Three Poems for a Disinfected World

Regime Change Will Come

Is this the season for insurrection, for coup

d’état or army putsch? Where are the Lenins,

the Trotskys and Bakhunins? The loyal few

and the frantic mob are only Krishna Menhins,

Mahatma Gandhi’s friends, and Jaha’ral Nehru’s.

We need not plot conspiracies, rehearse a Golpe,

perform the assassination of the Fűhrer,

 Il  Duce or Caudillo, the Great Leader--they’ll pay

the price in one way or another.  Fewer

on the streets the better, we will carefully cut

our victory with an old enigmatic smile:

a little irony, a sad exotic smirk—but

all it takes is subtlety to rile

the Grand Buffoon and make him inject

himself with disinfectant—and like an insect

he will wriggle, curl and drown in his own bile.

Incident at Natal Drakenberg

Seven dancers on a rickety bridge, legs

Extended and arms upraised, racing

Towards the other side of the universe;

Two figures urge them on, a lone man begs

At the end of the journey, his arms bracing

Against the unseen darkness, where the curse

Of powerlessness will soon be broken. Beneath,

Inside another world of jumbled sketches,

Humans and animals intermingle, the dead

And the living, beside, above, their breath

Expressed like arrows in a hunt. The wretches

Inside the spirits, the horns, the fingers, head

And muzzle, at one to catch the falling corpse,

Like a foetus when the great uterine rain drops.

The Return of Archaic Fears

It comes to us in waves, like the aurora borealis ,

the colours like a vast drapery across the arctic sky,

purples, crimsons and ice-bound greens; without malice

on other nights, we see explosions of pyrotechnicity,

galactic rosebuds and expanding star-shows, the night

a secret setting for our darkest wishes, false

images through Plato’s magic lantern, all fright

and delusive dreams. And then, as when in a waltz

inside the Wiener Wald, we  are swept away

down into the hidden valleys, our sight

obscured by tangled branches, where seven wolves

stare through the window of lost innocence, day-

deceiving monsters, where lost memory revolves.

A Trio of Bitter Old Poems

Vengeance At Last

In the time of reckoning, the traitors and the killers

Will have to pay the price. Those who survive

Will have to bring the villains to account,

All of them, the ones who sign the cheques, the spoilers

Of innocent souls, the ditherers, the dunces, the five

And twenty billionaires in their greed, and those who mount

The pile of corpses in their vile stupidity.

There will come a day when all the foolish followers

Of egotistical maniacs will have to clean the morgues

With their own tongues: they cannot babble their insanity

To the courts of natural justice; and all those wallowers

In self-pitying complaints about their losses in the biz and orgs

They used to own and from which they drained the blood

And spirit of the poor, the frail and the helpless good.

Without Time or Pity

Now is not the time for pity or forgiveness, for

Sentimental tears and platitudes;

Forget the Hallmark melodies of pure

And languid love for them to multitudes

Of putrefying corpses in ice palaces,

In muddy ditches or in paupers’ graves.

We cannot run after rabbits of time like Alices

Or ballet our sorrows like Goody Twoshoes who raves

About the charity tossed to her by yellow-haired phalluses

In oval offices, or ovaries of traitoresses

Whose ignorance is myriad in the palaces

Built on skeletons of slaves, and the one who blesses

You for sending your last bit-coin in return for masses

Sung by isolated idiots bolted in darknesses

Of their own devising, the very bots who save

Their honour and their admiration for their bosses,

Who look on them as expendable lumps and drosses.

Porous Scriptures

All our bitterness turns to rage, all our fears collapse

Into the moment we have never known before, the time

When meaning cannot be measured, caught in the apse

Of old conventions and the emptiness of rhyme,

Like autumn leaves, dry as tearless eyes.

We watch the crowds fill up the streets and hide

From reality, and argue over numbers, size

And volume, idiots whose empty pride

Drains away sense and reason. What wonders lapse

Into the void! What miracles are thin as slime

Over porous scriptures—like phoney noisome aps:

And greasy electronic poles we cannot climb!

The ignorant metallic humming of a hoax,

Breathing a syntactactless signal-circle of smokes.

Three More Poems from the Plaguey Bill

The Secret of Polichinelle

As in a comedia dell’arte production, the art

exceeds the comedy, when Polichinelle is heard

in blitherings of some old and fat senior Fart,

and life becomes a tragedy, the herd

applauding nonsense by the circus cart

that pushes donkeys, mules and asses, fleas

and ladybugs upon the stage of history:

abscesses, abbesses and other absurdities,

while we who flee the plague, and they the ague,

argue with Scaramouche, bottle-nosed flies and gnats

dance scatter-brained and all befuddled, like Harlequins

in padded suits, straw-yellow wigs, with sequins,

and purple noses, crimson ears held on by pins:

until at last, alas, we find the funny  hats

helicopters to rise above our sins.

Miasma and Mirrors in Masks

The pandemical masquerade goes on, in spite of all:

The solemn doctors in their protective costumes, plumes

And mirrors made of pasteboard; cutting capers

And sliding against the grain down the hall

Of patients; and outside, the miasma, stinking vapours

And mouldy stench, on the canals, where grooms

And guardians walk in darkness carrying tapers

Creating shadows, silhouettes that fall

Across the moats, the gutters, the sewers—consume

The powder of wigs and the flakes of gold, of rapers

And murderers as they pirouette into the wall,

Like painted corpses in a sickly Masque of Doom,

From Venice to Vienna, from London to Loudon,

The violence of viruses, the silence, the bourdon.

The Maker of Cupules, Ten Thousand Years Ago

I had never made these little cups in the rock before,

Though for a thousand years someone like me has chipped

And chiselled, blow after blow, deeper into the core

Of the earth, narrower and narrower, hand never slipped;

The deeper I cut into the darkness, then more and more

My mind is exposed, my thoughts and dreams are ripped

Out of the nothingness of mindless matter. I bore

Into previous caverns, into cavities of light where dripped

The limestone sculptures and rose into things that roar

Against the endless night, my song unlipped

From chants and riddles, each soundless word a store

Of knowledge, a fount of wisdom—I unlocked the crypt

Of logical propositions, solemn insights, and sure

Against the tides of ignorance…until I slipped

Into my final years and cried out for a cure

That never comes, where someone else will endure.

Three Poems in a Time of Plague

In a Time when Clichés Grow Stale and Fall Apart

They are going now, a whole generation of the people so famous

I never heard of them, singers, musicians and other celebrities,

Those long since retired, for sure I thought them already dead,

And some still plugging on and plugging in again:

Unlike the thousands of others who vanish into statistics

These flash on luminescent screens, without lasting fame,

But all the old and fragile victims, unsung and only lamented

Through windowless morgues and tent-cities of the dead.

The homeless still have no homes, the poor, the addicts,

The unemployed, who have no names. Meanwhile

The lowest of the low are suddenly heroes, applauded

By prime ministers and princes, who now depend on them,

The masked brigades of those who spray down streets

And rub away disease in shops, the weary warriors

Of check-out girls and first-responders, nurses

And bedpan emptiers; so that at the end of the crisis,

When our prosaic necessities appear on shelves again,

The great leaders will have passed away to secret lives.

Pandemonium

How comforting when nothing rhymes, when metric feet

go lame, all those worries about alliteration go bong

and bang. and assonance slithers in the mud.

No complaints and no claims of innocence

insinuate themselves into our thoughts.

We need no longer tap out rhythms—we dance

ecstatically in dithyrambs of turbulence like lambs

led to the laughter pits of wild Arcadia. Pan

and Io, yippy-ty-ay-ei through the sky...

Hysteria and hallucination, paralysis

of logic—phlech, they have disappeared. O joy!

Our pandemic is Pandemonium,

so nothing’s left to do now but grab a guitar or lute, my boy,

and strum-strum-strum.

Ghost Ships on a Plaguey Sea

Like bloated hospitals or Narrenschiffen, they sail

The seven seas seeking a port o’ call,

Huge vessels of the elderly and rich, the frail

And homeless, stateless wanderers, with silken shawl

And latex mask, reduced to luxury,

Some in stately-rooms, some in stinking holds,

Fed well so long as the biscuits last, the rye

And whisky flow; peanut snacks with rum,

While staring at the empty sky, that bowl

Of heaven’s offal and Davey Jones’s scum,

Rough tars below to keep the engines pumping.

We sight the Flying Dutchmen on every coast.

Ruby Princesses and Carnivals of the Sea,

The ferries and the wherries, that’s the cost

To turn a gallant galley to a plaguey brigantine.

So heave ho! my maties. Here’s the Jolly

Roger to sneeze you into a perpetual quarantine.