The Master Poem by Martin TURNER

In memoriam Tom Ravenette

In old age I comfort myself
with bits and pieces of food
and light, resisting extinction,
attentive to supply.

To the simple mind all is distortion.
Under my omniscient nose
the smell of a bad fact
is snuffed away, each scrap

of data patched to the quilt
of the world. You need me,
my decisively retorted formulae.
We clean up our concepts together.

In the swirl of influence the puppets kick
in sudden mannerism,
a slipstream of philosophers
plunging in mayhem.

Whence this apostolic transmission
of reverend cigars?
Great apes bequeath their habits,
radiant buttocks, even fleas.

Disciples? I abhor the term.
Each one comes to seem
a floating gravitational point.
I bode a permanent absence.

Nothing confines my view.
A favourite pupil, rising in hope
and catching for her breath,
dies in an interstellar eddy.