Some shorties: What is a warm night?; I Know this Boy; Song of Sounds

To me poems are sometimes a whole lot of small strings tied together and sometimes if you can imagine a long piece of rope made with lots of mismatched strings large and small all tied together, it's something like that. It's a wonder it can support anything at all? Maybe that's why poetry is such a personal things sometimes. Not that I claim to know what it is, but to me sometimes I only have a line or a single thought in a poem and I think by JOLLY, i must jot that little beauty down. Take this I wrote so hastily as I climbed off the train. Alot of poems start as a question for me.

I asked myself:

what is a warm night
is it light as he laughs and pretends
how clever he is to make night
into day

As I jotted that down I thought it was so fun! Haha, yeah funny what passes for fun these days. But all self deprocation aside, I think it's funny to see how poems come from playing around, like that. Those stupid random things you only say to your best friends or inside your head that make you laugh, like one time during class, someone mentioned the word monkey. While we were meant to be thinking about crime fiction, I could only hear a chimp rattling around in my head with big dopey eyes and I nearly burst out laughing in a pretty dead atmosphere. It's those secret thoughts that poetry comes from I think. Happy and sad.

Now the next thing I'm going to share is something I heard from my brother. He always knows how to make me laugh, even when it's incredibly unfunny. Dare I say the "sitting on the toilet" incident, which he will understand and my other siblings, if your out there on cyberspace. Anyway my brother was sitting on the train and a stoner beside him said in what you can imagine as a Texan drawl

I know this boy
I love this boy
I'm gonna kill this boy

Imagine that as your riding along. Some crazy stoner yowling he's gonna kill you! My brother quickly fled and ran fromt he carriage. Out of context, it's funny to hear it read out loud, "BOY!" nice and hoarse. He does it best.

Now the last thing I'm going to share is something which for a few days was only a single line. I was like, hmm I like this phrase "Song of Sounds". Why? It's absolutely ridiculous really? It's redundant and makes no real sense or it's completely unimportant to say. But honestly, that's the beauty of poetry, it redefines what's important. I don't see it as silly, look at how the line looks listen to the flow of the words. Suddenly, if you look at language differently, you realise that meaning is a little less concrete. ANyway, I could ramble on all day about language and my views on it and by the way anyone who can offer a vastly enriched multi-lingual perspective please post. Love to hear from you!

But anyway this is what I came up with and it is political, but sometimes politics is all emotion! As anyone would know if they're in Australia at the moment. So I wrote about the refugee policy of the moment (let's hope it is a brief moment")

Song of Sounds

They are crying
for your help
the children behind
the gates on
Christmas island they
sing a haunting
ballad of narrow
escapes on the
violent seas and
of their gentle
new masters due
to send them
back again into
lions jaws cast
adrift forever only
a song of sounds
on the rolling
waves of the sea.