With intriguing hints

Okay, I got it wrong,
it ain’t that old-style
manic depressiveness
and it ain’t
the new-fangled
bi-polar neither.

I haven’t been fixated
on sex in weeks, or
years – what’s sex anyway?
I don’t talk fast or slow
enough to qualify,
I just yell. And I ain’t

speeded up
or slowed down that I
recollect – why, hell,
I just poke along
like the slow ol’ boy
I always was. Sure,

I loose my temper
now and then, who
don’t? But I wouldn’t
be terribly fussed if
I didn’t never find
it again. So what’s

supposed to be
biting my ass? I don’t
know; it ain’t paranoia
insofar as I can tell;
I don’t feel nobody
is out to get me

like anywhere
near as much
as I used to.
Goddamn it,
probably I’m just
depressingly normal

with intriguing hints
of all the things
that I seem to be.
© I.D. Carswell

The light of day

I found them in a folder
foully mildewed from damp,
still pressed together, face to face,
hip to hip, as they were
when I put them there
43 years ago.

Christ, the pages stank
– a rankness reaching
back almost to another grave,
a burial sacrosanct of thought
in cruelly handwritten script
interred without measured release,
painful words gouged out of a
strained relationship doomed to die
because it never knew the light of day.

We had hidden in the thankless
dark, fucked our brains out
every night as if our last
until it was.

In the lonely days that ensued
I wrote alone the hundred pages
I never dared to show. And never will.
They’ll never see the light of day.
© I.D. Carswell

Reading Bukowski

Another hour
reading Bukowski,
I think
I’m still sane,
I am strung out,
wrung
out and in denial;
with effort

I can smile
at the boy genius
he met on the train going
down the Coast.

Nope,
it’s not pretty,
for sure,
and were I deflated
by the same perfunctory
ocean I’d never
noticed before
I guess
I’d think like that too.

He was trapped
in a child’s word picture
that shrank

him

from

view
© I.D. Carswell

http://www.levity.com/corduroy/bukowski.htm

I have five sons

I have five sons, the old man boasted,
his eyes glowing with delight, but
the woman who interrupted his reverie
with a long-suffering and drawn-out
sigh read him a gentle lecture,
only two are yours, you doting fool.
Now tell the truth.

True, he replied, only two are my natural
sons but the other three are an equal source
of delight. I think of them as an infrangible unity.

I know they are my sons, the warmth and spirit
of their greeting melts my heart; when they are
clasped to my bosom with no pretence and
nothing but clear sentiment in their eyes.

The woman’s eye’s misted, she did not cry
easily, but she cried for the bona fide belief
the old man expressed so succinctly. Yes,
she admitted, there is no pretence.
© I.D. Carswell

Who all go to Doyles

It is the last refuge of the older set,
too recent to be an institution, established
too long to be taken for granted except by
the restless souls of the 60’s and 70’s and their
doting families, plus a few trendy air-heads who
arrived recently at the realisation ‘this is where
it is at’. There are older restaurants in Watson’s
Bay, obviously wiser purveyors who have 

the uncompromising wherewithal not to
compromise their culinary skills or hire non-immigrant
itinerants to serve in their kitchens. For them
the crowds that wash in and out with the tide,
exhilarated by the fast ferry ride, are a distant
but useless domesticated beast of burden bearing
magical wallets filled with undesirable coin of
the realm. And who all go to Doyles.
© I.D. Carswell

Walked to Cammeray

That day we walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge
on the way back to Cammeray, we’d been to Doyles
on an often discussed but never actually completed
pilgrimage for a legendary lunch of fish and chips; it
was a raging success but the sea-cat trip back was over
in a flash, which hardly seemed adequate, and thus imbued
with a surfeit of brisk sea air and fortified by several
beers we started out on foot from Circular Quay.

We’ve walked the old rust and rivets before so it wasn’t
a great deal, though the thought of catching a bus in
North Sydney seemed an appalling waste of a brilliant
afternoon. And on we walked. Ninety minutes we agreed
it took, plus two bottles of water, and a couple of
kilos of sweat, at least. My feet were protesting and
I was assured by the severely abused appendages I
would regret the stupid decision to walk the whole way.

Suffice to say we survived a memorable day.
Hell, it is the stuff we’ve had dreams about, where
ordinary events are woven into the tapestry of legends,
expanded into impossible feats of grandeur; we’ll tell our
grandkids as doting septuagenarians of the exaggerated
day we walked from Watson’s Bay to Cammeray
after celebrating their daddy’s thirtieth birthday
with a famous Doyle’s fish and chips lunch.
Perhaps we won’t mention the fast sea-cat.
© I.D. Carswell

More than she appeared

Manet - Portrait of a Horsewoman
There was something mad
about it, an introduction of a
noted horsewoman in words
that said she was nothing
more than she appeared,
an ordinary, anonymous human
being, and yet we shared an
instantaneous intimacy as close
and as clear as a pair
of long-standing lovers.

They might have equally said
she was a virgin, said it credibly,
I would have agreed.
As if I cared, she could have been
everything and anything;
I knew nothing about her
except for her long, blonde
hair, mercurial wit, the
pair of mischievous eyes, those
magnificent thrusting tits.

In the glare of a fire that
evening we discovered
measureless nakedness,
explored the boundaries
of bodies aching in delirium,
tasted feverish liquors
spiced with salty tang,
sonorously rang again
and again the bells
of intense pleasure.

When the fires burned to a
gentle glow I learned about
her, the horses she rode,
where her referent self resided.
She chided me,
the less you know is best,
I swear that even
with what you know now
you will not understand
me in the morning. I am 

a child of my time, while
my parents and I have
parted ways, I will marry the
man they approve who
loves me. Until then I desire
every boy with dove-soft
eyes, will ride them relentlessly
until their stiff cocks
are limp and crying, lock
them in the stable of my mind.

For three months, out of sheer
lust and madness our reveries
renewed – the self-indulgence
did not interfere with her
equestrian privacy, and when
she announced, I can’t come
next weekend,
or possibly the next,
I’m getting married,

then I was visibly shaken.
She said with that deep,
enigmatic smile, instead
of grieving, I should
be greatly relieved.
© I.D. Carswell

Full & fruity

A cabernet, full and fruity,
deep purple-red in the glass,
lingering blackberry lilt, soft
tannins balanced and long
to the tongue. This is the
perfect accompaniment,
all I need is a moment
to share it with.
© I.D. Carswell

Saving grace

Surrounded by the dreary lives
of greedy symbiotes who feed
off endless crumbs, empowered by
placid planks of utter bunk
allowing parasites to breed,
the laisse faire society where
mutual needs are sycophant
and grovel in the hollow bins and
empty banks of dead intelligence.

Who would you be if you
could think without the
weight of thousands pressing
at your back, without the
hands that stroke and praise
and flatter this and that;
and grasp and twist and
gobble up your every phrase
as if it was a saving grace.

God forbid you should believe
this calumny of wit, it’s yours you
fool, you’ll never need to see it
in their eyes or hear it from their
sodden lips, or worse, to read it
with a guilty glow of pleasuring
suffused from tits to toes, from
orifice to orifice, from cock to fist.

Now you know my sympathies
are cold and steeled with bitterness,
my heart a fortress ever closed
against the press of fawning
dross and avarice, I will not
feed the symbiotes regardless
of their frantic needs, I have disowned
their plaintive praise, I will be pleased
to struggle on alone.
© I.D. Carswell

Peace denied

He cried and brokenly confessed,
I lied, he said, and all these years my dreams
have been tormented by his pleading mouth,
bright blood bubbling wordlessly, accusing me.
I lied because it was so stupidly wrong that he
died, that he was killed by freakish chance, a
frantic trigger finger and a flash of movement
in the corner of the eye.

Alas, the malevolent bullets know
no friend or foe and unleashed go with
unseemly haste true to their destiny.

He died while we waited in profound shock
for medevac, dumbfounded we had killed
a comrade, scared for our lives. And while
we waited the black-clothed enemy attacked.
We fought with disbelief, then anger, they had
sensed our grief and sought to kill us easily while
we lay aground protecting our dead comrade.

In the battle’s aftermath, when we had regained
our wits, I wrote he was wounded and had died in
the first moments of the exchange. The gunner who
squeezed the trigger and ended his life, sick with
remorse, cried his choke-voiced thanks.

Now I, too, need the peace denied me.
Please release me from my dreams.
© I.D. Carswell

Where they want to go

You’ve dreamed up piquant phrases
that describe in fancy flavours
the atavistic phases of the moon,
or some such clutch of trashy clichés
you’ve imbued with painted life in
hope they might excite the limp, effete,
imagined connoisseurs of verse.

You’ve rummaged in your purse for
bottled compliments to dab about
yourself, the thick and pungent epithets
of grease and flattery you bought
with rancid thinking while copulating
freely with your cerebrum and lofting
animate and naughty thoughts.

It is complete, the words are tight
the rhyming neat, the meter and
the sound is right, it’s you in every
sense, exactly like the airy verse that
went before. You shove it out the door.
It bounces back in flames, this soulless
crap is worse than shit applied as salve

to wounded pride. So you start again.
This time your aim is less converse, the pain
within your chest is terse and to the point,
you write your verse to free the gravid clutching
at your heart and feel the easing of the strain,
the words are flowing once again, prepared
this time, to take you where they want to go.
© I.D. Carswell

Three words or less

If it can be said
in three words
or less, she
explained, say it,
otherwise
remain hushed.
You’re forever
making long-winded
dissertations,
prefaced with
I and ending in We,
numbing my ears
needlessly.

He was
dumfounded,
the profound
affirmations
and earnest
declarations
of his deep,
enduring love
had been
dismissed
as rambling,
and discursive
shit.

Three words or less!
The best he could
come up with was
a terse:
“I’m leaving you!”

That’s four she said.
© I.D. Carswell

Dimensions of love

It comes down to
an overstated
four inches,
11 minutes missing in action
and 27 surplus pounds.
These are the dimensions of love.
You can work out the exact
details; there’s not too much to
think about – and the claim
is germane to movable excuses.

So, when did you last see
your toes, have an erection
that spanned one and a half hands
or breathed deeply for fifteen minutes
without blacking out? No doubt
these are criteria you can
understand!

The measure of love is a grand
piece of eclectic-strategic design,
where the notation of a quick shag
with frantic, breathless passion
in the semi-clothed shadows of
a steamy back seat falls short of a
healthy plan for a relationship.

You need time to reflect on the
mythologies and lies, time to apprise
a concept where size matters and
acknowledging it aids survival, an
accord beyond self-gratification aimed
to prolong passion, and a plan to disown
27 pounds of worthless testosterone.
© I.D. Carswell

Truth is a play on words

You can make light of it if you wish,
brush it off with a shrug and a wry smile,
tomorrow will be a new page, another
breaking story. But the controversy still
rages. You’ve never listened to the voices
anyway, never heeded the chaste call
of complimentary reason, never agreed
to the hoary ambiguities of wisdom. You
play it your way. These vignettes of your
artistry are all that matters, the truth is
a play on words, and no-one but the
naked man in your heart understands.
© I.D. Carswell

Wide-eyed in wonderment

Circa February 1951 – the first poem
I ever wrote didn’t rhyme;
I remember being told so tactfully
at the time, and that it didn’t matter,
but I must have missed the implication,
to me it was useless blather.

Then our teacher got enthused and
gave eager praise, read our fledgling
verses aloud while we sat amused
or mortified or glowing proud; I suppose
it was to make us literate, encourage
confidence, engender sentiment.

I could read by then, and reading
was a source of greater pride to me
than writing rhyming words for her to
spout; I also found derisive comments
written in the lavatory a seeded lexicon
for use in writing better verse.

So don’t try and tell me that it didn’t
matter; course it did, she read easy
on the ears Janet & John crap with that
cat & hat & mat Dr Seuss stuff
thirty years before his time of tone
deaf and mind numbing verse.

Now I recognise it was all about words,
easing the hard symbols into reading,
but it left a bleeding legacy of tortured,
torrid rhyme that dogs us worse than
battered clichés, split infinitives, soulless
similes adrift and mashed metaphor.

I wonder what I am writing for these days.
I know it’s not for praise, or to be borne aloft by
vacuous comments, or rated in numerical
content by anonymous readers. I think it’s still
the same fledgling desire to be read aloud and
listened to breathlessly, wide-eyed in wonderment.
© I.D. Carswell

Symmetrically Bound

There is so little to distinguish
the living from the dead when
both are symmetrically bound.
Life and death are optimistic
concepts of a nothingness,
extremities of the same view.
It is said one cannot meaningfully
be one without the other,
tho’ they mutually exclude.

Today I am neither;
I am convinced
by an unshakeable
sense of contentment.
© I.D. Carswell

Perhaps this is what it means

I am reborn every morning
tho’ free of nativities’ original event,
arriving nevertheless squirming and
breathless into a World of an eye blink
which I know I never left;
I drown in a flood of bounteous springtide,
it renews my optimism, renders me
weightless and naïve, able to soar seamlessly
into the spirit world, cross physical borders
without the clutch of atmospheric events.
I witness the break of day free of cosmic
advent, I see challenging horizons but no
frightening distance, I listen to birdsong and
care not they are eating my grain.
This is a place where I can sow the seeds
of my joy again, plant zygote ideas
and watch them grow. Perhaps
this where I can find my Aztlán,
perhaps this is what it means.
© I.D. Carswell

Celebration for life

The special day that you were born
began a celebration to last the whole
duration of your life – a gift for which
you pay no levied fee, so take your blessing
thankfully on every morning’s wakening.

The way we mark each birthday fête
with tributes and in gathered intimates
displays in sum on just one day
in numbered hours and gaudy flowers
one year of happy ‘wakenings.

We may await this special day with pleasure
or unease, but know we can’t regain a
sorry day mislaid or thrown away, so how
we live the days between will credit us
to be repaid in simple kind just once a year.

When you awake and greet each dawn
give thanks again that you were born, and
when you go to sleep each night pray you’ll
wake to further life. Further life, and life worth
making the joy behind this celebrating.
© I.D. Carswell

Happy Birthday Aaron - 30 years young!

Scale of satisfaction

How simply are you satisfied? A glance,
a fleeting smile? Must it have a substance
to compile a pleasured feeling, or can you
freely take your pleasure as it comes?

For some the satisfaction is the smile, but if
a co-respondent went the extra mile, moved
to consummate the greeting in embrace,
could you stand the change of pace?

Remember grandmamma who would insist
on kissing as a greeting, and kissing on the lips,
you had to face the withered skin, the musty
smell, the dry and crinkled hairy chin!

That’s not to say you didn’t like her anyway,
but gram’s embrace was penance that you
paid to satisfy a need you had from mum and
dad, a need to reach and touch your family.
Well, that’s the way it is with me.
© I.D. Carswell

Gentle touch

Awakened with a stifled scream, gagging
on the mortal fear of drowning, slumping,
limp and listless, shattered in defeat, too
well aware the madness is returning.

Subsiding in a jellied heap, battered by the wear
of sleep, torn and tried and near to tears and
deafened by the manic sounds your ears could not
dispel exploding blazing icons in your head.

Sleep is not returning. You wouldn’t let the madman
in without a fight; if you could fight. Your eyes
are drenched and shuttered tight against the
burning night’s excess of sadness.

And then the gentle touch of dawn whose hand
invades your solitude, the hand that moves with 
subtle skills, that soothes and moves through 
softened curves and slowly, slowly pacifies.
© I.D. Carswell

The rhyme will come

Don’t let the crime of halfpenny rhyme
abjure your verse, don’t let the curse of
dismal journalese cap your knees. You’re
better free of polished strictures, choosing
words for what they mean to you, as pictures
of your soul than going searching for obscure
but perfect rhyme. First plough the fields with
freshening words, seed them deep,
nurture them and let them grow.
In time the rhyme will come…
© I.D. Carswell

Mouse blind

My right shoulder creaks,
if I hadn’t suffered the indignity
of childhood ambidexterity arrested,
regimented and rewarded
into right-handedness,
it wouldn’t have mattered.
Now I couldn’t write left-handed
to save myself ( - Write,
what am I saying? Surely I meant
“use a left-handed mouse with fluency”).

If I play in a game with a bat
I’m naturally left-handed. I could
shoot off my left shoulder until
fading eyesight determined
a squinty-eyed change to the right.
And don’t mention racquet sport
because I’m hopeless either hand,
and no redeeming virtues in sight;
but at least I learned to live with that.

‘Mousing’ however, is the disconnect,
too critical be defined inconsequential,
or tendered potentially transferrable
to another appendage;
it is the old me, an original organ
of the ovoid personality
essential for communication.
I am blinded without the facility,
sans a creaky joint I think
about as fast as I mouse.
© I.D. Carswell

The sign wasn’t for the blind

Why do people
have to squeeze
the fruit to SEE
if it is ripe?

You ask them and receive
a perturbed look suggesting,
somehow, you’re
the one disturbed.

I put these signs on
trays of fruit which said,
“RIPE, BLIND PEOPLE
ONLY MAY SQUEEZE.”

After she had squeezed
a sighted woman complained
that Blind People
couldn’t read the sign.

I told her emphatically,
the sign
wasn’t FOR
the blind.
© I.D. Carswell

My sisters never knew

There was a sibling who might
have preceded me into the World,
I say ‘he’ as I had three sisters already
waiting in the wings with growing
impatience for a male candidate
to bind with fledgling love;
‘he’ as it is unthinkable our mother
might have conceived another girl.

I was told of the sad miscarriage only
when I observed a disparity in dates
on which we celebrated birthdays.
The gap between Mavis and me was our
brother stillborn. It was a slow-growing shock
to me and I still mourn for my brother, I still
mourn for an ally and friend whom I never
knew, assured he would agree.

There was a sibling who would have
preceded me and made the World
a less perilous place, a brother who
would have loved and protected me
but never was. And when I dreamed of him,
staunch and beautiful with features hewn
from the same living flesh, he was me
and my sisters never knew.
© I.D. Carswell

Pleading for the potent words

I’ve had my fill of plastic-poet penis-substitutes, of
drawing-room assertions putting stilted, rustic scenes
of peace and love in place of towering passions. To them I say
be proud of an erection, let it stand alone and state its case.

The idyll of the great romantic poets wasn’t stupid sheep
a-grazing placidly, it was a goat with cloven feet
and flinty horns and horny tendencies – (disguised as nicely
anguished thoughts engaged in wilful nether deeds).

They’d tinker with the tragic words describing lakes and
mirror’d surfaces reflecting birds in flight – then, with greater
glee, piss into the lake, each making wider rippling rings
of perfect light-deflecting, turgid tidal wake.

And then the nymphs and satyrs pranced in sheer delight,
capered in the rosy light of flesh engaged in fleshy acts,
embracing in contagious scenes of shameless passion
that the painters painted, of unabated artists’ feelings.

I cannot find the power of that in tranquil parks and trees, I
cannot see the power at all in broken-hearted plaintive
pleas for love forsworn eternally, I’m on my knees pleading
for the potent words you shielded from your dainty verse.

We can thrive with oestrus in our minds, it is a natural thing,
be tumescent in our words and deeds, and breathe the robust
life which brought us hence instead of faking, cagy, referent
complainers of the like we find within these lusty pages.
© I.D. Carswell

A new outlook

I start each poem in a file entitled ‘newpissedament.docx’,
I don’t know why. It might be a play on new testament
(not that I’m biblical) but probably I was pissed
(in the alcohol affected sense) at the time I invented it.

Anyway…
it stays until a new era
of change invades.

I have had a lot of new eras to contend
with. In the 60’s it was Woodstock and war,
individual freedoms and emancipation,
and I needed an education adequate
enough to understand it.

In the 70’s I teamed with James Fixx and ran
my damn head off. He died and I moved on,
head empty of pretence, ready to embrace
something different without endorphins
getting in the way.

The 80’s was mainly discontent, distrust of the
establishment, too much rank and not enough
commitment, too little to do and a huge,
bored-to-shit infrastructure to do it with.
Wisely I left.

The 90’s were best. They set me up for the rest
of my life and I thank you bums in Corporate Sydney.
Hey fellows, I’m hang-up free, loving the autonomy
of the open air. So, dudes, how are the stellar careers
and lunar influenced marriages?

2006, a new outlook and life, love the same wife of
thirty seven years, wilfully using MS Office 2007(Beta2)
et. al., aided and abetted by technology I don’t
understand and filing a new poem each day in a
document entitled ‘newpissedament.docx’.
© I.D. Carswell

Synchronous babble

The little things that should
amuse conspire these days,
combine in subtle ways;
after thirty seven years
you would expect them to
relent a bit.

Imagine,
a radio playing in
each room you visit
during the course
of vacuuming, not to listen to
but to make the room
alive - somehow it rouses
pleasant memories,
fills an empty room
and chills the dust.

How do I know?
I change the station
on one or two to let
a different message
into the ambience
instead of the same,
synchronous babble.

But you can’t tell the difference
above an asthmatic whine of the
labouring vacuum cleaner.
© I.D. Carswell

Brisbane Broncos Rule!

There’s cheers and beers and bandoliers
in the Red Hill Leagues Club bars tonight.
Brisbane Broncos are the premiers with a long,
long reign firmly in their sights.

Hell, we don’t conceal we’re parochial
in Queensland, but the best team won in clover, and
all you NSW also-rans can go to…, well, you know
where, quietly please, we’re still bloody hung-over.

For you Yankees, the game is Rugby League,
invented for men to play without armour plate,
and the guys don’t look like executive fairies or
overweight steroid abusers with low IQs.

Not all of them anyway, Melbourne Storm,
the team we beat, are great candidates for conversion
to American Football, being as it were, failed
executive fairies and steroid abusers withal.

Our game’s different from that other code (called AFL)
where players jump like ballet clone wanna-be flossies
and ponce around the field in flashy singlets and, almost
to a man, extremely tight, genital-clutching, uniform shorts.

You could be excused for occasionally getting the wrong
idea about them but around 87,000 people obviously did
by attending that final on Saturday. However, it was in
Melbourne, which just about explains everything.

You’ll note I haven’t mentioned Rugby Union, the game
they play in Heaven (though they share an ex-Leaguie
or two, can’t stop the bastards from switching codes) which
bodes well for the Rugby World Cup in France next year.

I think the Kiwis will win – Jesus, if they don’t
we’ll laugh them off the Western Plains, pee in their
beer and hold an hysterical Honour Guard as they
board the plane home in tears…
© I.D. Carswell

Crikey, it's all in good fun folks... I promise you I didn't mean that about executive fairies and steriod abusers.

Who's counting?

There has to be irony in setting a task which daily grows beyond reasonable expectations, but reasonable only if you are not a poet. I never expected anything as consuming and as exhausting as trying to write a creditable poem every day.

So why even try?

I don't know how to answer. If I didn't try somehow my self-belief would take a savage blow. If I gave it my best shot and failed it would still be crippling. In other words I have set myself up for a tumble.

Perhaps that is the answer.

On the positive side I have made some wonderful contacts since starting this madness.

I have read and will continue to read wonderful new poetry ranging from the raw and painful, to the erudite and sublime, to the sick and sinful, to the passionate and poisonous, to the peaceful and providential. It is an exciting journey! The poets are ordinary people expressing all the magnificent human emotions they possess in all the varieties and colours and languages one can imagine.

That is what keeps me going.

And hey, I've eclipsed 200 poems today.

My father was the riverbank

A sculptor of perfection shaped my being, fashioned
from a broken shard captured in a lucid dream of
comfort and acceptance, cradled in the shimmered
stream of weighted consciousness, aware my father was
the riverbank, my mother was the water.

I am a daughter of the dreamworld where the purest
visions of the future and the past combine in lucent
memoirs, refined reflections from the timeless pools
before the ancient sages deigned to say my father was
the riverbank, my mother was the water.

You ask me where I learned these things; I tell
you here beside the riverbank, amongst the reeds
and in the margins of the water, here I listened to
their vibrant laughter, giving thanks my father was
the riverbank, my mother was the water.

My mother bore me in a flooded dream that raged
between the ravaged banks, breaking free to
swamp the timid plains, tearing trees from rocky mounds,
a swathe of liquid slaughter, amazed my father was
the riverbank, my mother was the water.

The stream returned again to flow between the muddy
banks, nurtured and replete with sustenance
and greening strength, and quiet and peace engendered
trust, and thus I knew forever that my father was
the riverbank, my mother was the water.
© I.D. Carswell

Joie de vivre

We walk amongst
the pregnant
trees in torpid flower,
in breezeless damp
that hangs
a cloying pall
and can’t relieve
the rising smell.

Breathing in the
aching draughts
of liquid-laden air,
as redolent
as chloroform
intense and sweet,
disarming eyes
and aching head.

Hear the toneless
roaring of the bees,
drowned in silence
so complete
that chirping birds
cannot be heard
and seek the treeless
margins for relief.

The drug
of life returning
turns a sweet
dependency,
a yearning
so replete
your aching eyes
will sleep awake.

Seeking signs
along the way,
of tiny greening
nodules rising on
the panicles
in flower aspirant,
of orchard pests
in guilty flight.

Above the setting
fruit delight in
red-bronzed leaves
exciting burst
from soft-wood twigs
ascending into
light-delivered
orchard joie de vivre.
© I.D. Carswell