Ravaged, a full moon cut
The night with exquisite timing,
Refining darkness into diamond,
Making the moment a great circle,
The unimagined a spectacle,
Till some thought slammed shut

You the intruder outside,
Because eyes eyes are mortal
Intruders drowned in their own water,
And hands hands a dead man’s napkin
Mar the mystery once taken
For yours, the blood’s tide

Lapping against the marble
Stairs from the palace
Down to the harbour, the beggar’s chalice
Studded with barnacles, the gemstones
You cut your hands on, the guest
Who longed too much.

Whose is the face in the water
Floundering, befuddled and bridled
With the moon’s rhythms, anguished and addled,
Face face that wonders whose hands disfigure
The angel, yours, poor beggar?
Yes what do you matter?

But the moon you remember
Was ivory and bruises,
A ruined window true brilliance excuses,
Around which Heaven itself had gathered
Enamoured, darkness fractured,
Polished and tempered.

 

 

.

---

Current draft:

26 August 2015

29 August

15 September

25 April 2016

I’ve sought it in a million
Places without success,
At liesure, under stress,
In latter days and youth:
Where is that cold, reptilian
Chameleon thing, the truth?

Truth, I have heard some say,
Is nothing but the truth
And for its sake uncouth
Liars have swung from gallows.
Some say that if we pray
It inevitably follows.

Others have said that love
Is really truth itself,
None whole who is not half,
Though love, we know, is blind
And sad awakenings prove
Love is all in the mind.

I who have prayed a million
Times and loved once or twice,
I who despised all vice
In my intolerant youth,
Know what a cold, reptilian
Chameleon thing is truth.

 

.

---

26 August 2015

 

How out of place and out
Of joint this silly statue is,
A plump, preposterous, dead king
On horseback, a lone figure leading
Whom? People go about
Their private business now not his.

Here he sits left like drift-
wood when the tide has turned yet not
Fashioned by nature nor yet in
Touch with the world. He craves domin-
ion, too immense to lift,
Keeping for England this last spot.

And yet, thanks to the birds,
This brazen king and his lifeless steed
Exhibit motions: pausing there
Fluttering down pigeons dare
Crap on a king. Were turds,
Like every other vulgar need,

Such unacknowledged things
That those whose empire ruled the waves
Never foresaw this common smear
Upon the king they honoured here
Nor knew what strength life springs
From compost, ruins, mould and graves?

The mayor and councillors
Who set this monster up would blush
Behind their top hats to admit
That men have natural functions. Shit,
They attempted to cast us
In Edward’s mould, in his bronze flesh.

.

---

It is some years since I was last in Sydney but this statue has always stuck in my mind or my craw and I have never forgotten it. It is grand in its own way but…

Current edit 17 August 2016

15 February 2017

I met a man who scratched his head
Like someone at a loss
And, when I asked him why, he said,
Shedding huge tears, “Ah Ross,

This dandruff is a dreadful thing,
The telltale signs offend;
They fall like snowflakes in the Spring.
Oh will it never end?

I’d rather be a Beduin
And sqat in an adobe
Than always stand in snow, a man
More miserable than Job.

Oh woe is me, oh misery,
How can I stop this slough?
Bury me in the cemetary,
My skin is coming off!”

He shed more tears and more white flakes,
Shaking his sorry head,
Till I replied: “For all our sakes,
I wish that you were dead.

Look all around you, see the world,
How well all things are made!
How can a skull just going bald
Put all that in the shade?

Open your soul, your heart, your eye,
Become a man of vision!
Love Nature and her works and buy
Something for your condition.”

.

---

Good enough for a joke.

Why do you seem so small,
You in my distance there?
You are where I should be, where I most feel
I am myself at last. Only the air

Between me here you there
Makes you and me as small
As just a puff of wind. If we could share
The space between us (two halves make one whole),

I could be with you now,
You could be with me here,
Instead of which I stand back wondering how
You got to be so far away so near.

Distance has made things clear
This is our future now.
We have become the emptiness we share,
As if we somehow turned into a crowd.

.

---

Looks alright for now. Anyway, the idea is there.

Current edit 25 August 2015

Scissors are just two knives and two round holes,
Something and nothing, joined to separate,
Opposing faces, each the other’s mate,
Two ends that thumbs and fingers seek as goals,

Two they avoid and that dismember wholes,
Round, looping lines and lines completely straight,
Means to life’s simple ends yet tempting fate,
Ends in themselves, like beauty, life and souls,

A Ding an sich that is for its own sake.
Yes, beauty, life and souls are scissors-like,
The nothing in the hole, the goals we seek,
Somehow entwined with substances that break

Apart, leave gaps and hurt till, grown obtuse,
We value scissors only for their use.

.

---

Another sonnet. I am probably the best sonneteer writing today but that isn’t saying much – most people wouldn’t know a sonnet even if it hit them on the head with a baseball bat.

TAKEN FOR A RIDE

You have your life to live and so have I
A life to live, a road to wander down
Towards – who knows? I always try
To keep a sense of purpose yet have grown

Aimless. You gave me purpose, you
Who throbbed beneath me like an impatient horse,
A head-strong, vital girl who threw
Me off at last and took a different course.

I bear the bruises still. So I go slowly
Limping along from day to day. I need
You still, still long to feel that rolling
Beneath me lust for life, that wholesome greed.

So once again another toiling
Rolling drunk wave of lost humanity
Looms large then bursts into my cab
In the same way a breaker boiling
Up from the darkness of the sea
Rolls towards cliffs and roars inside a cave.

Though seated, they are still much moved,
Driven things snarling at the man who drives,
Gunpowder stuffed inside a tin,
Human emotions pressured, shoved
Into the shells of lonely lives,
Exploding loudly in a drunken din

While I remain restrained and show
Great patience, always on a sober course
Through winding ill-lit kilometres.
Without such contrasts, what could go?
We need a wild, combustive force
To drive the piston rods through cylinders,

Force turning on the thing that turns
Force to good use and nonsense to good sense.
This is no cab – this is the soul,
All that my soul both loves and spurns,
For what is man if not the tense
Centre of things that fight against control?

 

---

I used to drive taxis Friday and Saturday nights in Sydney and later Brisbane. I was no good with radio since my knowledge of these cities was scratchy, so I picked all my fares off the street, many of them the worse for a night of excess. After you drive a few hours, you are like a batsman who has been in long enough to see the ball big as a beach ball and you take risks as a driver that you wouldn’t otherwise. I think I scared more passengers than ever scared me, racing through gaps that hardly left room for a coat of paint either side. I had no accidents, I never got mugged. I was lucky, I guess. I don’t know how safe it is now but I have more sense these days.

Art is a thing we hang on walls,
Concealing cracked or flaking plaster,
Or substitute
For sport that blokes that have no balls
Engage in. Done by an old master,
Though, it means loot.

Sex is a quest for pleasure not
An act of love or reproduction.
Bosoms are fun bags.
Weddings are superstitious rot.
One may enjoy without state sanction
The women one shags.

‘God’ is an expletive best deleted
But ‘arsehole’ is a useful, all-round
Term of abuse.
Eternity is a circle never completed.
I prefer coins instead, hard, round
Things I can use.

Charity is the outcome of neurosis
Used as a counterweight for guilt.
I’m innocent.
The Ten Commandments were written by Moses
(Who today says ‘shalt not’ or ‘shalt’?)
In an Old Testament.

A thing may be valued if it wows
And most things ancient are a sham
But Latin ‘quid’
Means something and life (for those with nous)
Without it isn’t worth a damn.
Mankind is Id.

 

---

I think we all subscribe to these principles whether we know it or not. Life is a process of grappling with them. I don’t think we can form a real set of values without this ugly background.

Current draft: 23 August 2014

Down this
Road amid nothing, keep
Walking, keep walking, dreaming
That somewhere there is hope.
So this is life. Don’t stop
But continue walking. I must
Not stop for anything.

“Come over here
Under this canopy
Of wood within the silk
Recess and stretch
Your limbs while bells toll
The anthem of repose.
Surrender all thought
Of walking on and on.
Look what I have brought:
Peace of mind. Get in
And, after you are rested,
Sleep.”

Despair,
Leave me alone.
I must not stop. I must
Continue walking, so
Much depends on this,
Everything depends
On walking, eyes
Staring, arms swinging,
Legs moving, daring
To hope without
Altogether caring.
Somewhere the road bends
Towards real living.

 

---

 

We have all been down this road at some time or other, especially in youth. Free verse is best suited to this sort of dismay or sense of loss. It is a reflection and not a measure of how I feel at the moment.