Wednesday 15 May 2013

How to Become a Member of the Self Preservation Society


 How does one acquire a hide like a rhinoceros?

Perhaps one does not start by writing poetry but then again...
Compare me to a hippopotamus,
I am less gentle and more leathery,
Compelled merely by instinct without doubts,
I am no thoughtful kindly elephant,
Who moves through life with careful tenderness,
I look not where I tread nor whom upon,
But blunder unaware and don’t look back,
Rough skin contains my dense unfeeling bones,
I know not how to feel another’s pain.

Storm

Between the crash and the startled rise to consciousness
Was no vacuum for agnosticism to fill.
The violence that last night rent the air,
Spoke to the watchman of the mind asleep
Of God's anger. And, despite such reason,
Laid upon this primitive reaction
In millefeuille like layers of delicate abstraction,
The sense remained. 
The need to blame oneself lies deep,
Inverted arrogance that sees the human will
As powerful in the face of all evidence,
Hides beneath the cerebellum,
Lurks, bides its time, disregarding every contradiction.
No nihilistic counterbalance rises up in negative defiance.
The  too small voice of rationality
Whispers in the ear that's by the pillow squashed,
And the human sense, which reigns supreme in the tranquility
Of summer days and languid heat,
Retreats, replaced by this childish insanity.

Monday 6 May 2013

Asleep With my Eyes Open


The sky, framed within the old sashes,
Is painted by someone rather slapdash,
Whose palette was not truly clean,
And yet it is so complicated and perfectly itself;
Though the clouds resemble both bruises and ‘Germolene’,
That it speaks of endless time,
And the beauty of the world to my sleeping brain,
So that I am suffused with an intense sense
Of how interesting it all is.


And the greying wood of the shutters,
And the faded green damask of the curtains,
Are one, in the sight of my mind's open, sleeping eyes,
With the wet May garden,
And the warm heaviness of limbs.