You are my beautiful beast.
I love you, I hate you.
You drive me mad with your fecundity
but you keep me supplied with poems.
You are the grist to my mill.
What would I write about if not you?
But beware !
Mark is coming tomorrow
& he has instructions to cut you down
to size.
Engage Me,
Engage me ! I say to the printed words
before me.
You’ve got three seconds to grab
my attention
and another five to hold it.
You’re not entitled to my attention.
You have to earn it.
Don’t be lazy.
Experiment, Be transgressive, Adventurous.
Those first words. That first sentence.
Something to razzle my dazzle.
Engage me .
*pic courtesy of pinterest
You know you’re in a Canadian novel when people
are nice to each other.
apologize when they’re not
and take themselves to task when they entertain
un-neighborly thoughts
and when someone does step a little out of line
they’re met with:
‘And who gave you the green light to get personal?’
Lifted
Driving home from xmas lunch the car radio on. playing songs with a religious flavour, one of which hits me with the force of remembrance of things past:
Mum is in the lounge-room in the doldrums.
It has been three days since dad died.
I want to cheer her up.
What could I say? I was only a kid of fifteen.
I wasn’t in the Lord then but I was into folk rock and gospel so I put on a song that spoke to me during those dark days:
it was ‘Farther Along’, the Byrds trimmed down version of the rather bloated original that Dolly and Co sang.
I sat down with mum.
We listened together:
‘Farther along we’ll know all about it.
Farther along we’ll understand why.
So cheer up my brothers, live in the sunshine.
We’ll know all about it, all by and by’.
That seemed to say it all. Three glorious verses in all.
Mum cried a little but her mood seemed to lift.
We talked about the words for a while and then I left.
I felt lifted too
There’s a sloth in my blood.
A cancer.
Too lazy to get out of its own way. Can’t be bothered.
And I am glad.
How can ‘Sloth’ be one of the seven deadly sins?
It is one of the ‘other virtues’ like ‘indolence’, ‘contentment’.
How did this cancer with its ludicrously long name
of thirteen vowels and fourteen consonants survive in the wild
against its more murderous cousins?
Fork.
I’ve come to another fork in the road.
Like Robert Frost.
Green Day.
Christianity or Buddhism?
Does it have to be ‘either’, ‘or’?
When I mentioned my flirtation with Buddhism
Pastor Brian said, but he was a man, John?
as if that settled anything.
Jesus had the best parables though
But Buddha had the best back-story.
Jesus, however, could perform miracles.
He came to me once when I really needed Him.
Met me in the middle of the air.
You don’t forget a thing like that.
Miracles.
Miracles happen every day
amidst the fuss and din
look at the way the sun comes up
& the dark comes in
They’re not confined to occasion
or a geography
don’t always run when summoned
they have their own chronology.
So whatever you do don’t get
yourself in a tailspin
miracles happen every day
you just have to let them in
What it was Like.
It was like an infusion of Premium ’98 in my tank,
the fuel that gave my lethargic Lamborghini zest and zing,
that taught it how to sing along the road in lusty lazarettos
of recovery; it was a discovery like Cortez first sighting
the Pacific from a peak in Darien, or to be more specific
the first time I read your little chapbook of poems
as exquisite as the chronograph on Lewis Hamilton’s arm.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Tepid.
Tepid’s okay if you’re bath water
or happy to sit on the fence.
But it’s not where life is.
Life is a fizz,
a gee whiz of a ride.
It should be entered wide-eyed
and big-hearted.
You don’t want it over
before it’s started.
The Bridge.
It wasn’t the bridge of san luis rey
or the bridge to terabithia
it was just a bridge
that spanned a river of no consequence
that ran down to the sea.
No songs were written about it.
No poems.
No plays.
It was just a bridge
and that’s how it would stay.
Always.
John Malone 
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