recent stuff by allan boyd - antipoet

this is not a poem
this is not a song
these are all the things
we did when we were young
this is not my story
this is not my tongue
some of the following is true
only the words have been changed
to protect the poetry:
do you remember
when it rained poems
all those wasted tomes
lurching from spent ink
on generic paper
our new bodies
designed by automatic tellers
all the fake news
and invisible words
trained like stunning systems
on the shadow shafts

so we let loose
all the stunning words
we spin on stages
inside locked and gated poems
like metered pages
another word stack
packed back to back
behind another word here
in front of another word here
beyond another word here
beneath another word here
yet another word here
layers of lines here
this big list is a poem here
a rhyming dictionary of chronic fictions
of autocratic conniptions
with tight noun light attacks
a language of clenched fists
running verbs we spat

under the setting saturday sun
we speak truth
and stand in solid sentence
can you sense our veracity?
our molten lava reality?
as we spin these rampant words
into vacant spaces
dripping rapid-fire syllables of eloquent syntax
into open mouths
and brazen faces

listen, as we sell our sins
to gods and masters and lovers
so walls of paper can burn
and gravel can hurt
or build concrete
and smashed locks can break fences
and stripped cyclone from solid steel
are hammers to shape us

hello, so here we are now

huddled for this tented voyage

never ready for blunt-faced

rock star poets to speak

like main street pastry

sweet calorific word-units rained brutal

all yr fat thick metaphoric

les murray-style stanzas

spoken lines and maybe munted rhymes

here in this sacred semiotic space

hills n hills of rows of fine vines clarified

harrowed like hashtagged hashtags

a margaret river narrative

not even a weed in sight

and poetry is dead again, woke