Fire fills a skirt of grass
To keep itself warm
As evil looking clouds pass
By bringing up a storm.

I’m burning off a pile
Of dry, old garden scraps
I’ve stored up for a while,
A year or two perhaps,

Standing here with the hose,
Keeping things in control,
Relying, if this fails, on those
Clouds to play the role

Of villain in the wings,
A black hat and black heart,
The vampire with his fangs
Out for a bit of skirt,

In case the fire breaks free
And sets my house alight,
Bungalow in between
Bungalows left and right

In a world full of nice
Neighbours and homely scenes,
Where the old anger tries
Not to say what it means.

.

---

Here I am writing about a back yard fire I lit while the storm clouds were approaching. I chose that moment to ensure I kept control of the fire as there was a lot of dead grass and it could easily have got away from me. Such moments always operate like metaphors. Current edit: 26 August 2015

I shamble to the kitchen out of bed,
Tumble-
down
man needing coffee, slip-shod
in whiskers toilet-brush-face
scrubbing the ceramic rim,
steamed
ah
clumping together like rice
here at the edge of another day

I am myself again
and yet remembering all that
struggle to get here, this morning’s
metaphor, all to do again, I wonder
if I can ever be myself again

while in the gathering day
winking at me from garden oases
bedouin dew dissolves away,
fading lives, forgotten faces.

Well-scrubbed man on a mission, company man,
suited up like a deep sea diver, in slow bounds
of effortless commotion I proceed towards
wrecked hopes as if they held a treasure.

 

************************************

Life generally is a set of potentialities that can’t be realized. Seen in that way, I can excuse the world’s failures, just as I excuse my own.

I don’t like what you tried to do
what you did
Xerxes did before you
lash the sea
lash the sea out of spite
flog that elastic strength
into the submissive firmness of a road
or at least he tried to.

I will not wear the patter of your hobnailed boots
I will not be the highway for your loot
I will not lie down
I will not surrender the curve
the playful arching of my back
the wiggle-room waves crave
in the great sloshing to-and-fro turmoil
inside the heart’s barnacle-covered cave

I am my own man not yours.

Whatever I choose to be
form I take
representation of my will
light flung hung on the ceiling
bouncing around barnacles
in a great guffaw of mirth
being free
no stone-sucking barnacle I
am by nature’s law the man I am.

I am my own man not yours.

So should the wind trip along the wild tongue 
of water
roaring from the sky’s throat
 I shall explode from my cave
and skud along 
the white-whipped surf without a boat.

I am my own man not yours.

 

---

 

Each of us is a battlefield between raw energy that scarcely tolerates restrictions and an orderly spirit that we acquire through social discipline. It is an old story and free verse is well suited to telling it.

Current edit: 23 May 2014

 

At day’s end, when I complete some task,
It is with pleasure that I descry,
Just limping along through the gathering dusk,
A wallaby on my property.

She gets here through a barbed-wire fence,
Clambering under somehow, and tall grass,
A covert where dingoes might hide in suspense
To ambush my uninvited guest.

She comes for the lawn that I keep cut,
The acre I mow and I would mow
In any case, whether she came here or not;
Well I have no reason to object.

The grass I keep cut is fresh and green
And nothing she does can alter that:
A meal for the wallaby makes a nice scene
And both of us benefit from it.

A wallaby isn’t a movie or a book
But what harm will all my looking do?
What about all the chances I took
Limping my way to something new?

And yet I never risked as much
As she does and never with such cause.
She carries a baby in her pouch.
Like eyelashes are those peeping paws.

 

---

 

The courage of a mother wallaby is a beautiful thing to watch because she comes so delicately, not at all like a wild thing. Sadly, it isn’t all beauty. A wallaby carries ticks. I lost my 5 month old puppy to tick poisoning recently and the tick was almost certainly carried by her or some other native mammal. There is an animal track through the long grass around my dam and I suspect that is where the the tick hijacked my unsuspecting pup. Bye Baby Biggles. Luv u always.

There is a tree upon the neighbouring hill,
The sky behind it, all alone up there,
Whose branches, I imagine, grasp the air
As if it took its final breath, that still
Moment in life when life drinks in its fill
And knows itself to be. The hill is bare
Except for that, for farmers cannot spare
Space for mere trees. Mere trees take grass from cattle.

Why do I think I know how that tree feels?
Why do I feel as if we feel as one?
What in me goes up there? What in me kneels
To life that stands upon a hill alone?

Farmers live off the land and grass must grow
But men will breathe their last.  The tree knows.

 

 

.

 

---

Farmers are close to the natural world but they can also be very remote from Nature. But who am I to criticise? They grow things. I eat what they produce. Meanwhile I breathe in what the trees produce. Current edit: 24 June 2014

You call me murderer just coz I killed
That farmer, but it’s innocent I pleads.
He called my cannabis a pile of weeds.
Don’t weeds grow best in a neglected field?
Well ‘e was just a nuisance so I drilled
‘im full of ‘oles like I was plantin’ seeds
And still ‘e gripped me throat like one that needs
Must fight his fill. So I say ‘e’s been filled.

And it’s not like I am the only one.
The judge there drives ‘is flash car when ‘e’s stoned.
It aint black powder in the copper’s gun.
Is it illegal only when it’s growned?

But us men of the world know ‘ow to deal:
Manslaughter 2, suspended on appeal?

 

.

---

Usually a sonnet is the amber in which poets study the lovely butterfly of intellectualised feeling. Here I have used it to trap a dirty cockroach. The speaker is the remnant of a human being, an apt spokesman for  a corrupt and dehumanised lifestyle – but still a man in spite of that.

Current edit:

26 August 2015

25 April 2016

Spring brings the face to mind, eyes green as buds,
Skin clear as air annihilating space,
The conflagration that’s her hair the blood’s
Intoxication with that perfect face.

Summer suggests her manner, bright and warm,
The rose that lifts the room, that careless air,
Those folded hands, the action giving form
To something hidden but felt everywhere.

Autumn speaks with her voice, the gold that clings
In farewell to the trees, the rich, sweet plum
That stores the summer sun, the bird that sings
As doors are shut of warmer days to come.

Winter is a bare and barren time of year.
It sums her up the best: she isn’t here.

 

***************************************

If you head due north or due south
You won’t go east or west;
If you talk only with your mouth
Your hands and eyes will rest
In silence. If a baseball bat
Is your idea of sport
All you will play with is just that.
What will you do when caught?
If only God is God then He
Or She or maybe It
Is stuck with an eternity
That won’t let poor God quit.
Forget your God, your south, your north,
Your bat, your hands, your eyes
For none of all these things is worth
Anything if life dries
Out, shrinking, gathered in one spot.
Thus the cicada steps
From its shell, breathing in the hot
Summer air from tree tops.

.

---

Current edit: 9 June 2015, reworked from ‘Quixotic Song’. Looks good for now.

---

 

You see the Tower of Babel
In the stained window of the chapel
And, under it, yourself, a knight recumbant
Upon a cold sarcophagus? How the light slumbers
Like dreams in summer haunting glassy shallows
Lazily fingered by the willows
One quiet afternoon!

Those colours you see strewn
Are lyrics from the Tower of Babel,
Once magic phrases, words unheard, unable
To rouse the marble knight from his too awful calm,
Who never stirs on hearing any psalm
Or music through ten thousand years,
So much stone blocks your ears,

So much stone seals your eyes.
Or are you petrified with lies,
A spell-bound victim of the Tower of Babel,
With no mind of your own, a cold corpse on a table
Under a bright light, under such a weight
God knows how many years? Too late
To change things now, the Tower

Of Babel has no power
Nor will to raise you from the dead
And yet you think you think he moved his head?
Was it some trick of that deceptive Tower of Babel,
Whose language alters like the sun, unstable
And shifting in its accents, or
What was it that you saw

Within the stone awakened,
What flower stirring in the vacant
Space of a heart encased in such surrender
That it can feel no poetry however tender
Unless it rains down from a Tower of Babel,
Unsure if all you hear is babble
Or if you see the light?

How hard to get things right
When all the time we have is short,
When so much lies beyond our powers of thought,
Here underneath the towers that watch and rule the world,
Believers or, with some rock picked up and hurled,
Fugitives from the Tower of Babel
‘s broken dream, childish fable!

The colours fade, night falls.
The glass is dark now like the walls.
Pity the beggars in their marble shrouds,
The ash of vanished dreams patrolled by listless crowds,
Eyes rummaging the laneways for a fire,
Flames in a dustbin rising higher
Than the lost Tower of Babel.

 

---

 

This draft looks OK to me for now.

Current edit: 14 June 2014

There is a python ten feet long,
As quiet as a mouse,
A muscle flexible and strong
That hangs around my house,

Feeding – on what? I never ask:
Maybe the neighbours’ cats
Or, with them gone, he has the task
Of getting rid of rats.

But in this country pythons never,
I have been told, eat blokes
Or, if one tried, however clever,
He fails at last and chokes,

So if some day you see me in
A coloured leather coat,
Help me! It is a python’s skin
And I’m stuck in his throat.

*****************************

I have a lot of tree frogs around my house and therefore I have a lot of tree snakes. I don’t mind the green tree snakes. They don’t get bigger than six feet and they are pythons i.e. they are not venomous. But lately a ten foot carpet python has moved in and I am a bit wary of treading on it in the dark. I also have brown snakes at ground level and they are highly venomous. So when I go outside in summer, I am not sure if I should look up or down.