I thought I’d sit down with it
Knock back a few beers
Chew the cud of all those years
But I couldn’t get into it
I couldn’t be bothered
I just wanted to get out
No tears, no recriminations,
Start a new life
Go on perhaps my last adventure
A modest one but still.
The blossoms were out
And so was I.
I wasn’t over the hill
Yet.
When people down the track
Ask me, how was it?
I’ll say, read this poem.
This is how it was.
That mangled text
Shot off in seconds: such
Furious fingers
Just bear with me, the voice on the line said.
Your call is important to us.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this
Over the past few weeks:
Librarians, telcos, clinics, call centres
In India, Thailand.
A phrase without borders
I have always done as requested.
I have borne much.
There should be a medal awarded:
The O.I.P
The Order of Infinite Patience
Whose recipients would be many.
I can imagine St. Peter
Perusing the names of the recently dead
And, on coming to mine, say,
Just bear with me. I’ll be with you in a moment
Before checking my details
& letting me through.
Spent all my life looking for this, he said.
And?
It hasn’t worked out. She goes her way, does her thing. She gives me only four days a week.
Are they good days?
Yes. But I want more. Total commitment.
You like wine, don’t you?
You know I do. What’s wine got to do with it?
What’s the one wine you’ve always wanted?
Grange Hermitage, of course. It’s the best.
You ever tasted it? Bought a bottle?
No.
Ever berated a bottle of red for not being a Grange Hermitage? Ever stopped you drinking other reds?
Of course not.
Then let it go.
Let what go?
Your obsession with S. Or should I say your possession. You will never have the S you want. Enjoy the one you have. Allow yourself to be replete. From what you tell me she is a very, very good red. Stop thinking Grange Hermitage.
Back and forth the fly darts across the windscreen like black thoughts inside my head, floaters before my eyes, distracting my driving. It won’t get out. I’ll fix you, I say as I pull in the driveway, wind the windows up and pump in the fly spray, the little Nazi inside me quite pleased with itself.
It had been a splendid evening but now, rankled by some recent memory and loosened perhaps by a little too much wine, he leaned across the table and made a cutting remark. She began to bleed almost immediately. His words raked across her wrists like a suicide attempt. She began to deflate in front of him. She had to learn not to take things so literally.
I want to photograph the galahs
clowning on the bare limbs
of the Norfolk pines
but the buggers won’t keep still
racing around like particles
inside a Hadron Collider.
Just as you line up a couple
They’d be elsewhere.
All I needed was a panoramic shot
But then they’d be off
Across the river, raucous as a footy crowd..
Better off snapping flowers,
blossoms.
Can someone feel like a car?
A burnt out car?
That’s how he feels at the moment.
Run down. Abandoned. Torched.
Oh, he’s bit of a drama queen, he knows
But it helps if you’re a poet.
Conveyancers, Real Estate Agents, Bank Managers
& the endless decluttering.
He always wanted to be a minimalist
So now he is.
And that countdown. Prisoners on Death Row
Must feel it.
The drama queen again.
Less than three weeks now.
He better get on with it and stop blogging!
As she lay in the hospice ,
cranked up by morphine,
she thought of Mr. Barnes
That little red rooster from her childhood days
In Battlelake, Minnesota.
That Barnes — he was something,
She said
Puffed out his chest and walked through life:
“I want the biggest and the best and the most of whatever
You’ve got”
He had attitude.
He had a harem.
One day when she was home from school with chickenpox
She watched Mr. Barnes
Fornicate with his hens forty six times and that was when
She was awake.
He was the sheik of Battlelake
Even strutting off to other farms.
That Mr. Barnes!
He thought the whole world belonged to him and beyond that —
The sun, the stars, the Milky Way — all of it
& as she lay dying
She hoped to meet him on the other side.
do you have a hero? what qualities do you admire in that person?
do you have an animal you admire, either in literature or real life?
Does my comfort discomfort you?
What would you have me do?
Lie on a bed of nails?
Put tacks in my shoes?
Quite early in life I was labelled a hedonist. I craved comfort the way some people craved adventure. It was my natural state. I mostly landed on my feet, things fell into place. This would annoy some people. I could see why but should I create a prickly existence for myself so others feel more at ease? I was feline. We had a cat who liked nothing better after a meal than to curl up on the lid of the rubbish bin and soak up the sun. I am like that though I prefer a mattress to the lid of a bin. But it does come with a cautionary tale:
Hedonist
Look at that little hedonist
Curled up on the bin
Better watch out the rubbish van
Doesn’t tip him in
John Malone 