packing

Those missiles you bubble-wrap

18

An invisible sion,
Judea Icarii - fallen.
Steps to an old pavement,
parchment & flagstones
rubble & ruin

pugilism

Charlie’s gone for now – stunned as I am

to be introduced to an old man in

an attic, not the gutter-drunk pugilist you know –

this turpitude some sad joke from

a sick movie

I couldn’t do that sort of easy breeze –

he’d say I hadn’t found an edge, the

next-bottle focus of a consumption

that spurred him through all the

hovels and whores and walk-aways –

comfort kills that grit, I’m begging to

see

words obscure words, a shower of noise

in a sea of thoughts, scraping at your

brain, moths tonight set to

sizzle before they soar.

Exercising charlie

Poetry is what happens
when nothing else
can ~

Charles Bukowski

Charlie (Hank, Huck?) was right when he said

nothing else

is left.

But the space between words,

that’s the truest time -

soldered to a chair, port-induced

haze mingled with free-based elegies

and steep admissions.

they walked you today

out and across the bridal veil,

water tumbling like sheets of photo-chemicals,

all slick and deep and burning

You stroke the keys - like a gland for milk

and nothing but association to factions survive

you type and hope nothing’s left that isn’t yours -

even though they’ve all said it,

maybe you’ll follow Dylan to the grave – rigid with adoration and clogged with old, dead, poems.

do your slippages account for these gaps?

the little times bereft of ‘comfortable, clever poems’ maybe that’s all there ever was – hazy winter wanderings, padded and pandering declarations

and half-carved demi-gods – mortal and yet stained

can you construct this? Charlie wouldn’t ask a question like that, buried up in his room, candy wrappers and bottles and hate –

his dysfunction a fuel, his fucking an ode, his drink an answer.

he might not have seen it so…grandly. He wouldn’t have talked to you – but you don’t know that, at least

not tonight

Para-aortic

Star light on a ring of snow, two men, one imperceptibly shorter than the other, begin to dig a grave for a fallen clown.

It’s harder than they think, this clown being by now at this later stage, more jolly than perhaps is best given the circumstances.

They hunker down for a long dig and talk about the effects of green-house emissions on global warming and the rising price of fine salmon.

They’ll dig through to night to bury this half-remembered joker as close to the centre of the earth as they can get.

They plunge and punch and push his bloated frame deep into the warm earth as storms lash their fine bespoke suits, muddy now in the torrent.

But he won’t go down, not this way, not whole.

They’ll have to hack him up, slap and slice the fat from all around, like whittling lard to make an old toy soldier fit back in the box.

Once their done, what’s left of our Jester strewn in and around the cavity, they’ll lie on the wet grass in the burning morning air and light a cigarette to share.

They laugh at their ruined suits and the night’s wet fury but somehow they manage to eulogise their deceased and dismembered charge.

He’ll be remembered for that quick maudlin temper, his sweet rages and biting barbs, the purity of his joy and the harshness of his gaze – but he wont be coming back, at least not back through the earth.

Destiny and Irony will sleep well tonight.