I wonder if spiders
in their webs
at night
spin poems
‘bout me & you
nattering away in the moonlight
in neat little haiku
you with your cigs
me with my brew
of jasmine tea
spinning our memories
wishes
of how things might be
or would they instead
taking a jaundiced view
spin snarky little
senryu
Thought
you’d be
my rock,
he said,
upon which
I could build
my future;
but you turned
into a sharp-
edged reef,
now I’m all scarred
& sutured
*pic by Tengyart on Unsplash
You inherit another day.
So what are you going to do with it?
Melancholize ?
Rhapsodize ?
What?
Sift through it for cigarette butts?
Scrambled messages on billboards?
What you gunna do?
Rehearse it like a song you’re going to record?
Look it straight in the eye?
Shoulder your way through it like an NRL star?
Squeeze the juice right out of it?
Hitch a ride on it?
Or lean against it like a lamp post and watch it amble by?
You inherit another day.
So what you gunna do?
You don’t see many poems celebrating the sense of smell.
Sight rules the roost, cock-a-doodles its pre-eminence
on every page; the nose rarely gets a look-in.
An anthology of ‘Smell’ poems would be very thin indeed
and would be ‘on the nose’ for most readers.
I haven’t had a whiff of a good smell poem for years.
I like to read calm sentences, she says.
No ugly exclamation marks that bully and harass.
No question marks that interrogate.
No dots or dashes.
Nothing jittery or jagged
Calm.
Calm sentences.
Placid as a billabong.
Soothing as slumber,
Pachelbel’s canon.
I’ve always wanted to do stand-up
but never enough, never passionately.
And anyway I couldn’t be bothered
learning material by heart if that is what
stand-ups do. I was a lazy bugger.
My heroes were all stand-ups, not poets
like you might imagine: the two Jerries,
Lewis and Seinfeld, Bob Newhart,
and Billy Connoly who I saw
do a three –hour show in Adelaide with only
a fifteen minute break. That’s stamina.
That’s my kind of comedy: the Observational
kind, the sort that poets are good at with their
nifty little eyes and agile turns of phrase.
Is anyone still reading this?
Anyhow the page is my stage.
I never have to worry about stage fright
or ‘dying’ in front of an audience.
The comments and likes are my applause.
They keep me going. The occasional heckler
with a snide pen. Water off a duck’s back.
I love readings too,being guest poet.
But most of all, I love writing the stuff.
Nothing scatological. The fart is as far as I go.
And if you wondered, that’s me in the picture,
whistling along the lane, thinking up funny lines,
even then.
Don and I were having a chat
about the magician’s rabbit,
the one my dog killed,
and the killer instincts dogs seem to have;
It’s in all animals, Don, I said.
‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’
Ahhh, that old Tennyson chestnut , he replied;
that would explain why ‘Cilla and Ralph [his cat and dog]
are often at each other : ‘kill, kill.’
We’re no different, Don:
you ever felt like throttling someone?
Do I have to answer that? he said.
Of course, you’re right: but wouldn’t it be nice,
if we could take off our nasty ‘genes’
as easily as we take off our denim ‘jeans’?
It wasn’t an affliction
like polio
though it crippled you
just the same.
There were no calipers
for crippled speech.
You had to hobble around
conversations
as best you could
hoping no one would notice.
They did.
When things went badly
when you were teased
you put yourself into
the iron lung of shame —
& stayed for days.
*pic courtesy on Pinterest
I have a mote in my left eye
not the metaphoric one that Jesus
spoke of
but an actual one of grit.
I have amoat in my head too
which is metaphoric.
It cuts me off from needy people
which is kinda funny
coz I’m needy too.
Some people are overly guarded.
Too many moats to cross.
Australia has a moat,
a helluva big one
called the Pacific Ocean
on one side
& the Indian on the other
the one that boat people crossed
to get to Australia.
One family from Vietnam
lived across the road from us
for years.
I wrote about the man, the grandfather
in my first book.
[I’ll post it tomorrow]
A moat as big as the ocean
is hazardous.
Not everyone made it back then.
The Earth is surrounded
by a moat too
the vast star-studded ocean
of space.
I could go on but this poem
is starting to drift.
so I’m going to put a moat around it
and close it off.
* photo by juvnsky-enton-maksimor on Unsplash
mirrors never lie : sideshow mirrors only distort the truth
you can look a mirror in the eye but it won’t blink first
ceiling mirrors are up themselves
wall mirrors have hang ups
mirrors continually surprise us in the act of being ourselves
mirrors both give and receive simultaneously
during the day when everyone’s out do mirrors contemplate their navel
do they get tired of looking at the same faces
does familiarity breed contempt
can mirrors go rogue like Hal, the computer in 2001
are one-way mirrors guilty of duplicity
do cracked mirrors have an image problem
do mirrors ever take a good hard look at themselves.
pic courtesy of wiki media
