Three Poems For The End Of April

Farewell to a Friend Never Met

Without being a wasteland or a wonderland my topos

Lacks a generic space, and therefore all history,

And lacklustre as the moonbeams are the fickle tops:

Mountains call to me like wolves all eerie.

Neither here nor there, then nor now, my pencil

Glides across the lines, outside the boxes to mark

A limit to the limitless, smudges by stencil:

Celan, Celine, Ceylon and Sri Lanka, dark

And brooding, farewell, Anneliese, whom

I never met; now it’s too late, but you defied

The pundits, breeding children out of gloom,

A generation out of genocide.

Your poetry and stories gave me substance and hope

While my own wandering and exodus tugged the rope.

 The Fourteenth of July

Even after they broke through the gates and found

the dungeons deep under the surface of the street

and smelled the noxious vapours of the drains

no one was prepared, could not believe their eyes,

the rusted cages through whose thick bars no sound

had penetrated for thirty years, not one beat

of revolutionary fervour, no strains

of reason’s hymn, nor sympathetic sighs.

One skeleton and sixteen walking dead,

and centuries of injustice caked upon the eyes,

a slimy silence oozing through the lead

encrusted darkness, that no one ever sees

until the future breaks open ignorance

and fear of eternal awakening in France.

 In Honour of S R

Not everyone loved him, you know; they thought him a fool.

But if he blundered with a necklace or rode down the side of the stream,

It was because he had principles, and he stuck with them.  Dream

At the beginning, loyalty to the end.  His mind was a tool

Too sharp to be blunted by gossip or innuendo.

If you asked for help, he gave it willingly,

And often looked in on his neighbours when ill just to see

If he could help: Is there anything I can do?

He catalogued and recognized vast amounts of art:

He lectured to women and wrote for children, he faced

Up to evil when it bared its ugly fangs, his heart

Belonged to someone hardly anyone knew, he traced

The origins of spirit to taboo and totem and part

Of him knew it belonged to a Law he never embrace

In Anticipation of a Cyclone: Three Poems

Putting You On Notice

Not one flower has grown since I started writing this poem,

Not one puppy has wagged its tail, or baby owl smiled,

No one could even list the five most important events

That were changed because of it.  The ocean foam

Still piles up on the shore, those clowns who were exiled

From their historic roles, well, nothing prevents

Them returning to the circus for repainting. In fact,

The only advantage created by my verse

Is meeting you again after all these years:

The last time, to be sure, neither of us had the tact

Or maturity to realize that rhymes are a curse

And yield not simple pleasure but bitter tears.

If I wrote another sonnet, if I had the leisure,

It would be a bouquet or florilegia.

Judging by their Enamel, they could Sing Arias all Night

Perhaps in the cave of the Neanderthals, that toothsome lot,

someone dabbled and sprinkled the colours of the moon,

chewing on sprigs and sprays to make a brush,

and if she left her fingerprints, who would not

examine them a thousand years too soon,

tripping and traipsing, gnawing bones to mush,

the despised outsiders created art. better, earlier

than the noisy immigrants from Africa,

even pointillist configurations, tier on tier

at the edges of the cavern where it was darker

and where shadows danced and leaped, a spear

in hand, a dagger in the air, swish and swoosh

captured in a strange meandering line, a dot

next to a dot, the remnant of some forgotten tune.

Before there were Voices or Vices

Darkness, silence, insensitivity, what else

Can there be lost in the great descent into death,

Unless it is consciousness itself, not pulse

Or something more subtle even than final breath;

And dullness of intellect as nothing, or soft confusion,

As when the river breaks through the levee, currents seep

Into already sodden soil, stability an illusion,

Security a shadow soaking up the peaceful sleep;

Or extended hallucinations tangled in the weeds,

Like primeval creatures, neither fish nor anemones,

Where everything collapses into slimy beads

Of silence, life deformed or formless, genes

Ungendered and discombobulated, back

Into the primary sludge, originary crack.