surreal

V.142 – Fiorenze by the Arno

A ghost walks along the river
past the neon jewellery door
(blue and pulsating – bright rings
of papal girth) a magpie caw

comes from the counter – or a Jay?
Mother of pearl eyes. It’s his place.
The history of jewels in res,
he fluffs himself behind the caisse.

The pyramids of glass have dust
crusted to the linings – coaches
of ghosts queue around it in lines
he senses weakness, and poaches

coins from the spectral flaneurs.
The flagstones are split – in one slip
Machiavelli dropped a coin –
yellow – it has rested there since.

Now when we pass over that crack
we feel the urge to betray all
our friends to attain power – that
is all that echoes in our halls.

Machiavelli – in constant
rotation in his grave (his bones
hitting the stone in a cut beat
that sounds like house music) unthroned.

An Evening at the Gallery

I

A rainbow must be poured,
the air framed and hammered –
a million wrinkled angel hands
hold

II

I take the glass and glowing ice,
put it in the racist’s mouth and say –
bite

III

Of complex fire
little can be said – at first.
Then, it toasts the mind

IV

Imperial marble glitches
(robed in light, disperses)

V

Imagine the whole world in pastel
skyscrapers. Then,
through the dark, a mist
and floodlit grass

VI

A devil dances on the church.
Children laugh and reach
but only feel the stone –
gaps where faces should be

VII

In the dry ice
and perfect acoustic space
a sofa waits

VIII

Bodies on a walkway
in black coats – all watching
an ad for trainers

IX

A thirties hotel
immaculate corridors, red carpets –
in each room, a clump of
mushrooms
sprouts from a freshly made bed

X

Mecha-godzilla was only a child…
He didn’t know the ripples were chaos!!!

XI

The grass in a late nineteenth century
park square, begins to glow
at the tip
and shiver

XII

Words carved on a black wall say –
we are sediments.
We sink to the bottom
– anyway,
let’s go eat soup

V.136

The house was on a steep. The sun
was belly button of the sky –
hot head, the red light of my blood
pearled with bright neuronal pearling.

They were shouting, I could hear it
from upstairs. There is so much love
in an exasperated scream.
In a textured chocolate croissant.

Sleep will take me soon and collapse
lose pertinence. After such days,
brimming call-centres of the heat
enrich my dreams. Hello you’re through –

Oh Sam, I know you’ve lost so much
and words are not the kind of thing
that can change our minds – but sometimes
I try to try – you were captain.

Life is a penguin, no life is
penguin egg cracked and just sizzling
on a cast iron pan. Oceans
shifted and took your ship out south.

I was stranded, you said, in cold
and night that lasted months. A light
on my far sailboat caught your eye –
you look up from your fire, and cry

V.112

I want you to be the first one
I talk to on my birthday
gliding over the clouds in space
in a glass dodecahedron,

our little pile of cool blankets
and when I can’t sleep due to things,
I will whisper to your earrings
that I want you to be the first

person I talk to on that day
(and I will caption the footage
with star and heart emojis)
that’s when we watch it back, my dear

(me and the orbit habitat
attendant) I will tell them how
I want you to be the first one
I speak to on my birthday – yes

I don’t know what words I would use
Maybe I would express anger
at how you mistrust my judgement
‘how dare you!!’ I would say, ‘morning –

by the way. You are beautiful
the way that shadows of nimbus
are elegant, on their cloud bed
from our glass ship, it’s my birthday’

V.111

After a propagating night
on the space ship, the undulate
light and ambient bleeps and bloops
punctuated by our moaning –

A faint smile came up behind me
I engaged my boosters. Fleeing,
but the smile was fast. It could swing
across clouds on its curved wing-span

I used all the scant resources
of my mind to avoid it, first
thinking of everything I’d done
and nebulas of betterness

Then, just dwelling with the panic.
It wasn’t enough. The smile hit
and my dark vessel exploded
with an unassuming shockwave

and a cloud of steam and glitter
(gold glitter, with small silver hearts)
erupted, and I was falling –
the landscape of the alien

calmness reached across horizons
as the smile consumed me, fodder
for the ancient and bitter god
that wants me to be happy. damn

Duck

Does any animal float as well?
Resting on this peel of thickness
pedalling slowly, and honking

Duck taught the angels
how to fly – see them now
by the barrage, watching for tips –

just put your face in your armpit
and hang there, careless –
that is how to go about it.

Lessons such as that.
And how to remain calm
in the face of such rain

After duck stands up, wrings out his coat
he waves to the angels, who nod abashed
and calmly floats off into the sky

V.72

Being in love with you is like
wrongly putting the recycling
in the black bin, but liking it.
And the rubbish in the green bin,

but liking it. Being in love
with you is like getting my ears
syringed, and I can hear a range
of high and annoying tones I lack

at any other time, but it’s great.
It is knowing that any mar
of my ears is now down to meat
asymmetry, rather than wax –

you reveal my material
defaults, simply by existing.
Being in love with you is like
accepting the judges’ avis

despite knowing that taste and all
aesthetic sensation is based
on subjective judgements, grinding
my teeth to get out that word ‘good’,

sitting in the cold waiting room
on the almost unused sofas
shivering with nerves, until I
hear your voice call out ‘we’re ready’

V.43

With this poem, we will approach
obliquely, a statement about
beginnings and introductions.
We will take the correct approach

not taken by the author in
their own preface, which was written
by an entirely different crux
of forces than the text itself

and let’s not start on how poets
enhance and distort the way words
arrive from the constellations
by talk of love and stars and more

distortions. We will take up more
than the text itself; biographs,
scans, scansions and resonances
autopsies, trials and physics

also the being of beings
themselves. We will make it present
in a way pure and crystalised.
Just the thought of you crossing this

road ten years in the past is quite
enchanting to me. This poem
will confuse, and then begin to
make sense, I promise. To begin,