Auckland Poetry.com Edition 12

Unapproachable and air-locked
Strutting for calculation and expectation
Hold the door, I’m going up
Yes yes yes, I happen to be well informed on the subject
Yes yes yes, I happen to be wearing a flagrant tie
Stripes and spots, blotch and blemish
Wipe it off and start again.

Mulish stares plus too pleasant an ‘excuse me’
Equals people I will never know
Never talk to, never meet
We don’t share this planet
If we never make eye contact
Look up, look up, look up and see
The million individual experiences and sentiments
All could be you
Just open your mouth
Chew the cud, chew the cud, they say
Rats and children, we think we are
But above the pavement ceiling
Emotion, love, life, time to breathe
Air can’t be sold
So breathe
Quit only cherishing that which cost a crisp twenty
And love what’s free
What’s life
Live, for fuck’s sake
I tell myself
And stop. Turn around. Go home.
Give my dog a hug.
Listen to the cars
Live.

kntrezona-lecomte

On waking from the deepest sleep
I wondered, were life in reverse.
If nights of sleep be school of life
each day a play we must rehearse.

I’d have to study my behaviour
selfish acts and maybe worse.
a mind so full of petty thoughts
and maybe once or twice a curse.

Maybe I should practise caution
indiscretion deemed perverse.
Erotic sighs won’t pass this student,
shock waves rock the universe.

At dusk pretence just slips away
the naked form is free of sham.
I join the line of student souls
to sit the practise death exam.

Roan.

all flesh is grass

The young blade dreams his days will pass
In mexican waves of wind and sun,
Light rain night-falling. This is grass.

Life is a Meadow? Hope soon gone.
The taxing mower descends, demands;
In severing swathes are dreams undone.

Truth is desire low mown, close shorn.
Harsh years confirm the cynical view:
That Life, regrettably, is a Lawn.

- new westie

Fangle the bans swang apera
seething at tooting gale vor shedder
Now now ly mear skun
lom it in the bar bell song
and fit it for a ding
longing for lugers
masting the tigers
and making it break even
party sun dive opus
magnet strike now
loud and cool seetin
garlac smol bettarn la looks
shamel la lard ark snark
fablio saard daken
mabilo bard sharken

A Landscape

Here in this landscape of bushes and crippled
trees, silence speaks of the final peace.
Grotesque dead trees, daylight ghosts, stand there
with grey boughs stretching upward appealing
to a fairytale god, “give us today a new life” but
no, there is only one god he is almighty, and hears
not your fearful whispered wishes, those who do
not understand are doomed to a life of an empty
pursuit for pleasures, crowding nightclubs and
casinos trying to avoid being alone with the night
and facing the truth: we are mortal and heaven is
to be remembered for a while by other mortals.
Faces in a black frame seeing you seeing through
you and into a void. Yet I fear not this landscape as
it is shunned by man and no harm can happen to me
here except the inevitable

A Belly Full

Christmas Eve, festive shop windows
cast glee on sleet, huddled in a doorway
as seeking the fading warmth of people
in a hurry to get home, an old man sits,
looks a window display of phony happy
Santa Clauses.

Tomorrow they’ll be brought down to
a dank crypt, oddly smile in darkness
with rats nesting in their vacant bellies,
while he- the real one- will carry on as
the town’s longest living drunk for one
more year.

Broken Window

“Stand aside, the shop keeper impolitely said,
paying customer first.” Mother and I stood aside
and waited it took long busy now before Yule,
she had a card from the social to purchase boots
and jumpers and I was getting fidgety and upset.

Finally we got our stuff in a brown paper bag,
time was hard fancy papers was for those who
had money. I was seven but the humiliation was
gnawing a big hole in my guts, mother said:
“Beggars can be choosers” I was silent.

The local paper reported about a broken shop
window, oddly nothing was stolen, I smiled
proud of my mother, she had a job nearby
cleaning the office of a tropical fruit importer,
in a good mood now she smoked a cigarette.

Portuguese Blues.

The kitchen is in perfect order nothing out
of place as winter light seeps through clean
windows and the fridge hums:” open me.”
I do and find cheese and tomatoes wrapped
in plastic, butter in a dish. No, too much work
making a sandwich and then put everything
neatly back in place. Coffee? Nah, it means
boiling water finding a mug and rinsing it
after use. The kitchen is full of gloomy light
I have to push my way out. On TV a big lady,
with dyed hair and powdered bosom, sings
Fado, dark eyes fill the screen with sadness;
yeah she has been around the block ok; I put
my jacket on and walk to the nearest bar.

The Awareness

As the days of light draw in I’m pulled
back to a mythical past, and I remember
a perfect moment, when time stood still
and we’re a contented family.

An alarm clock rang, a shift worker had
to get up, do his job, a summer evening
that would never return when nature
and humanity were as one

No one remember them now, traceless
but for a box of old photos in the drawer,
bones that rattle in the night; the expanse
between us is unbridgeable now

As the memory fades into a shadow
and faces are hidden in a miasma of time,
there is in the vanishing light a beacon
that still shines till my journeying ends.