Erech/Uruk, Iraq

We’re told that writing was invented here:
lists of weapons, foodstuffs, kings, kinsmen,
laws and penalties.
Here lived the first Man-God, Gilgamesh.
Here children beg for ballpoint pens.

Here there is no fence around the ruins,
no turnstile, booklet, shop or guide.
Here there are no tourists, toilets, postcards
or Keep Off notices.

Here is the first city.
Here urban evil started
to gyre its tentacles across a world
which now it strangles.
Here was the New York and Washington
of seven thousand years ago —

the best of man is his ruins.

Not far away is Hamurabbi’s Babylon
whose ruins were so recently reconquered
by American Marines,
and turned into a huge base
with helipad and roads wide enough
for trucks, the threshing floors
the shards of pottery
covered with gravel and hardcore.

The best of man is his ruins.

Self-Portrait as Oedipus

Self-portrait in Memory of Fernando Pessoa

1.

I am not a person, but a place
of thistly thought. Like a disquiet
I write spiky silences beyond
the terrifying noise.
Life is just glue
between unmatching shards.
Grace is stone, fur, fruit, catastrophe.
Timid, perceptive, aslant, aloof, impetuous,
I find that only alcohol
makes living seem a little less than fatuous.

A poet is not respected
without parade.
A poet is not even acknowledged
without performance.
It is difficult being a poet
when you respect words
and meaning, and not performance
and not parade;
and not publication,
because soon the world will end
in famine, war and stultification.

2.

Rats laugh when tickled
and enjoy surfing.
Dogs smile,
and Duns Scotus believed
that the world was born
when the Trinity fell in love
with Jesus’ soul,
and in Massachusetts there’s a law
preventing goats from wearing trousers.
Botticelli threw his paintings
on a puritan fanatic’s fire.
The sound of one hand clapping
is the amputee applauding war.

3.

There is more variety in vegetables than in people
and I can eat them
without risk of prosecution,
courtroom mumbo-jumbo
and life-imprisonment.
There are 4,119 kinds of cultivated potato,
but people all seem the same,
unearthy.

Hyænas love tanks
or more particularly their dead crews.
Hyænas eat up their dinners
and don’t think of the starving
children of Africa.

4.

Now I’m 66 and I have a travel-pass
and I don’t do up my fly
and my trousers smell of piss

and family and riches and career
have passed me by
and I’m sipping cognac by the fire
in France, composing this.

Alcohol’s a tender friend
if you treat her with respect —
like dogs — and unlike men
who’ll stifle you, unchecked.

Man is the cancer of the world
evolution turned to tumour,
mainly because he has an
undeveloped sense of humour.