WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

We cannot live an afterlife in lieu;
the next is predicated on the last,
dependent on the lessons: many, few.

Not satisfied rewriting teachings, you
absolve him of his race, Semitic cast.
Yes, Yeshua ben Yosef was a Jew.

Depict him as Caucasian, and to woo
those acts he railed against (wage war? Aghast).
Step out of stone, of darker ageing hue.

No ‘Jew’ as the Messiah, yet you view
their lineage as sacred scriptured past.
Yes, Yeshua ben Josef was a Jew.

His sexuality’s been taken, too,
and Maryam declassed, a whore (out)cast.*
Such carnal inadmission tends to skew.

Staunch Theocratic hegemony’s due
its Karmic fate: no Heaven’s Gate, at last.
We cannot live an afterlife in lieu -

it rests upon the lessons: many, few.

 
 
✩

*Pope Gregory the Great‘s homily on Luke’s gospel dated 14 September 591 first suggested that Mary Magdalene (Maryam/Miriam) was a prostitute: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? … It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.”(homily XXXIII).

(Source: Wikipedia). Sources generally: several over many years (none including Dan Brown), and just the tip of a rather large iceberg. It was pretty difficult packing even this much into nineteen lines. I feel a free verse rewrite coming on.

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.

soft fall,
upturned hands;
luxuriate in let-go forget.

the relief trust brings
the falling leaf, held aloft
with an exhalation

of cobalt firmament;
ephemerality taken
with soft, upturned hands,

and held.

☆

Join us for Meeting the Bar: Crit and Craft at d’Verse Poets’ Pub where we are exploring the Craft of Poetry and the giving and receiving of Constructive Criticism. Bring a poem to link and pull a stool up to the bar.

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Amy Winehouse (14 Sept 1983 – 23 July 2011) British R&B/Soul/Jazz singer

I sat with death at twenty-seven.

If death an absence of life, I was alleywayed alongside.
Lying, unafraid, catching a fox’s bark – that eerie
cry for carnal comfort – around the copse across the track.

I wasn’t to be taken back to Earth and Sky;
neither was the fox. Morning light split my face
and drove all nocturnes down.

Cobain’s split by double-barrel self-prescribed
for the deepdarksink; Jimi, Janis, Morrison’s
by uppers, downers and bangdownupside vomit.

Twenty-seven, twenty-seven, twenty-seven.

Read the news today (oh boy). Amy Winehouse, twenty-seven.
Rolling out and unfolding the appled silverback, announcing
online, with every ounce of gravity cyberspace allows -

‘I survived twenty-seven’.

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Bangkok Redlight District

If inauspicious that Roma
had love back to front,
what tragic prophecy

in naming Bangkok.
Phuket a beach for
boorish tourists

paying pittance in tuk-tuks
take-take-taking on
lascivious escapade.

☆

Onomast: a person who studies the history and origin of proper names

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There was a time
when sex was a capricious portcullis
and platonic playmates were few;

those I knew were bent, or bent the rules
and fools we felt when we lost the love,
not that I dug the push and shove, but

guys were vastly less complicated for a
hormonally elated-unelated semi-obscene
and masturbated hetero teen.

The portcullis guard was put in the stocks
and pelted with boxes of rancid tomatoes
for being a toxic incompetent sot;

his successor took the task seriously.
Mishandled once or twice, but the
emotional intellect of Circles of Sisters

buried a derelict teenage libido,
swiftly short-shrifting potential fowl-play of
an inner turkey, and chickens were made of

single-night Braves, limping lacklustre hungover.
After Custer’s last one-night stand with ten
beers in one hand, I opened my arms to Plato.

Circles of Sisters (prose-poetry)

There was a time when sex was a capricious portcullis, and platonic playmates were few; those I knew were bent, or bent the rules, and fools we felt when we lost the love, not that I dug the push and shove, but guys were vastly less complicated for a hormonally elated-unelated semi-obscene and masturbated hetero teen.

The portcullis guard was put in the stocks and pelted with boxes of rancid tomatoes for being a toxic incompetent sot; his successor took the task seriously. Mishandled once or twice (more nicely), but the emotional intellect of Circles of Sisters buried a derelict teenage libido, swiftly short-shrifting potential fowl-play of an inner turkey, and chickens were made of single-night Braves, limping lacklustre hungover.

After Custer’s last one-night stand with ten beers in one hand, I opened my arms to Plato.

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Beneath my nose
I run a happy thumb
across the top of the pages

so they flurry and flail uniformly,
wafting upwards the exquisite smell
of factory-fresh paper.

‘Can I help, sir?’, unhelpfully.
I consider offering her a turn,
but she’s got a bookshop-full;

this one’s mine.
On the bus, I sneak my hand
into the paper bookshop bag

touch the smooth cover, finger
the impossible symmetry of the pages,
run a hand down the perfect spine.

Sitting with it on my lap, on the bed,
I ease off my jacket and slowly,
very slowly, remove the bag.

Hardly breathing -
a soft flick, another deep smell,
I pull back the front cover

I’m in.

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Tony Blair addressing Britain

Ex-’president’ Bush and Mister
Blair thought they’d play God,
create Hell somewhere.

Take those black, widowing hands
and say your earnest prayers,
because, sure as Hell:

you’re going there.

.

☆

This was written in 2009, when Tony Blair’s New ‘Labour’ Government was still pacing the Corridors of Power in Westminster, though he had wilfully, as planned, given up the Premiership to Gordon Brown by then. Quoting something about ‘health’, and admitting popularity was a problem (for him, and for his Party), he resigned an ashen-faced shadow of the young and vibrant man who came to Government with a landslide in the 1997 UK General Election. The ‘War on Terror’ continues, George W Bush and Blair never held to account for quoting ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (and links to Al-Qaeda) as reasons for  invading Iraq in 2003. None were found.

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.

‘Blue Dress’ -
can that be your epithet?
I’ll put it with your name.

It’s pushed ‘Pink Top’
out of my mind,
but I was careful to catch it

before it broke on the tiles.
While away some hours
indulging in your get-up,

get down. Brown thighs;
French knickers. There’s another.
What can I peel away from

petite and lissome (stopping
to smell for the unhinging
bouquet of your body), to further

festoon a fool’s brain with?

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Soweto Gospel Choir

If Scat is talkin’ shit, cat, up yer hackles,
and Rap is knockin’ it right on the knuckles,
gonna ask, what does that music bring?

If Rock is heavy, hard place to get stuck,
and Dance is groove, to move, not give a fuck,
okay, man, but does it mean a thing?

If Pop’s the sound of bubblegum that burst,
and Opera arias annoy the worst;
someone else is waiting in the wing.

Death-Metal hits: lead-piping to the head;
with all that Jazz, I’d rather jizz instead.
Here’s the thing, as pure as wine-glass ring:

World is when the people stand and sing.

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Today, according to my Events Diary,
was the International Day of Peace:
Tuesday the twenty-first of September.

If I hadn’t remembered
to write what I needed to do tomorrow,
Wednesday the twenty-second of September,

I may never have noticed that today was
the International Day of Peace.
Uncannily though, mine was rather troubled.

Had laundry to do, and the colours ran.
Wondered how many others
didn’t feel the Peace? I scoured the Internet for

news stories of ceasefire, just for today,
in Afghanistan.
For reports of football played in

No Man’s Land, dribbling around land-mines,
using helmets for goalposts.
Enemies shaking hands,

tasting happy sweat for the first time in forever.
Three hundred and sixty-five days;
one dedicated to Peace.

And the damn colours ran.
I wondered, as I folded my spoiled laundry,
if the colours had bled in Kandahar today.

☆

I have been reading the two-time US Poet Laureate Billy Collins lately. Being the sponge I am, inevitably a poem was to vomit forth in his style. This is a first for me, writing so low-key in tone yet attentive to small detail, and more notably, with no aural poetic device whatsoever bar some repetition of key words/phrases (and very little visual device either).

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