return,
I felt bound to pay him back a good five times over,
insisting that it was he who was always given the first choice,
or taking one for him when he was absent,
or keeping a tally of his all his goals at all his matches -
these things were the very least I could do, I mean
I know how hard it can be to be a brother.

The Faller Climber

Who can say how long or how far you had been falling
through the darkness when first you caught hold of something
in your left hand, which, like a ribbon, ran along with you as you fell
ever slower, until your right hand caught another something, and another
and finally you stopped falling, and finally you thought to yourself
Now I understand, after which, in the darkness, you gingerly began
to pull yourself along, gathering in those propitious threads
as you worked your way into the silky world of knowledge,
not quite a performer, no, but something to be compared
to one of those roving rope-loving acrobats from Cirque du Soleil,
climbing your way around for a lifetime inside a single head
in search of other fallers who also caught hold of a thread.

Mental Health Week

It is mental health week, and to prove it
at the bottom of my cluttered bag
where a shaggy copy of Szymborska
fends off toothpicks, pen lids and foil-clad painkillers,
are two identical balloons,
yellow and stamped
with smiley faces and unbegun slogans
think well. be well.

Deflated, or yet to be inflated,
however you look at it
they are rubber and mass produced
and they are making my bag smell like a hospital,
so perhaps I will blow one up to a sensible size
and let it go in the wind
after a funeral
or in a playground;
the other, I will blow up until
it reaches that critical point
where people start to notice it
and cover their ears
and look away,
and then I will blow some more -
a comforting thought
in a broken kind of way.

The Boom of Inclusion

Press that depressing button
on your phone
and feel that little boom of inclusion.

That boom is the tantalizing magic
of coltan minerals –
a spell unmatched
by the unmagic of written assurances,
by any supplier’s map,
by any signed agreement.

That boom is the shudder
of a baby swallowing milk
in the shade,

of a spade hitting into sand
in the tropics,

of a single gunshot
in the Congo.

We have our magic.
We turn pages.
We open gates.
We shift weights.
We change currencies.
We grind bones into powder.
We make tracks.
We lose track.

boom.

Homage to an Ancestor

Before I was even conceived, my great grandfather
crafted his own headstone - a task not too different, I imagine,
from whipping up the white boxes he used as real estate
for his bees (he was an apiarist by trade)
or knocking together a boot (he was a cobbler too)
or rigging up the first electric lights
his small town ever knew - not that they would sit beneath
the bulbs, in case liquescent electricity dripped
on their flammable heads. Have I made my point?
Can I now declare that in the mellow Edwardian light
of his eyes I was always destined to fail -
to fail whenever I remember him, this stout little man
who I never met, but who now crawls down
through the piping of generations, and shines
his home-made flashlight into my head,
this man in the gelatin silver photo, the one who is feeding
Frostian stove-length sticks of wood
into a giant buzz saw, and who never lost his hand,
who at the age of twelve, when his father lost his head
and drowned himself in the deep asylum dam,
would cut up a lamb, wrap the red meat in flippant sheets
of wild newspaper, and stack it all on his billy cart
(oh, he made that too) with his baby brother
perched on the back, and go from door to door.
What else did he do that I can employ
to measure the transmundane distance
between his sensational feats and my scratchings?
He carved an angel into the purple shell of an emu's egg.
He pressed floral patterns into the tin of flattened cans.
He made time flux in crippled clocks.
He shore sheep.
He mined eternal gold.
Can you understand
how I will forever be fresh dirt
in the bone sockets of his unearthly eyes -
I who was dumbfounded, and who fumbled
for an answer, when my own son, Samuel,
his namesake, once asked me
if the moon could catch on fire.

The Fate of Empires

It was this park bench
(hardened with as many
coats of plush enamel
as there are rainy days
in a decade)
that sent me back

to that fluorescent avenue
of ornamental trees
with its whiteout
of ceremonial blossom
quivering in the breeze.

But this is now,
and that stock-still tree
(the one just over there)
is watching me
from the gnarls and whorls
of its layered bark
with as many eyes
as a pack of wolves,

and see how its roots
have been set out
around its burly trunk
like waiting paws.

Hope

Hope, I lost you in the garden
with the name of flowers
so true that they follow us
to our grave, and later leap up
for the eyes of our nameless progeny.

Hope, I glimpsed your corpse,
positively, in books of guilt,
long after I refused to vote
with my soft feet
and instead went about my father's work.

Hope, I couldn't recognise you
behind those glasses and moustaches,
or in that blood-red lipstick and those hoopy earrings,
tricking me into playing my part, too,
for laughter and for love.

Hope, I falsely accused you
of good deeds that you might not have committed,
then I hid when you knocked on my door,
and later I wrote this poem,
sincerely, to apologize.

For Prime Minister and Country

Loopy troops
or just breadwinners who stray
in old Afghanistan?
(After all, you take work
where you can.)

Boy scouts gone mad
or just video game buffoons
who seek the ultimate graphics
in old Afghanistan?
(After all, you were COD's
biggest fan.)

History class dropouts,
or just groundbreakers
breaking old ground
in old Afghanistan?
(After all, there's nothing quite so rational
as an anger-management plan.)

Japanese Calendar

When I am sweltering, your shrines catch me the snow.
When my flowers bloom, your leaves flush to crimson.
When my leaves blemish and fall, your flowers erupt.
When snow falls in my life, you offer me golden fields and steaming roads.
When I sink, you elevate me.
When I am the fulgent moon, you deal in wells.
Your streams cut through my rock.
Your rocks guide and steer my streams.
Boats wait at your lake’s edge, as empty as a Sunday morning.
Your rain slashes at April’s woodcut.
My heart gallops at the end of every month.

Goldfish

Goldfish in your orange evening gown,
lugubrious lips toying with the surface
tension in a sunlit tank (a christmas purchase)
where there is no 'long way down',

where every night is another humdrum ball,
another circus of addiction,
another eye-popping perlustration
in your quest for a stale morsel.

Emergence (e)

The morning after a day so torrid
that it cooked the socks and stockings right off
a marathon of administrative feet –
that morning is a frigid morning,
a continuous April in London dawn,
masquerading as one long apocalyptic dusk,
where people who quietly covet more sleep
resent so deeply their puffy faces,
where the little red dome of a dusty alarm bell
mounted high on a factory wall
seems softer, and all the objects that we usually ignore
pine to be noticed - like the lovesick tattoo
peeking from the collar of a fellow worker,
or the far-fallen but ever-chipper leaf
that catches itself
in the drinking fountain's trough.

Where the horses fall

This is the dream
where the horses fall,
where bling colours tear
at the darkish turf,

where the playful grass,
innocently,
infantly,
snatches at eyes,

where the gargoyalan
megaphones
clamour hoarsely
at the track,

where the crystal
champagne flutes
snap clean
in the stem,

where your paramour
rises
and walks out
(a walking flower!),

where high in the stands,
undercover,

the wind is reading
a newspaper,

where you are left feeling
a deep remorse

for having watched,
and then for looking away.

Three Signs

On a bestial road, where both ways of traffic
flow downhill,
a real estate FOR SALE sign shows
the interior of a new home - and here I am
representing it
as a modern gallery, a space filled
with space, or an installation titled minimal,
at least for the first two or three
weeks, and thereafter
a kind of hereafter,
a working morgue to me.

A few doors up,
outside a wholly refurbished
apartment block
where families used to lived in a ratio
of four people to one room,
is another glossy morbid sign
of the times, promising in white italics
exclusivity in retirement
for those who might still be able
to swing in on the boom.

And then a third sign,
leaning against a concrete pole
a couple more houses along,
beginning to genuflect,
a little crucifix, cut from MDF
just to remind us
that death is an inclusive stroke
of ornamentation, meek and roadside,
who spends its afternoon
waiting to hail a cab, or to catch the bus.

Sunshine and Sugar Nights

In every clay bend of The Richardson
the flow is sown up
in green clouds of wet fabric.

The spirit of progress
chokes on the alchemy of insects.

There is the fuzz and buzz of misfits.

Spikes rush up
into the soft soles of heaven.

A rusting forty-four gallon drum
lies half-sunken in the scum.

Beneath the surface, a fitting conclusion
materializes and blooms
in the static water,
a breaking open of red nebulae,
a fomenting of brown thunderheads,
a leaking of things artesian.
The river has reached

its manifold ends,
giving way to a cache, hatch and brew,
to a stir of luminous chlorophyll.

We are moving away
from form.

We have landed our plan
to escape landscape,
metaphorically

leaping headlong
into the knee-deep freedom
of a looming swamp.

Both Peirce and Dewey
wrote of the woof and warp
of all thought –
and I suppose

we could mull and ponder
these symbols, too -

but the feeling here
is riverside,
and these words are the science
of those who love
to babble on,
after-hours,
like a chorus of frogs.

Meditation on Meditation

If this is not a poem
about poems
then it is about being

ground down
and fed up
into

the mouth of the old
guard-
eons old -
who waited on
the concrete bridge
for you,
the bridge

spanning difference.

Your mistake
was trying
to return
at the wrong time
to the old world,
where a bird

was a bird,
a cage door

was a cage door
and a bridge

was a bridge -
if there ever were
two worlds -
after all

you made
a questionable calculation
when you chose to lose
yourself
in someone else's
language,
in a game
of all
or nothing,

when you traded in a moment
of fear
for the feeling
of being
and let-it-be,

when you chose
to lose your self-
portrait
in someone else's
frame.

In the end
living
in a roundabout way
will always be
like rummaging
through someone else's drawer;

thank goodness
this is all
just a mixed-up metaphor.