Dumping Ground for Derek's Poetry

the centre of the universe is not a real place and you are not it

it is awful that world doesn't stop for your grief,
but moves on, and it is awful,
that we must still plant crops,
when they're gone, and it is awful,
that life is so brief and it is awful, just awful,
that their loved ones are not dead too
and it is awful, purely awful,
that they are not suffering along
with you and it truly is awful,
that you cannot just make them feel
a fragment of your pain and it is awful
that if you visit it upon them
in the name of education then.
then the cycle starts again
and someone else feels awful
and demands the world cease
forever for their grief.

October, have I counted you before

It never stops, does it;
the dripping tap.
"This too shall pass" my ass.
Or my arse, if you pronounce it like that.
Still the water level rises
in the waiting cup, and
across the water the smoke curls
as bodies go on piling up;
or disappearing, which is better:
can't count the crimes,
don't have to do the time.
I'm debating chemical peel
for my cracked soles;
spent a week working on
how to soften my callused feet.
Tried pumice: not very effective,
a man on the internet shares
his perspective, says sandpaper might do it.
Bleeding on the bathroom tiles
is a young man's game, so I will
apply a little more thought to it.
A circle of bureaucracy bans
my cancer-fleeing friend
from the antivirals he needs:
call this number, no that number,
no none of these; just wait
until it gets worse.
It never stops, all of that;
still the water level rises
in the water-catching mug.
Across the weary waters
our his-and-hers matching thug
orders children into prison
for the crime of bilingualism;
feeds permatanned jism to unwilling mouths,
and crows to waiting, hateful crowds.
The skin on my feet thickens,
maybe I should walk it off?
And the air across the water
sickens half a continent with smog;
I am catching drips from a tap
I can't fix; while absent God
masturbates to dying kids,
buried without recourse to hearse.
What a farce.
This too shall pass?
Just you wait
until it gets worse.

tick tock

time is a sickness enacted on the body,
i am livid with it, grey with it,
stumbling into decay with it,
and living one last day with it;
portioned out like my remaining teeth,
minutes crack and fracture without cease,
crumbling like the walls of belief,
and turn to ashes in the hands of this thief
of happiness

between midnight and dawn

spitting up jellyfish into the sink
in my break from digesting hell on paper, i think,
i hope i die before it gets any worse;
a sort of self-defeating curse.
i used to have dreams of the future, perhaps
although now i say it, i'm not sure of that.
and here i am trapped in a terrible body
with a terrible world failing all around me;
yes, i hope i die before it gets any worse,
or someone asks me to conclude this verse.

how long did you spend listening to robyn anyway

the dead
should stay dead:

leave eurydice
and lot's wife.

there may be a way out
that isn't through

but not for you;
so live your life.

Le Médecin Dit

Tu dois manger moins de tristesse,
boire moins de pleurs:
Et donc il y aura du soleil en janvier,
tu dormiras parmi les fleurs -
si tu peux oublier
La raison pour laquelle tu en détresse.

A short hop across the sea

The ticket to Liverpool is cheaper by far
Than one to New York; and for this
Your grandchildren's children will forever be
Traitors to their roots
And never crowned the president of the freest.

You will join someone else's war an engineer
And return malnourished and revolutionary
From the inhumanity of a spared life;
Your blood, red and socialist, will fill
with printers' poisons and leave behind,
unfathered, two English children and one Welsh wife.

But for all these futures, I want you to know
As you lie almost a full century dead
That your descendant's flag is only ever rainbow
But his heart and soul and blood are forever red.

tired of saccharine retelling

he saw my need and abused it
used hospitality to hold me prisoner
and made my mother weep and beg
for my safe return

you simpered and called it the love
for which you yearn

just like him
you forced your red ripe
story between my lips
and will not let me scream

the naming of things

they say beauty
is only another name
for god

and if that's true
it's clear that god
is only another name

for the sight
of you.

i don't give a damn about persia

he, too, is alexander;
he said it in love, the purest expression
of which he could think: i am a king, and he is my king
we are one man. we think alike
we dream alike. we make our bodies
into one body in the deep circle
of the well-black encompassing night;
i, too, am he
an appendage to love,
fifty percent of a sentence which,
spoken without its conclusion
or its introduction, is unintelligible;
i make no sense without him...
the direction in which his presence
joins mine
is unknown to cartographers
indefinable to mathematicians
unscribed by the words of men
and the sung laments of the women
he has spurned in favour of my bed;
i, too, myself, am alexander,

it is said;

we make ourselves a greater whole
from halves of incomplete selves;
divided presocratic souls,
an aristophanean fantasy of octopedal unity,
a spirit sundered reunited in a soul... mate.

it is said.

oh, it is said:
he too is alexander.

it is said with love;
and only arrogance would say,
i am alone am too alexander.
it is a crime to paint a crown upon one's own brow.

it is said that to be alexander
is to dream of only two things:
the thighs of hephaistion,
and the conquests of a king of kings.

i, too, am myself.
i am the undivided soul, the undiluted spring,
and it is through no rejoining spirit
that i am made a whole and spectacular thing,
and it is said

(by me)

i alone am alexander

yes, i alone am alexander

and i decide
what that means.