I love how songs grow from talk
in Hollywood musicals
like ‘Carousel’, for instance,
and think, maybe, that’s how we should be
in our writing, loose and organic,
let the words, when they pulse with life,
grow feathers and spread their wings
as poems up and down the page
There is a beach called Maslin
where nude people go
It’s not far from us
we used to go there, you know
when we were hippies
but is there a place for unclad thoughts
thoughts free of political correctness,
herd mentality
to go?
thoughts still showing their wobbly bits,
their stretch marks,
scowl lines?
No.
No Place
No free forum of ideas
of any kind.
No Maslin of Minds
He’d never noticed before
but since he was locked in
he looked up from his crimped
back yard
and saw it, the patch of blue
as a curtain of fleecy clouds parted:
cornflower blue, aqua blue
and later towards evening
a majestic midnight blue
& he looked up over the days
and week that followed,
noticing the interchanges:
teal blue, robin’s egg blue
& his favourite, denim blue
the colour of the stone-washed
jeans he wore as a young man
when he strode the byways
of the world, a king, & the sky
stayed denim all week
The sky is full of butterflies
beach butterflies
bucking and lunging
in the strong sea breeze,
wings curved and colorful
as real butterflies:
brumby butterflies
tethered to earth-men
on surfboards below
I used to like my poems neatly wrapped.
I thought of them as artifacts.
Pristine, well presented, spruce
But now I like them ramshackle, loose,
keen to slouch in seedy places,
tie undone, inquisitive with loose shoe laces.
John Malone 