The Billy Collins Cookbook.
Billy Collins taught me
how to write
poetry
the same way Alison Roman
taught her disciples
to cook :
don’t be fussy.
have fun in the kitchen:
a small room doesn’t mean
small ideas;
experiment:
with different flavours, textures,
be funny, entertain.
I thought I could do that
Above all,
Billy Collins taught me:
be light.
You don’t have to stomp
to be heard.
Who’s Doing It?
Jeff looks around.
I do too.
We both want to know
who’s doing it.
Standing up. Speaking in tongues.
We both want to do it too.
But we’re not ready.
We both wonder why,
if we’ll ever be ready.
Pastor Bill speaks to us
in an avuncular way:
It will come spontaneously, he says.
Like a poem? I say.
Yes, like a poem.
but it won’t be in English.
You won’t know what you’re saying.
Huh? I say, huh?
And the people around you won’t know what you’re saying either.
It will be in tongues.
Ahh, I say, like that poem
I wrote yesterday,
‘Crack/Unfiltered’.
I suppose so, he says.
I get it, I say, I get it.
No one understood it.
I didn’t understand it either.
But I stood up
like a tree.
I posted it.
Good on you, he says, good on you.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
I pull aside the curtain
the hallucinogenic dawn rushes in
a sporidium of colours splatter
against the Winnipeg Fog wall
a bacchanal, a squall
like the hormonal hysterics
of ‘The Notebook’.
Golden Staph, Such a sweet, mellifluous name.
Its Latin counterpart, staphylococcus aureus,
just as euphonious, a name fit for a new species
of wildflower, an exotic dessert, or a freshly discovered
galaxy, glowing golden. at the edge of the universe;
even the bacilli under the eyes of an electron microscope
look like jolly mauve mushrooms clustered in a field
not the toxic toadstools they are.
*photo courtesy of CDC
Why would you even do that? she asks as I demonstrate the pose in the spacious confines of her consulting room.
It’s known as the king of the Asanas, I say.
But it’s a headstand! she scoffs.
No, I say, calm breathing and meditation is involved too. It stimulates the mind and body.
And how long do you hold it for?
Up to eight minutes, I say.
She looks alarmed.
We’ll see what the cardiologist says,she replies.
A few days later I’m in his office.
Can you show me? he says.
So I do. The polished floorboards are a little hard on the hands and head so I do a shortened version.
Well, what do you think? I ask.
It just looks wrong, he says. No, you can’t do it after the operation. We can do a modified version.
He instructs me to lie on the floor, put my legs up in the air, stiff and hold.
I show my daughter.
She calls the pose, ‘The Dying Cockroach.’
I’m not happy with it but I bite the bullet.
However, every now and then on a dark and stormy night when no one is watching, a little devil gets inside me and i flip onto my head and swing into the Shirshasana.
Eight minutes of bliss.
The Roofs of Queenstown.
I can look all day at the metal roofs of Queenstown
like Jacob, wearing coats of many colors:
this one matte black like my Cruize that beat
the Monaro at the lights ; that one on the corner rust red,
the colour you see striated on the tin roofs of settler cottages,
the one just built, Tomahawk with its brash of burnt umber
and my favourites, Blue Balm, and Winnipeg Fog,
the two beside the park that calm and soothe;
I raise my hat to the metal roofs of Queenstown,
stylish and stately hats worn on the heads of houses.
Breathe.
I watch the shirts
On the line
Breathe in and out
Letterboxes.
They line up along
The footpath mouths open
Hungry for mail.
Exercise.
That black bug
Stretching wings, legs
Doing tai chi on the page.
Trigger.
That rustling in the hedge
A short story
Stirring into life
Egg.
Bald and black
As an emu’s egg, the helmet’s hatched
A biker’s head.
At the Place where Poems Begin.
I should be grateful
she comes
at all.
It’s hardly a place
for visiting Royalty;
she doesn’t have ‘airs’, my Muse:
she’s like Diana,
‘the people’s princess’;
she pays no heed to the currawong
wolf-whistling
in the covert
of the honeysuckle bush
where the yellow-shouldered honey-eaters play
& the wattle-birds cluck;
she doesn’t mind sharing my instant coffee
in my ramshackle carport café;
it’s where I think,
tease out my thoughts,
it’s the place where poems begin.
feet on one plastic chair,
bum on the other
cushioned by my retired blue hoodie.
The Girl Who Loved Rain.
I remember the girl in year nine
who used to stare through the window
at the rain
when the class was doing silent reading.
They would all be reading their books
but she would be reading the rain,
its steady rhythms
stroking her as if
she were a cat.
*pic courtesy of Unsplash
Chicken Run.
It was like that classic car duel
in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’
where two cars race towards a cliff
and the driver who jumps out first
is the chicken.
I was in my Holden Cruize,
he in his yellow Monaro
and he wasn’t going to let me in his lane.
This went on for half a mile.
So when we were at the intersection,
I looked across, gave him
the ‘You’re on, buddy’ sign
and soon as the lights turned.
I gunned the engine,
shot across as if flung by a catapult
my batman black against his banana yellow
burning rubber, billowing smoke,
cars horns beeping, a voice yelling,
HOOOOOON !!
which was kinda funny considering my age
but I made the turn I wanted
got my sausage sizzle and this poem.
I don’t know what got onto me.
It was my James Dean moment.
John Malone 