WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  The Sailboat           II       o how i luv     to muse     over my nude figure bathing     irresistible     in the river     drop      my shorts     &     knead   with my invincible     army     of fingers          flesh warm & quiet    ever vibrant as i glide     across it flexible     like so      with a tickle    both wild    &    flagrant beneath the bob of bubbles     hidden below       i surf this      river      bare & laud each member of mine massaged    &     pulled      in   ...

  Hill (i.m. Geoffrey Hill)   Remove your hard-hat, turn off the hazard lights. You do the philosophy in different voices, with Heraclitus travel through gloom. You think the deceased are not the dead: the dead do not cease.   Your poem had an effect on me: it smelt like cold music, exercise of war. It points away from you, who are dead, who was not thought out or down. Nor is music sound.   Deities use us as the lenses through which they see the shadows of themselves gather wing. As one sweeps one is swept in turn. Stories froth through us. In our time   the masters of the white vans refine what cannot be said. The frowning nurse fulfils the prophecy. The kite-flyers fish for gods. Roadsides strew with canisters of nox.   The assembled dead are new-fallen sibilant leaves. Call-waiting music purls among the many tongued ghosts. A question concerns the Sibyl: is strong art made by the angry, or the unwise. The void.   Heading towards the spee...

  teapot   i mixed with the streets ripped from your roots a rose bud no longer the road is shortened, one small bud with my yearnings sunk i’m a tea a little bit blood red, a lesser lover   mother come wrap my sprouting shoots, pick me up tuck me into the house steep me on the window in your song’s vibrations, garnish with basil sugar me, stir with your hand make the house drink me mother   i left the street i’m a frostbitten petal my sweat is tired i took my missing feelings back i’m a little bit emptiness, a full separation i’m a small roof a small portico, i’m a rose bud torn loose no longer   mother come shake off my dust, tuck me like a roll in your chest raise me again with letters and lullabies, put me to sleep three days and nights lay me in life mother before your eyes spread a thick inside over me   (Translated by Andrew Wessels) the sky settled on the lake   the sky settled on the lake, clouds a flying carpet we prepare to step on the moon,...

  somewhere above the harbor where seagulls spear the day with old songs of Sirens lost I find myself not anchored nor moored to the coming of yesterday’s debris weathered and carved a message a wooden whisper a note in a bottle bobbing on grey water I see you you ship of dreams sails singing my breath the wind     ***   that day the tide whispered a few words to blue sky above to make sure history moved ahead standing in straight lines small men watch the grinder turning all before them to pulp blue sky still above moonlit nights when lakes tend to loot pale beaches reed conspiracies sing of new and inexplicable things the streets are swept tonight by a hundred small men with their eyes on the run weather is just another word for being taken apart     ***   I see signs in the sky where worried faces roll running for office in countries where flags burst into fire on any given day ruled by the unfair and the...

  The virtual goat   Old woman Floarea’s goat and Saba’s Semite goat even now graze the same grass in the flat piece of ground where I used to bring my goats too in my childhood. And in Paris the virtual goat lives in my son’s computer and tries to bleat. It is a problem of adjustment and generations of  life and its shadow –                                                             aporia               that gives reality headaches                                                     and far-off                                 ...