Poem for my mother, who read me Frost first

Poem for my mother, who read me Frost first

The whole thing is the fact we’re not okay,

The thing and the rest of it are the same corollary

It has the name of all and several sectors, sprayed,

Like lavender oil or some arcane graffiti, in display –

We’re meshed up with the disappearing decay, gone

Like Spengler into the madhouse there, a fairground

Array that would make Ian Curtis moan this is the way

Not to go – we’re AWOL on a precipice for Cruise

To cycle off, in cyclone, in perpetuity, as if to say,

The ground is up above, the twister is also there,

And I don’t care who knows the plans of the Chief

Who holds the cards intact, the hand betrays

The eye that bulges from battle affray, from fearsome

Blown debris, it’s not a good time to be staying out late,

Or even indoors, mate, stay somewhere else, sick bay?

The tree that hid us from the storm has been struck twice

First by light’s finger, then by the malefactor known as ice.

As Elvis C. bleated in his nasal best, it’s beyond belief, worse,

Because see here, there’s Freudian anxiety at play, plus,

When we step inside, we see the Disneyfied idea of our selves

As interior lampoons; but the lamp’s a false dawn,

As Diogenes, and his ilk, have instructed, on and on and on.

All I want is my mommy, but she’s got cancer of the entirety,

Nor would a cure be possible, madam, in this perplexity of bone,

Skin; I ache from aching at the ache of dying in my someone else.

JULY 11, 2024, LONDON

Comments

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