Kit Kelen #152 -- your tuppenny bunger (for Les Wicks)

your tuppenny bunger

for Les Wicks

we'll always have our Blue Mosque moment

we'll always have Constantinople

as I was wishing to believe

I came upon the truth

it was more and less than expected

not telling

it was

just like that

old edifice

and now they're bricking up the windows

I am the opening – a sky

make up the map as I go

the 'I' of course is never me

won't be caught out there –

there's the driver, the boss, the engineer

a ruin – I'm crumbled teeth of the town

I'm waiting for the bus to go

it never was me you know

I carry the book

it is yet to be written

pages as blank as a desert

cloudless

I am one of those people

that's why

you simply have to believe

I have a pen

bleeds in my top pocket

hope to slip like a ghost

through the city

the worst religion is

I'm not saying

but they know who they are

have come for me

the angels, the jinn

every shape of demon

has its special hour

and they say this is the organised wing

a superstition with a bank account

once you believe a single nonsense

you'll be open to all others

I call them to prayer

at my soul like rats

but I vanish

like every other abstraction

slip through their mitts

what care I for fantasies?

how can I know what's good for anyone

without rattling off the rules

the one-ness is a terrible master

it piles stones till the sky is gone

then who is it gave me a mind to make up?

must be your lad with the tuppenny bunger

for fifteen billion years we've scattered

as if we had somewhere to go

but now the cows are coming home

shall we add to the edifice of guessing

or think about what could be useful to know?

the one-ness – that's where we lose count

I always find that religion insults me

it doesn't matter whose

a building with a superstition

that's when the thing is organised

nothing believes me

nothing believes in me

nothing in this world will chant my name

the one who dwells in a roadside shrine

almost in the elements

almost afoot

for that one I have time – a wink

no scrape or genuflexion

the sky is all revolution

the desert?

the desert denies itself

prophets have been and gone

we are the untranslatable tribe

so much dust in us – you won't blow it off

philosophy's too hard for some

for those too boring for a story

prose for those who lack poetry's spark

as for myself

I believe I believe

I'm the heretic you burn

I'm the pages you set to ash

don't know how they get a pavement so slippery

which army will first abolish itself?

I have a feeling I'm in good company

have a feeling that everyone is wrong

I think that's a very encouraging sign