Stranger

Sometimes you aren't aware how much your own actions can effect someone else. I've recently been in a position of terrible power taking almost everything away from someone who hardly deserved it. 

And the worst of all is being powerless to assist. I'm being vague deliberately but my work at the moment is forcing me to confront a lot of terrible realities and unfortunately at the moment to do something I consider wrong and bad. In this poem I'm trying to imagine how that person might be feeling, so here it is my newest poem "stranger".

Stranger

I took it all away

All away from a stranger

A Vagabond destined to roam in BMWs by the river

I took it all away

I'm the target 

I'm the enemy of your everything stranger

I'll shatter your relationships

Just with pen and paper

Worst of all stranger 

I'll happily take the cheque

Turning over the pages of other lives

Just as briskly and as carelessly

Where to now stranger

There is no compassion here

No remorse to nurse 

No hope

There is only time, stranger

Time and the dollar

What's yours is mine 

What's yours is always mine 

Stranger

I'm the ghoul that haunts your memories

The mistakable shade wandering

The paths you write 

Of your own turmoil

I am that which is called justice

For stranger there is none 

And the man in black has come

The scythe sways to detach 

Each limb each morsel 

Silent shining relentless 

Day and Night

I am the day

You are the night

I am the first hint of morning 

Smiling across at your pillow

The warmth, baking bodies awake

You are the night

Connected to the darkscapes of

Neon and paths woven

Of dancing lights

I am the slow drawl 

The waving sands

The rolling waves

You are elastic, wound tight

Zigzagging dinner tables

Streets, markets

Fire and glass 

And also 

In the dark, in the human

There too are oceans 

There too are waves 

I am the day

exposed 

You are the night

 opaque

Our time is the twilight

Where the whole world bows

In calm repose

The birds pause in flight

To Gaze at the magnificent pink lights

All noise turns dim and stern

Old folk and young all pause

And look upon the explosive wonder

Of the phantasmagoria 

So fleeting

So precious

Wrong

Whether you write, draw, paint, act, make films, animate, weave, knit, forge, craft, compose or otherwise create we've all known the fight within ourselves to keep going. In essence that's what be written this poem about today! Anyway happy reading everyone and never give up no matter how wrong you feel about your craft whatever it be.

Wrong

Write today wrong tomorrow

And the brain ticks over

And the inspiration falls

And the karma engine bombards 

With ricocheting bullets violently spraying mind chews

"I shouldn't" "I can't"

And the devil voice loves to destroy effort and break the bones of motivation

Splintering snapping 

"You shall never achieve that which you seek"

"That which you seek is a torn sad dream, destined to be broken on the wind"

"As spiteful as lost tears, caught, dried and lost in melancholy eyes"

Where we ran with Bears

Where we ran with bears

When we swam with swans

The days they took flight

Covering the sky in feathers

Those days of eyewide blue

The days the summer sang

The days that faded as long as dogs at noon,

Who lazed better than tabbies upon warm Sunrise couches 

The times when we would laugh so close

Your nostril hairs showing

The pollen piling up running wild

Itching its way like beams of light

The ways in which we shared thoughts

Like milk sustenance 

The forms we took the shapes that played out in shadows and clouds

The nape of your neck the white alabaster that stirs me as the wind

The moments as mystic as a whale

Whose fin lingers but a moment

Suspended over Ocean and sky

Glinting black, white serene

Diving disappearing floating in the great green 

Gettin

This all began after reading a motivational website. It's called 7 things to get you motivated, it says no. 1 do a little. So tonight I'm doing a little. The following poem, is all about what is suggested. I enjoy doing my suggestive sexual poems. I was trying in this one to paint a picture with as few words as possible, there really are no sentences or phrases just words paired and positioned in such a way as to suggest a scene. I hope you enjoy, or maybe this experiment just gives you food for thought! Until next time readers :)

Gettin

Tired I crave
Snatch
Succumb

Symbols fonts
Burgeoning
Warmth Snatch
Wet
Touch

Lips
Dam lick
Snatch
Crave luxuriating
Silk, blood, heat

Youth
Succulent pearl
Swollen pink
Pulsing sense
Snatching alive

Nuzzle flowing
Consume crave
Snatch

Good Morning

"Good morning" I said
as your crinkly eyes
spoke to me of the dear struggle
to open and how worthwhile it all
was just to see me

Next our games move to hide and go seek
a lazy exchange of eye brows and lids
peeking and booing
your head comical as it emerges above
a mountain of doona
I am reminded of a baby
freshly plucked from the womb
and tucked inside a blanket
where the two combine in
an uncanny parody of a sausage roll

Your smile creates a pleasant crease
a slope that crosses the landscape
of your face
that cascades down
and drops onto my body
dripping all the way down

Sticky wet and warm in your embrace
enjoying my nakedness
and me all the more brazen
for bearing my buttocks
in the cool morning air
I'll compel you to join me
and we'll fold together
among the piles of lace, sweat and sex
among the smooth skin and
the staleness of the morning
We'll continue and we'll dance wild
and then collapse much as the
morning began with crinkly eyes
and words and hands
tightly wrapped and you drawn to my chest
It's warm beat blasting you
with the sounds of fatigue, passion, love
and again I say, "Good morning."

The Paths of Trees

I strode along
Down a corridor of wood
I barked about the leafy road
I glimpsed a species of fig
Strangling in the coolness
Of this natural arch
By which limbs entwined in
A twisted canopy
One patchy
One that would allow them To breathe

How deep do your paths grow
You eternal anchors
Guardians of green
Monuments of life

Knots

Today I just happened to look through some old messages and quite frankly it made me happy to be in the present at the same time I had a true sense of how much it had all changed. Boy we forget things fast dont we? But it's more the experience of things we forget and the details. Anyway folks here is Knots my first effort of August.

Knots

Whats lost ought not be found
Messages best forgot and drowned

Twines of words and rhymes
Strings and lives forever intwined

Strings pulled taught
Strings too thin
Rope burn
Torn skin

Frayed ends

How cruel the uncoiling, the unravelling
the falling away of burden and balance
The drop so certain so sincere
The pitfalls and the avalanches

Bonds broken and lost
The frail coils of memory
The news knots we tie
The loops and the noose we
Forge
And how meticulous we forge
To tie loose threads
with varying lengths
From the threads we accumulate
To weave a crooked rope
To spin a life
To endure

Bubbles

Hey all,

You know those times when you were a kid and you played with bubbles, big ones, small ones etc. We used to have a clown that came around to our place, he'd have a big soapy tub and then have these small plastic and much greater bubble blowers (is that what you call them?). You don't have to be little to see the magic in bubbles.

Of course, readers you've probably already guessed these bubbles are a bit different to the bubbles at the sort of parties I described above. As with a lot of my writing, I love injecting the sinister into something so simple and pleasant. I won't describe what scene plays out in the poem, but it's an interesting experiment to try and invert an idea. Maybe I can try the other way around for a change. I apologise for the melancholy in my words, but for anyone whose read this far and wants to keep going, thanks again, you're the reason I keep writing. You may be modest in number, but that makes you all the more precious to me :)

Until next time...

Bubbles

Bobbing gently bobbing
above the reeds below the surface
the dull brown surface
Water gentle but rubbing
numbing

Bubbles below his air and life
air drifting up
through the screen of
murk and mud

as he gently silently bobs
invisibly numbly bobs
bobs below the screen
unseen

They do not see
the obscene stream of life
choked down below
smokestacks of bubbles
desperate stacks of grey dying bubbles

life is buoyant
but bubbles discharge
sinking fast
sinking eternal

no more bubbles...

Giraffes

There's this amazing moment in The Last of Us, a game on the PS3 for the initiated, it's right before the final action of the game and the two characters pause and watch a herd of giraffes wander over a ruined city scape.

In such a bleak world there's a ray of hope and wonder, moreso than that though wanting to play but it's also a moment where we truly get to see that the characters relationship has dramatically changed from initial ambivalence, you xan see they care for each other and it's only now they both begin to imagine a different future and road to the one they are currently on.

Anyway that's a little back ground, google Vanishing Grace off the Last of Us soundtrack, this is the music for this portion of the game and I think more than anything that captures the complicated place the characters are in. Anyway peeps this is my quick tribute to what I consider one of the coolest games I've ever played.

Giraffes

Tall and untamed
Grazing the graveyards of our cities
In the majestic light
There is an absence that can be imbued with hunger, happiness even hope
Cold dark pupils that perhaps miss the sight of the ruin about them
With odd antennae poking out of their beak-like snouts
Perhaps they are the alien heirs to this empire of stone cold steel

Age Will Not Weary them and the Years Condemn

Good day all,

I've been hearing about our poor suffering seniors in the news. There are certain retirement homes that just aren't up to scratch, but the news has me thinking about another phenomenon so common to us.

We as a society well in Australia at least have the attitude of shipping our elderly off to a home, the idea of truly helping our older family members is inconceivable.

Sometimes I think it's sad to live in a world where people's only option for care and welfare are strangers, on the other hand it's great we have these services. But it's tragic the poor way some of our elderly are being neglected and I truly hope it's not another important issue people will bury their heads in the sand about. Anyway people enjoy my poem.

Age will Weary them and the Years Condemn

Into the night the cold night
Strolled a octogenarian
The white halo of the retirement home
Lost on her
The wilderness of younger faces
Younger times younger memories
always greener

Round them up and bar them within
These Alabaster pens
Where moral bankruptcy begets decay
But only For the love of the grey haired and the balding
(And only for the love of the money)

We will carry them away through the wild into the false halo of their gatekeepers

We will not remember them

Lost Memory

I thought to help me really feel one of my characters emotions I'd write a poem from their point of view. Poetry is inherently sensory and visceral and really helps describe feeling! Anyway enjoy :)

Lost Memory

Thoughts recoil at passions
Buried in beds too difficult to imagine
Your long golden hair
And what might have been
What we might have seen
The highway is broken
I have no compass
I have no way

Where to now
To climb this mountain tall
And impassable
Best to find a cave in which to shelter
A cave to crouch
A cave to hide
Hideaway from the specter of what was
To hideaway all the cursed memories
The tainted images poisoning my ears
The screams never dying
My own screams
Wails unimaginable
To bury it all
To lose it all forever
Maybe then when memories are lost
And forgot
might I recall
Fondly what we had
Our time
the perfect times
Imagined and real

Dinner for 1

The time is late and he arrives home
Kettle ready to boil an old antique model
The knife a present from his wife
Her smile radiant
as the fungus growing on cave walls
Her spritely step a reminder of her failure in pottery
A fragile shell of vase sulks deep within the kitchenette
the only reminder of a simpler, uglier time

The fridge bites at his fingers
It's cold
worse than usual
Something in cling wrap demands his attention
Whatever it is calls to mind the Las Vegas of fast food franchises, coming to a highway near you

He places the plate within the microwave
A small box conceived of something plastic and something metal
Allegedly Radiation proof
His wife would prove different
She saw it on display
At one of those morbid strings of matchbox houses
villages of empty homes
He recalls the giant poster
The smiling male and female persons standing neutered at least one foot apart (at all times)
No touching
the paths of their smiles never crossing their minds facing outward and away

Bing dinner is ready

" lounge for one"
Don't mind if I do
"Would you like to see out specials?"
Just hand me the remote!

Water

This is a poem about my grandfather recently diseased Eugenio Mestroni, but I think it's more a poem about aging generally. Being around my father and grandfathers family I was continually reminded how disconnected we as humans are from our aging bodies.

He never stopped being 20 people say about my grandfather, but I think it could be said about most aging people.

Water

I knew him well
Tall as a mountain
Bright in tooth and eye
Sore headed young at heart
Though decaying inside
Struggling to cling to water the seed
Of life the origin of life
Boring a nest for himself by the sea
To view the sea to remember the sea
His hair was thick knotted
A pustule came from his right cheek
The funniest thing about the sight of his corpse
Was how red it was
How bright scarlet red
Blood pooled too long and
Next it was purple and then maybe transcended colour and life
Or maybe even now he lies log hard pinned to the steel covered ceremoniously
Blood, phlegm and bile draining down an unseen sinkhole

Quarter

Hells shape reveals itself
In the pupils that do not blink
Do not shutter do not think

In my head I picture a perfect day
That includes you
The dream-light echoes in my ears
In patterns of faint light
In patterns of rippling shades of
Golden autumn yellow

Fires burn in my chest
Neither warm neither cold
Spewing, humming, contemplating
Love

the sky stripped back
spits down
Tears down
Everything washes away in its waters

Stupendous

The beds are prepared, the sheets are tucked, the pillows pressed by angels hands
How resplendent, amazing, stupendous
There is none a cobweb to speak of not etch or marking in carpet or wall
Glorious, effervescent, stupendous

Not a man without grace, nor a woman without face
No excrement of tongue nor that born of bowel
Marvelous, brilliant, stupendous

No dirt outside or in, Nothing soiled,
Nothing dim nor light, only transparent and bright
Not a single blight
Astounding, remarkable, incalculable,
Stupendous, stupendous, stupid-pendous

The Universe

The universe is mine alone
The great expanses of stars
That cause my eyes to grow teary and my chest to swell

The empire is mine
The expanse of cities and the faces smiling hopeful laughing
The children run at my feet
Parks are crowded with my subjects
All the people that shall never enter me

My gates are tall and invisible
They reach from within me and extend out to the stars
I can touch the sun with my hand
The universe is mine

I can swim through time
Through black holes
I have seen quasars I have seen beginning and have some notion of the end
Men built with stones my hands sow clouds, earth, steel and knowledge
The world is mine
The countries are known to me
The peoples are cold to me

I can make things that never were
I can think and it is so
All is below me
All are around me
They will never welcome me
They cannot see

My universe is a cold void
It is mine and mine alone
In my universe each day is a struggle
The atoms of stars burst and explode
Plumes of light cascade so beautiful
And so wrought by cries
Cries of not yet, not now
They are never ready to dissolve their time cannot be up
In my universe destiny is to revert to the dark that so consumes

My universe is vast and empty
Perhaps something lies in all the darkness
But I cannot see it
It is mine yet I cannot see

Alone

Night breathes alone
Cold scars of sky peer alone
The world is shot through a grey filter alone
The stars burn cold alone
Breakers smash ice shores alone
The Moon shivers alone
Grass shimmers like barbed wire alone
The wind tickles but does not whistle alone
Leaves dance in pale blue night alone

The sea wails into me and inside me
Wails indiscernibly loud and insect
Its great expanse weeping alone

Squish

The sound two storeys up
Past the mewling cats
That sounded as though they were
Orgasming pain

The blunt object upon which
A history had been written
Yet none had anticipated its
Final trajectory through bone
Into brain

The taste of death mingled
With the smells of excrement
The smells of absolute terror
As a victim soils itself

The cats continue
Up and down and then up down down
Squish squish squish

Sunbaked Pathers

What better time to write than in the glow of sun on the coast! I'm not sure what worth there is in this other than he experiment of tracing a thought which on reflection I find interesting. Yes I saw an ant walking on some bricks and here is the rest of that thought.

Sunbaked Pathers

This glorious pavement
Forget me not says the ant
Upon it reciting words that
Were spoken when there was grass only here and dunes that stretched fifty yards or so in successions of mounds four own to the shore
His legs touch the earth
And communicate with it
The lines of pavement cry for their
Mother a giant slab dug from limestone in a quarry where shards
Of sand compressed to birth it
And before that structures organic and non crumbled and decomposed to weave the colors of the sand

This is my home wedged and perfectly tessellated between my brothers hard and stubborn as the filler that binds us
All these things are here present
History playing out the shape of The land only crudely buried beneath
The make of man

The loneliest Beach

The black night is silent
The smoke of the burning trails acrid in the air
Dogs and sure they're cute
Sure they look as all dogs do
But there's an otherness here

The white white sand
So whitened in pictures is as black as volcanoes
And the shore laps our feet in mud

The rich colours of smiles
White tiger teeth glowing through
Grit and poverty
Walls of broken rocks speak
Of attempts at something unwanted

The earth and air speaks of a reluctance
Waiters purse there large brown lips
Girls cast their eyes out out across the sea
Somewhere that is the loneliest and untouched of islands
Somewhere in there families memory

There are few street here
There is little
So little sound and yet
Sitting on the patios below the banana leaf roof
Feels like rebellion
feels like some ancient war might begin
So silent the start of a battle
The edge of the knife
But the waters continues to lap gently
And all remains hidden and cheated
In the moist air of the night

The absence of me

The absence of me
Is an assault on my way of living
The presence of the foreign
Is so common and yet frightening
With each passing breath
I am nearer to isolation
Will I too be lost in the gray wilderness?

Difference is an unavoidable fact
so much as we are all composed
Of meat and water
So too is each of us posessed
Of such radically divergent
Ideology

To be lost is to exist
One man longs for his tracks to intersect
Seeks to have his feet rooted and grounded
One man seeks to tear it all asunder
To wander aimlessly among stars and unknown celestial bodies

I Behold the mystery before me
The stars to me are comprehensible
But what of she that sits across from me
That is a landscape i can never pierce
The only hope is that perhaps in some fundamental way we are the same

What would the world look like if we were defined by the shapes and ideas of our minds
The truth is we are as close as separate dimensions
Each of us occupies our own universe
Each has their own meaning

The absence of me
Is the only thing I'm not ready for