Wasn’t Their Concern

Call her Ingrid, say she died pursuing things
she made a mission of; personal freedoms,
unfettered choices, perhaps she too followed
the voices. She died on a busy suburban
street in rush-hour traffic, her fragile body
thrown by impact in an undignified sprawl,
dressed in hand-me-downs clutching a small
cloth bag she lay a barely breathing speck
in the centre of a scene of chaotic panic.

Ingrid never knew who had killed her, even
he never saw her face before until he
crouched over her protectively, begging her
to breathe in anguished fear and disbelief.
The ambulance and traffic police brought calm
to disorder, if not relief, sending the on-lookers
scurrying back to the shops or their homes. The
traffic merely manoeuvred past dispassionately,
after all, it wasn’t their concern.

Two Sisters of Mercy came to the door to help
him grieve. They said Ingrid died as she had lived,
a poor but free spirit who bore no ill-will in her
uncluttered life. A kindly soul, never a mother or
wife, came and went as she pleased. The tears
he shed were real, remorseful, compassionate,
he always carries her still image in his mind, the
impossibly small woman he begged to breathe
on an anonymous street where she died.
© I.D. Carswell 2006

No Heroes To A Man

These bruised and battered men
weren’t heroes, there was no swagger
to their stride, no twinkle toes and
fancy steps, no flashy clothes. Their
rumpled denims were the very least
expected of their Company pride,
and when they marched in line abreast
there was no sparkle in their eyes.

They stood at ease when ordered
by commands they scarcely heard,
their ears still rang with chilling sounds
subsumed in larger schemes that drowned
their immaturity; the shriek and crash of
hours ill spent in terror of their lives,
the stink and death and ruthless grip
on weapons hot from recent use,
the props that held their shoulders
square, their eyes aligned and chins so
sundered in, rigid with the fright of firing
helplessly into the night to stay alive.

Then they returned to friendly shores
for even more endemic enmity,
shunned, condemned, who dared
malign these fragile men, called
them cowards and murderers of children,
denied them peace and sanctuary when
all their terrors should have ended.

And there they stand at barely twenty
years, no heroes to a man, just boys worn
old, austere from battle strain, at odds again
for love within their thankless mother land.
© I.D. Carswell 1968

Imagine

Imagine,
one tablet taken will make
you able to imagine the
universe without intervention
of definitions or strictures of
sectional belief, take one
and you are liberated from
structured reason, released
from sanctioned meaning, floating
free where you can see all points of
view equally.

However,
if you have a dread of falling you must
be brave, the pill cannot replace
dimensions of a worldly gravity; you’ll
fear the tinctured pull of that attraction,
compaction of your weight still lords its
call to commonsense in making up and
down. So you’re still bound to two dimensions
at the very least. Gravity is just another thief,
a crude impediment to freedoms you might
seek. But gravity won’t go away.

Can you avoid the tenements of crowded
thought, ready for the freedom? Can you step
away from pathways to embrasures from where
you’ve always fired your shots, did not expose
your face, to an open place not protecting or
effacing your identity? Are you swayed by
powerful views, or news from trenchant
sources making claims of stilted commentary?

Imagine you could step away from that and take
a tenured seat, perhaps in parliament. You could
debate the issues making faces red, rise above
the dreaded party line, earn applause no matter
what the cause because you’re free of fixed opinion.

There is a price to pay my friend. You would be dead;
you’d have to be reborn again without the trappings
of a mother land, a language or a coloured skin, no
sense of God or a religion. And then, perhaps,
you wouldn’t want to play the game.
© I.D. Carswell 2006

Ever-Pleasant Denouement

It was whether the
pleasuring proceeded
from known indices
to unknown territories
by way of cancerous
progressions that
raised the debate.

It was already
too late to save
the relationship – he
eclipsed her needs
by a power of ten.
It is sexual slavery
she complained.

Foreplay with clinical
intent surely wasn’t
meant to pave the
only way to
orgasmic glory,
it ought to be
spontaneous play,

childlike and innocent,
diversionary, and the
grateful ending tinged
with astonishment,
thankfulness, and
an ever-pleasant
denouement.

I’m afraid you’ve
lost me there
he said anxiously,
can you please
explain what’s meant
by denouement?
© I.D. Carswell

Evading The Short Answers

Awakening in a pool of stagnant indirections – brushing
aside blue-green algae clinging to centuries-old
thoughts blanketing suppressing so damn depressing.

Seeking a freshness in meaning escaping demeaning
and dire decisions brought by evading the short answers
of yes no do not pass go do not collect $200.

Raging this is not a game life’s strategies do not have
agreed rules or referees and the fool’s field is not defined
by legible signs that denote absolute or any dimensions.

Quaking before bald imperatives that brook no fantasies
hear no plaintive pleas listen and see nothing in an oblivion
as complete as here and now has no clear idea of tomorrow.

Sinking in a morass of reeking mud and cloying symbolism
invading the senses acquiescing to dying comforts appeased
only by being nothing in an urbane emptiness of nowhere.
© I.D. Carswell 2006

Statistical Meanderings

If you are already a poet, a standing member of the
establishment’s august chorus of couplet creationists
and your surname’s Dunn there’s a fair chance
you are listed at the foot of my ‘Poem Hunter’ page.

You didn’t have to do anything special to engage
the distinction – apart from what you’ve always done;
‘distinction’ here is used in an anomalous sense

of an absolute and eerily random assignment.

Ostensibly there is a more sinister plan suggesting
readership has a discerning end, statistical meanderings
and popularity, or even genre, might have had something
to do with it. Amazing? But then again, patent bullshit!
© I.D. Carswell 2006

Voyeuristic Complications

If that’s what voyeurism was supposed
to be it wasn’t even close to expectations – and I had
thought I understood expectancy:

after all a voyeur’s just some kind of kinky dingo
eccentric who gets off furtively watching other’s
naked bodies and their sexual acts. But I wasn’t even

excited. Period. Bored in fact and really wanted to
pee but couldn’t because she was playing with me,
sort of expectantly.

You’re supposed to be a bit more rigid she intoned
critically in my ear. I said ordinarily I’m sure I would
have been, but hadn’t you noticed, we aren’t alone...
© I.D. Carswell 2006

Life’s Unexplained Mysteries

As if the memory isn’t bad enough
alone, you’ve put things down in
places known or unknown and cannot
find them – and now we’ve got an
errant mobile phone! The bloody thing’s
just up and walked away; there is no easy
explanation; and of course it’s off so
dialling it won’t give a clue to where
it’s at, tho’ 'tisn’t lost, it will be found, oh
yes, I’m patiently assured of that.

I was supposed to pay a bill of late,
we both agreed on what was owed, at
any rate the $45 sounds ‘bout right.
But I’m delivery man, financial matters
beyond my limited command, I let it lie.
The mystery is that I’m to blame for lack
of diligence. It seems the fault is mine
because I wasn’t quick enough to say,
hand me the necessary, I’m off to have
a beer with Mick and pay him his money.

Your Honour, I was supposed to make the
trip on the afternoon in question when I’d
imbibed one or six beers too many. Sadly,
whichever came first. We suffer a terrible
thirst because of the drought, ever-present
heat, a failing memory, or doubt about the
exact nature of my delivery status because
she didn’t hand me the money, suggesting
I go and have that well-earned beer with
Mick – and mention I had to pay him.
© I.D. Carswell 2006

Shopping In Shades

A new shopping experience the mail-out says, the one
to eclipse all trips you’ve planned but never done,
and here it is, by your demand, brand-new and
opening soon within the precincts of your local Mall.

Exotic shades of lilac pave the way, subtle hints
that pink would not sustain in bloom are used
to reckon with the eye, draw your sighs along
the welcome path, to beckon and entice you in.

It has an air of indolence, voluptuous to turn a phrase,
it earns your gaze of winsome admiration easily,
your eyes are feasting on the windows robed and
draped displaying sumptuous extravagance.

You’ve never seen the like before, an elvan dell,
a sylvan glade, meridian between the real and
fantasy with lilac air to titillate the sinuses and
soothe away your rubric shopper’s weariness.

Mauve or gray just wouldn’t work with equal
artistry, so déclassé, no mystery, too fey for
this establishment, it needs dépêche, it needs
élan, but mostly it needs paying customers.
© I.D. Carswell

A Worthy Ending

Don’t fool yourself, you write to be read;
it’s nice to be liked, heaven to be admired,
but unread is implacably dead.

Some poets and wannabe’s will claim they
don’t give a damn joint whether you like their
stuff. And no, they aren’t missing the point,

if you’ve beat an aversion to tactless
promotion and scanned that far then
they’ve conned you into reading them.

And that’s vital man! Read means nothing
more than read – and they ain’t dead,
but liked or admired? Another story.

I, too, want to be read; I have a plan for glory,
how to be liked and admired – sire a coterie
of naïve wannabe’s with salacious untruths

about their writing, add to it every day. The
innocent are lead to believe they have talent,
while me, I feed off the kudos, create

an iron-clad standing as a modest
and able poet with an admirable
reputation. In time even I could believe it.

But it’s a fatal mistake. I write in a genre
which isn’t real, on subjects for their appeal,
using expressions and word progressions which

are forged signatures in lieu of original
thought, descend into trite and promiscuous
acts of Bovary sought by an ego which denies

itself decency, or any potential leniency on
a judgement day impending – or for that
matter, self-respect and a worthy ending.
© I.D. Carswell

Birds Visit Us

Birds visit us because they
know we’re safe to live with;
pale headed rosellas drop
by to pay their dues in a dignified
flush of good manners drink
bobbing heads politely chatter
discretely rainbow lorikeets
invade in a scalding rush of rude
shrieks attitude and mad posturing
everything done at top speed
they depart the same way to crash
another party. Crows brown-headed
honey eaters figbirds currawongs
rainbow bee-eaters a crush of noisy
miners a family of magpies arriving
late to enliven proceedings. Gallery
of galahs kookaburras azure kingfisher
crested doves a crass covey of
cockatoos fly by arguing ten or
more as-yet-unidentified wrens
butcher birds red-browed
treecreeper grey shrike-thrush
two dollarbirds at a dollar each
and – did I mention a spangled
drongo? Flycatchers twirl above
the trees while up the back a
chorus of whipbirds whistle and
crack. This feast is happening
while our favourite noisy miner
is nesting in a shrub outside the
kitchen window with four chicks
to feed. We’d have missed all this
had we stayed in Sydney.
© I.D. Carswell

Music Of The Spheres

You fight the need to run amok,
a frenzied, unvoiced cry to free the
fettered spirits’ chains, flee the stifling
and mundane inanities unending.

So move then with the music of the
Spheres, converse in voices of the
Universe, be at ease and easy in yourself
but harsh in fielding Earthly choices.

Fly on poet’s wings secure, soar where
others dance with dread, deplore the
hapless, insecure, inconsequent, the
dead and broken thoughts bedevilling.

Fly free, be strong – rejoice, take care
and bend the rules declaring servitude,
have a holiday each day, don’t go to
school, rebel, yell out your joyous choices.

When you prepare to land beware, you’ll
find the harsh realities regain the upper
hand, the rules pertaining to the task are
bare of comfort, signs always misleading.

Its there you’ll likely come unstuck.
© I.D. Carswell

Other Worlds

I couldn’t be much closer to lunacy
than the view allowed, yet regardless
what the admission costs I swear I saw
sunlight under a leaf beneath a bench
on the packing shed floor.

To be sure it was only a momentary glimpse,
an instant’s capture of a daydream in a
library of nonsense, had I looked again,
regained my senses, dispelled the hallucination,
but I didn’t – accepted what it meant.

The halves of my brain were at war,
the afferent bent on doing what it could with
the information while the referent stood on
boring ceremony, analysed what it meant
and naturally refused to accept it.

It preordained another World beneath
the leaf, perhaps it was the portal through
which I would step into another place,
maybe somewhere else, but instanced
at that moment only in my afferent brain.

The rational half deduced the hole was too
small to be anything but enigmatic, and why
would it be on the floor? A wall made
much more sense, or a plasma screen,
or why not, damn it, a sodding door?

The debate was eclectic – it might have
gone on in this vein forever; can one half of a
brain really be mad and know it? Who gives
a shit anyway – and why are there always more
leaves than portals to alternate universes?
© I.D. Carswell

You Could Die For It

You know when you’ve nailed it,
you feel flushed, adrenaline-intense,
that mad-dispensed rare pleasure
illicitly akin to salacious feelings
dressed in an orgasmic sense,
wearing a mask of self-satisfied
indolent guilt-conscience.

And you revel in it,
writhe with fake remorse,
shame on you,
punch your hands in the air,
exclaim, “Yes!”

You read it again.
It is good...

Who would have thought
it an adversary, a real-time
killer identified by physiologists
with less interest in reality than
professional fame; their game is
to avoid anger which can lead to
adrenaline-induced heart seizure!

Think of it, adrenaline determines
the morphology of contemporary
behaviour. Avoid anger. Your heart
will be stressed equally by bliss, don’t
have orgasms, don’t revel in a verse
completed with adrenaline-intense
feelings of pleasurable achievement.

You could die for it.
© I.D. Carswell

Daph and Clem

Clem and Daph are friends, sell epiphytes from
their site, not exclusively, they have other types
of plants as well – but ‘testicles’ (orchids were named
by Ancient Greeks who thought that’s what they
kind of looked alike) are the general rule.

Daph and Clem the Testicle Team; we’re glad to have
made their acquaintance, Market life just ain’t the same
without ‘em. Daphne was around back when we were
a tin-pot, one-table part of Rina’s Stone & Pip Fruit Stall,
sold our avocados uneasily without a license.

Of course it’s all changed, Rina’s retired to Brisbane
and Daphne’s the Out-Front-Boss-Woman-Honcho
on the Epiphyte site assisted by Clem’s ‘coming-out’
of shy retirement. We’re legal at last, doing okay
on Rina’s old spot – or so our return customers say.

Daphne is the one who tells scurrilous jokes unbelievably
well, implacably straight faced, loves her scotch neat,
shoots accurately from the hip; Clem has an incredulous
baby face, sports a hearing-aid and wears glasses
but he’s no male-apologist, definitely no shrinking violet.

The long-haul driver’s tales he tells are legend, would make
a navvy grin, but he’s a VIP who owns an original FJ ute,
beat that dudes! We’re pleased we’ve got to know them,
it’s like rediscovering that even at our age
the World’s full of interesting older people.
© I.D. Carswell

Dismissed On A Missed Hello

He didn’t know he was a chauvinist,
he couldn’t yet because his focus was
intent on killing dragons. She had said it

meant a lack of common manners, arrested
childhood development, no social conscience.
My God, I thought, and marvelled how she

knew all that. Thinking back his greeting may
have had no substance, a glance, half a nod
perhaps. You’d see it as perfunctory, but she

intuitively knew it was a chauvinist at work,
and that was that. Well, I’d best ensure my future
greetings are effusive to avoid her ire, she bears

her grudges long and fiery hot; not that I’m a
hearthside husband whipped nor chastened, but
woe to be summarily dismissed on a missed hello…!
© I.D. Carswell

Market Conversations

Oh yes, they lived in Glasshouse she said stridently,
years ago, twenty, thirty – who really knows,
she didn’t actually say; but she claimed to understand
avocados. We joked with her because we know
the couple who bought their old place, and her husband
had a smile on his weathered face from her meanderings,
nodded to me, whispered she’s a bit deaf. When she saw
we were talking she joined the conversation less about two
bars and three beats into the tune. She said, Evan, are you
going to pay the man? Sure thing he said, grinning at me,
but have you actually bought anything?
© I.D. Carswell

Moon-Struck Pavlovian Excess

My God, is this the last sanctuary
of the wanking sanctimonious, of
the dribbling lead-pencil benders
devil-may-care bent on writing
self-aggrandising gratuitous crap
shaping anxiously solicitous lines
in clapboard, claptrap, structure-less
verse barely sufficient to stand erect
of its own integral incontinence,
confidently expecting gobbets
of phlegm-like respect out of
eye-lidless elapids curled mockingly
in an edifice already defunct,
wilfully inciting less-than-aloof commentary
from sycophants vomiting unctuous
praises in mutually and equally deluded
self-admiration – a fulsome unity incorporated
in a looniness of moon-struck
Pavlovian excess? Well, I’m damn
glad blessed it isn’t that!
© I.D. Carswell

Live It Again

I want to be seventeen again not twenty two,
I want to sleep between eye-blinks, missing
the essence of nothing with that moves
in my spirit. I want the freedom of unfettered
wings, the glory of endless motion, the taste
of unblunted aspirings. I want those things
madly, I feel them clamouring in my heart
to be free. I want to be seventeen again
and to have you there with me.

I want to be twenty two with the choices
unchecked, facing that sort of organised future
bought by years of organic study, assured of
a circumspect foot in a career leading to
greater glory somewhere. I want to be there
confronting the same conclusion which left no
choice, aware life is too short to waste. I want
to make the choice I didn’t make, to take you
with me, to break away and to run free.

I want to be thirty two with my son watching
me, quizzically, questioning whether he should
see the disreputable, hung-over wreck with his
head in his hands – despairing his wasted youth.
I want to be thirty two again and to tell him
the truth. I want to be there for him in his young
life, with a wife to live for, to love, and a vision
of the future torn out of a blind past to guide
me where I turned off the path.

I don’t want to grow old anymore, I want to
relive parts of my life, to dwell longer where
time serves my memory best, salvage what’s left,
rebuild a fragmented passage of time that’s not
mine to have but to wish for, and wishing would
rest easier than being uselessly penitent to feelings
of waste. Long ago I lived that life in great haste,
I’d like to slow down a ways and notice the view,
to live it again with the closeness of you.
© I.D. Carswell

The Way You’re Facing

The question is, ‘Bad poetry, does it have a place?’
The answer is, of course, it makes all other poems
seem like better verse. And there we have it
poeteasers, an iron-clad rule for rhyming screamers,
strain yourself to pen a flogging rhyme, repeat it
ad-infinitum ‘til the line meanders to a sodden,
mewling close in trite and sickening repose.

On the nose? Why would you think like that?
A pleasant rhythm soon disposes readers to
discover roses in a rancid verse, pick up the
rhythmic pace, start a race with shorter words
that canter on the line, then crack the whip
and slap the leather, free the reins discard
the tether, holler as you thunder off

into a vacant wild blue yonder. ‘Tho now of course
you’re lost for words to stem the flow of gross
inanities, you’re standing where you see the
hollow farce you’ve writ; its full of shit, you’re
full of shit, less the bit you used in verse – but rest
assured; someone out there likes this stuff
so post it quick. It’s worth at least a 9 or 10.

I’m not taking the piss, I’m demonstrating.
The difference is in the way you’re facing.
© I.D. Carswell

(In memory of William Topaz McGonagall)

David’s Crime

Ned Kelly was tried in an open Court,
so was Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, a trial
of sorts in as far as a soldier’s Court Martial
is construed ‘open’ and fair.
But not David Hicks.

Justice for David will be a rare commodity,
he will have no access to civil rights, due
process will not exist, rules of evidence
dispensed with, Defence won’t have a say,
can’t review, won’t be able to defend.

A godsend for Prosecution you’ll say. Now
what was David’s crime? Your guess is as
good as mine – surviving the battlefield
per se, in the wrong place at the wrong time,
injured when most around him were dead?

Was his crime stupidity, being with Taliban fighters
defending their land? Ostensibly he bore arms
resisting Americans killing his companions,
but not as a soldier sanctioned – rather an
Al-Qaeda trained terrorist civilian, so they say.

It must be a rare distinction. Now he languishes
a five year, untried victim of the US Armed Forces
legal system, a non-person to the Justice Department,
a Guantanamo Bay civilian detainee held ominously
and disadvantageously in an offshore prison.

Is he simply a guilty verdict awaiting unspecified
charges to be laid at a gimcrack show trial
for which the Authorities hastily rewrote regulations,
enacted after their first attempts to bring him to
trial spectacularly bumbled, stumbled and failed?

He hasn’t committed an offense in Australia, but
we’ve disowned him anyway. Perhaps we’ll seek
clemency after he’s found guilty and sentenced to
death. But probably after the event as it seems,
sadly, to be the new, unheralded, Australian way.
© I.D. Carswell

The Legend Fanniesson

(after reading Mike Fanniesson)

When I finished reading
the man’s poetry I began
to see the whole of legend
Fanniesson as it formed, fabled
and brassy as any that sprang
from the bucolic backstreets
of the Bronx, crazy as the friends
of Bukowski, down-town as
Kerouac & Ginsberg’s coterie
of beatific, rhythmic rhetoric.

And the man still won’t
waste words embellishing
what he doesn’t see, he
punches it straight and clean,
creating pictures in words
which we know to be
both his and our stable
and back-home truths.

Believe me, the poetry of the
street has a new youthful Jesus,
an evangelist who spreads his
words in the dialect of the bus stop,
subway and tram, whose
phrases will hop into use from
the street cars and drop-in bars,
radiate from the stadiums, be
shouted from billboards and
echoed along freeways.

Gather on the streets and hear
how his legend was born,
hear what is said by acolytes
sworn to tell it like it is.
Mike Fanniesson.
Renaissance man. And
you heard it from me.
© I.D. Carswell

You can read 420 poems by Mike at http://poemhunter.com/fanniesson/

Stolen dreams

There was no satisfaction in that deed
of stolen dreams, its aftermath an artful
sheathe of anxious piety; it really was no
challenge, truth be told, a needlessly insensate
act to perpetrate, a trashy tour of arrogance
enacted in a wholly passive space.

And then the strike that killed the magic in a single
blow, rewrote the sentiment and glory glistening
from an early Autumn shower, despoiled the infant
tears that trickled down, ignored the easy fourteen
season’s story – quelled the myth and so denied the
wishes of the slender teenage poet’s tender heart.

The orphaned dream intones a carolled cry, the
guileless poet lives a blameless lie, belies a symphony
abandoned to an empty scene, a play that’s never
played, a scene that’s never seen by candid eyes
or touched with all imaginings from stolen dreams
that surely never lived and truly never died.
© I.D. Carswell

He would have liked

He would have liked a day in the sun,
he would have liked to stand up and run
with quick easy strides to the seats he
saw by the chestnut trees on the lawn
seat himself in a cacophony of
unrestrained sound drink in its bounty.

He would have liked to turn back the
clock to when he did not think this way
was young and unafraid of tomorrow
whole and not living with death. He
counted the limbs but could not
progress beyond the two he had lost.

He would have liked to discard his chair
the wheels too stiff for his hands
his feeble protests unheard by deaf
ears damped with demands he learn to
be independent to accept his infirmity
to thank the fates he lived.

He would have liked to have died at the
scene amid carnage and blood
the wreckage the screams. He would
have liked to have died before it began
the ignominy the pain it would
have seemed more noble than this.
© I.D. Carswell

Wherever You’re At

This is no trial separation,
it’s an amputation
of a limb, a surgery
without the medicine.

But for rare demonstrations
of affection we’re still the same
pair who’ve endured all these
years together. What has changed?

Is it a matter of powerlessness,
of fear? The twisting weakness
of a yielding flesh, of trust,
despair, your power to resist?

Is it the sense, the advent
of becoming aware,
of taking control, wary
of where it will steer?

Is it revulsion engineered
by distaste or disgust, a
faceless mistrust, an obsession
to clear the air?

My full five and fair senses
are rightly impaired, I care for
your liberty, I dare not speak
for fear of what you may seek.

I have nowhere but here,
I still care, I tell you that
because I need you,
wherever you’re at.
© I.D. Carswell

Bound to narrow themes

No matter what it seems was what she said,
no matter how it hurts – there are always
disappointments. The life she planned was
bound to narrow themes, to rigid shapes
and structures lent to old ideas; and where she
went the vistas thus remained extant for years.

Disillusionment was nothing new, discontent
a fever to be borne – a compliment to moments
when the Heaven’s blessed us with a heady shower
of dangled wares. Our eyes expressed our disbelief,
no largesse was ever sent without a cost, and cost
was evident but not relief from insincere intent.

Follow me, she said, and cited texts from dry
and dusty tomes bereft of magic and enchantment.
We struggled to accept the books she left,
we read them carefully and thought of dragons,
elves and fairies under double moons in fabled skies,
were demonised and living cautious in our double lives.

Bear with me, she said, and lashed us with the
cane of tortured temperament, stand up and
look your master in the eye. I stood and wore
her approbation, this boy will lead she surely lied,
take heed and follow in his step. I cried, in anger
said I wouldn’t lead, and neither would be lead.
© I.D. Carswell

Safest way back

Through shades of recent memories,
contentious fleeting flash-backs presenting
glimpses of events long past; there out on the
periphery, too hazy and indistinct to see properly
an almost-out-of-view something familiar lurks
with features blurred and long since forgot
amidst the hints of greater glory.

There the strength has gathered, there in
corners spurned for interests far ahead,
mindless of the choices left to gather dust on
pedestals with busts of dead and sanguine
follies disabused, the mindless paths pursued,
the baggage left in careless piles disguised
by random veils un-viewed.

The vista is a Dante’s scene of fractal
realities unhinged – though comforting, I
know exactly where I stand. I’m at the
fringe and looking in, absorbing energy from
hoarded plants of past pursuits which mark
my causal path amongst the reeking ruins,
and point the safest way back in.
© I.D. Carswell

Welcome Andreas

Welcome Andreas, fondest greetings, these
early days of your being are busy with
meetings, joyful conventions, wide-eyed
events, confusion and wonder and bafflement.
But these are just the beginnings.

Andreas, my young friend, these challenges
have run great men ragged, rendered
even greater women haggard, written
indelible words in our psychology but for
all our sakes you must enjoy them.

Already you’ve known the touch of soft,
loving hands, heard the rhythm of hearts
beating with fervent love and sucked
at the breast of wisdom. These are
huge things.

Soon you will know everything there
is to know but that time is not now,
now you must trust, eat and sleep
and learn to smile,
for smiles will win you the World.
© I.D. Carswell - 25 October 2006

Sometimes hard-edged surreality

Well, what do you want?
Truth or lies? I am not lying
when I yell you’re a menace,
or when I whisper that I love you,
you sweet dill, the difference
is in the tone – it’s still reality no
matter what the penance.

It appears you only want to hear
the affectionate bits. You’ve said it
many times, you can’t reconcile your
loving man with the angry one who
tells it like it is. I’ve tried to keep a silent
tongue, bit my lip, swallowed hard,
walked the painful extra yards to distance
me from it. Didn’t help a bit, my seething,
troubled silence merely roused your fears anew.

Cheap and gaudy psychologists espouse
this strategy, they deflect realities, just deal
with reactionary effects; they say manage anger,
segment it and confront the bits. So the neighbour’s
bull terrorising my steers isn’t the problem, it’s that
I’d like to shoot the bull AND owner to solve it. To me
anger management delays release. It may surcease
your fears, but the problems lurking beneath are
concealed in a blanket of seriously edited deceit.

In effect I have to manage my anger to reduce
your anxiety, I must reconcile how to love you
and not be annoyed when a disagreement
effects a chain of disastrous events. We agree
these things are neither rational nor can be
explained in tangible terms. Like being in love,
like living luxuriously in a fairytale embedded
in a benign swamp of eccentric but
sometimes hard-edged surreality.
© I.D. Carswell

Remembering kowhai

Jacaranda replaces
kowhai blooms in this warmer place,
lilac showers lilting in backyards
and alleyways, decorously adorning
where golden kowhai shades
would vigorously light up whole hillsides.

This sweet mauve softly invades
a late greening of spring,
eye-catching in soothing
silhouettes against
seamless skies, claiming
an end to winter.

Today I remembered again
the hearty welcoming of kowhai,
its reckoning warmth, its lively beckoning,
the challenge to begin a new year of growing.
I remembered kowhai and gathered in
soft jacaranda blooms with my gilded eyes.
© I.D. Carswell

Kowhai is a small woody legume tree native to New Zealand. There are eight species. Sophora microphylla is the most common, and has smaller leaves and flowers than Sophora teraptera. Kowhai trees grow throughout the country and are a common feature in New Zealand gardens.
Most species of Kowhai grow to around 8 m high and have fairly smooth bark with small leaves. They have horn-shaped yellow flowers, which appear in early spring. Their nectar is a favourite food for Tui and Kererū (New Zealand Wood Pigeon). The pods which appear after flowering each contain six or more seeds. Unusually for New Zealand plants, some species of Kowhai are deciduous, losing their tiny, dull green leaves each winter.
Sophora prostrata, sometimes called "Little Baby", is used as a Bonsai tree. It grows to the height of up to 2 meters, has zigzaging stems, and smallish leaves quite sparsely in the tree. [1]
Kōwhai is the Maori word for yellow, from the colour of the flowers.
The Kowhai is the national flower of New Zealand.