Darren Stein

You can judge a nation by the way it treats its
poets.

For a long time I have been stuck in 1994.

When I was a child I would visit my grandpa’s farm with its fields of maze; its lengthy chicken coups; and dogs – many, many dogs who showed up uninvited and in appreciation never left.

I face a regimented class of school age cadets,
children in military uniform – black boots,
webbing and camouflage…

Cows are mad and pigs have flu
So it seems do birdies too.

There is nothing more tedious than supervising
an exam.
Back and forth between the rows…

The Holocaust was merely Christianity taken to
its logical conclusion

I sometimes think that people who smoke
do so that they may see their own breath
like a child blowing steam

The pills I take have cured me of my Poetry;

Brittle and brown it was by accident that
our daughter added water to their arid vase,
and curiously they have sprung to life –

Pork chop
Hates slop
Revenge takes
Outbreaks

Docs give
Bad news
Will live

There was many a time when I contemplated suicide.
Camus once wrote that the only serious question is
whether to kill yourself.

Genius is often small recompense for a broken heart,
Often knowing is a torture in itself,
For feeling the world intensely
You are scourged at every cruelty wrought by man.

Success is a narrow gap
that you can try to slip
through, but have to
leave a part of you
behind – a hand
or a heart.

All my relationships came through you.
You were my connector;

Take comfort in the prophecy that all will finally be alright;
And lo there shall be a committee and this committee
Will form a sub-committee

On reading a book of Post-Modernist Theory,
I ask myself, where else might I use the words
epistemes or similitude..?

Sleep won out, and my poem
unsatisfied like a fickle lover
abandoned me

‘I published your poem!’ I wrote to you,
but you did not respond, so perhaps you
were right after-all, maths is incompatible
with poetry.