I look for him everywhere .
In supermarkets , shopping malls ,
along the esplanade where he
hangs out .
Have you seen Milton ? I ask .
But no one has .
Not lately .
Suddenly I need him
this gnome of a man
with the grey goatee .
Milton the Gatekeeper
hoarding the knowledge
like bullion .
Like Diogones with his lamp
I scour the streets
with my headlights
looking for Milton .
But is it poetry, John?
You mean, is it like Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’
you know the one, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’
or ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?
Probably not.
Well, How about Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost?
Come on, we’re talking 2020 here.
Then what?
A little bit of Billy Collins, I say, and Billy Connelly,
a sort of mad mix, the demotic and demonic.
We let our dirty laundry hang out. moon the pious,
but always in an Aussie accent. Your country first.
Does it have to rhyme? you ask. Probably not.
It’s not like Aussie Rules. There are no rules.
Though it’s a game anyone can play.
Just let it rattle off the tongue, roll off the mind,
Ignore the referees.
Have fun.
I like graphic novels.
I always have.
I like the illustrations.
It’s the little kid in me.
I always wanted to be an illustrator
but I never got past
little stick men, sorry, people.
I like that they can tell a novel-size story
in 64 pages or less
when some writers – I am thinking Pasolini here —
can push it up to 900 pages.
Come on!! as Lleyton Hewitt would say.
I have my little list of favourites:
‘Wilson’ by Daniel Clowes and ‘A Taste of Chlorine’
by that French author
and ‘Maus’, of course, the classic by Art Spiegel.
I remember the excitement when I purchased
‘The Dark Knight Returns’ by Frank Miller when it first came out.
It was like when I bought the just released “Revolver’ by the Beatles
and ran down the ramp of the Adelaide Railway Station to catch
the train home so I could play it on the turntable
only to come a cropper at the end.
It was that kind of excitement.
When in doubt, choose a graphic novel, I say.
It’s the little things I love
Like watching
‘Paterson’, the movie
About the bus driver
Who wrote his little epiphanies in his note book
like William Carlos Williams
the doctor who wrote
the red wheelbarrow
And finding out
That’s where Lou Costello grew up,
Paterson, New Jersey
There’s even a park named after him,
Lou Costello the chubby comedian who played alongside Bud Abbot,
The straight guy.
I used to watch those guys in the funhouse
Of the fifties,
Frolicking with Frankenstein and The Wolf man.
But it was Lou Costello
I loved
The funny little fat guy
And that’s where he came from,
Paterson, New Jersey.
I wash myself with transcendental soap,
it makes me shine, lathers my hope,
rinses away all my petty needs,
you know the ones: the urge to pee,
to have three square meals, to sleep
it lifts me high, takes me deep
whenever I feel that I’m on the ropes
I wash myself with transcendental soap
The cat is the forgotten candidate when they fight:
sure, they hurt each other but the cat recoils too,
even the walls and lounge chairs at the suddenness,
the squall of this. The walls and sofas cannot move,
but the cat can. Exit, pursued by bear. Only small,
but with the memory of an elephant. The cat remembers
long after they forget.
I have a very bad feeling.
Tell me I’m wrong.
That I have written myself into obscurity.
That I was too clever by half.
That no one knew what the f*** I was writing about
in the previous post ‘Not a nightingale ode’.
It was a glass of red wine.
But that’s what happens when you put up a post
while you’ve been drinking
while you’ve been rhapsodizing about a glass
of red wine
O
the voluptuous girth
of you
yr full mouth
yr
tiny tiny waist
I love
to twirl
between forefinger and thumb
yr long tapering body
rich aromas
the blush
of yr beauty
the swill
of yr full-bodied flavours
down
my
gullet
What are you doing? I asked.
Scratching my cerebrals, uncle would answer studying the crossword before him, his right hand deftly scratching his scalp, between loose strands of sandy hair, as though he had nits.
It seemed to work. The more furious he scratched, the better he got, the crossword soon solved.
Then uncle would go out in the garden and within a short space of time, as aunty used to say, he’d be ‘off with the fairies’.
Perhaps the two activities were allied.
Perhaps I caught it from uncle but whenever I work on a poem or a piece of stubborn flash fiction, I scratch my cerebrals too.
My partner caught me at it one morning.
Stop it, you’ll go blind, she says.
We both chuckle.
It’s good to make light of things then go back to scratching your cerebrals should things become difficult.
Most people think of stars when they think
Of infinity
Or grains of sand
But I think Adam Sandler,
All the films of his I haven’t seen
And all those I have
Even the stinkers like ‘Little Nicky’
I want to see again and again
and again.
There are so many.
Almost as many as the stars
and the guy’s still making them!
But as Jim Croce says, ‘there’s never enough time
To do the things you want to do,’
It’s just not funny.
