FORMULA
it is a manager’s credo
that sleep is not living
and so every night
we die because to live
is to be awake
POEM
The life not lived sentimentally
justifies the one lived. Pulled by
ideas outside the close captioned frame
the lag equates the quality
and quantity of human life.
Even now the ghost
takes shape in the model of linguistic refraction
in which one thing
is mistaken for another – concise
and extractable like a modular component
or this or that universal socket,
where every distinction is but a fine point
on the physiological preconditions
of what we call reading the page,
the fine point infinitely small
shuddering in the branching clades.
IMAGINARY SUBSUMPTION
The world is a network
of millions of teacups.
Some milky, some not,
some with a teabag.
This one is a fascist
thinktank. It has a storm in it.
This storm masquerades
as a storm of teacups,
even pretends to be a teapot.
And they all vibrate. They
all vibrate in storm.
Robert Kiely
Robert Kiely is the author of simmering of a declarative void and Incomparable Poetry. Other recent writing can be found here. He is currently poet in residence at University of Surrey.
