What do you want? she asks.
A zing of apricot.
A zing of apricot?
Yes, a zing of apricot and lavender jam
to set me off.
2. Frustration.
Fuss, fiddle,
turn, twiddle,
push, prod,
nup, o god !
3. The Possibility of a Poem.
No sooner does the head hit the pillow
than the possibility of a poem
taps you on the head.
4. My Mother, the Drama Queen.
I feel like the wreck of the Hesperus,
the Lusitania and the Titanic
rolled into one
The Wonder of You.
I never got to see Elvis.
I saw the Beatles.
Saw the Rolling Stones
but I never got to see Elvis,
Saw Niagara
Saw three of the Seven Wonders
Saw a rainbow sit like a tiara
over my city
but I never got to see Elvis.
But I saw my baby girl
get born
held her in the palms of my hands.
I never got to see Elvis
but I got to hold my baby girl.
the breeze is slurping my face
like Bella’s pink dog tongue
when sick, I slumped on the sofa
The ibises have moved along
have gone upmarket
grubbing in the well manicured lawns
of Davis Court.
Something needs to be done.
They look more dowdy than ever.
Reminds me of the time
in the Adelaide Central Market
during an upgrade
when the benches inside Coles supermarket
where I used to wait for my paraplegic friend
to do his shopping
were all suddenly removed;
What the &^%$$%, we all said,
our little community of bench people.
When approached,
management see – sawed for a while
but after constant badgering
a junior manager not yet used to the ropes
of sidestepping,
admitted — wait for it —
the benches were removed to keep
the riff-raff out
Phillip Hodgins wrote one.
A great one about ibises.
They were a less scraggly, dissolute lot
than mine. Less louche.
I like the way he described them:
‘They had bodies the shape of caraway seeds,
and long black bills that curved like scythes’.
There is awe in his writing, respect.
He speaks of them flying in great flocks
casting deep shadows over the land
before descending like gods
beneficent as rain
aerating the soil, grubbing for bugs..
The farmer’s friend.
The Sacred Ibis of ancient Egypt.
I think I sold the ibises short.
I fractured my funny bone
on the bedpost overnight
got into a squabble with myself:
you’re wrong.
No, I’m right !
when a CRAAACK
splintered my sleep
and a SCREEEEAM
split the night
I fractured my funny bone
on the bedpost overnight.
Now I can’t pull a pun,
or even crack a joke
or wink a double entendre
I’m a sad sort of bloke.
They look more like gizmos than birds,
cartoonish cut-outs that flock outside
the house that time has marauded,
freaking out the orange tabby next door;
one gives me a mean-dog look
as I snap him with my camera:
you sneery snake perve, it says ;
‘bin chickens’, ‘dumpster divers’,
they look more like street people
scraggling for scraps than Sacred Ibis
All the Well Ordered Books.
All the well ordered books
behave themselves just like chooks
leaping down with squawk and cluck
and soon begin to run amuck
scrambling around from door to door
for crumbs of knowledge upon the floor
Stranded.
I don’t want to be stranded
like Robinson Crusoe
on an island
of pain
with no rescue in sight
another weekend;
so, doc,
can you fill out
the prescription again
that one with real bite?
Dambo.
I want to be a gangly recycle artist like Dambo,
the builder of wooden trolls.
Instead of discarded furniture, I use discarded poems,
snippets I’ve copied down in my commonplace books,
bits and pieces on suffering coz I know what’s that like now.
All the best poems have been written, Daz says.
He’s the one who wrote ‘The Parable of the Albino Pigeon’
so I listen.
“About suffering they were never wrong the Old Masters’,
says Auden, and I added:
while someone is bringing in the bins, watching ‘Bullet Train’
on Binge, or cleaning the car of dogs’ fur like my neighbour
who asks, Hey Bro, how’s it hanging? Do I even want to answer that?
‘This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears’
says Hopkins in ‘Felix Randall’
who taught me empathy;
and those lines from Mary Oliver;
‘Someone I once loved
gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this too was a gift’.
You can’t better that, Daz would say.
So is cancer a gift?
Anyhow I want to build my wooden trolls of poems
coz like Daz says, the best poems have all been written.
pic courtesy of pinterest
John Malone 