Gymnast Anna at Sea

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The beam she walks is wider than they’re wont
to be, she sees. It is anchored at one end
but not the other, like a diving board.

A pulled-punch, prodding cutlass punctuates
her pause to think. Her puncture fear propels
her next step forward, leaving her less plank

than she’d wish for, and the ship’s slight heeling shows
her more waves than she’s seen since the time she won
the Olympic gold, and a friendly crowd had cheered

her coming home with it, had met her plane.
‘Planck’s constant,’ she says, seeing first her words
and then their value, wondering should her steps

be quantum small, could she prolong her stroll?
‘The plank is constant,’ said the Moorish Mate,
‘the penalty for not being one of us

but of another tribe.’ His hooting crew
hosannas Anna, while the arabesque-
festooned blade of his cutlass draws first blood

and then her full attention. Pirouetting
on what, for her, is a boulevard-wide beam,
she somersaults, then leaps on the Mate’s head

and hands it to him, having swiped his blade
then swiped it, horizontally, through his neck.
Four leaps suffice to reach the quarterdeck… …

Ravine

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There are skunks, and a flask of warm gin, and a barrel of laughs
in the ravine where Sam’s kept far away from the unlighted house,
kept attached by a collar to a chain that links up to a cable
that runs overhead between trees stood a good way apart.
He runs back-and-forth, forth-and back, back-and-forth when he’s able.
He barks at the skunks, drinks the gin, and he looks in the barrel
for the joke why he’s here, in the fading hope this time he’ll get it.

Time Fall

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We take time to contemplate the universe,
our approaching sleep embraced by alien arms.
Is our galaxy avoiding the void?
How many super galaxies underpin
the nothingness on which all matter rests?
I fall asleep while you count falling stars.

I wake once more on our planet on the edge
of falling while revolving round a star
that itself is falling casually in step
with myriads and plethoras, and with slews
of things and forces I don’t understand.
Not that it matters as the fall continues.

230 rolls 2 3

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2:30 rolls to 3. The night train stalls.
The pistol grip on the angel’s sword confuses.
How to use the thing if Satan calls him out?
Clarence and Edward gaze at bowls of porridge.
They wrack their brains remembering why food
was necessary — when they were alive
in the temporal fashion popular on earth.
I fly through and land between them. 4 o’clock.
Partygoers cycle homeward roads.
We three submerge into the dark canal,
play musical chairs with an ogre and with the god
of manuscripts. We snicker how his name
means wimp in the language prevalent on Orion.
‘I need closure!’ Clarence clamors. Edward grins.
A sun is rising somewhere and we chase it.

Were Worthy Were

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‘Which words resemble me?’ I asked.
The Red Queen answered, ‘None.’

‘Is that use or mention?’ I inquired.
‘Do no words look like me?

Is “None” my doppelgänger, Ma’am?’
There was silence in the Hall.

When someone laughed, ‘Off with his head!’
was what the Red Queen screamed.

Her liveried rabbits strode my way
and pointed tungsten pikes

at what I hoped was someone stood
behind me, and it was.

It was my password Were who laughed:
it was my old friend Were.

Were simpered still, subjectively.
The Red Queen rose, irate,

and ripped a pike from a rabbit’s hands
and smote Were on his pate.

And what was Were right up to then
went weirdly inert.

From the nose bleed nudged by queenly pike
rose flowers on Were’s shirt.

I wished no more that I were Were;
were that so I’d be dead.

I woke and wept for Were who wasn’t
anymore, and left.

Hades

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We fall into silence and through it
to end up with rib-cracking sighs
the size of a minnow or an inner
tube connecting the cosmos to sin.

We grunt as we board the boats shunting
the bodies of the people we were
to the other side widely imagined
as resembling a permanent state

of stasis in motion, a notion
hard to swallow now we are au fait.

‘I pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that sour ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.’
― William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, I. iv.