All The Lovely Books

All the Lovely Books.

All the lovely books

give me black looks

as if to say,

you’re so hard to read

these days,

once you turned

to us always,

but now you

barely look.

Reveries of Frances

Reveries of Frances.

Her flight is two hours late.

It’s pushing midnight.

O, how I wish I had the stamina of Frances,

perched on the balcony of her high rise

in the peppercorn tree hooting for her love.

She’d be at it all hours of the night.

By morning she’d be gone

but back again the next night.

She was welcome as a full moon, the stars.

I know love is as good a reason to hoot

as any other.

Christ, she had great lungs.

Shone a torch up there once

but she retreated to a backroom up there

in the peppercorn tree.

Spring after Spring she’d come

then one Spring, the year of the bush-fires,

she stopped.

The peppercorn tree seems empty now

like a fridge with no food in it.

*pic courtesy of wiki commons

I Fractured my Funny Bone

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.

Along the Way

Along the Way

I’ve lost Ed along the way.

Don too.

And Hobbo, of course.

We’ve all lost him.

Blogging friends come and go

like friends in the real world.

But a handful, a baker’s dozen, if you’re lucky,

stay with you.

Your tribe.
Through thick and thin.

Missteps and triumphs.

Five years is not a long time

but they’re always there

sharing their thoughts, their little poems,

their stories,

knowing you won’t be judgmental.

A few drift off for a while

but they come back.
I love their voices in the night,

on bleak afternoons,

on the mornings you’re home alone,

souls you can share your inner life with.

And they listen

*pic courtesy of dreamstime.com

Immaculate Misconception

That photo you posted

on Facebook

of her and him

unmoored me

sent my head spinning

down

down

that whirlpool

of memory

the immaculate misconception

of my frail craft

the face in the photo

having the last laugh

Backs to the Sea

People who live here, he said, live with their backs to the sea.

And I said, how could anyone turn their backs to the sea?

And I thought of mum, before she was hauled away, saying,

I want to go back to the sea again,

how she sounded like Miranda the mermaid who had strayed

from her home

but when she got her wish, when we got her into a retirement home

on the esplanade, she grew jaded.

What’s wrong, mum? we asked.

I want to go home, she said. I want to go back where I lived with dad.

But you’ve got a ringside seat, mum, to the Southern Ocean. A view to die for.

It’s not the same, she said, not when you see the same thing day after day.

But we sat with her, watching the red sun sit on the lip of the horizon like a wafer,

the seabirds flying home, and a kind of calm settled on her.

Baptism

When you were gone

when it finally sank in

you had left

for good

it was too late

to make amends.

I wept

& shook

that long night —

& was cleansed.

Meg

Something is bothering

this silkie

She wanders

round and round

the yard

in

a solipsistic fluff

driving us round the bend.

She worries the others.

A few days later

when we let her out she resumes

her circling

then huddles beneath

the bird bath

and will not move.

We shift her.

She crawls under a bush

hard to reach.

The cat who often bothers the chooks

leaves her alone.

That night it rains and rains.

In the morning

she is bedraggled

and dead.

I lift her into the earth.

There isn’t much of her.

The chooks settle after that.

So do we.

Wished I Never Knew

I wish I had never known.

Wish I had never found out

Wish I had never made that search

But I did. And that was that.

I should have remembered what

curiosity did to the cat.

But I remembered Sunday mornings

at the pool; we would walk up and down

brushing against each other

you in your lane, me in mine, sharing stories,

laughing, not getting much swimming done, giddy

in each other’s presence. We used to joke

we never saw each other in clothes.

You were always glad to see me

you were striking in your black swim suit

and blonde hair; you had an artist’s laugh

but then I had my sudden operation and when

I got back, a month later, you weren’t there.

I didn’t have your number; I asked discreetly

at the desk but they wouldn’t say. I tried Facebook

but you had a strange surname. I assumed

you moved to a pool closer to home or you

were busy with family. Four years later

unattached and lonely, I tracked you down

and found why you never returned.

You died in Feb, 2016. Peacefully at home.

All that time I thought you were alive.

But you had long gone. Death had closed

the gate. If only I hadn’t waited.

If only I’d tried sooner. But I was much too late.

Rock

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