Confession

Some of us are definitely not of this Earth.
Of course, we carefully disguise this fact
with our cars, cards, clubs and calculated ways,
our pinstriped two-piece and encoded ties.
But underneath the loose-cut clothing and contact
lenses, we have an innate fluid grace and yellow eyes.
We live at a slight slant to society’s norms;
enough to only occasionally ruffle the odd feather.
Sometimes, when out in public, we provoke storms,
accompanied by models in microskirts and leather.
We’ve been called mutant, android, alien, cyborg
and although we’re none and all of those, we’d
prefer to be known for who and what we really are:
Those who create out of time/space by thought/deed.

First (for Ray Bradbury)

You were the first, so now you are the one
who should be born again for you are young,
but as your days are gone, your days are gone
away into a wash of pale blue nights
that eat your past, your mind, your time, your right
to be exactly who you should have been;
the one with strength, audacity; the one
who invented the invention machine.
Pressed to the bars of interlocking teeth
inside the hot mouth of the black leopard
(the one that models take out on a lead
for walks through dark and sultry city streets)
you look out at a world you comprehend
and wait for that one dark spark to ascend.

Doppelganger

Pens, papers, rough drafts, copy sheets, notebooks
and him, distraught, producing lines each day –
abandoned poems with pernicious hooks.

From where he doesn’t know – nor wants to stay:
a blasted landscape of hot desert sand,
in which a dead child stares with sightless eyes
at vultures circling slow in azure skies,
as red-eyed monsters glare from cactus land.

Snowflake crystals are made of new-blown glass –
all things that are are going past too fast:
he finds this when he stands alone and looks
into a darkened shop window at night.

That’s when the double detaches itself – unhooks
from its life support and crawls into sight.

Peacocks

Turquoise and emerald-eyed they
toe their way daintily into the dawn
to throstle and quark keeningly
to a new-minted world.
And they do this
even as the first tendrils of morning mist
encircle, envelope, enshroud, transforming
everything into indistinct shapes in the grey.

© R J Dent (2003)

Roman Occupation

What I did to you was not a crime;
what you did was. How I loved
the steel ring of my hammer echo-
ing along the long corridors of time.
The reverberations will last for years;
that’s how it is for each of us.
Freedom is an elusive concept, even
during these turbulent times. Never mind
the vinegar, I’d have used petrol to
douse that rich purple cloth, then set
it on fire, watching your evil burn
away to nothing of any value.
That you died and stayed dead
is the only thing I ever wished
for you. Now it is accomplished.

Translating Baudelaire

It is an abandoned city by the sea;
the wide streets are deserted and empty,
the houses hold nothing but silences,
and the pale sun-lit autumn air resounds
with echoes of a strident, vibrant past.

As I walk between ornamental parks
and vast buildings, seeing their perfection,
smelling the sea scents and the rich perfumes,
hearing the faint echoes of then, combined
with the wave rush and shingle drag of now,
I know you are reclining in a fine-
ly furnished room, immaculately dressed
and feeding a cat in between each line.

© R J Dent (2003)
Translating Baudelaire is a much anthologised poem and has appeared in Braquemard, The Colour of Light and Best Poems & Poets 2003