Archive for December, 2004
Poem: The Ice Room
as year end comes
the temperature drops
ice forms quickly on the lying brows
of politicians, there is no sign: their breath
enrobed with thick suspension, watery
excuses doing away with the need for gallows
a collective hanging in process, like margarine
the cheapness slips across the bread: shocking
landslide, earthquake, God’s Own Roar
a frozen transmission, truth not pending
permafrost subtleties hinged on glass erupting
nobody’s been alone like this before: barking
as the sea bed reaches up to touch the sky
the foreskin line of the beach retracts: a moment only
too little time, too late a cry and millions die
the numbers racking up like dice
Aristotle’s revelatory bath: no suds
only frowning, the stars tell stories again
The dead man’s quadrilogy
Sometimes I scare myself. I certainly did so in writing the four poems you’ll find here, here, here and here – all of them, I think, very different from one another in respect of structure but sharing a common theme or even a number of common themes.
I recognise in them varying degrees of morbidity, death, depression and longing. Longing for what, you might ask? For an end to suffering and the attainment of spiritual perfection. For a full stop to be applied to the end of life’s long and oft-times tortuously worded sentence. Grim stuff, in other words.
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