Poetry

What Is to Be Done?*

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Another year slowly ending,
heavy eyelids
        closing.

The City is freezing.

The City is everything.

No fells to see, just poisonous beasts
with pistol engine organs;
no forest or beach,
        only felled trees
become cardboard boxes to meet
manufactured need.

I’ve seen Lilacs
beneath a cracked & dirty screen,
but the cruelty of April
        means nothing to me
since mixing memory & desire
is now
how Capital
conspires to control us:

Data is Damyatta
        & compassion
died when concrete foundations,
built over the bones of Moloch,
became home.

So wide-awake, or still
stubbornly clinging to sleep,
        we divide
along newly drawn lines:

in a world run by cunts,
the terrifying truth
is that our very existence
makes us all complicit
with a system
        built upon suffering
        & destruction.

The years will violently begin
        & our eyes must
        open again.

The seasons
        have forced our predictions
        to confront us;

now is the time for new values,
now is the time to choose:

        Which side are you on,
                &
        what is to be done?

 

*What Is to Be Done? – Vladimir Lenin

Derangement

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I’ve felt the soft surface of temporal fabric,
watched the world begin to fold
small, then
            smaller &
            smaller…

…organic origami elided
            into water,
rearing over what remained of
what was no longer me.

Electricity began to scream;

nameless incandescence;

sound waves of colour;

cold feathers
folding down,
            down,
                down.
Inside
nothing remained but space & light,
a deep divide
between body & mind.

Quick flicker of panic
as all thoughts plunge into ice…

then it doesn’t matter
what I try to write or
if I write

nothing at all.

Zabbaleen

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& like any god
-forsaken thing, I want nothing more
than my breaths – Ocean Vuong

Signals traverse spines & veins.

Eyes dilate.

Tracing ancient patterns,
the sinuous ribbons of memory
renewed through constant sacrifice

                rise:

another performance

of terror & necessity.

Some animals survive & others die,

while through it all

the light plays games across the spectacle,
watched over by gods
who know nothing of mercy.
 
~~~

Here though, there are no gods;
here the wind touches glass & concrete trees
fells greasy cardboard leaves,
plastic carrier bags,
cigarette ends,
empty cans &
people.

~~~

The Gazelle has broken limbs,
has lost it's noble frame
& the grace of such delicate movements

between jaws, claws, teeth &
brutal muscle;
adrenaline, instinct & chance.
 
The Gazelle searches for a place to hide

somewhere to die in peace before
scavengers arrive to tear away meat
from the warmth of life.

Such an ugly fate for a gentle beast:

watch the blood draining from a dead-eyed dream.

~~~

The Zabbaleen
have been forced to become human garbage.

There are many others like them.

It need not be this way.

Here there are no gods but
mercy could exist. This

makes me ashamed to be human.

What about you?

Momento from the full moon

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For A

Once
I loved someone,
in the same way,
& for the same reason
I love the moon:

you don’t need to see it every day,
to know that you’ll see it again;
you can’t always see it, but
you know it’ll always be there…

…& then
months became years & those years
became the unnoticed mouldering kiss;
a distance turning stale,
old & cold as the
empty bed.

So lonely not knowing how to explain
until too late,
& strange to find how changed
the feeling is when found again;

the pain so far away

just like the Moon.

The River

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Everything moves in the river,
even the stones erode slowly &
disappear.

We are no exception.

If you try becoming a prisoner
in love with their guard, then maybe
existence wont be so hard
but

when you search for the spirit in the bone
be prepared for disappointment:

the sickness is indiscriminate &
it never goes away.

Everything moves through the river,
everything decays.

You are no exception.