Tag: writing

from Sandy Room #2

8

I hear footsteps
and the blood begins
to listen,

the scrunch
of boots on sand
on concrete steps:

coarse bristles
crisp rusking
on the steps…

I swam here
two seasons before
the tremendous surge

the summer, swore
I’d wear my {~} more
than I had been, habitat

of work and that
amazing pride
a father earns

remaining while his child
yearns eras
ahead of him.

the acceleration
agents, degreasers,
a leaf blower…

the Cleaning firm
is sweeping the ground
floor sand back

to the beach.
and swiftly I incline
toward my underwear,

half a hardy, light pivot
in the hips, gesticulating
limb, a secondary

minimum influence,
like shadow
the sun-light accentuates

on this melon, geranium
this feel-capsule of platforms
spun hippity hop

sharing nearly everything
we’ve got
a winning method

to attract & keep hot
the controlled emotion
of minds secondary

not less, strangers, pent
up as the smoke is when
unlit.

 

 

 

from Übermanis Geniac #2

7

Well, Jim, you’re dead, you know you are
the only one who’s left behind a myth
past the valour of his verse. A plinth
has been erected, above a sewer,
because poets translate muck back into water.

The myth holds you versified in youth;
I hated writing, couldn’t match my thought,
speech likewise, stutters, speedbumps, at speed,
and leaps surprising me, of brevity and depth,
a signal, I took, of concepts kept
on higher courts of consciousness—Strewth,

mate!, my Aussie drinking neighbours
would remark; keep it light
and breezy! I didn’t know I knew
until I spoke, that’s what got me started,
why I wrote drunk, to begin with, the easy
way I had with words

translated awfully on to paper,
spontaneity with abandonment, the
careful study of this in sobriety
plus extra time alone confirmed the poem
as epistle to the rightness of the creed.

 

 

 

Hello Friend

 

Playing my old guitar ,
Old days like dead stars, falling apart
Memories hold me back, they’re trying to Steal my dreams away
I’ve never seen such a lonely heart, making my six string Rot and stale.

A broken guitar
Broken from inside and outside
I can hear the screams of pain that has stayed Of late.

Hello Friend,

you’re back again asking me what I have to say
Well Can you hear my six strings fade away
There was a time, it had a name, now it’s just broken it’s not the same.

Please don’t forget our time she said,
the time when we played and laughed away
the time when you kissed my soul, my name
for all to see who loved us just the same.

A broken guitar
Broken from inside and outside
I can hear the screams of pain that has stayed Of late.

Hello Friend,

you’re back again asking me what I have to say
Well Can you hear my six strings fade away,
There was a time, it had a name, now it’s just broken it’s not the same.

Oh I see,
you played with me played with my name
My soul feels tired, it wants to rest now
my heart is broken it needs to be fixed now
Just go away get the fuck away,
The time has come for you to go home now.
Just leave me in pain, let me be how I know I need to
I cannot be broken I am not my old six string.
Though I’ve lost my name, but soon I’ll find it.

A broken guitar
Broken from inside and outside
I can hear the screams of pain that has stayed Of late.

Hello Friend,

you’re back again asking me what I have to say
Well Can you hear my six strings fade away
There was a time, it had a name, now it’s just broken, has lost its name

Symbolic Uneasy

The Dial’s swung round again:
the Taupata autumns in berry clusters,
tight bunches in flawless contrast,
fire-orange in a roundness of green
at the window, where the neighbour’s
enormous grey cat climbs the step-ladder
in like she lives here. Summer is three
days gone, but the southern midday
heat has weeks left, and if I do not
do it soon it will be Spring before
the next break. Art has poured out
and still comes on, I feel it backed up—
I have only a little of the Fisherman’s
enthusiasm left for the catch, the hunt:
the skipper now plans to do deeper
searching, his new thing in, while I
have more of a walking on water buzz
clustering, catch poems, and coins, hauled
from a net set tidily on the boulevards.

And I give to you now, who is me, don’t
set out alone on the rough seas of the heart
if you’re not a confident swimmer. Read
the stars. Read the clouds, know when
it’s time leave. And, like the bigger cat
eating young Max’s snacks, check first
if there is not something pinching you
at the root of authentic desire. This is
the poem’s meat, it’s protein source. The
back is sore, and it wont uncoil better
fishing; the graveyard is full of that surety.

I stood here a year ago, after surgery,
at the window the berries fire from, saying hello,
change!, like a wedge!, lift up and go!
Just to get the thin edge in…I must get
to my son’s bookcase and find out
what happened to the train that got off
the rails to play in the daisies and butterflies
behind the Controller’s back. Adventure stories,
too, where the sailor was rolled to and fro
for months with the teaspoons of dawn
condensation to drink over his red raw lips
with the miniature pages of onion skins peeling
open and moving in the breeze like a well loved book.

 

 

 

 

Survived

It seems romantic, looking back
on it, the withdrawing of 50¢
over the counter, before eftpos, I suppose,
to have enough for cigarettes.
It had back-story, engraved, or
engineered, as when a writer’s past
helps the reader grasp
the sardines, and half
eaten lifestyle salvaged
from dumpsters with the lumps of bread
I got free at the soup kitchen
under the overpass. I always took
the speciality loaves donated from
the supermarkets. They were unsliced,
leavened, and never in plastic,
and usually close enough to fresh
to eat un-toasted. Also, I ate… my
vitality was fluid, thats, never mind,
in this memory, I’m standing in line, with a 65¢
withdrawal slip, and a masculine dollah something
in my pocket, so dead broke, and still getting
wasted! Substance over love. Yet
the memory of it
is that I had sufficient store of each.
Love, food, sunshine, the rent, somehow,
when the time came to exit
that, sever, finally, the needs of that existence,
when the time came to leave, all that I had written,
up till then, was put in a drum for burning.
It was autumn, the drum was over by the feijoas,
on the square of pale grass made by the caravan,
the sea was less than thirty metres away
throwing up post-swell odours of rotting
weed and salted limestone bull kelp.
I  tipped out two sacks of papers, fire-engine
red scholastic exercise books, the too hastily
bound A4 manuscripts, and scraps of exegetically
impossible to interpret commando failures,
soaked it with meths, and bent in
to the drum with a lit match, and BOOM!

Far king me! blown back on my arse,
burnt eyebrows, nose hair, lashes,
fringe sizzle; hairs on the flame hand;
singed, and pumping capillaries, ALIVE!