Here are poems as games and provocations, where fun with an idea (or even a geometrical shape) can slip seamlessly into matters of the heart. In his second collection, Stephen Payne is fired by the white-hot joy of language — its sounds, its speed, its spin.
And he’s on a mission to share that joy.
TRIANGLE
The geometer said
Let trigons be trigons
but ‘triangle’ it stays
for a pointy polygon,
arrowhead and instrument,
metaphor and sign
pointing to inequality,
the priority
of the straight line.
The sum of the lengths
of any two sides
is greater than the length of the third
so if Alex loves Blake and Blake loves Chris
it would be easier
if Alex loves Chris.