"Self-love. Feeds the hive"
The old man’s words,
His city state,
As though the bible
Were glamrock, and we
Were not unduly foisted with this
One-fifty idyll,
Glittery purview
Physiocracy.
“If my sons don’t find a wife...”
He’d say, like we were
Mandevilles’ bees -
“My sister has three daughters”.
A hiatus in Bishkek.
Slip the supertanker
Of public rage.
Time for a nude erection.
But then reminded,
The vice of our writers
In double-spread
Colour-coded entanglements:
He made a pass at her,
Rebuked him for liking Beckett’s prose;
Their agents now fucking.
But when you see him
In the flesh,
Five-five in ferrety
Smirking jacket, vampish
On the step of the seat where he is,
Showboat seminary,
You forget he once moved you too
With a relative truth;
Paean to a stiff father.
And that bliss is
Sideways, not lineage;
Sisters,
Not muscular prose.
"Cosma"
Romance and dismal science –
Little corpses at teatime.
Sunset strikes like a possession,
Damning, and consigning blue
To the longest prison.
Flames clothe back-fence branches in violence;
And pink clouds effervesce.
This comes:
We must evolve post-haste,
Or gently peter out.
All else between –
This blinkered growth,
This progeny,
This deck of self,
This toxic grid of mastery…
Ahh.
These fierce quotidian illusions:
That I am man enough to make
A categorical pact;
That peace is a prison of crashing finality;
Dissolve in the trade-wind
Of your tessellating brow.
