Consciousness of our return

Night's grating of steel on stone and splash
of water crashing from the buckets
brings back that moment in a flash;
the night burnt bright in limb's caress
and flesh yielding flesh in passions
blessed by sealed lips.

Abandon bested grace in our pummelled bed
where we found a beauty in a closeness
of our bodies welded hip to hip in cleavage
closer than the clench of life,
possessed each other's fevered soul,
embraced the darkness from us.

Our struggle of gigantic rhythms
found no modest harmony in fellow tunes,
and yet the war of lover's needs
touched mortality within our dreams.

In the light that shrieks from our potency
glares an image of each, perceived and bared
as only climacteric can, unclothe
in fervency of mutual ascent,
the nakedness of man.

The vision in that lucid truth
which quelled our raging passion,
the anguished gasps which quavered
to a warm and glowing balsam
is a thousand choral voices,
all wise men's tongues and wisdom
and a million unwritten poems.

In music of our dying embers chorus' strong
the cry of sanity returning,
unenchanted in our selfish song.
Subdued and silenced, limpness of a sighed
caress of movement, gentle, tender, and we part
to lie contused in humid sweetness;
the venom of our vigour cools,
belies our lucid state,
and the eerie bucket's dirge
echoes to the turn of fate,
a shivered jarring on the crumpled sheets,
discerned in coldness of the sea-bed,
dredges consciousness of our return.
© I.D. Carswell

No conscience in escape

Should you be allowed sole privilege
of unconscionable martyrdom?
This affliction is self-pity brought by suffering
as penitent to unrequited lust.

Private sexuality has you bound
In bonds no-one devised,
in silent bondage languishing,
abject, victimised and anguishing,
yet victor in the sum.

None but the coarsest heart could feign
to feel in simple kind and heed
the cry you echo in your need.
There is no escape from conscience,
there is no conscience in escape.

But why the female classic, why the passive role?
You know better life
with purer soul unwrought by self-despair,
your pride is signal, sentient,
not wifely, reviling humble care.

You can return; you held it by the ears
and heard the fiery words it uttered in your loins,
it is not the furnace in your mind
consuming passion blindly
but self-fulfilment by bodily design.
© I.D. Carswell

None is spared your handsome smile

The mystery of a smile that glows within your eyes
and is framed in an innocent countenance
passes not unheeded. Those transient's hallway
smiles and greetings offered through your door
are slyly seeking kisses you unwittingly bestow
each time you purse your lips
and say hello.

There is a bounty of pleasure in your pretty face
suffused with guileless feelings unconcealed
to every passer-by,
and none is spared your handsome smile
revealing to each courted glance
a promised tryst, an aired caress,
a moment of significance.

And when you venture forth your lines
are pleasing to the watcher's eye
of softened curves and billows in a tidy form
that draws a muted wish of sighs.
Voluptuous and languid grace placates your urgent stride
and pillows breast and buttock in a sultry swell,
all undulating gently with the tide.

Were you ungirded of conventions stays
and flowed to fill the place you own
in natural flesh, your unrestrained allure would so
ignite this reverie that lust would burst its seams;
your naked charm, that promise in your smile,
beckons madness in its sweetest form
and titillates illicit, luscious dreams.
© I.D. Carswell

Passions flight

"Zipless sex" one cynic called
this festival of fornication,
this celebration of new-found sexual strength
and urbane honesty, of sex for sex as sex alone
and not a public test of latent puberty.
These damsels riding hands and heels
pursue their prey with crop and spur
for prizes that are neurons firing salvoes
in their bellies, not weary, vintage clichés
or semen spurts that stain their pubic hair.
Theirs’ is a mindless drive to join
the trigger of the spasms
stirring powerful surges in their loins,
of reaching an orgasm.

A drama in a field I saw before
while walking near the horses. A filly
frisked and nipped the stallion sore
until his thick, black rod arose
all of a metre long,
and he mounted her and rudely thrust it in
with heaves that drove her flanks apart.
His nostrils bulged and flared
in the frenzy of his ride until she twitched,
disgorged his shaft and cantered off aside.
He followed, softened cock a sway,
flopping side to side, a comic sight,
unfinished in his business, intimidated
by her flight. She lead him far and teased
him every turn, standing quiet to take his shaft
a moment, half a thrust, a touch, and fleeing
as of whim. She milked him dry and raw,
his rod withdrawn, her cleft engorged
and glistening while I watched enthralled.
Her wanton wiles and artist's touch had stirred me deep,
it was a game she played so well
I only wish her season never ended.

There is faint motive in your hunt of sexual game,
of craving for extension, of seeking out exotic fruit
emboldened by invention. Life's cup spills diversions
in a bounty that confuses, you savour without style,
relentless urges palter, you are afraid it seems
to counter this inanity in case it proves a dream.
A weakness of your yielding flesh,
the treachery where wit cannot compel
it quiet, clouds the nature of reality, and
drives this single-minded search
where each new conquest proves you right
and fuels desire that swells until it hurts.

You are the matriarch, aloof and desolate,
a valkyrie to consummate the chosen sons,
anoint their swords in sacrifice and dub
them heroes of the night. They rub
and plunge without their eyes for miracles
you promise in the valley of your thighs.
Yet this vision of a vamp arcane confounds urbanity,
invites derision from its very source. You seem distraught,
elusive passion cedes your nerveless grip
and you wield your body in erotic seas
as a rudderless, sensuous ship.

We are the watchers stirred to witness sex,
thrilled with sympathetic energy
which quickens in our breath;
but other forces guide your bodily design
and moisten nether lips in unctuous flow
without correction. Your cerebrum in muzzled
with sensations, you are coming with your mind aglow
in riot of desires you can only tame to know;
and in the mellow ebb of truth you find
that passion's flight has left you, too, behind.
© I.D. Carswell

No disguising that he cares

There’s no disguising that he cares, he’s hitching
at his underwear with unconcealed distress,
he’s in a mess of moods, confused and clearly
ill at ease with flashy clothes he’d rather shed.

There’s no disguising whom he clothes his
feelings for, he’s sore appraised, trapped
inside a crude charade that falls too short
to be a dream, yet too real to be concealed.

There’s no disguising where he’d rather be,
and she despairs when anywhere but here
and here is where the source of disrepair
disarms his soul and steals serenity.

She smiles and says he’s looking great,
his shirt and tie a work of art and could they
have the picture please, and right away,
they look so good together – please, oh please!

He’s on his knees, driven by her charm
to acquiesce, her heady innocence has mingled
with his nervous sweat, he holds her hand and
shyly smiles and looks a little sad. And click.

There,
it wasn’t all that hard
now was it,
dearest Grandpapa.
© I.D. Carswell

Twenty four hour embrace

Awakening
in the twenty four hour embrace of a few moments sleep,
where half a lifetime eludes dreams;
and feeling you were cheated
by too much gin and lack of sleep
in these unconsummated fumblings.

Reunions of this passion seem anomalous,
do we feed self-interests which destroy its mutuality?
To cling together is a punishment
when coursing blood is chilled by footsteps in the hall.

Guilt's malignancy stalks
this gas-lit shadow dance upon the walls
where perversity commands that guilt arouse
an oestrus in the embers of our trance;
and magic moments muted in taut breath
are crushed in weighted consequence,
discretion flees the field to heighten senses
steeped in self-pity, drowned In self-indulgence.

Is this trauma just a scene
in which the players claim immunity from plight
by plea of actors licence?
The effect is more abrasive than abandonment
to passion's flight.
© I.D. Carswell

Puissant morons

Clean your glory glasses, scrub the lenses clean
and see the puissant morons stare;
garbed in common guises far from unfamiliar,
guises fair as anyone you know or care,
and what they seem is who they are,
and what they do and what they don’t
reflects their heir to common rationality.

They’re a film upon our ears and eyes
which mocks our haul to sanity, to plague
our petty little worlds with toxic insincerity.

Puissant I say, I meant ‘piss-ant’, but both apply,
they’re decadent, obsolete, a non-event.

Yet tell them so and bear the wrath; I’d rather not,
I’m kind of loath to bear more scars as recent as today.
So why, you say, demur, now are you man or mouse?


I'll even purr if you can rub my fur just right
and suffer fools as gladly as the next
but keep those bastards out of sight.
© I.D. Carswell

In these quiet moments

In these quiet moments before the night
softens the mountains of the South
and deflates the clouds
that float beneath their peaks,
the dying sun's rich, peach glow
deepens in the gathering gloom.
There, where the mists stretch
a false horizon between the sea
and the land’s end
Aratika glides across the trackless strait
and winks out beyond Terawhiti.
Taputeranga Island looms up in the bay
beneath my windows,
gathering grandeur in the shadows
that blot the features of little wonder,
commanding the bay in a mysterious night.

It is light, the night has passed in fitful sleep
and the dawn greets the gulls cry
as they circle a softer countenanced island,
the fishing boats point into the wind
that crawls a trance-like, ripple-pattern
across the bay.
The day begins a pastel glow
behind the Heads, and spreads
its cloudless scan to the mountains
which stand impassively guarding the Strait.
© I.D. Carswell

Night’s sentinel

Even tonight will pass into memory’s oblivion,
doomed, despite an ardent reunion
of once estranged yet precisely matched parts,
to a guiltless verdict – a foregone conclusion.
As you dissolve twice-blessed
in a kaleidoscope of dreams,
claimed by the deep, curdling sands
and sink, absorbed in sated self-suffusion,
I sense hard-edged awareness balefully prick,
dredging insomnia, haggardly thick with past phantoms
relating the fates of all vast and antique storms
that ever rose and menaced our skies, a raging
suspension of consensual lives which all but passed
into nothing; wise and implausible storms that calmed
hearts in thrall, teased sad wrinkled eyes before falling
easily upon our sore and thirsting land.

Even tonight will last only as long
as eponymous night can last, decreed
by blindness and a beggar’s mask to beg
in the darkness ahead of the light - and
when it is all said and done, perpetually
follow a transient path
under an old and intransitive sun.

And in the evening’s ritual dying and before tomorrow’s dawn flies
this night’s unguent shore I am more awake than trying to sleep,
at last alive in glory, fast-steeped, encased in a mould
of your liquid embrace where tied in fine bondings I fuse
with the dew from your sleep-used cheeks, rejoice in the scent
of your fragrant hair; absorbed in still-comfort and reading your skin’s
mercerised signs from the melt of our union – united in sum
and not caring to part, suborned, a transfusion of wearing your heart.

Yet I desert you again in a dilettante swoon, atoning for deeds,
bleeding with sins, an amateur whom while knowing his trial,
self-mutilates in thin pledges and bogus denial,
unable to render or stomach his fate… I won’t be reborn, it’s too late
and too long to the innocence of dawn; the judging is done, it schemes
in the bier, and calamitously so for surely it seems
I’ve abused my renewal in your library of dreams.

As the light from a new day splits the anxious night
along its softened seams and spreads a filigree
of lucent threads to gleam in my mired eyes,
I am alight; the clouded cold ebbs to journey’s end
and tangles in the bends of broken sleep,
and though I’ve only strung a line or two
in a dearth of odds and ends where meaning’s clear
I know I can return from here; night’s sentinel will wait
good-naturedly to place my fate. I can without fear
rejoin your embrace and thrill in the joy of your awakening face;
comforts abide and time has stood still in a blaze of enlightenment;
I know what is true – as I always will, my comfort is You,
Forever is true, You are as you are, and You are as I see you.
© I.D. Carswell

So let us dare

How do we discover an antidote to each other,
a faculty to commune in spiteful space?
Our bleeding hearts and noxious farts
tie us in a hopeless chase to free this place
of evil parts that detonate without behest;
distress the poise we need to keep our sanity.
Profanity which vents each manic crash
rends the fabric where we weave our divers ends
and tangles in the warp and weft,
we are left to ponder with regret the bolt of cloth unwoven,
the promises betrothen, the futures that are stolen.
And yet there is a silence in the loom,
a space as free of curdled dreams as paradise
allows; its crashing quiet assaults the senses,
overwhelms the sad defences, avows a calm
which would eschew an armistice – a synthesis
of each of us, an end of war. Before we tear
the loom apart let us heed the healing quiet,
listen to the tick of time, hearken to its here and now,
let it invade our where and how and open up our seething minds
before the cloying blindness rends us mindless.
The quiet and calm and dignity needs no antidote from me
or you, nor do we need a place apart, we start right here
in peace and light and in the dome of silence where
our voices join in common prayer.
We know that we are free to care,
so let us dare.
© I.D. Carswell

Don’t talk to me of War

Don’t talk to me of War or stalk the ground
our fabled soldiers died upon, I’m sound
of limb and strong of will, my mind as clear
as when we learnt those gory lessons founded
by our forebears; I’m whole still, my sanity intact,
wife and sanguine life extant despite
the wrack of loyal Service, though I will avow
some wrinkled stress in thirty years, more or less,
and pride as signal as the very best
of graduates from OCS.
Oh the pomp and circumstance of that,
the cringing revelations, the flat drum beat
of sibling cries alive with drear elation,
steeped in deep emotion, plied and pried
by driving tides of damned humiliation.
In those early hours we sat confused
in closet ease to crew a hurly burly year,
taking cheer in kindred arms and comradeship,
bonded in the object cup of common deed,
proud and young and strong and needing
just the Company to keep the faith. In that year
we ran a cracking chase, a course of tally ho
and view halloo, of pulses racing in a strain of sweat
that smudged our painted faces,
entrained our natural graces,
tempered us in diverse ways without ado although
we grew and learned to look out for each other,
holding in our hearts a strong belief that each
and every one of us would reach the fabled end.
And when the thief of Time denied those rites to some
who sundered in the night; a shameful passing without fête
or argent cause, or silent class debate,
we knew, and turned our eyes, it could have been our fate.
Who where we then? Fine striplings come
to take their place in larger schemes,
subordinate, acquiescent, yet free of shocking dreams.
Who are we now? It takes a mighty leap to bridge the gap
or shed entanglements that wrap us to our past
and sleep the deep and blameless sleep,
survive the shrieking terrors of the night;
for some the task is nemesis, for some the quiet
of peaceful death is rife, for most it is a part of life.
And yet we know that when we meet again
the years will disappear and time will be our friend.
© I.D. Carswell

It is an abhorrent thing

It is an abhorrent thing, this incarceration of your vulnerability,
profoundly cruel in the way you were beaten
to your knees, blithely unaware it was a battle lost
for your health and wellbeing. It was dreadful to witness
your vigour evaporate, sapped by a merciless agent
of discontinuity, sold into the slavery of a sickness
that debilitates your will from within.

I am shocked, too, at my smallness in the face of it,
cowed by the enormity beyond, which threatens
the core of our being as one. And seeing you pale
and traumatised in a hospital bed, whispering
in a tiny, distant voice, the fire in your eyes a flicker
where it blazed before,
I am unashamedly terrified.

And yet you inspire me with your selflessness;
though sorely ill you strive to ease my ragged sense
of right and wrong which leaves me devastated.
But I can think clearly, it is me who should be
abed in the hospital ward instead of you. It is I
who should shield you from the pain and uncertainty.
Truly, I should be suffering there instead of you.

As it is I fear the melancholy of this empty house
which echoes with the effervescent lives we lived
before this cursed disease arrived to blight
our fragile happiness. As it is I fear the worst
in every living moment, hoping for reprieve,
fearing for my hope, and caring for you such
my aching heart should burst.
© I.D. Carswell
Peachester May, 2005

The light was always you

The light was always you
In the beginning there was light,
abundant light that truly lit the way,
time was never lost in dodging flights
of feckless shadows and darkness seldom
ever blight the brightness of our days.
And when the shadows came at night
and stretched into the weary dawn, tangled
in the sleepers’ eyes and yawning in their
tousled hair, barely then we were aware.
And that was when we dwelt in dismal shades
of grey, remembering the flawless summers’ days
we left behind in broken time, dismembering
the quintessence of everything that bound us
thence and held us tightly on our way.
And now we stumble in the dark and walk
a sorely riven path that’s strewn with rubble
of our tumbled past, strive to find our perfect light,
aghast the gloom compounds our plight and treats
us to affray; could we ever find our flawless day
within this darkened room, or ever find the kindly light
we seek whilst stepping in each other’s way?
The bruises which we bear from crashes in the night
are sorely worn, we’re torn by crazy flights of fantasy
despite the anchors of our past, deluged by vast
illusions with no caste or frame to give a name to;
I know it’s not a game and I despair
at my lost sight but see a worldly light that glows
within the warmth of you, a light to guide you true,
a light to surely show you where to go;
and where you go is where I have to be
because I’m blind, did not construe,
the source of light was always you.
© I.D. Carswell

Without you I am blind….

Clouded dreams

At dawn I dreamed of wispy clouds,
I had the time to wield and watched
the regimented lines of cirrus racing
from the north by west; elusive
strands of airy ice that spread
up high across the gravid sky.

Each seemed less obsessed than
speeding to a destination far-away,
constrained in ever shifting shapes that lead
somewhere out to sea, an unseen deep
instanced in my mind beyond the lines
of obfuscating hills, off where they belonged,
enthroned in solemn dignity.

This afternoon the clouds are cumulus
for so their shape suggests, dumpy lumps
that hang in sombre clumps descended
from their aerie vastness. A tired cirrhosis
of their former selves, they droop about
the mordant blue and plod their way at very least
in ordered flow from west to east.

Tonight I’ll dream of stratus clouds and gentle rain
to drench the shroud that binds the earth in powdered
dust, rising in asthmatic puffs about our dusty feet;
and sleep I will with cirrus wings to soar above
the earthy things that strive to snare my clouded dreams.
© I.D. Carswell

Captains Three

We sailed a pebbled sea in The Weeping Willow
with our Captains Three and a crew of me.
I was four, practically five, a cabin boy blue,
too young to do more than cry. Why
they even took me I can only guess,
emotional blackmail - no less would suffice
to explain how I shared their Corsairs’ domain.
The Jolly Jacks’ were my sisters three who
were a little older, naturally, so I was the crew.
That gave them scope to do, had they the wont,
legitimately those despicable things sisters
think are fun. I had to run pointless errands,
walk the plank, clear crocodiles from
the dank pools at the docks edge
and still yet, pile pebbles so they could
cross the creek and not get their feet wet.
I regret I did not play the game and complained,
bellowed wretchedly they said, enough to bring rain.
Thankfully the ship never put to sea, it remained
moored at its creekbank dock; as steady
as a rock was our supple barque, anchored
to the Mangatoitoi Valley stream
that bubbled by our Ngatapa home. I never
sailed it alone, and even when my brother
could walk the grassy banks to the dock,
somehow we’d talk ourselves out of putting to sea.
It wasn’t right without Captains Three.
© I.D. Carswell

Paper towel

She wrapped a paper towel around his softened cock
in what he thought was quaint affection, that was new,
an after-thought perhaps, refined appreciation?
She had never talked a lot in bed just let her actions
tell her needs in ways he understood with very little
coaching. And when he asked about the towel she said
relax, at last I’m bleeding, it’s a great relief, but I don’t
want to change the sheets. For him the revelation was a
sorry thought and dulled his urge to rise once more
and romp into the dawn. She must have read his mind,
held him close and whispered in his ear she didn’t care
about the sheets that much. But the paper towel
remained a hollow shell around his withered cock.
© I.D. Carswell

Other side

The dung was recent, not an event
unusual in itself but difficult to explain
of cows grazing the other side of the fence.
Too new to be dismissed without a thought,
disturbing evidence which brought
a desired state of bovine restraint
into an irksome disgrace.
We couldn’t see a beast
ranging free, eating
and defecating on the run,
a spirited debate arose implicating
any one anonymous member
of the species, not necessarily a resident,
perhaps a passing vagrant who ate, shat and
quit the orchard before the rising sun.
Or you might suppose that was the case
when all your cattle are accounted for, grazing
innocently where they’re meant to be.
And it goes to show the first mistake
one makes in branding cattle dumb,
they’re social beasts, preferring company,
but given opportunity and a temporary gate
will make the boldest moves from subtly
suppressed but promising intelligence.
So one, or maybe two had forced the fence,
ah, temporary gate, ate some grass,
deposited dung,
meandered back to the herd
before they could be sprung.
And they will do it all again until the rest
decide the grass is greener on the other side
of the temporary gate,
ah, fence.
© I.D. Carswell

Shook off the dust

I rediscovered my youngest brother in 1972,
it was a construed meeting in Wellington
some years after we last shared the same
breathing space. Time and place were
not significant but I recall the glowing
face of a young man whose parentage
no-one would doubt as he greeted me.

It was a moment where time stands
still from one breath to the next, where
invisible effects cancel earthly constraints
and the conversation of eleven years past
continues without a thought a word being
lost. We didn’t shake hands, we just
shook off the dust and renewed our lives.
© I.D. Carswell

Ciabatta for lunch

After lunch I like to ponder on
the simple things that bring delight,
and any topic might evolve
– it really doesn’t matter;
today the first which sprang
to mind was crusty Ciabatta.

Now here’s a bread whose name
implies a slight within its meaning.
Despite the connotation its name
derives from shape – not taste, and 
ciabatta stands for ‘slipper’ in Italian.

It should be tried; you can’t deny
yourself the gustatory pleasure,
freshly torn and dipped in extra
virgin oil, or toasted golden brown
and drowned with powerful flavours,

the bread delivers savours foreign
to our usual ways. They say it’s great
bruschetta, rubbed with garlic,
brushed with oil, grilled and dipped
in soups or dishes redolent with juices.

Too soon since lunch without excuses.
© I.D. Carswell, 1970

Give her a chance

There is a risk when you open up your heart,
a risk that when you start along the path of
saying how you care – a risk, an fundamental chance
that twists of viscous fate will rule the day;
and while you tremble as you say those simple words
which might expose your harried soul, doubt may
pave the way in words to teeter in a seething mind,
or perhaps excite concupiscence in kind.

There’s risk in being blind where arrows fall,
there’s risk to fire them in the air at all before
you’re sure your aim is true, and where the heart
at which you loose them wears a guise enamoured
by the prize of love’s bequest, you’re unsurpassed.
Though beware, sharpened arrows fall with little care
to render pain, and pain unnamed is still decisive pain
to cancel out the gain of frail surmise.

There’s risk to take no risk at all. There’s risk in an appalling
bleakness of no dare, no aspiration only fear of ridicule,
rejection, condemnation. If that’s your
contemplation you deserve to fail; now look, she’s
sitting sweetly there, a winsome smile, a casual glance,
she stifles stares she has the guile, ask her up to
dance. To think of failure means you’ll surely fail,
give her a chance to show you how she cares.
© I.D. Carswell

Good morning sir or madam

Good morning sir or madam.
Please tell
me
how to help you.
It isn’t any bother,
I
am mainly here
to listen, or
if that’s what
you’d rather,
I
can do all the talking,
that’s no trouble either.

You are nodding for the latter?
I
will do all the talking?
No?
Nodding for some other.
Is that a sign of silence?
Confirming yes it is. You want
me
to be silent?

Why, thank you, sir or madam.
I
am glad to be of service.

Good morning sir or madam.
Please tell
me
how to help you…
© I.D. Carswell

See both sides

You could stand astride the ridge and see
both sides, perhaps that’s what contrived a reason
for returning to the spot (though not a crucial
part of Final Exercise). I know it cleansed
me when I stood and moved my head just so,
engendered such a sense of the surreal,
blending as it did with what was real and
far away, a powerful kind of healing,
a feeling that sustained your distanced soul.

The major wouldn’t go to where I stood,
he said it wouldn’t matter if he did, our
business wasn’t there. We only walked the
path up to the ridge to test the fitness of
the very best. Those who passed could rest,
the stragglers and the lesser lights were let
to glimpse the view. As the major said, for them
the business was at end and cleansed or not
it really didn’t matter.
© I.D. Carswell

The logic of this state

Marking time in pencil strokes across a virgin page
and waiting for coincidence of heart-beat and second-hand,
keying to the electronic blips that phase
the passing time; visionary states of grace
do not deluge to stupefy a mounting conscience,
prescience would ease the wait and melt
the phlegm of apprehension clotted
in the membranes of my mind.

Flirting either side of double-edged consequence
is guileless, but pensive pleasures thrill
the senses, dull the pain of wounds unopened sure
as self-indulgence soothes the same away.
Sensations which dispose tumescence drown the psyche
in a viscous spate, arousing urges out of circumstance;
there is no relief from anguish,
but even pain anticipated heightens senses in disdain.

Tautologies are offered as responses
to the questions never asked
in tactful, secretive connivance after motives
equally evident and equally unmasked.
This is the razor of decision
slashing with discretion every way one turns
with precisely measured precedent;
covert wounds that sap conspired vitality
traumatise each act of mute consent,
Inaction is not ominous, paralysis invites
survival of the spirit without an end in sight.

With waiting time suspended in hiatus
ambient diffusion breaks the drought of quiet
and wordless animation,
and breathless calm with no temporal end
to blight its claim of muzzled grace
invades the logic of this state.
© I.D. Carswell

For freedoms of the birds

If you’ve come upon a stranded bird with broken wing
your sympathies ignite, the very sight entrains
a sequence of contrite compassion rising from
the awesome power of birds aloft in joyous flight,
a marvelling at freedoms they delight in.

To soar and wheel in weightless air, a sense of levity
arousing passions that despair at beauty lost, severed
in the bleak and hard impaction of a loss of flight, benign
restrictions, drear, unsympathetic anchors catching freedoms
unaware, acting in a weighted drama of benighted gravity.

And yet we see a similar plight in Nature’s use, the casualness
where it becomes a sanctioned lavatory abused and fouled,
our admiration drowned and bartered every day in senseless ways
of compromised and cluttered peaceful places we preserved
for freedoms of the birds, for curing sad depression.

Indeed, we’ve brought ourselves to breast the outer edge of an
extinction, the ledge is shattered where the mirror sits, it should excite
a future view but still obscures a clarity of vision, we try to use illusion
to improve our daily news, refuse to see the symbols of the
rot compounding in its useless, hedonistically obtuse reflection.

We delude ourselves with fantasies, reuse distinctions claiming more
is less, and less is just corrected portion of the former wonders bad
dispensed as tokens of the riches we were once the heirs to.
We know we’ve used the last of Earth’s munificent largesse and even
thought they know it too our stolid leaders still digress.
© I.D. Carswell

No man’s land

There is a wasted space between
us, a plain as large as the Gobi,
a treeless pan that makes
the Simpson seem no less scary
than a barefoot stroll in a sandy
and featureless desert.

It wasn’t planned this way, along
the track the arctic mesa we
sleep in became a corral of
divergence, a battlefield of
allegiance defined only by
the sides we sleep upon.

We are confined to the margins of a
vast sleeping edifice separated by
a ‘no-man’s-land’ raked and raddled
with imaginary salvoes of lethal cannon
fire, swathed in rumour and invective,
entered only under duress of a white flag.
© I.D. Carswell

Plonker head

Etymology, ever wondered where that came
from? It’s not the sort of thing you’d dine-out
on, regardless how cleverly you played it,
too sort of dry and unhistrionic, not the way
we poets like to play with words.

Take a euphemism, a word or phrase used
instead of a term that might be considered
too direct, derisive or offensive – but meaning,
in a more colloquial sense,
exactly the same thing.

Say we take the term ‘plonker’ (British), marry it
to ‘head’ (an Americanism), and create a
new schism in understanding with ‘plonker head’;
literally a ‘dickhead toilet’, or perhaps a
‘wanker-with-a-head-full-of-shit’.

It doesn’t mean exactly that, it merely suggests
the term dickhead may have a wider
range of feelings attached than the simple,
disparaging report of inexcusable social failings
addressed to some geeky, maladroit inept.

So the next time someone raises your ire
use the epithet ‘plonker head’ and see what
you get. It could be the start of a beautiful
relationship, a succinct battle of wits, or a
hissy fit with limp brandishing of wussy wrists.
© I.D. Carswell