The Tumbalist Raw beginnings are never pretty – tackle breakfast with my tabla & bib, there’s nothing going on. Chores are just traffic, no glory in birds & the sun is so predictable.
But it doesn’t last. My fledgling fingers tear off scabs & light yawns over the wounds. I will wonder before the day concedes… reminded of Douglas’ stylishly necrotic aplomb.
Secrets rest in storms well outside this friend’s shelter which is an ossuary of stasis. His expertise is his enemy, that comfortable place to live – a cell.
I force myself to stand, that’s a stand. Each clinquant day is adorned with brine-crusted eyes. Wisdom is a tribe that demands regular sacrifice.
Arts & air are statically charged, hanging silk. Miranda gets orchestral. We applaud as Mitchell breaks a rule – our possibilities for transgression are astounding.
The MRIs show rebellion in the spines, aging turns out to be expensive & participation is compulsory. But that’s a dull story. Other generations talk of wars. No one’s interested in everyday battles though we tell them at twice the volume, there’s
enough dark but it’s all still veined in argence. Happy is a hard word to sell so Sing! (prudence suggests perhaps not). I’ll try to insert levity. When that fails roll out generosity which only occasionally gets exhausted. I want the water & the bridge. Feast with tomcats, nestle in the down, be this paradox within continuity. Verge is both the end & the point of any new growth.
Intelligence, winter, integrity, joy. Our pretensions & hopes are massive, knowing leviathan lives are beyond repair we all work on building them yet. I have learnt to love my hopelessness, the best gift some god gave me. I shall be ardent in my failure. Think I have more… will make it so if it kills me. So said to Douglas & every shutting door.
World War
There was a massacre in the whole planet is a village. But we’re villains too, break a heart as we drink-drive to bliss. At medicine altars we are ordered by ordered families.
With our mighty tubs of territory empathic thieves & dirty saints each of us has much to explain as we wait for occasional glint. Getaway body, giveaway humanity.
The Easter Flips
Tried to hold my head in but amidst the futility of angels the herding of joy collapses that push of sunlight. Friends are out… a conflux involving minds.
Death-ridden rods are no longer gods. A colour of chords holy leaks anarchy grows best in the verges of river parks, we soar past the boats that money has polished all morning. Buckled by the leaves, my pretensions cave in, Harriet’s smile is the diet to die for. Ardent rides, teeming moment.
Don & Margie inscribed a waterside fever on buzzcut lawn. I left the balm to the bay. Janelle had archived flatter but I fall in love with argute balm One is obliged to pant beneath this cockatoo carillon. Our cage is remembered rage, now dishevelled parole – an echo of cold which children poke with mythic hilarity. Too much future fattens the heart. Then, turned round on downstream. can’t blame salutary spiders, we are the playground of that estuary. The skin of our lives thin. Emotional. Bile drains emergency, our minds lighten – this flagrant perfection. Scarcely grown up greybeards chuckle like loam as granite mothers crack-up. This has always been the point.
Tabula Rasa
Time hangs around my place
like an errant friend who overstays, drives you mad but then he leaves town & you grieve for those moments of shambolic intimacy.
Can’t be with him, maybe he’s living in some community now but I’m locked out of any gated communities, still too young for retirement lifestyle villas, too much of everything for lentils & the hippy drum.
Austerity breeds space, space breeds foolishness which is precious. Daniel smirks as I save the world. Ophelia says yes, thinks loving is again possible.
There is no god, I will die. Cultivate indifference & a measured ethics that even my cardinal thinks will get us at heaven.
But I’m drunk again – with moment this week. No one has been rescued. The river’s taxes spread the blame, my pains like polite children fuster at my feet.
Above a colloquium of Pacific black ducks I realise a jackhammer has been going on across the bay – all morning. It is a small thing beside remnant ideas & warming sun.
Mothers have rolled this day & are smoking it. Hazard reduction is a universal goodity. Gilding the liver we wear helmets to bed our cloaks of haze are immortal.
This could (but won’t) go on forever. Local Rural Fire Service seems to have blended a subtle mix of rum & feathers. The secret is to peel a living from your skin.
Back home around the poker table… Boredom
drinks your beer, has a take on everything. A tottering Certainty is perennially bleak, he needs a talking to.
Acceptance makes up the fourth, she’s already exhausted her stake but has bet carefully & will go home with small change in her pocket.
She lives in the past, but also in the present. All our laughs come from her interjections. That laughter is the real prayer before this monstrance filled with bone dust.
Les Wicks: Over 40 years Wicks has performed at festivals, schools, prison etc. Published in over 350 different magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 24 countries in 12 languages. Conducts workshops & runs Meuse Press which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry published on the surface of a river. His 13thbook of poetry isGetting By Not Fitting In(Island, 2016). [email protected] http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm