THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM
Things are not what they seem
Appearances are fabricated just as easily as poor
Mummers costume & make-up as queens and kings.
Things are not what they seem
An old deceit is on the make, the all too human default
too much likes to climb the cock's dunghill and sing.
Things are not what they seem
The mirror displays only reversals, the opposite is true
as a barbed lure glitters, as a baited fishhook swings.
Things are not what they seem
The seeming is the very trap set for green and naïve hunters
as the mother duck wrong-flies on her broken wing.
Things are not what they seem
Seeming is not the thing. Seeming is all too often
only seeming. Seeming is the sport of living things.
Things are not what they seem.
* * *
6th February 2015 - WDK
THE ROAD IS PAUSE
A road gone mute is a pause as traffic
ceases far out beyond where icons of it go;
a common road now most empty as folks hurry
to stay near to where love or habit answers,
and back! as a road is pause in the traffic rattling
by like death, like hungry death on the make, on the take
as if it has a go away clause in its contract, its mission
to crash the bright lights, to flash on and off for code, gone;
gone, gone then binary stars give back their old look-out
in light shot out like cars on an astral highway
that keeps a going on and on, off, off forever
where final love or rote childhood will answer.
5th Feb 2015 - WDK
The text truth
Your next text
might lose you your licence,
as you lose your life.
REST NOT IN PEACE
Offspring, word: hatch here, take flight, grow devote
Rise of ashes in sackclothed backbone from the mud
For freedom's sake in goodness reject all that's base.
Let me not like father Abel be so casually Cain-smote
Nor see this decried word diluted in any moment's flood
But let abiding light shine out in its every true trace
As the patriarch, our father Job of holy legend wrote*
O earth, cover not thou this pain, this hope, my blood,
And let my cry have no resting place.
* * *
28 Jan 2015 WDK - (* Book of Job 16: 18)
THE WAY THE SUN
The way the slanting sun of the morning
catches and kicks many things sidelong
as if illumination was a game it's playing
with all matters attested here short or long
Its probing fingers tease out the tress of things
with its golden touch just as a father yearns
for the fullness of his son to be as glory sings
in the full light of that day of the heart's concern.
Still the sun hunts lion-hearted even shaded by cloud
the red sun that scratches to bleed out in bright blood,
or as reduced to this shattering of light that shrouds
its beating heart in gloom of a world on which it broods.
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THE NIGHTMARE OF OUR RIGHT
As if a day came
As if the day had gone
We'd forgotten 'Aright
Lost memory of arights!
As if night came
And the night had gone
Properly in need to arise aright
In need to rise aright.
* * *
As if a day came and we'd forgotten 'Aright',
Lost to arights! Properly in need to rise aright
To put things to rights: where our very rights
Had become the nightmare of our nights
* * *
To put things to rights:
where our very rights
Had become the nightmare
of our nights
To put things to rights:
where our very rights
Had become the nightmare
of our nights.
* * *
As if a day came
As if the day had gone
We'd forgotten 'Aright
Lost memory of arights!
YOU SIT BY THE BASE OF A GIANT TREE
You sit by the foot at the base of a giant sequoia differently
to how you sit by the foot of an elephant though as life it might
seem the same; the huge pachyderm might lift a foot and crush you
while you are so near even while awed to stillness by such utter
massiveness such sheer largesse, while the grounded other, being
more inert might still give a shake sky high and down a ton of mere
offshoot in grace like a heap of firewood to bury you but we take it for
granted that such a fast unfastening movement in a great tree would
be far less likely and fatally irregular though we know it happens we
expect our big end to be slower tho' we know things fall accelerating
yet we hardly admit that contemplation of life in real size decelerates
us back to a sort of snail pace as if it had some live mesmerising
power which brings us back to fellow feeling with its greatness, a sort
of claw extended on some mystic root that gnaws at us like growth.
It's like global
warming only
seen to be cooler,
much cooler,
that iconizing,
It's like global
warming only
seen to be cooler,
much cooler,
that iconizing,
an odd romanticising
of it as chemistry-
'The chemistry'
that makes its users
greater fools
and keeps the cake
it eats in icing.
It's like global warming only
seen to be cooler, much cooler,
that iconizing, an odd romanticising
of it as chemistry- 'The chemistry'
that makes its users greater fools
and keeps the cake it eats in icing.
It's like global warming only
seen to be cooler, much cooler,
that iconizing,
It's like global warming only
seen to be cooler, much cooler,
that iconizing, an odd romanticising
of it as chemistry- 'The chemistry'
that makes its users greater fools
and keeps the cake it eats in icing.
.jpg)
A SHEER CALL
The monumental svelte erectness
of a pencil cypress that is something!
A frame of tree trunk and limbs entirely
clad in tight foliage, close as modesty
a risen uprightness that bends like grace
as a mercy from any too-tight vertical
but never bending too far, quite abiding
in its taught spring back to upright justice
to a sheer line of dignity at living rampant
a plumb column to the honour of stature.
The call of a high pillar of being descends
even to each milepost to red boxes of the Post
as each light post in a power line rises cut off
from its longing to be more elevated, each one
descends from such a real living column, even a
boundary fence post knows the statuesque longing
as its corner post is cut off from its claim to
boundary rights in the sky, but even it holds
to the old memory of its kin, that sheer call
to be a column principled as a pencil pine.
- 17th January 2015
CALL HER
Call her Giginyu ! Else, call her Tarauni !
She was just a slip of a girl. Africa's girl.
As if a nothing for them! Fauna! Kid-snared like a wild bird
From the land jails of abjection, tied, shackled up.
Robbed in the manacles of men's hate at Jihad.
A Girl insect to invest with secret venom bombs.
Child of God to the crowd-jostled marketplace!
Too young to be suspect. Winked by the detectors.
Dolorously she came like one going up to His calvary.
Call her Gwale ! Else call her Sabon Gari !
This is another one. Even yet. Call her Kano !
We don't, do not know her name. Yet, yet she was.
Her lithe girl body too young too young for breasts;
Unweighted by pendulous breasts, but yet.
Yes She carried a weight up there! From her middle
Upwards. Upwards like a call to heaven, "No."
Nine or ten years old, a girl too young for breasts.
Call her, dear God. Call her from her damners.
- WDK 13 Jan 2015
CALL HER
Call her Giginyu!
Else call her Tarauni!
This is but a silph of a girl, Kenya's girl.
So outed, as if a nothing! Some fauna!
Kid-snared as nestling bird, as a wild bird
ff land jails of abjection, tied, shackled up,
plucked and robed in these Jihad manacles
as men rape for the deadliness, headlines
witha Girl-insect to invest with
their load of venom bomb.
Child of gods led to
the crowd-jostled marketplace!
Too young to be suspect.
Winked by hard eyed detectors.
Dolorously she comes
like a mother going up her son's calvary.
Call her Gwale! Of Magdala,
Nazara. Else call her Sabon Gari !
This is another one. Even yet,
of the land. Call her Kano !
We don't, do not know her name.
Yet, yet, she is. She was.
A lithe girl body too young,
too young for breasts;
Unweighted by pendulous breasts yet, but yet.
Yes. She carried a weight up there!
From her middle upward. Upwards
like an infant call to all above; "No."
Nine or ten years old,
a girl too young for breasts.
Call her, dear God.
Call her from her damners.
* * *
WRONG TREE
The seer-skin possum's not up there
There's no sign of the eagle-eyed nest;
That tree holds no talking koala bear
Why don't you leave it go, let it rest?
Any amount of devoted music played
Won't bring what's not up there down;
And you sermonise others as too staid!
Barking your guitars routine as a clown.
SHAPE WITHOUT FORM
politically correct circles make
a vacuum in loyalty as
the arc of an axe cuts down a tree
politically correct networks take
the shadow out of commitment and
portray that shadow on the screen
* * *
politically correct threads bind
up the swings and roundabouts
as their unsafes to be deployed
and a vacuum made from this kind
of ideologically correct geometry forms
that shape of old described as void
Raising A Daughter In The Garden Of Ancient Rivers
Let not your daughter be beautiful, your pride and joy,
She is now a danger to herself, to your whole family.
Let her not remain naïve. Hide any innocence as a jewel.
Hope not now that your daughter is good to look at
Delight not in the glory of her long hair. No, shear
It all off quickly, cut it crew, shave her bald as a crone.
Admire not the softness of her young skin, age it
With flour and dough make wrinkles as sun does a prune,
mask her sweet dimples with rough gouged dungs of earth.
Allow not your daughter’s eyes to glow with any winsome
Allure. For such a light in the night of the world attracts
The light-bereft, the predators, wasps, bull hornets addicted
to the honey, with many stings of robotic cocked weapons
and automatic pinioning arms, the robotic urges of desire
that would turn her to empty, that would make a grave of her.
Erase all trace of your daughter’s loveliness, cover her
With rags, dress her with madness, allow her to speak only
The tongue of lizard and toad, with the voice of a hornet
That seems a sting to hornets, that cooks up potent bitterness,
One that bites like ticks, that draws blood from another's lust,
drains the vital fluid of the greedy, let her mirror such parasites.
