Near Dawn.
The night
sky is like one big black fucking eye.
There seems
no sense left,
no sense
left in throwing punches.
Something
stares down at me, it’s the moon I think,
blood shot
and peeling tears,
the drops,
sized like fat fucking fruit, thumping
and splitting on
the rotten boards of the balcony.
A fat tear
for weeping pain
a fat tear
for my drunken state, again.
And falling,
fill the ashtray at my feet,
my sorry fucking
soul, in cigarette butts
soaking up
the bloody rain.
Soaking up
the taste of highway soot,
the taste of
a lost souls petty shit,
Taste the
sweat in the coming storm,
taste the
juice of some distant bruise.
Taste the
shit in the soot
the ash in
each step
in that, left
early, loping walk home.
*
There’s a
couple walking on the street below,
swaying and
laughing between the small puddles,
lost in the
quiet contentment of two.
There’s
something in that secret.
For me, in
the healthy happiness
of one more well
earned drunken funk.
Home?
The look or a lack of it that black the black that dark down there buried deep filled with disappointments filled with all that discouraging sight.
We sent them there
to see that
and they’re coming back.
The one on top of the other carnage the bodies like garbage like nothing is coming trucked in the dismembered wrecks of every cracked and crying kid and every kneeling woman wailing and burning in all that disaffected loss.
And how about now
we sent them there
to see that
and now they’re back.
They see themselves in corner shop windows reflections of their limbs torn apart and busted and their friends amidst the putrefied ruins the carnage of their heroic aspirations.
In everyday breaths in everyday steps written in our faces for their bemusement the pumping blood all that humanity cast aside flung away in market places like dying carp flapping in the desert dirt.
We sent them there
to see that
and now we’re the bundled
death and corpses.
All standing in the rain and waiting and waiting for another mission another pair of boots coming down on us from someone else’s tidy war and they could rightly step aside having already seen our charred remains on another countries faces.
We sent them there
to see that
and now we’re too afraid to look
at all that black.
Unplugged.
The hardest thing
About splitting up
With that
vicious,
manipulating
bitch.
Was loosing access
to her sweet little
super fucking fast
broadband connection.
It’s tough love
on the god damn
dial up!
(Jan 2001 Pre Kevin 07)
Milking Pilgrimage.
The trees lean out, straining
Their dry leaves fly free
like a hail of Zulu spears.
Bored, I toss small stones
and savour their short flights
in defiance of the westerly wind.
I Turn away from the sting,
from the drought busted pastures,
and a sky scoured by dust.
Along the fence line,
coming up from the gully,
the black and whites meandering.
In long ambling bovine lines,
following the tracks, cut deep,
when the soils were dark and sticky.
The milkers stagger, their thick necks
bent in a mulish battle
against that dry killing wind.
One treads softly after another,
as they climb that long slope,
a journey, repeated their entire lives
Slow, quiet and resolute,
on their afternoon pilgrimage
to those rattling iron sheds.
To the heat, and the smells
of silage, sweet warm milk,
and dark, grass fed shit.
They file past me,
Their bursting udders beat rhythm
between their stained white legs.
The last dawdling milker
Hurries to catch her sisters
Waiting for her up at the sheds.
The dust plasters my shirt against me
and I wonder at those dull dark eyes
and scoff at that dim-witted gaze.
Suddenly, my hat is stolen
by that the damned westerly wind
and cursing I chase it through the dust.
Defeated, in those broken paddocks,
I begrudgingly envy the milkers
and their lofty bovine enlightenments.
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“The Portrait ” |
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