Poetry Break #4 - Woolworths

I caught a glimpse of the child today.

A Frustration of reflections,

Dancing along the mirrored glass sides

Of steel horses sauntering on stone & asphalt

That gore at his feet as they steal past.

He is running alongside them now,

Looking for an escape,

A space to dart through

But his need goes unnoticed.

Questions unanswered

And Graces unaccounted for,

He has long stripped himself of himself

And left it there abandoned

At the curbside.

The road rises up to meet his feet,

In his hands - a ball

The world clutched to his 40 lb frame,

Bigger than he is and

Perched precariously above his snow-white shoulders.

He stops now.

He notices now.

He knows.

The child turns around to face me.

The traffic grinds to a halt;

Time (that infinite machine) grinds.

And the world stops turning in his hands,

Tips forward

And crashes to a fault.

The word is stripped from me now.

Laid bare, I am nothing but a hanging sentence.

With nothing more than

The memory of a reflection of a ghost.

His cold eyes reach up to mine now

From three feet off the ground.

Accusing,

Pointing,

Giggling impishly –

Giddy with the casual realization

That the child

Is me?

I am meditating upon

Klee’s ‘Scream’,

(Does the man scream because someone has stolen the words from his lips?

Or does he scream because he is ‘me’)

Its all too much for me to digest.

Its greater than the sum total of meaning.

To much to bear on these shoulders

(Too much; too bare - these shoulders)

For I long dropped the ball

And watched it crash,

On a stone and asphalt heart.

And Watched the child

Plucked up from this place.

High above the men and the steel horses,

Drifting, floating out of reach –

The child is lost.

The Child is lost.

No search parties assembled.

No army of angels dispatched.

Only an open grave

Hungrily waiting,

The (printer’s) devil adds another ‘S’ to the ‘child’s laughter’.

The devil adds another name to his ledger.

Poetry Break #3 - Pierced

1. Whispers grow to screams

In the busy coffee houses

That I frequent,

The waiters – they don’t know me

But lately, they spill my latte

(Almost) at will.

Grungy gamines

Trip and fall on the lines and verses

That I feed them;

They’re never hungry –

And they only sniff at

The pages of the books that I leaf.

2. Prying eyes make it difficult

For me to ascend the staircase

To the stage where

A podium and the microphone

Long fashioned into a lonely noose

awaits me;

My trousers soaked through

With hot coffee

and cold spite

Cling to me

like the words that I peel off

One by one and discard upstage.

3. I rise and take my place

in the lonely spotlight

nevertheless

To aver the angst

On behalf of my

Shiftless generation;

Scared shitless generation

With too many stories

To tell

And bubbles

like the bile to the back of my throat and spills out of me like so:

4. A goth-ed chick

Stands before me

The Dark around her eyes

Absorbs the light

In a monotone drawl

She says:

‘I am the queen

of mono-syllabic rage’

And bludgeons me

With her soliloquy.

5. ‘Shit!’ She calls me.

‘Bitch!’ I reply

And shift my eyes downstage.

I search the glare

For a love long lost.

And try not to recall

How I was once impaled

On that love

Pierced and tattooed

And Twisted as you.

6. Was I Ever more

Than the object of

Your murderous fixation?

Another one of your

Trampled flowers

Another door

That you preferred to keep closed

And the retreating light

From above the threshold

In the face of your rage

7. Your eyes juxtaposed

Bring me

Sharply into focus

And line me up

With the horns

On your face

Four legs and four feet

Hastily scratch

The dusty ground

Shaking the folds

Of her dark grey

Skin

8. And shakes

the empty branches

of a tree long silent

And a heart that

still trembles

And pines,

For the shadows

That haunt its every corner,

And the yearning

Each time

the rhinoceros climbs down

And peers in.

Poetry Break # 1: Like Code

In honour of the Derek Walcott 70th Birthday Celebrations now on at the University of the West Indies (he's doing a book signing this evening!), I thought that I would post one of my poems for your consumption. That said, this is in no way as epic as Omeros and I pray that no one tries to decipher it as if it were a Rorshach, but still please leave me your impressions. At its worst, I hope you enjoy it. Its called 'Like Code'.

Crows sit perched
On lamp-posts.

They swing by,
Fast

past me -

Sequentially

I see one alone and
Watching;

Then two,

And four.

Shadows against
The eastern sun
Like breaks in the transmission,
Tapping out
Messages in code.

Sub-conscious.
Unconscious.
I want to close my eyes

And surrender
This wheel
For a ride
In the back
Of a big,
Black car.

(Baklava?)

Soaked
Sticky sweet
With honey
For you honey
With hidden guilt
And shame,

Is nothing more
Than a distant taste
Of kind words
Of reconsolation

Dripping
From my tongue
Like breaks in the transmission

Like code.