IN MY EYE RHYME

IN MY EYE RHYME

I see your
poetry

want to rhyme
with you

let you
walk me through it

take on board
all that alliteration, meter,
rhyme

lines
end-stopped
and
run-on
alike
(imbibing the rules
of poetic enjambment)

those
open-vowel flowing
and consonant cluttered
rising, falling
strophe, antistrophe
tumbling, jumping,
colliding, shunting

metaphorically rich,
juxtaposed
so cleverly in
a way
I cannot say

je ne sais
without lapsing quite into
a foreign tongue

and best of all
use of assonance, the piece
de resistance

(don’t ask me why
brings tears

to my eyes!)

ULYSSIZER

ULYSSIZER

I am Odysseus
I navigate your storms
circumnavigate your pleasures

was Calypsoed by your
tranquil beauty

fell victim
to your Circe magic

heard the crazed madness
of your Siren song
(no torture devised
with so much poetry)

eventually
finding you my Penelope
home
threatened, not yet
compromised

snuck in back
to rightful place
via
back gate
not that history
thus records it

GRANDE MAÎTRESSE

GRANDE MAÎTRESSE

She has studied the ins and
outs of every opening exhaustively.

Every hypermodern game, every line
and variation
she knows them all
by heart.

Tightening the screw comes easily to her
as if it is in fact her second nature.
So rare
that to her satisfaction
all her thought-through play of
clever rook and knight and
bishop and queen
and pawn combinations
do not win, somehow
fail to work out.

Oh the pressure!
the relentless pressure

there is
no answer

simply no
answer

your king dead, mated, not
just mated
but in the afterlife

and you
priding yourself on
all your stratagems
where are
you now?

what can you say to her
cry of victory?
(louder
than Belinda’s
at her
winning hand in the Rape of the Lock)

best
just to lie there
summoning your strength
for possible rematch

or just
sleep

in her arms
vanquished hero
on the field of battle

screwed by
gorgeous chess genius
in her beautiful square bed.

WINK; WINK

WINK; WINK

I’m not
actually shapeshifting here
and you
no shapeshifter
either

no I just
go
hot cold
hard soft

bound by and according
to my nature

you
go hot cold too

and
hard soft
not so soft

following the (binary
opposite) laws
of your biological
constitution

which, bear with me
now, no
flying off
the handle!

wax soft
when I’m hard
wane
hard when I’m soft

if you get my gist, follow
my drift
wink wink think
you understand my forever
shapeshifting line of thinking.

OR MOZART

OR MOZART

chess problems

are,
I find,

inherently
logically, structurally,
aesthetically

beautiful

like figuring out
how to undress you
seamlessly,
in
fewest moves possible

to a soundtrack
by Morricone
or
Mozart

TICKS TOCKED

TICKS TOCKED

needed to find out
what makes
your clock tick

so I got my Black and Dekker
(teeny-tiniest bit)
drilled down and
precise tool pulled
it apart

scrutinized all the springs and gears
and stuff
checked the efficacy
of its jewelled heart

just
a spot of old oil
and back together and
up and running again

Lo! and behold
Rolls Royce smooth — a miracle really
given
my lack of a sense
of watch anatomy
I had before I did explore

every aspect
of your inner working

knowing now
the exact mechanics behind
your process

can set you back
push you forward

master of
those marvellous coils

AUTOPILOT

AUTOPILOT

we
are on
autopilot

I see your runway
big lights
in the darkness

hear your voice
from the tower
guiding me down
guiding
me in

you got me
on your radar, picked me up
some way out

and here
I take over the controls personally
gear up
for landing

after landing
after landing

each perfect
each
three-point

but then you stop
me in my tracks
radically
confused

all
hot and flustered

ask why
so many landings like
the scene is
stuck
on repeat

hey, this
is poetry
not
scriptwriting

sometimes the sexual metaphor
gets such intense
it is just
rush
to the head

is chopper gunship tree-
skimming rushing in ride of the Valkyrie
all kiss apocalypse

the logic in
the thing

getting
totally screwed

DOWN HERE

DOWN HERE

what a big
brain
you got

would love
to spend
a lifetime
feeding it

I said
not a touch
of big bad wolf
in my
tone or
demeanor

quick to
add though
(not entirely
devoid of
all
predatory
instinct)

but
for the
moment

pray, let me see,
what we have down here