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SWIPE RIGHT REDRAFTED


SWIPE RIGHT

 

No point harassing the Niceday highlighter.

The busted bust of Palas in the palace, alas,

Is all the marbles you get in Poetrydom,

More or less.  Poetry tends to get, fast,

 

Unfriended, in this pacey age of sub/dom.

My poetry job ended at half-time, ushered

Out with the blinded majorettes (pom-poms,

Falling).  What remains on the field are

 

Meatheads bulleting each other’s hurtlocker

Torsos. Ever rooted for a side you shouldn’t

Have, mate? Taliban verse was reviewed

I gather. Favourably? Not sure.

 

Music is, to them, over-rated, while drones

Rake down.  Wake me before you drown-drown.

My partner joined a LGBTQ

Group at her investment bank to be inclusive;

 

Or rather, more inclusive. I felt a cold shoulder

At the wheel of corporate ownership.

I remain impossibly pre-facebook, queer,

But never more bisexualist than Tiresias.

 

Money, meanwhile, is comfortable eyeless,

Communes with fags, hags, and stags,

So long as they hold moneybags between

Their legs.  History ended again yesterday

 

When we made peace with Iran. We now means

China too.  I waited my whole middle youth

For Pixies to release new material and when

They do, no Deal.  Poetry is a gang of thugs

 

Unable to move units at WH Smith,

Whose verbal skills, like Toby Jugs, shape

National mirth in streams of urinal force.

Thus, when one drinks a poet’s piss, we really

 

Toast healthier sales of all the horsecrap prose

Our novelist friends managed to e-book.

I learned around an oak table at school

That spanking fiction pays if the wood is birch.

 

The greatest living poet in our tongue is Hill.

I too take the occasional pill.  My soul is ill.

It sobs like a fat man at a slim WC door.

My voice broke last week, the same time

 

As my will to compete with the love brigade.

That’s the arseholes with keyboards, iPhones.

Having sold my soul at the demonic crossroads

To Harold Bloom, I should have swerved

 

To celebrity, but he said, look, lack

Is what poesis ravenously adores to crave,

Feed on what you don’t get paid. Again.

Poesis is how you don’t get made a man

 

By picking up a pen, friend, in this mean town.

The canon, he informed me as only he can

In Latin, Greek, Hebrew and gobbledygook,

Knows that for the bard, being ranked A-list

 

Is like being sun-kissed with wax wings.

Avoid being classed too high, drowsy,

Drugged or straight edge.  Compose

Yourself on a thin ledge, and don’t jump

 

When your many followers invite you to fist

The ferro-concrete floor with brain matter.

In short, don’t die when the Commander-

In-chief says take them, take them all


 

And out of the sky falling like Tennyson hawks

Or falcons or eagles, crooked out of some

Droning hook of fate, meaning clashes

Cymbals, to detonate a small meeting of things

 

That might normally not have met, like bodies

And fire, ice and wire, weddings and hate.

The resulting shit smear is drain of life incarnate

Delivered from the man who claimed to be good,

 

Which is just the way they talk in the neighbourhood.

I bend to pick up old women, and pieces of their

Old men.  I am stooped with a rushing loss

Of faith such as blood streaming from

 

An artery might appear to be.  My

Belief in faith is at a total low ebb.

These wedding shrouds that are my eyeballs

Offer as a timely gift obliteration’s

 

Pall, a purple answer to shade

When arterial spillage is waste.

Taste demands we pay victims of a quake.

I swipe right to slake my desire

 

To kiss every face I can see on my screen

For free, or if they give A service, a hundred.

Don’t dread the ban on the dark net,

Margins peddle images out of Spiritus Mundi,

 

All those in Westminster Abbey

Rise to bow.  Nevermore lick any firm's helmet

Of flesh or blood.  My dick a platinum catalyst

And the rest is fusion, confused as history.
 
 
NEW POEM BY TODD SWIFT; COPYRIGHT 2013

 

 

 

 

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