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