Second Generation Once Removed

Here is a man with his teeth sucked in
and space in his skin where eyes should reside.

He breathes through a hole where a question
once was. Now his thought turns inward.

The answer he seeks is a long blue-grey
cold day billboard riding the side of a bus

in the language of a distant land
he's known since he was young.

His grandfather waded through rice fields
of Uonuma, terraced slender green blades

glowing row upon row to the soft rise of mountains
around his farm. He never knelt at his grandfather's table.

Sleep

As she nears sleep
she likes the way
details rush past
securing only the heart
of the matter.

She likes the way his ribs
curve up into graceful
cathedral arches,
whereas hers sweep down
and around like two k's
face to face - the way
kids draw curtains at windows.

Her fingers fall to patterns
of dreams, tracing the day away
in fantastic landscapes
and broken poems.

She likes the way sleep
lights the colours of her dreams
bright against darkness.

The Search for Meaning

Some would say - ah -
confessional poetry -
whingeing women droning on -
what could be valid?

But only the individual's
unique experience
of the passage of days
can ever have authenticity.

Authors write, each one,
a celebration of their own endeavour
to overcome the daily challenge -

no longer to forage for food and shelter,
but to find reason, sense, purpose,
for the effort to exist.

Released from ploughing fields,
now we are cast adrift in factories
producing sheepskin rugs for Abu Dhabi,
losing jobs to third world countries
and researching sales trends for energy drinks.

How to tolerate such banal existence?
Where is the dream egg, the idea egg,
to hatch and lend relevance to toil?

To 'think too much'
is to gurgle in a swill of alcohol,
or drift on a malaise of depression.
Self-medicate away the plague of inconsistencies.
The meaningless harp of jingles, catch phrases -
buy this button, hear this band, wear this logo,
these sunglasses, shoes, T.V. Playstation: I, II, III,
extra sensory surround sound, ultra sonic,
mega millennium, uba future,
buy tomorrow today,
have the best first -

the more you buy the more real you will become.
I have stuff, therefore I am.

And when you die, your stuff
will be converted back to cash
and distributed among friends and relatives,
or bull-dozed into landfill.

The memory of your life will dissipate
in empty rooms where psychics
claim to read your image,
lost and vacant, in some future day.

Only your confessions,
spilled out on some internet blog,
a rubbish-dumped hard drive,
or occasional unread poetry journal,
might survive -

ramblings of a madwoman
in a sleepless night.

The Rise Of The Idiots by Dan Ashcroft of Nathan Barley

Once, the idiots were just the fools gawping in through the windows. Now they've entered the building. You can hear them everywhere. They use the word " cool" . It is their favourite word. The idiot does not think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish. And rubbish isn't cool. Stuff & shit is cool. The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection, they wear their waistbands below their balls, they babble into hand-held twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He's an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail to the rise of the idiots.

Winterseed

Water slows and thickens,
and eventually glasses over.

Impenetrable - resistant -
forcing a different sort of interaction.

Now it's become a medium
that cannot be entered.

Private, closed off,
its movement is introspective.

Trees, plants, animals,
all follow this meditative tendency,

snuggled beneath a snow-castle fantasy -
the frozen flower of winter's seed.

Turbines

giant white daisies
spin their petals slowly
to the impulse of wind

power machines in cities
far from the quiet hills
beneath the blood moon

Lunch on the Alps

My breakfast was so nice this morning
I decided to have it again for lunch,
and some hot buttered toast as well.

I read your email saying how
you’d like to have lunch on the alps
instead of in your office

and I thought, that seems just right
because you are so like the alps covered in snow.
Both smooth and clean with long, shadowed
contours.

Looking so purely white
until the sun sparkles up all those rainbows.

Tuesdays

Tuesday's child, full of bliss,
tip-toes along a monkey's tail.

Feather-light wings of cloud
mark her trail.

The monkey tricks
with gifts of lillies, the joy of flight.

It's always choice:
step off the fiery hoop and fly,

or endure beneath the sleight
of monkey's paw

Gone

What is there to write of you
now that you're gone?

That you come to me in dreams
and we sit, face to face,
legs folded together,
cuddled round each other,
and talk like happy children -
words tripping impetuous -

till I waken to that old
twelve hour, sixty minute clock
at my bedside.

The Fire Bees

A soul raises the smokey fire of stars
like clouds of burning bees
flashed from the energy of thoughts and feelings -
not blue, but golden -
worked privately, beneath the skin.

How we push out our wants and needs -
the unscathed ego,
disatisfied
with being 'in the moment,'
wants, wants - always more,
and plots with cunning, guile, secrecy,
to its own ends. So selfish.
So obsessed with preservation of the self -
however miserable.

Baroque sands sweep and dance
in fingerpatterns, obscure, re draw.
Watchers weep at windows art reveals,
fire bees, burn for realisation of their desires -
tender at the bone.

new year resolution?

oh god, I don't know ....

resolve to exercise, but then,
where will I fit that in to my schedule?
lose weight ... but that hasn't work for fifty years so what's the use ...
resolve to find a new job that pays better -
hard to do at fifty. No one wants to employ you.

Resolve to be more resolute?

There's always chocolate consolation ...