Violent Baudrillard

 

We draw our nails across the sky

And scratch the blue away

A jagged line, a hole in space and time

A fissure in the surface of this world

This false world, I should say

If you look close you’ll see the folds

And creases in the map

That lay on top of streets and buildings

Passing for the real 

So tightly is it wrapped

But it, like paper, comes away

We tear and rub and work it loose

There’s truth behind this thin facade

We’ll see, once it’s come apart

We will not let ourselves be fooled

All around, like paint on glass

People move and sing and laugh

But they will see the truth revealed

We’ll scrabble, strip and scrape and peel

Their joy is no more than a photograph

We score away the shallows

Of this unconvincing simulacrum

Rub right through this thin veneer

Religion, romance, music, power

We tear apart this weak illusion

And now, at last, the work is done

No longers will the shallows of this world deceive

The surface is all scored away

We will see our real faces

Reflected in the mirror of the deep

And there, beyond it all…

Is nothing

An emptiness. A silent void

A cold dead blast of empty sky

An endless ocean of white noise

The surface we have ripped apart

Had been, it seems,

Sincere

Not truth, exactly, not “the answer”

Often contradictory and random

But in the end, the closest thing we had to something real

Cobweb thin, those tiny brushstrokes

Painted in the world, each day

A fragile pact, a shared illusion

Truth though a million scattered visions

And we 

Unconvinced by what we saw

So clever in our quest for something more

We had scratched it all away

The Tricky Kid Whose Rhythm was Arithmetic

 

Jason was into maths and music

And music that sounded like maths

And maths that moved like music

And it gave him an emotion

Like a sort of

Slow explosion

Those beeps and pulses and angular noises

Turquoise waves inside his chest

Endorphins fired by electronic voices

A nameless delight at this aural precision

This choral set of complicated decisions

He’d tilt his head at a geometric angle

To catch the wonder of the frequencies

Time signatures describing patterns in the air

Interweaving harmonies

In fibonacci sequences

He had no friends

Well. That’s not quite true

He had people whom he’d play the music to

And they listened because they liked our Jason

Even if they were intimidated by

the music he would play them

And they would have said, “Yeah,

Jason, he’s our mate.”

But it wasn’t a sentiment

The man of maths could reciprocate

To him they were subjects to be exposed

Living spreadsheets to be filled with notes

On his aural adventures in a complex equation

He’d give them questionnaires

About the music he’d just played them

With its algorithmic beats and 

Quadrilateral melodies

He'd drum his bony fingers on his perfectly

Aligned knees in complicated rhythm

A cacophony to all but him

He heard structure deep within

And didn’t care, when the others made their excuses

And left him

His eyes were fixed on things more pure

Sonic architecture, shrinking in infinite regression

Jason smiles, warm at the beauty of it all

The Afternoon When Nothing Was a Metaphor

 

We are walking through a yellow field open to the blue sky

You are chewing one of those long bits of grass

I am eating a banana

Loving the now-ness of the moment

Trying to remember if banana peel is bio-degradable

There are cows across the field but I reckon they are

Too far away to chase me and kill me

I tell you this and you laugh, as if I’m being droll

And not actually genuinely terrified of cows

I mean, banana skins must be OK to throw away, right?

They’re nature

But… is it because they’re from abroad, 

And maybe English soil is weirdly racist?

The tall grass brushes our hands

You are being light and funny and your smile

Looks good in the sun

We have no particular destination

I decide to throw the banana peel away

It arcs into the grass and disappears

You tell me that it won’t rot properly

I say, it will, probably

You say it’s litter

I say, where is it then?

You can’t find it

I think it’s only litter if you can find it

The cows are closer than they were

I close my eyes and enjoy the warmth of the sun

On my face

And the feel of your fingers brushing against mine

Hemingway

 

I’m trying Ernest Hemingway, I am

To be like you

To be a man

To speak words like the whip tough crack

Of leather on a madman’s back

To be as simple as I am profound

To grow the kind of beard

In which a lesser man would drown

But

The words that dance out of my brain

Are playful. Daft. And, I’m afraid

They’d run a mile if they met up

With the rough and twisted gnarly phrases

You carved into the wood

I suppose your thoughts might start the same

I suppose it’s in the drafting

That they shake the whims and notions away

The road you make them walk

Hones the muscle

Makes them strong

And I quite like the road

I’ll walk for miles, I’ll do the time

But it’s the journey and

The stuff we see along the way

That, for me, brings out the song

I know. I’m sorry, Ernest Hemingway

I’m not tough

I haven’t got what you might call “the stuff”

My words don’t have that discipline

And I love some of them too much

But don’t give up on me,

You old man. If you could see

The crossed out lines

And scratched through phrases

That scar this poem’s first draft pages

You’d smile, maybe, 

A little

Through your tangle of a bearded face

And find me on that long, tough road

And meet me

In the broken places

Star Stuff

 

Come with me and dance in space

Reach out and touch the constellations

They paint the sky like

David Bowie’s zig-zag face

The solar winds rip through

The fabric of our clothes

We are pirates

New Romantics

Kissing

Turning

Tumbling

Against the void, burning

We fall though time, 

Made of stars

Your pupils wide

A black hole forms within your eyes

I’m stronger now

My veins alive

With the moving reds and purples of the night

And we explode, and wine cascades

Down our throats like velvet snakes

You rise above me, silhouette 

Hair tumbling like Medusa

A visualisation of an echo

A pop art painting

You, repeating.

The floor dissolves and we fall through

An orchestra rises up to swallow us

Ripples of electric pink and blue

We loop around each other

A Mobius strip of call and response

Melting waves of sound

Fading to a single point

After-image dancing and receding

And the rising, gentle shuffle

Of silence

Above us in the sky

The wolf star 

Burning bright