I grew up by the beach
Air salt and sunscreen
Houses squat on dunes
Calendar in scratchy sand
All yellows and brindle

Winter scored in cactus ketch-groans
Summer seagull soundtrack
Snake sunbakes
Kikuyu crunches

Now home is hillside
Rosemary jasmine breeze
Every pane a picture
Year parades in colour
All purples and greens

Spring exits in lily lavender
Soft sepia summer
Auburn autumn
Jade July

And in unison agave flower
Invisible itinerary
Monocarpic masts
Noble nativity

Curtains to overture
In purples and greens

Now plenty of books. Redundant the quill
Queries well-sated; papyrus well-served
Journalist, poet, and dramatist still
Recumbent and smug, securely preserved
Smirk for the camera illustrious friends
Expressions freeze-frame, the genteel applause
Locutions abed, your industry ends
Settled profession contently withdraws
Troublesome confound? Don’t answer yourselves
All is deciphered, on parallel shelves

What innovation now possible here?
Planet post-poet not artist-constrained
Transmitting thinker nor analyst peer
Unburdened truth-sleuths repose addle-brained
Yet further books, birth ideas that birth more
Science yields questions more often than fixes
New voices surface as wave serves the shore
Shapes settled sandbars, produces admixes
Now plenty of books? The only rebuff
Plenty will never be plenty enough

Psychic vicissitudes working cross purposes
One thought dissolves and another one surfaces
Feelings are fleeting
So watch as you’re greeting
The many sensations that consciousness furnishes

Stupidly genius, moronic and shrewd people eat their fast food on fine China
Failing is vertical, errors are slander
Their gross insults impacting easy digestion
Hyperbole falsehood messiah

Piercingly silent and ardently soft people keep their opinions on fences
Insults are weaponry not to be yielded
Their platitudes cradling fragile personas
Perversely destructive defences

Classically learned and bookishly rich people carry their privilege with kindness
Science is built with colonial scaffolds
Their method constraining all true innovation
Parochial qualified blindness

Shockingly worthy and recklessly small people polish their boots with lead solder
Gravity holding them grounded and upright
Their bootlaces impacting aerodynamics
Inferior sturdy upholder

Gallantly serving and fearlessly trained people douse the political embers
Fire escape blocked with hobnails and lumber
Their pickaxes caught in the thick poison ivy
Nugatory self-rule defenders

The silent, the learned, the worthy, the trained people trade voyeurism for vision
Hologram values are no longer trump cards
Their gazes averted from hate-dripping sophists
Integrity first coalition

Feet leave the floor in drumbeat-timed pulses
Sandwiched by giants, I undulate there
At zenith I glimpse, the lead singer’s hair

Crowd-bound congested, controller convulses
Unobserved passenger bobs in the air
Feet leave the floor in drumbeat-timed pulses
Sandwiched by giants, I undulate there

World is all movement on giant-jump trusses
Weird carousel in need of repair
Invisible rider evading the fare
Feet leave the floor in drumbeat-timed pulses
Sandwiched by giants, I undulate there
At zenith I glimpse, the lead singer’s hair

Don’t give me your feed
-back, -down in the sand
-pit, -fall in the band
-width

Onboarding cost, competence lost, budgetary frost

Don’t mess with my head
-count, -down to the start
-up, -take until hard
stop

Low-hanging fruit, slim-fitting suit, payroll dispute

Don’t throw me the ball
-park, -run in your lane
-way, -out of my brain
-storm

Sanity check, turbo pitch-deck, stretching your neck

Don’t gift me your work
-stream, -line up the play
-back, -down in the grey
-zone

Dropping the *****, lining the halls, walking the walls

Don’t ping me a straw
-man, -go with your best
guess, -work in a stress
dream

Cracking the whip, losing your grip, sinking the ship

In gravity handcuffs, I don’t need a check-up
I’m fighting inertia, while trying to reverse a
       malicious assertion, resisting coercion,
I’d really prefer a fleet-footed desertion
Or chemical recess, a little-lunch brain-bliss
Just something to blur the emotional burn that
       smacks hard when I wake up and threatens to freeze me
I should take it easy…

Don’t, think I’m a waste-
land, -slide in the deep
dive, -down in the ****
bed

Bored by the ****, losing my wit, apathy pit

-Quietly quit-