Friday, April 25, 2014

The Notepad Men

It's cold today, the wind has China on its breath,
Shards of a thousand years of culture,
Wrecked by the crossing of the border,

This country will not scan for poets,
Like me, the proscribed and unapproved,
Its name rolls out and jolts us all,

The DPRK is formed from blanks,
The dreams of nana's nursery thugs,
Crushing the trash they pass off as toys,

He's a flat, grey man with flat, grey minders,
The dead eyed Notepad Men of Juche,
Fearful of hunger and re-education.

The paper is un-lined, non-aligned,
Government Issue stationery,
Locally produced for fear of empty space,

That would import a dangerous idea,
A whole white page to fill with freedom,
A page to let you think and be.

He talks, they walk and note verbatim,
Policy and doctrine, rocket drill,
Fisheries protection, isolationist redress,

The poetry of those considered artists,
Taken down in quadruplicate or more,
The white sails of charisma.

At night the Dear Leader wakes alone,
Calling for these men to note ideas,
The border smashed with ideology,

But in the low-rise bunkers to the south,
Autonomous machines and men are blinking,
It's fissile here and futile to imagine victory.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Blood Art

They fail and yet proclaim success,
Those who would deny a dirty peace,
For all necessary peace is flawed,
The future requires it to be so.

Mixing dinosaurs with men,
All the righteous floating,
In one empty, glorious day,
Away into the void of tolerance.

Years ago, old before the end of youth,
They walked in maths and envy,
Through the mad crowd of artists,
Superior in perceived maturity.

They regret now, not "going into finance",
All those red-faced, failed engineers,
Missing the wet money of banking,
Through lacking wider intellects.

Thinking theft a laudable career,
They moved outside of left or right,
Into the icy heights of avarice,
Above the tree lines of morality,

Heads down in sophistry and slime,
Apt redress from The Inferno,
They seem to revel in this lake,
This sewer of fire and foul intent.

It's just a form for filling in,
Stealing from a million mouths,
To feed a million lines of grace,
And graceless favourites.

They feel for nothing but themselves,
Hearts racing at the extreme edge,
Of hatreds built on empty space,
On the shades of skin and creeds,

These are the grey bombardiers,
We'll pen their "Blood Art" poem,
On the walls of shining steel and glass,
A hymn to The City and all its fears.

For it takes no more than paper,
Under the arches with derelicts,
Copied along the fibre optics,
Killing us all under the sky of black,

All our dreams of art are cheap,
Lost songs ,poetry and Craquelure,
All just history to those dead inside,
No more troubling than dust.


Friday, April 11, 2014

Philosophy Poem

Define yourself with numbers and it is all calculus,
Beyond all the necessary, existential force,
Confined deep in the blurry, chemical soup,
Of eyeless sight and endless, crushing hunger
Temporarily staved off with monochrome.