Rip off

Rip Off.

I want to rip off your clothing,

want to get at yr cranberry and oat cookies,

dunk them in my coffee,

orgasm in my mouth,

like I want to unzip bananas,

tear off the cellophane cover my New Yorker

comes in each week;

why do I always want to unpack things?

I would like to unpack your heart,

see where it went wrong between us,

why it went downhill so doggedly

after the lightness of those early years;

I want to crack open the kernel of existence.

I don’t want to die like Grant Beaumont yesterday

57 years after his three kids disappeared from

a busy suburban beach in Adelaide on Australia Day

not knowing.

Little Orphan Poems

1. Zing.

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

• pic courtesy of Wiki Commons

Well, Are You?

The grin-faced pistachios look up at me from the bowl.

Are you looking at me? I say. You looking at me?

But the dumb pistachios just keep on grinning.

You’re nuts, I say. Nuts !

The Cookie Man

[in honour of National Cookie Day in the U.S]

I used to give my Sydney Morning Heralds

To the Cookie Man

for his customers to read;

they’d devour the weekend papers with their cookies and cappuccinos

and dream

of the Harbor City they’d visit one day;

and I’d go away feeling

I had spread some wealth:

the Saturday supplements:

Food, Fashion, Film, Fun —

The Land of Plenty

& the Cookie Man would give me

the thumbs up;

Then one day

He was gone,

The whole edifice had crumbled

Like a cookie.

Now my Sydney Morning Heralds are looking

for a new home

& I miss the cookie man

Single White Rolls

You got to feel sorry for single white rolls.

Even in packs they can’t make a go of it.

Maybe they should take a good hard look

at themselves

consult relationship experts like couples

on Married …

or search for roll-mates on Tinder.

There must be someone out there.

If ‘Baked Fresh’ doesn’t confer any advantages

I don’t know what does.

Even when consumed they die alone.

It must be a lonely existence.

The First Word

 

What’s the first word you’re going to forget? The first word that’s going to slip through the sieve in your brain?

The name of your partner, child, grandson?

With me it was an item of food.

A breakfast food we eat once a week on Wednesday. I knew it began with ‘c’ and that it was a French-sounding word like ‘croutons’ but it wasn’t that.

I could have asked my partner but I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

I did not want to acknowledge that ‘the forgetting’ had begun.

 Then after a week it came to me in a flash, like the click of a thumb. I wrote it down on a pad with a marker pen just in case but I needn’t have bothered.

Now I enjoy my croissants that little bit more.

 

 

 

Cake

It simply is not true.

You can’t eat your cake

And have it too.

I tried it once.

It does not work.

Someone always ends up hurt.

 

Take a slice maybe two.

Leave some for others too.

And if the cake

is truly sound.

There should be enough

To go around.

Three Thugs and a Mugging

 

They came at me when I was at my most vulnerable.

I had just got up

And gone outside to pee

and was crunching on a few cheese crackers.

“Give us yer loot!” the big one intimated

With hard, implacable eyes,

Big bony dagger drawn.

So I did

Throwing the crackers at them.

They grabbed it in their beaks and flew off

Black cloaks drawn around them

Into the big blue sky.

Don’t Be Creepy

 

Don’t be creepy, I said, as she slunk down the passageway when she heard me

come inside and began circling the bowl.

I just fed you an hour ago.

But she looked up at me with her one cold, implacable eye.

Look at you, I said. You’re tubby.

I’m not fat, she said, Just fluffy. Will you please feed me?

I had no comeback for that.

You can’t argue with a cat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Little This. A Little That

 

 

A little this, a little that

Said the all-inclusive cat:

A sparrow, robin, mouse or two,

A snake, skink, perhaps a shrew.

A  pigeon plump down on its luck,

Its feathers I like to pluck.

Nature is bountiful, said the cat.

A little this, a little that.