may 2018

                     (i)

...every poem is a life sentence

an unyielding prison

a wilderness crawling from my throat

and every syllable of every word

is a stone in death’s mouth

a planet held between teeth

so that grief swallows logic

and the solitary language of confinement

is all that is left of life

is all of the world wide open

to a mind immured

the deserts groaning, the walls crawling with semen

the skies troubled by justice

and everyone torn by the wilderness

that sits between their teeth

and every bead of sweat on every brow

is proof I was pulled from the womb

with prosody already chained to my neck

already haunted by verse

already terrified by the verdict of birth...

                            (ii)

...and then came coitus behind glass

our fingers intertwined, our tears trailing backwards

the biometric evolution had begun

and we were held ready for the surgical intimacy

of a rapping, raping primate

in love with its own promiscuity

its own mushy angst

this was to be a metamorphosis

a coronation of some microscopic species of god

for whom its own blood

had now the face of gold

and gold the face of all blood

for there was indeed to be no more mercy

just a lifetime of four hundred long years

masturbating before a screen

mesmerised by how the tools of death

had wound themselves so tightly around our flesh

our tears betrayed by tears

our fingers still intertwined

and evolution a pastime behind glass...

                             (iii)

...today not one speck of a word can be seen

my mind is featureless

a blank, never-ending tunnel

that nonetheless reverberates invisibly

with chorus upon chorus of squalid witticisms

clichés that bounce like demons from the walls

like those elastic messiahs and prophets

all of whom tease

humankind away from itself

away from the lonely triumph

of embracing its own black skin

somewhere deep inside the tunnel

where truth receives its paper blood

its paper eyes, its paper breath

the one, explosive moment of conception

a stone that seeks tenderness

anything which can crush the solitude

turn back starlight

and even split evil from evil

the one, never-ending victory of words...