Category: Sonnets (page 1 of 8)

Who said sonnets were cool? And who said a poem that’s fourteen lines long is a sonnet? I’m not sure, but I hope nobody notices how amateur these ones are.

Folding their clothes

they will just move on once we are gone, of course;
what choice do they have, after all? perhaps none—

their play-filled days a soundscape we cannot hear, 
we can't pretend to know if they'll sleep or eat enough

to get them through it; but should they fall asleep
in a park somewhere, who will be there to hold them?

surely that new friend, the one they met just once, 
will come along with smiles and new ideas for games?

(we must rely on this idea of new friends with games,
otherwise there's nothing to hold onto in the dark,

when we listen for some sniff or cough and realise
those nightmares were really our own (oh! but look—

the moon falls behind the trees and we say: "goodbye!"
just fold their clothes, then try extra hard not to cry 

B.A.S.E.

building

our atoms move deeper into the nuclear cycle
building machines to dispense between cracks
radioactive like that northern summer’s milk
leap from a guard rail with leg rope attached

antennae

mike oldfield in orbit around some ragged sun
i read rilke as we fell towards the waiting vans
electric shock as people have sex to our album
hunting for the frozen deer aka kaleidoscopics

span

inside the chaos of that frantic gig we plucked
up courage we spread out our shivering arms
extending our antennae as we hit the freezing

earth

eclipsed by roars of album traffic morse code
what could it possibly mean forever repeated
looking for the same elastics kindling in earth

Ik Mis Je

ik ben alleen maar wij zijn samen –
samen in de dromen en in de dag
ik mis je en ik wil je mijn sperzie (
in de avond en wanneer ik slapen

ik mis je nu omdat ik ben alleen
maar wij zijn samen en dit is genoeg
met jouwe knuffelen en kus (samen
alle dag elke dag ook elke nacht

als ik slaperig ben in het hoofd en
jou bent laat op tijd (dan zal onze
harten in het overzees zwem en in
de dromen als wij niet genoeg water

heben dan wil ik meer van de liefde
rivier maken ( – of is dit niet genoeg?

Attack!

in my dreams do dogs attack! us in jumpsuits
& next to me does belle epoch whistle murder
while the big st. bernard's letter to the string
epistles brings on a sigh like hey babe take it

no one's here & the chorus will envelop us our
dovetail's merely flicker'd like an ark autopsy
we were raised on ten commandments attack!
i've sussed out all the angles coronary gristles  

seaside rendezvous a foggy beginning & some
march of the pa-ra-pa-pum pum drummers
(bless my penguin halos & commence attack!
oh all right then stop me from making sense

wedged between flak & a mealy promontory
slack? who's that (isle of romance or of death

Ninety Nine Rabbits

This is getting serious. I've just got to see you live.
Ninety nine rabbits with big fangs can't be wrong.
I'm stuck in a lower east side case machine looking
cool, if not cold. Let's not get old, forever moulded.
  
I like John Ashbery's fingernails. He did look good
in that lecture theatre, as the early 1990s whirled.
Flow Chart was my mind's magnet. When I heard
Slanted and Enchanted I threw up. The other day

I found the page from Jaws that Gary Young tore
out for me, at Max's in Petersham. Somebody said
SM read(s) Ashbery. If you listen to his lyrics you
can hear, or read, why. Outside the Poetry Project

someone was playing a saxophone. I searched for
Pynchon's voices but only found SY (on Murray St.