Sofa Surfer Blues

 I drank myself last night and I tasted of oblivion.
Keep on swinging madly across the sun Mr Dylan,
I could never keep up with you I’m in a war of words
with the verse endless invisible unknowable in my head
riding in on your sofa surfer blues.

 “Poetry is dead!” shouts Poverty of Mind,
but we hear a cold lonely trumpet in the afternoon haze,
conjuring in the air and biting at his claws.
She sits in the lizard lounge with a wire in her brain
telling her what the whispers mean
as she drifts in the stranger’s kitchen Limboland;
we pass on the Road swaying to our sofa surfer blues.

 Our day a long bar pulling slow pints ends
in holding each other on the heath,
Road still rolling by us
she writes letters penned in junk
(ink in the vein swirling hunger)
 “Dear exalted nymphs of Road,” she begins,
  “we abstain from further direction; baby your swastika
  lies with broken arms I’m out filling up on fatalism
  and crowning us all with sickles,
  the desolated heroes of Beatnik Boulevard.”

  I am the twisted nerve of your panopticon heart,
let the smile dissolve on your tongue –
watch yourself from beyond dimension
heartbreak shatters itself and
we give birth to ourselves,
Frida Kahlo’s doppelgängers on jazz
tasting the tip of dharma on the
gibberish lips of our sofa surfer blues.

 
At Karl Marx’s Grave

 What new horror greets your sad bronze eyes today Karl Marx?
O desolate! O forgotten! O distant! O beauty!
Jewel in the festering crown of colony!
London I’m probing through all you can offer
  and burning the ends of my fingers
  in the lemon haze of heartbreak

  Let poverty stir you from your plinth Karl Marx,
my eyes have deflated and colours don’t taste the same anymore
I’m walking 1,000 years at Highgate and imperialism
 is trying to steal our tears in the midst of acidic excursions
The workers don’t know how to scream anymore
 and I’m silent too I watched my tongue run away
 now my verse mutely bleeds
 looking out at the great unattainable

---

David Dobson is a poet from Bradford in Yorkshire, currently living in London studying English literature at QMUL. You can follow him on Twitter @David_Dobson or catch him at open mics trying to sustain a literary lifestyle he can’t afford.

Show David some love via PayPal at davedobs34(at)gmail(dot)com.