ROBIN HELWEG-LARSEN has had some 350 poems, largely formal, published in the Alabama Literary Review, Allegro, Ambit, Amsterdam Quarterly, and other international magazines. He is Series Editor for Sampson Low’s Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times, and blogs at formalverse.com from his hometown of Governor’s Harbour in the Bahamas.

His Mad Skull’s Like

a motorcycle cage of death,

the engines roaring over and beneath:

conflicting paths, crashless machinery –

the crowd roars, hoping for catastrophe.

---

an alchemist’s laboratory,

he strives through Universal symmetry

alone to conquer nature, friendlessly,

transmuting hopeless to hope endlessly.

---

a planet with its atmosphere,

blossoming gaudy from beginnings drear;

from grand extinctions and tectonic faults

life reaches out to loot galactic vaults.

---

a plant with taproot down the spine

side-nerve extractors reaching out to mine

the Universe’s minerals of sense,

make sense, and raise to Mind the mind’s pretense.

Pointillist

(Note: this poem is so named  because if you look at it closely you may not find as much meaning as if you step back, let it flow past you, and see an outline of a story.)

Awake

Anew

Awhile

Askew;

Afoot

Among

Amass

Along;

Abet

Aback

Ado

Alack;

Alas!

---

Abroad

Again

Astride

Amain;

Atop

Alight

Aglow

Afright;

Afar

Ahead

Aloft

Abed;

Alone!

---

Aware

Amused

Affair

Accused;

Away

Aboard

Affray

Abhorred;

Aground

Alive

Abound

Arrive;

Ahoy!

---

Array

Await

Assay

Abate;

Appraise

Accord

Amaze

Adored;

Apprise

Appoint

Arise

Anoint;

Adieu!

Leadership Transition

Julius Caesar, Antony, King Lear,

Hamlet, Macbeth – corrupted, vain, impure,

Irrational, bombastic, insecure –

He’s no more clarity or veritas

Than the deceptions of a covert war,

All morals blurred.

---

That tyrant rant, Tyrannosaurus roar,

Forecasts he’ll suffer a dictator’s fate:

His proud obsessed confusion first seems great,

Then grates, unravels at the seams, slips gear,

Loses its moral metaphors, grows crass;

He dies absurd.

---

Octavius, Malcolm, Edgar, Fortinbras,

Comes from the wings and strides to centre stage –

Competent, measured, reasonable, sane –

To rule the wreckage of the tragic reign;

Restores some structure, closes out the age,

Speaks the last word.

---

This archetypal character’s strong thump

Will get his nation out of the morass;

The raucous self-styled hero being dead,

A truer leader takes the throne instead.

(How Shakespeare’d end the Tragedy of Trump

Can be inferred.)

Poems Like Motes of Dust

Like tiny midges, poems in the air

were unseen all my life, presence unclear,

occasionally one would land, bite, sting…

I’d be aware

a poem had come, was singing by my ear.

Now everything, literally every thing,

---

is a poem: a car, a dog, a glass,

a chair, a seagull, every blade of grass,

all people and each thing they pass.

Now I see swarms, millions of flies,

or like light’s dots of darkness thickening as day dies,

---

the poems are visible in the air around,

a pointillist canvas, every dot

a poem in itself, an image, word, rhyme, thought,

or like neutrinos streaming from the sun,

billions a second passing with no sound

unseen, unfelt, through everyone,

the poetry of existence, raw, untaught.

---

The Universe: a cloud of dust that hangs and floats,

dust like a drive of cattle on the range,

or when you fill a barn with dusty motes

by sudden action, and a sunbeam’s slice;

or as Sumerian gods convene, converse,

swarming like flies around burnt sacrifice,

---

summoned by smell of sacrificial meal…

was it my sacrifices made this change,

made poems visible like motes of dust?

Is this the Universe’s thrust?

Hide them, and then reveal?

For all the poems make one UniVerse.

Pumpkins

I said:

‘Look at the little kids playing Tag round the pumpkins – you can be that age again, if you close your eyes and remember pumpkins almost as big as you, too big to move – the massive newness, strangeness of them, never seen before, so big, but obviously to sight and touch a vegetable – you can reexperience the never before experienced, a world in which everything new absorbs your mind, and every minute you experience something new – playing Tag is a sensory delight, of running-and-not-falling (wobbly) in the half-dark (strange light) around pumpkins (absorbing color and texture) with an older sibling (touch and clutch) across strewn hay (a new but not difficult surface) and sometimes wooden pallets (a new and bizarre and impossible-to-run-on surface) but mostly the joy of running in the dark as a physical delight and not falling over – and then you stop and sit and throw straw in the air, and it doesn’t hurt (unlike gravel) and it doesn’t make a mess (unlike mud) and it doesn’t really get in your hair and eyes (unlike sand) and it also doesn’t really go anywhere no matter how hard you throw it (unlike any of them) and you laugh; you can remember all that if you can remember/imagine all the pumpkins three times as big, nearly as tall as you, too big to move – and adults become a different species, they go “Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa” and make no sense, so you only really talk with other kids until finally an adult breaks into your world and tags your mind, and makes you hear with threats of violent pain, makes you give up your soul in self-defence,

Leaves you a narrow life of yes’m, no’m.’

She said: ‘You don’t make any sense.

Go write a poem.’