I don’t like the look of them
these runaways
the way they huddle darkly
in alleys,
in vacant lots amongst
the runtish grass
with their hangdog faces
and surly looks
they’re up to something
but if you edge closer to eavesdrop
they clam up
look at you with bloodshot
insolent eyes
what have they been drinking
smoking?
perhaps they are planning
a revolution
against their colonial masters
the supermarkets.
I felt cheated
by the short story writer
whose piece
morphed
into a
sociopolitical tract
on racism
for page after phlegmatic page
leaving the characters fumbling
in the dark
in search of a plot —
and me, with them
There was a saying in my parents’ day
not to upset the apple cart.
My uncle was a market gardener so it had extra meaning for us.
For a while things went smoothly
then I came along, then my sister.
We were the world’s first teenagers.
There was sex, booze — no drugs — and rock ‘n’ roll.
Mum and dad didn’t know what hit them.
And this went on all over the world.
A whole lot of apple carts were being upset, overturned.
Then came Feminism, Vietnam War protests, R rated movies
and in our country
the sacking of a government.
Boats were rocked, apple carts overturned.
It’s a bit like that now. Only there’s far more involved.
The fate of our planet.
I think before we get to wherever we’re going there won’t be too many
apple carts left standing.
*pic courtesy of Pinterest
Jackson Browne, I say.
Who?
Jackson Browne, the singer. You look like him, like he was in the seventies when he was big.
I do?
Yes.
But I can’t sing and I work in a burger bar.
I know, but you’re finishing a degree in International Studies, right? You’ll be a diplomat. And you have his idealism, his energy. One thing though.
What’s that?
Don’t fade. Don’t go sanctimonious on us
I won’t, he says.
And looking at him, his floppy brown hair, chiselled features, slender build, alert eyes, I believe him.
He won’t.
Halfway through my walk I get this poem in my head.
I’ve got to write it down.
I pick up pace, hurry through the Brickworks Market. Someone surely ….
A stall owner looks up as I go past.
“You got a pen and paper?” I ask. “I’ve got this poem here — [pointing to my head] — I got to write down.”
“Sure,” he says, “do I get my biro back?”
“Of course,” I say. “Do I get to keep the paper?”
He gives a feeble smile.
“What’s yr name?” I say. “Yr first name? I’ll dedicate the poem to you.”
What human being could resist such a grand gesture?
“Costa”, he says in a deadpan voice.
Just then his mobile rings.
It’s his girlfriend. He brightens up. A lascivious smile crosses his lips.
He gives me a wink.
He yabbers on what they’ll get up to tonight while I furiously write. It’s hard to stay focused.
Some of what he says gets in the poem.
He keeps adjusting his crotch.
That gets in the poem too.
Then I sense the dialogue winding down as I stagger to the end of the poem like a runner over the finishing line.
“Here”, I say. “I’m done”,
I’m hoping he’ll ask for a copy or at least a read.
But Costa isn’t interested.
He only wants his biro back.
“No hard feelings”, I say. “This poem’s still dedicated to you”.
And I write his name, Costa, above it in bold letters with a flourish.
But I needn’t have bothered.
The poem’s crap.
Did someone throw a switch?
One moment we were out of the woods.
The next in.
We’re going in hard, fast, early,
the Premier said.
And that’s how it happened.
Six days hard lockdown,
stricter than Wuhan
or Melbourne.
Pubs, schools, businesses.
Even the police were caught
on the hop.
Who decides these things?
.Hard, fast, early.
Then three days later
we were out again.
A lockdown based
on a pizza worker’s thick crust
of lies.
Even my grandson in Vienna
heard about it.
Did you?
We’re the Easter Bunny State
where decisions are made
on the hop.
I had left President Trump outside.
I don’t know what got into me
but one moment I was reading about him
in a New Yorker article a week before
his fall, and I remembered I had put the oven on
& forgot all about him. The ex-President
was having a hard enough time without being abandoned
on a plastic chair with a cold southerly sweeping in & being compared
to Nixon a week before his fall. How the mighty have fallen, Shelley
might have intoned so I did the decent thing and brought the magazine in
where conditions were more conducive to the ex-President. Besides,
with the hail beginning to clatter outside, I wanted to finish the article.
It took 66 days for Bobby Sands to starve himself to death.
It took me many years to starve my mind of the fear of public speaking
& though I have come a long way & people praise my confidence
it is still a work-in-progress
Have you ever noticed how placid an ad becomes
when you put a cow in it?
Farmers too when they milk?
All my good ideas came to me while I was milking a cow,
the American painter Grant Wood
declared.
Have you ever noticed how much more pleasant
‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’ is
compared to the bitchy, sniping
‘Married At First Sight’?
We should all pat a cow in the morning, hug a tree
if we are to start the day right.
Riot-prone areas, prisons too should be equipped with cows
their melodious moos
soothing the seething masses.
Bovine Buddhas
emblems of placidity
a state we aspire to in these troubled times.
Please don’t try to colonize me.
I’m not unclaimed territory.
I own me.
*pic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
John Malone 