Dambo

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

Water Towers

To the uninitiated , mysterious as

the moon monoliths in 2001 ;

pensioned off light-houses ? a giant’s

apartment house or a giant

phallus set in cement , a reminder

to the young colony —

populate or perish ? they come in

all shapes and sizes ; rise

suddenly from the landscape like

mushrooms with their long

stalks and caps yet exist singly —

it is houses that cluster

around them ; scattered around the

countryside they are tall

as wheat silos though their bellies

seem full of water

but why windows — for fish to peer

through ? or doors — what if

someone should break in ? only the tops

hold water , I am told ,

like a water tank on a stand ; largely

redundant , now they are

being sold off like unwanted churches ;

yet I consider them ,

their brief reign ; for me they always

held more than water

• pic courtesy of Wikipedia

See Ya !

I hope old Schooner’s all right.

He looked a little cranky last time.

He knew something was coming down the pike.

Birds know. They have a crystal ball.

They foresee earthquakes, tsunamis.

He must have foreseen the sale of the pub

& the old drive-thru that housed his Taj Mahal

of a cage where he held court. Customers

would stop by for a chat  and when they were done

he would rasp in his Tom Waits  voice, See Ya!

I liked his magisterial presence. I hope he’s okay

 wherever he is. Each Friday at the pub I raise a glass

To old Schooner. Here’s to you! I say. Stay cocky, dude.

See Ya!

Bridges

Not Katherine Anne Paterson’s Bridge

to Terabithia,

the one that Leslie and Jess cross

to get to their magic kingdom.

Nor that bridge too far.

Not the one Over Troubled Waters.

Nor that terrible one on the River Kwai.

Not even the bridges you burn

so there’s no turning back

but that rope suspension bridge

dangling high over the gully

that me and my faithful mutt, Salem,

can’t bring ourselves to cross

photo by Andre Amaral on Unsplash.com

Graffiti Found in Abandoned Train Tunnel

You & me, we bifurcate

you come early, I come late.

You like trains, I like buses.

I don’t know what the fuss is.

You my tunnel, I’m your train.

We have each other on the brain.

You like reds, I like whites

you my afternoon delight.

pic courtesy of Pinterest

The Nine Towers

While I was sleeping

the nine towers rose

in my head

from the TV news

the night before;

They were nothing like

the Eiffel Tower

or the Burj Khalifa

of Dubai

not even the Tower of Babel

though their residents spoke

in a multitude of tongues,

Instead they were the nine

po-faced Tower Blocks of Melbourne

ringed by police

like a besieging army

in ‘hard lockdown’:

a term we had never heard before.

They looked more like the Grenfell Towers

though the fires consuming them

were a virus and fear

That Annoying Little Novel

 

I am reading an annoying little novel called ‘To The Lighthouse’.

I am on page 138 and they still haven’t got there — though they talk about it a lot: whether they will or they won’t and on what day they should venture forth? It is always the weather.

Hamlet, if he were written a few hundred years later, would have loved it. He was a ditherer too. There’s even a skull he could have addressed as ‘Alas. Poor Yorick’ though sadly it belonged to a sheep.

I’m getting tired of these people. They need a cattle prod applied to a certain part of their anatomy — though it may be it is not the book for me. I didn’t much like ‘Hamlet’ either.

 

Bridges

 

Not the bridge too far

Nor the one over troubled waters

Not even the ones you burn

So there’s no turning back

But that rope suspension bridge

Dangling over the gully

like a sagging power line

That me and my faithful mutt, Salem,

Can’t bring ourselves to cross