free the tongue

the poet's tongue
must be free
from complicity
 in anti-liberty

no sooner set up
words to cure the bull
by inventing a
 copy writing tool

than sunk the idea
like a raving fool
on a new patent copyright
 ducking stool

now each page
with a little 'c'
marks the bards' descent
 to bastardry

why wonder why?

when we skewer the butterfly
 the butterfly
don't fly



This poem is written in defence of my casting off the shackles of copyright- indeed every word here is released into the winds of the public domain forever.

bios

prosody fought back
with a barb and a pin
and stuck it write in

like the trembling clime
and this eggshell earth
slipping from our grasp

the hot wind blows
through a desolation
unknown to us

the rust and ruin
of the totality
of extinguished desire

βραδέως, βαθέως καὶ κακῶς

Slowly, Deeply, Badly

I dug
that great old fern before
 somewhere in the late Pleistocene

remind me fern
 from what are we here?

tell me -
 before you waste, waste away

"O Man
 despot of the Anthropocene

your mother is a corpse
 cremate her on the bed she lies

in your bones
 her wisdom is encoded

is it noon?

Kronos lifts slowly
 the dice laden hand

not one of us
 disembarks alive"

ediacara

I light on the page
the stone page - a dull buff slab
and admire the pattern there
the traces of old intelligence
presssd leaf hard into a palm frond
(an frog = amphiborian)
those bitter ediacara days
were bellsweather of cambarian genesis
 you crawl out from under a rock
 and are crushed immediately punctured
 by the back hand of (r)evolution

translate that antient tongue
and it sounds like something like-
plasmosis egregious fidgit smearl
the trilobyte dial in a research laboratory
flickering - lobed antennae prehistoric
space vehicles their particular designs
 long out of fashion
badly parked and mysteriously
in the empty playground
bonnet up, half smashed
one is eating another one
was it a plant? was it a fish?


the fine sand brushes off
my skin like Aristophanes lantern
cold and pliant rolls of wiggly pinkish rubber
a giant storm front rolling over the tundra
of snowball earth
its oceans formless unwound clouds
a goddess large and multiformulae
pinching earwigs in molasses
perfectiform classic shapes
just like in class, the slight bob
of nugigerulous forms, heads, noses
ears, but never eyes -
though some might have had five eyes

we take but we also give

building a huge house - or is it a ship?
made out of timber beams, a little room just here
for you and me
and the baby three
mankind constructs his fire-stair into the sky
spirular in form, part gold, part airy matter
the code for many future things
is being transcribed today - it is only ever
transcription, never creation
blessed it is to be the transcriptor
blessed it is to understand the code
to unwind it and wind it up again
on this pink little finger
blessed.