Three Poems
Clash of the Titans
Misawa’s spinal cord severed by a routine headdrop;
uploaded months ago, his Emerald Frosion ‘absolutely kills’.
Related videos: Coulter owns Paxman, Paxo pwns Coulter;
gouts of purple prose incur a nine-page thread
as a typo-addled slave is forced by the flames to admit
she knows he knows she’s bound by garlands of her own.
Like the Harris levels, our moans don’t represent real doom.
Through the pre-dawn hours I learn to follow, follow to learn
the hurt of you poured forth with the red. The yellow brick road
is paved with eggshells – you scratch my wound, I’ll scratch yours.
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Obsessive-compulsive
Although I have picked
my keratinized thumb
smooth and hard
as a thimble
or a circumcised glans
it’s what’s inside
that counts –
it must be I think
each turn of the knob’s
less than whole,
less wired
than a licked index;
five twists
leave me grasping
for the plot,
about the point
of inarticulacy
suspense builds
this room
that’s basically sound
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Lemmings
The sprites are tiny but our villainous
leather swivel chair encompasses
a hundred lemmings headed off
a bitmapped cliff – an unhappy few
hold back. No wonder we admire those
who cliff-dive, shattering from above
fear’s terrible glass ceiling;
no wonder we admire,
smelt from downwind, doesn’t keep
the scent of the cliff-edge,
the sea whose calculable peaks and troughs
are the teeth of a side-on hacksaw blade.
**********************************************
Vidyan Ravinthiran is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. His pamphlet, At Home or Nowhere, was published in 2009 by Tall-Lighthouse; other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Magma, Poetry Review, The North, The Times Literary Supplement, Ambit, Stand, and Horizon Review.
