The Well Ordered Life.
I’m going back to work.
It’s not the money.
It’s the well –ordered life.
Clock on. Clock off.
Home by five.
Dinner with the fam.
Veg out in front of the telly.
Weekend bliss.
Now every day’s a weekend.
The wide open road.
A labyrinth of choices.
Go, go, go.
Up at seven. Lucky if I’m home by ten.
I didn’t sign on for this.
Too much for one man on a bicycle.
My Mother the Sea.
I went down again to my mother the sea
to ponder the great philosophers who taught me
how there is no path to happiness, happiness is the path
said the serene Buddha, in his first sermon to a class;
and this from Bukowski who could be hard on himself:
the less I needed, he confessed, the better I felt;
and when blind Bartimaeus cried, Rabbi, have mercy on me
Jesus said, Go,your Faith has healed you – and he could see.
Shed
I’ve shed my attachments
am sunnier, brighter
I whistle when I walk
feel 10 kilos lighter
Barnacles
So easy to get attached
to things
they cling like barnacles
to yr feet and shins
The Greater Kindness
Sometimes the greater kindness
is to let someone go
or to let them let you go
The Beautiful Goodbye
My dog had stomach cancer.
She would suffer no more.
She gently passed away
as I held her paw.
Jacket.
Someone once asked me to write a poem
about a jacket.
I didn’t know what to write except how it waits
quietly in the closet
like the car in the driveway
the strawberries in their punnets,
the placid souls at Centrelink in their
green plastic chairs,
the patience of the poem upon the page.
No tapping of fingers.
Gruff looks.
Drawing attention to oneself.
Most humans are not like that.
We’re tricky,
Unreliable.
We can go off anytime.
Which is why I turn to things
for solace and assurance.
Things don’t break your heart.
Hope.
Where would we be without Hope?
It is the ballast that keeps us afloat.
It’s ‘the thing with feathers’ as Emily
Dickinson wrote.
Where would we be without Hope?
Every answer would come back, NOPE!
Life is a slippery slope.
Where would we be without Hope?
Hope is the beacon, Hope is the light.
Keep Hope in yr saddlebag, you’ll be right,
Hope holds yr hand in the darkest night.
Hope is the beacon. Hope is the light.
So be a tree, grow strong roots.
Always look upwards to the Truth.
Have Faith, Belief. Cry if you must.
Hope is the beacon in which we Trust.
You Could Tell.
You could tell the Lord was there.
You felt the rapture.
That driving jungle beat,
the rousing rhythms,
the ecstatic chorus
and that song
that went on and on
for 33 delirious minutes,
a wild ride of a song
that swept you up
leaving you
exhilarated
amplified
if a little unhinged
That bucolic portrait of wheatfields
at Lucindale
where you used to teach
deserved better
than to have your fist thrust through it
shards scattering on yr grandson
cringing
below.
Such Ordinary lives.
So it’s Saturday again.
Shopping, Sausage Sizzle at Bunnings.
Such ordinary lives poets lead.
A bit more Tessa in the afternoon
before gym.
You can’t get enough of Tessa.
That extraordinary story, ‘After the Funeral’.
Oh, there was that extraordinary end to that meal
last night at Otto’s,
the penny pinching scramble to settle the bill,
notes and coins of all denominations spread over the table
as if we were in a gambling den,
I can’t remember who stormed off first.
Then the angry texts.
Drama queens all of us.
One door closes.
I go outside. Contemplate the pig-weed, the honeysuckle hedge,
the bees revving up like lawnmowers.
Alone and Palely Loitering.
First it was Bono.
Now it’s Britney.
Alone and palely loitering
on the Express Collection Shelf.
She’s been there five days,
Unwanted.
Bono knows what this does
to a star’s ego.
He grew quite surly by the time
I borrowed him.
Britney’s developing a pout.
Hello, she’s singing something,
low and mournful.
I crane my ear a little closer.
It’s Linda Ronstadt’s
‘Poor, Poor Pitiful Me’.
“Hang on in there,“ I say,
“I’ll borrow you in a few days
if you’re still there.”
She gives me a smile.
I give her the thumbs up.
“And put some clothes on.
It’s cold in here.”
Upside Down.
I think better upside down.
There’s nothing more liberating
than lying on your back
feet high in the air
against the door,
‘the dead cockroach’ pose
that blood rushing to your head.
You realize
you don’t have to eat the fourth square
of the sandwich,
go to gym three times a week
to stay healthy,
hold onto anger instead of just letting go,
The first line of that poem comes to you.
the answer to the conundrum, how to love
without clutching,
and how to helicopter your friend out
of his dredge of darkness.
Even clogged bowels loosen.
Those innocent fawn sausages
in the bowl.
John Malone 
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