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
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.
Sidekick.
I’m walking down the corridor
in my zig zaggy socks
just me and my sturdy side kick.
I admire how slender, sturdy he is.
I like his bling though it’s not the sort
I would covet.
His face I like, its open and informative,
the moving lights that run across his lips
showing someone is home,
that I’m being monitored.
Hey! I’m here for you.
Walk on brother,
he says.
Les in Real Life,
The book of Les’ s poetry just fell off the desk
onto the polished wood floor.
At 783 pages it created quite a bang.
The millipede on the wall twitched.
The fluff sausage dogs in the corner jumped.
Les in real life was as hefty as his ‘Collected’.
He wrote poems celebrating the fat, his tribe,
including Quintets For Robert Morley,
the bushy-browed, triple-chinned English actor.
with the plummy voice.
There’s nothing plummy about our Les’s poetry.
It is wide of girth as Les himself, capacious,
containing jokes, puns, outlandish rhymes,
skew whiff metaphors., and clever insights.
It is written in Aussie English.
I bent down, picked dear old Les off the floor.
No need to go to gym tomorrow
lugging Les around.,
A Playful Panda of a Poem
She glows and she glitters
from sunset to sunrise
she is an all night lady
with tachycardic eyes
She loves the crickets of Quorrobolong
the whimsy of the wind
the noisy cross-eyed mynah
the clatter of rubbish bins
She has a tachycardic heart
and tachycardic toes
and takes herself off
wherever the wild wind blows
She loves the smell of coquetry
the stars, the perfumed black
and when she finally settles, eats
French Fries and Big Macs
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Indolent.
I’m going to lounge around like the old ginger cat
the rest of the afternoon,
‘Indolent’ is not a bad descriptor
for the disease.
makes it sound almost amiable. good natured,
like a lazy, but lovable work-shy relation.
Other cancers are hares.
This is a tortoise.
In the afternoon it takes nana naps like me.
The Things I’ve Heard about It.
It is a cancer.
It is not a cancer.
You will not die from it.
You will die with it.
It is the cancer you want to have
if you have to have a cancer.
It is indolent. Lazy.
And that strange name.
Long as the name of a Welsh railway station.
Waldenstrom macroglobulinaneamia.
Try saying that in one breath.
Whew.
Maybe it was the Meds.
Maybe it was the meds
but I felt a little trippy
so when the nurse leaned over and said.
we’ll give your cannula a good flush in a minute
I said, O wow! It’s been a long time since I’ve had my cannula flushed
& the room broke up.
Rhianna and Jacob joined in the fun.
It was that kind of treatment room.
Don’t worry.
We all have our heads screwed on
but with the lids a little open
to let the silly in.
K’s fond of haiku,
Michael senryu, its jokey cousin;
Mia, ‘a struggling author’ writes tiny tales,
Richard American sentences,
put them together,
and what have you got?
a slim, selection
of shorts,
a breviary of brevities
a pocket book of poems
for the wee small hours
We are sitting across from each other
trying not to stare
looking down at our phones.
There are some paintings on the wall
but no one is looking at them.
Perhaps they are the sort of paintings
that are not meant to be looked at
but are there to establish a presence,
maintain a mood.
Then I notice the paintings,
half figurative, half abstract
in faded denim blue
with black, springy squiggles
like a cat’s whiskers
are not signed.
Perhaps the painter was half abstracted
when he painted them
& simply forgot.
John Malone 