First you figure out who you are not;
then you figure out who you are;
finally, you figure out you are not who.
Tag: metaphorisms
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Who are you?
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My Love
“Oh my Luve is like a red, red rose” – Robert Burns
My love is like a red, red rose
the flowers and thorns combined.
The vivid beauty intertwined
with sharpness. There is no repose.
The colour of the velvet petals
Evokes blood, subsists in blood.
Ambivalence that never settles
existed there from the bud.
My love is like a red, red rose
it’s in my blood least petals dry.
In me, with me, as me it grows
and if it dies the I shall die. -
London
The difference between art and ornamentation is provocation. If it provokes thoughts, feelings, actions, opposition – anything but indifference – it is art. (Me, personal communication)
London is art.
I wander around the city,
from pillar to post,
from juxtaposition to juxtaposition.
It has a lot of pillars and posts –
old and contemporary,
pretentions and utilitarian,
faux Greek and real concrete.
I peel it layer by layer:
Shiny facades concealing ruins,
ruins prepared to be reorganised,
rebuilt, repurposed,
reabsorbed into nostalgia for the past
or hope for the future.
Only dead cities are immutable –
monuments to past hopes of individual success
and current delusions of national grandeur.
Gravestones.
Living cities have to consist of ruins,
it is a process of recreation,
flux and flow of people and things,
moving between loss and hope,
provoking innovation and outrage.
London is art. -
Of Rainbows and Fairness
We long for answers. For a way to clear
the shadows of doubt from the mind.
We want uncertainty to disappear,
confusion and complexity – unwind
onto the straight and narrow – a pier
above the murky waters of the mind.
The only way to go. Nothing queer.
No thread of Ariadne to unwind.
We wish for clear weather, warm and dry,
but clear thinking quickly makes it clear
as wind sweeps all the clouds from the sky
the rainbows will also disappear. -
The waters of eternal youth
My well is deep and almost full of sadness,
its waters dark, its syrupy contents
attracting ants and flies and other creatures:
some birds and mice that sunk under the surface,
preserved in sugar – feathers, fur and bones,
like little gods, demanding adoration.
The lure so sweet: abandon hope,
abandon disappointment, strife and effort,
become an angel, paragon of virtue,
of feathers so smooth, and white, and silky,
forever undisturbed, forever perfect,
forever still.
Intoxicating poison
of sugar, death and mystery fermented –
the nectar of the gods,
the well of legend
containing waters of eternal youth. -
Sleeping Beauty
With gratitude to a friend and a poet, Yana Kane, who asked this question – and inspired so many others.
White monolithic marble
slowly flows into
blue, where curling spires,
gradually exhausted,
fade into sky and vanish.
Tracing intricate movement,
my gaze, under its enchantment,
takes me away and out
where there is no sound,
colour or time – just spaces
still but containing movement.
Somewhere in these spires
there’s an enchanted princess
sleeping a hundred years
and one.
And then?
[question from the audience]
What happens
In year one hundred and two?
And then…
When a miracle happens it gives you a choice –
it defies the prediction’s imperious voice.
If the prince failed to show and give you a kiss
you can give happy ending a miss.
You can stay in your own unchanged universe
and ignore the fairy’s presumptuous curse.
You can stick middle finger to human endeavour –
Sleeping Beauty, enchanted forever. -
On the Nature of Poetry
Trying to describe the indescribable
is a mug’s game.
There are no stories
beyond the power of words,
for stories are words.
As we try to get at the magic of experience,
the enchantment that can transcend facts
and transmute reality,
…it turns into a story
born of words
and limited by them.
It rhymes and writhes,
but artifice of language
only hints
at possibility
of something deeper;
it makes your reader work,
inventing meaning,
while losing your experience forever
and making you redundant…
What a pity!
Poor poet –
forever betrayed by your tools
turning experience into stories,
visceral into abstract,
dreams into – what? -
When empty cup runneth over
You imbibe of your desperate loves to get over the voids,
forming rickety bridges and narrow paths in the clover.
He is happy and chirpy, who covers, sidesteps and avoids,
but the longer you do it the heavier is the hangover.
