Amphisbaena
amphisbaena
bright and black
blindly searching in a water sack
or even raging in chasmic loch:
round and round you go
double-tongued and flashing woe
and speak with actions tho unseen
how go is stop and stop is green,
and red is green and green is blue
and Triunes to you were never true
and back is front and front is back:
and words are wrong unless they’re wrong.
We are like Aladdin in a chaos cave:
you, A, cannot Be, but are:
and now we cut out the brains
of all the old and perfect heads:
and inscribe our wonky meanings inside a drop of rain.
Richard Taylor is an Auckland poet, who has worked in various fields and studied Engineering and later Literature and Philosophy at Auck Uni. He has put out a chapbook, Singing in the Slaughterhouse in 1991 (helped by Mark McIvor) the title reflects the wars going on in the 90s but also his experience working in the freezing works and trying to help a young Maori fellow to get his songs 'going'. Later came RED, 1995, Dead Poets (Ron Riddell), Conversation with a Stone 2007 (Titus Books) and more recently his yet to be launched The Secret of Being Unpopular. This is a poem connected to a larger project, as is my Eyelight Blog.
