Poems – Existential

V.66

Short breaks in the lambent parade
of life arrive at the greasy
spoon in the market. The hot oil
soon replaces everything else

with crackling. Money slips and slides
from hand to hand around here, but
in a way somehow comforting,
like a hospital, compared to

a hospice. Rain comes in again,
an intermittent then constant
grey wash to tamp down all the days
into a lead sheet over me.

Words can be used by anyone
at any time, and this fact is
a casket leant in the corner
in a dark dickensian house.

The small bright machine in my hand
clicks and whirs and sells me products.
My low social achievement score
is indicative of distaste

towards crucifixion. I speak
and instantly eyes are on me,
disapprovingly rolling round
and round and round and round and round

V.65

If buildings stand built in the sun
by the oak hill, why must we pay?
when all transactions are known to
release their bonds upon us, why

must we pay? When our lives are short
and end shortly, in the field full
of broken trees, why must we pay?
When skeletons possess estates,

when the dead pile up endlessly
all over the world, and will persist
in doing so until the death
of death itself, one dark moment

is ours, and nothing more, desires
gum up the cogs, they jam, and break,
and we sit amongst the breakage
and stare blankly into it, stare

at the landowner who stares down,
at the wreckage and holds out bones
attached to bones attached to bones,
why must we pay? Why must we pay

when the earth will fall into fire
as its orbital arc decays,
and all long things become shorter
and waste, why then must we pay?

V.63

The future doesn’t exist
only the moment exists, and the moment
is the moment of despair that the future does not exist.

There are no hopes
There are only desires and deepest of those
the desire to have hopes.

I ride the bus back from town
having achieved a slight melancholy

and bought things I did not need
when I should have been saving
for the future I do not have.

Love once tore my head open
and everything inside fell on the ground.

Now, I feel no love.
And my head remains empty.
such is time’s slow dripping
and the cloud moves toward the horizon.

Should I be angry? No.
Should I want
Should

Note to this poem: this is not really what I am feeling. In reality the hopes I have are what has led to a situation with an inbuilt lack. But of course, we are fundamentally messed up due to the situation we find ourselves in. Maybe it is that the deepest hopes we have can send us into a jammed cog situation. That our estimations of the world are systematically wrong in a way that functions as an excuse to continue in an equilibrium that leaves us in a bearable situation, even if that situation is dead and jellyfish like. Maybe a moment of decision deferred is like a coagulant.

A Natural History of Destruction

In the beginning, something was destroyed
at least it seems that way
and something else rose outwards.
Sky-sized waves follow the instant
an ocean meteor impacts, and ricochet –
the planet at great speed becomes
Something Else – because all ends
are also beginnings, no law is more
certain. What more do things have to say
about destruction – all else is lists
of the long fall of the satellite from orbit
and the short cracks as the overhang weakens
the instant a fish first knows the harsh net.
In my end is my beginning
Is false because the I must end
For something else to begin – materials
work upon themselves some magic
which brings others to the house party
where clear sands contain rotten liquids!
Our whole civilisation is a harvest
of destruction, even in its peace, when
blackbirds sing the lay of the worm’s
redescription in branches in the sun.
And nature also, this vast restructuring
where some shapes lose what others
gain – a magpie flies as the sun dips
its smooth light onto the striated oak
and on and again until the end of this
and the beginning of something else
and we can’t often tell the difference.

On Beauty

Considered with reference to bodies

Standing water, in the cold night
reflects the crisp moon,
thin stars in the eye’s quiet corner

In its shallows the dark leaves rot
starving greens and wriggling things
’til stillness reigns

There is only so much you can get
from a reflection –
just ask these dying flowers on the shore

But a river – god damn it
just look – look at that flow
It goes where it wants to

But slip up, take a photo
and there! It’s a pool again.
For gods’ sake delete it

Let us leave all our still disasters
a night of stars, devastated
without their flutter, their refocus and shift

and lay paper puppets, torn and sullied
by the fire which crackles with time
and burns with everything you needed

[Beyond Literature]

Beyond literature
crystal latticed books
interface in halls
so vast the humans
have been lost, always.

Every sentence starts
and ends with a whole
life, a human life,
short simulated
and in the centre

the books turn about
a spine – which is real
human spinechord cut
and spun from the tears
of ancient servers.

You do not ‘read’ books –
You must choose but one,
and it only seems
that way – in cold fact
it was built for you.

So tear your heart out
at the plug – thousand
eras dawn and die
to build its climax;
it is perfect life.

V.62

When you are exposed to the beams
and the wind of the universe
blows through you, you may still seem
to walk, but you are dust, and thus

the skeleton you are stands still
in the dark, surrounded by dirt
and the wind blows and the air falls
to rest in lungs and waters. Hurt

and defeated your body melts
and returns to first and last things
as tears that glow blue trail their salt.
The air itself was on fire, sin

of the knowledge of our kind. Hell
was not real, but we made it real
and now it clicks and clicks and all
would do well to fear it. I feel

a kind of horror, this grey light
that is born out of new dangers
which make old metaphors apt; tired,
blind, the will to power failed us

as Pandora lay in a ward
this blue chord burned into her eyes
The small moth that had once meant more
that came last, was burned in the fire.