Where The Creek Used To Run (rev)

In ash-fine silk-like sand that spread
after the flood and ahead of the wild
weeds claim on the old stream bed;

before needle phalanx sprang in drying
hollows to march on stones marooned;
in bones of thistle-down we ran, played

where the creek used to run in olden days
– fed in a heat of mid-summer dreams
on juvenile feasts of imaginings.

Trunk of a sad yellow willow slowly
dying, gnarled roots denied relief in
stony ground, stood mute beside

the crumbling bank, watched in staid
silence – uncomplaining, maintained
poignant dignity while we played.

In this khaki valley scented with sweet
and flawless green we measured our
pleasures in a joy peace engendered.

We quarrelled, collaborated, dug rebellious
rocks from the dry stream bed, shifted silt
with Tonka toys, emulated a perfect world.
© 27 June 2006, I.D. Carswell

Good Cobbers Mate

Some dickhead, dropkick ding-bat said
in Urban Dictionary that no dinky-die
Aussie uses ‘cobber’ anymore. Well I’m
appalled a dingo turd would out ‘imself
in such a way. It goes to say that he’s
no Queenslander. A word like cobber is
okay, rhymes with mate don’t cha know.
No worries! Means th’ same at any rate.

Introduced a bloke the other day, said
he’s ‘n ‘old cobber’ from way back to me
old mate Tiny, ‘n he knew what I meant.
Tiny’s a big feller, six foot seven ‘n sees
further’n me. G’day, he says to Slim who’s
fat, pleased t’ meet cha. Ya know Th’ Poet
ay? Yeah, from way back sez Slim grinnin’
like a snake, we was at school together.

Y’ know sez Tiny, Th’ Poet’s a fair bit of a
wanker ay, but any mate of ‘is is a mate
of mine. Put ‘er there cobber, ‘n holds out
his mitt. So I don’t give a spit what they
say about some words meanin’ you’re not
a self-respectin’ Aussie. Both these blokes
are good cobbers mate – I wouldn’t rate
‘em by some bloody Urban Dictionary!
© 2 June 2008, I. D. Carswell

Tara, Birthday Girl

Aha, another 21st today;
greetings queen of flippancy
approval’s seal is barking at the door
with gifts & flowers & more
surprises than a girl your age
can gladly take with ease –
but pleased you are for sure.

Remembering the first remains
a treasured memory,
sixteen going on twenty one –
recalled across the years
as treasured, happy days with
each a vivid scene - but counted
surreptitiously, oh Heavens,
that makes me...
Why, just 21 again!
© 1 June 2008, I. D. Carswell

Actually Poet Tara McHale is, give or take a year, 21... or thereabouts

Mummy’s Girl

While we haven’t met I know you well
you are your mother’s smile with eyes
that light up like delighted stars. You’ll
tell me soon it isn’t so, the impishness
is yours alone to catch and throw aloft
to please a spirit free. Oh, I’ll agree, it
is your own; and smile – remembering

You’ll hold your daddy’s hand and ask
in anxious tone – if grandad says I’m
mummy’s clone – what does he really
mean? Your dad will smile and gently
laugh remembering. You are your own
he’ll say, it’s yours to be. Grandad is
a funny man – but he’ll agree

And when we meet in years to come
your mum will say you’re everything
a girl should be. I’ll wish I’d placed a
penny in an urn to seed a celebration
when you turn and claim to Gran and
me; I’m not like mum, just look and
see – it’s she who looks a lot like me!
© 31 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

For “Grommet” – granddaughter-to-be,
due to touch down 23 October 2008...

Mountains of Delight (rev)

The problem was in manner of choice
or whether there was a choice for that
matter. You reduced them as you had
to do, choosing what was right for you;
there is no shame and no reproving,
it’s legitimated by your doing.

Odd conventions weigh against events
believed logical but not in your natural
reality. Denied restraints I am poised
halfway to lunacy’s sanctuary – buoyed
by useless knowledge which cannot aid
defence against prescriptions of fate.

Hoped for better life, fairytale endings
expressed as fine destiny. Too late to
make it thus I know, but I won’t desert
an ally of the same romanticism, born
steadfast and true, grew worldly wise,
at least in light of my colour-blind eyes.

Cannot choose other than this singular
place, of which you know as do I there is
no manner of choice in the matter – and
accepted irrevocably in choosing you. It
was never a question of winning or losing,
was purely a matter of simply choosing.

Can we face this flight in concert, judging
not a road to come by looking backwards
where we’d find no pathway we could climb?
The mountains of despair which rise out of
the distant past are no surprise; our plight
should make them mountains of delight.
© June 13th 2005, I.D. Carswell

Ha’penny Alms

Naïve shall inherit where mature souls
lure inflated ideals – it’s said. Doesn’t
mean the meek denied a place would
ever be, there’s room within the Inn
for all who care to gather, but to share
the bounty needs timidity, not take.

Excusing quirks and foibles special to
the characters that man this stage is
keen; we’ve endured their strange,
at times bizarre, at times extreme
behaviour. So what, you say. Please
make your point – and leave!

You need be blind and stupid if at all
deceived by what I’ve seen with eyes
wound wide and mind aghast; the man
relieves himself, pees indecorously in
ha’penny pockets of wannabes naïve –
no other explanation would agree.

These beings that he praises needing
alms is quaint in thinking; is peeing on
thus deemed a privilege and distinction
whence he hails? It holds the answer I
surmise and lays to rest a riddle of just
where and how his popularity derives.

It trickles off one’s brows, my friend,
and blinds receivers’ ears and eyes.
© 30 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

On bizarre commentary behaviours by
some of the cyber-poet fraternity.

Futurelessness (rev)

Why can't I keep out of harm's way?
Am I so preoccupied, simultaneously
looking ahead, concurrently looking
behind; concerned to avoid what I'll
fail to heed, blundering into calamity?

I lurch with no confidence from moment
to moment in a blindness as complete as
if we'd never met. Colliding with figments
of your imagination or mine, recoiling from
dead-ends, dangling conversations, half-
truths and dyspeptic distortions.

And when we crash into inevitable walls I
am gutted by its abruptness. There is scant
time to plan avoidance, each clash is instant,
after our loud but brittle utterances you leave
in mnemonic silence and I burn to ashes.

The fire is ruthless, it devours egregiously,
consuming reason without respite, though
I cringe in its aftermath, shocked in a charred hell,
cursing my stupidity bodes no pyrrhic insight.

Time to count the torrid cost of careless words inflicted on
your battered dignity, time to close the ugly face that chanted
out invective foul and shattered amity, time to quell
the fervid rush of feckless wrath which weighs
against the bloodied loss this manic madness brusque
and hot has flung across the face of sanity.

And I think of the words we've used;
how we've talked without touching the
matter directly, or walking it to sleep,
not laying a hand on its heart, resolving
nothing other than knowing it hurt too
much to say more, or having said too
much afraid we’d be buried too deep.

And I fear the litanies, the trifling banter
which offended none until a fatal line was
uttered and the battle thus begun. And now
I think a thousand lines, fear to utter one.

Who are these strangers in our house?
Cavalier of feeling, lacking sensitivity, cartoons
of battered self-esteem circling vulturously.

When I equate your sapping pain the
sickness in my stomach quells my need
to eat or drink and bile derides a bitter
taste upon my tongue. I tremble in the
aftershock, ravaged numb with boiling
shame; my deed it was, I knew it not
for what it was and bear the blame.

I wear this millstone as a symbol of my
fate – a fate that weighs alone. That you
should feel the weight belies your quiet,
so deathly hushed it is without you home.

Time to count the torrid cost of careless words inflicted on
your battered dignity, time to close the ugly face that chanted
out invective foul and shattered amity, time to quell
the fervid rush of feckless wrath which weighs
against the bloodied loss this manic madness brusque
and hot has flung across the face of sanity.

Where is the person you once were?
Who is the one you have become? Can
I find you in between? I searched in
memories which span the years we knew
but rummaged in a closet bare. It is as if
you’d left with every vestige of yourself,
and though mementos and odds and ends
remain they are cold, inanimate.

I don't know who the new You is, I am
sorely afraid it isn't the same You I knew.
I don't know the new me either; I can't see,
I am blinded by futureless prospects
which appal and terrify me.

I know of your wont for contentment for
when you are not I am despondent and
spiritless; yet you need me to be happy
to mollify your joy, which to me is as much
affliction as frivolity. It is difficult to rise
above the effect you have and impossible
to deflect this curse of your decent geniality
and courteous respect, you are the civilised
soul; I, the angst-ridden ghoul.

Had we common joys to share and shared
them not to keep a pact we never made,
preserve a calm of artifice, I'd be a hand to
misery - but share we did and kept a peace
we'd never trade.

Low as I am and ready to sleep, I smile at
gentle snores I hear through the walls that
separate us now. They woke me at times,
I could touch to reassure you, if not myself,
that at the heart of the matter, the matter
was we were together. Now I'm not so sure.
Can we be together still, but need to be apart?

Time to count the torrid cost of careless words inflicted on
your battered dignity, time to close the ugly face that chanted
out invective foul and shattered amity, time to quell
the fervid rush of feckless wrath which weighs
against the bloodied loss this manic madness brusque
and hot has flung across the face of sanity.
© March 1984, I.D. Carswell

.

.

Of What Will Be

Editing out the
blackheads and
pugnacious bits of a
brashly bucolic tract
I am actinically affected
by soul-abiding decency.

Is this
really me
seeing an infant
in atavistic innocence
– harbinger of what
will be?

Burdened
by conscience cowed
in derelicted military absences
I recall deliciously
cuddling my sons
in their earliest years.

Grand-niece Kiara simply
smiles inviting more memories.
Pleased by the beard she
seeks only familiar while
I collide
with crescendoed reveries.
© 30 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

A Few Kind Words (rev)

A few kind words, what can be
bought with that? In essence
just a clique of prose, a verb,
a noun, perhaps an adjectival
phrase offered in the form of
venal praise – and be surprised
at what it buys.

Like fleeting smiles its currency
outweighs the simple form, a hint
of urbane compliment, a subtle
implement to sway discursive
dissertation, stun a lengthy
recitation stealing centre stage;

Oh, was that smile for me?
Profound congratulations are
implied, and truth abides, we
always need a dose of that! I’ll
put it in my hat, my ego is well
fed enough – poets with a fat,
indulgent ego are a nuisance
to the trade.

Thank you for your words;
these words are yours in
kind to muse – I hope you’ll
find some joy in that.
© 13 June 2006, I.D. Carswell

Call Of The Sea

The puzzle is how you can lead
a life half-closed to what is real
starting a journey downwards
may imply various destinations
but I know the conundrum that
living on a hill presents

It is where you want to be you
say – but go to religious lengths
to undermine the pull of gravity
your heart is in the heights seen
in your delight as endless vistas
devour the Earth’s smooth rump

Rounded curves satisfy here only
as a cerebral liquor consumed for
the pleasure of eyes feasting but
down there in sensory city sties
the lights beckon enticingly – or
do I confuse the call of the sea?
© 29 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Greatest Show On Earth

You may have mistaken me
for someone who gives a shit,
an egregious impression and
I am pleased to correct it

I am not in sympathy with that
demonstration by standing here;
it is a public thoroughfare,
I go where I please

At the moment it entertains me,
I am waiting to see Police brutality
or ignorance or something
extreme –

the sort of thing this Society
incessantly demands while it
wiles aways its last days
to extinction

Be assured, ‘tho you weren’t here
cameras recorded everything and
edited it to suggest you just missed
The Greatest Show On Earth.
© 28 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

The Price of Fame (rev)

Do I really love you? So let me guess, you’ll
think I’m easy prey if I say, okay I do – but it
won’t delay impending fame; I will be famous,
be assured of that, please to keep it hidden
in your fancy beggar’s hat.

Be it fame or notoriety, I’ll need to parley that;
but my dream of space in bigger things will not
be done by ruse or wily subterfuge but earned
indeed by sterling deeds I deem to be my own.

I don’t know how I’ll do it yet, I know it will be
done and in the wash I’ll stand the test and shine
beside the very best; while yet I rank amongst
the rest I can surely rise with you to guide me.

Do I really love you? Yes; polished love as pure
as snow, sweet as birdsong in the morning,
neat as furrowed rows that stretch across the
fields until tomorrow. And when they recognise
my name and cry their adulation I will wear your
smile upon my lips and avidly acclaim whose
hand it was that lead me to my eminence.

You look askance; I know that troubled glance,
it says you see the fame I seek as refuse rotting
on the beach, a pile of putrid vows and vapid lies,
and you chastise yourself; it’s my demise my dear,
I’ll die a pauper anyway if I don’t play the game.
You know it is the price of fame.
© 6 August 2007, I.D. Carswell

Writing In The Cold (rev)

Formerly: A Fragile Beauty Writing In The Damn Cold

While translating her ordinary thoughts
into lines on paper she had a revelation,
who would want discourse, or intercourse
for that matter, with a girl who was so
patently obvious? It came hot breathed,
urgent and unveiling, she was not someone
with whom she wanted a relationship.

She had read to death and back again
every passionate and moving poem ever
written by awesome men and women
whom she held in great regard, and in the
final rendering they too were too damn
obvious, condescending even; no room
for improvement in being just like them.

Then a line sprang from her confusion, a
hairy thing that leaped sideways from
staid and usually urbane classical fields,
landed in an undignified sprawl, square
where she’d thought a genteel opinion
might engender the right sentiment. And
it did, breaking the chain, setting her free.

Now she writes easily, cares less of restraint
or whether her meaning is bent by rogue
ideas married to obscure opinion, senses
an enjoyment outreaching the bare words,
revels in less rhyme and more meaning, dares
tilt at icons shared as sacrament. It is lonely
out there, but the cold is pure damn gold.
© 1 January 2007, I.D. Carswell

Comedy In Suspense

False gods are free for the wooing
in this helter-skelter hamlet where
magnates manipulate effects into
particle movements in glass. Power
engendered in 10,000 instances of
random error expands in electronic
measures of statistical farcicality –
a pride of place ascription pulsed on
LED monitors which display no great
ability in the word or any sense of it.

Surreal as it seems the pleasure in
counted hits is mercenary – not a
literary gesture. Reading the word is
small beer and soured expectations;
why is it irony? We bask in shade of
wordsmith peers, revere them with
passion, but play in the pits of murky
marketable reality – a Shakespearean
comedy in suspense. Surely, even The
Bard laughs famously from his grave.
© 26 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Anchored (rev)

Formerly: Anchored In Her Ever-Brimming Heart

She knew the words and whispered
them as mantras softly trilled, her
hands were butterflies and fluttered
light and easy never still, her eyes
devoured with eager bites and
savoured all the sweet delights she
ever dreamed – while deep inside
her nascent conscience schemed.

She kissed him wet and fluidly her
lips a sovereign entity that roved
without respite and in the brilliance
of the light that glared from touch
consumed in urgent body heat she
bared her breast and thrust a nipple
in his mouth to suck, crooned
an ancient lover’s rune.

Cradled there in loving arms he smiles
a toothless smile of deep content,
his eyes closed tight, a hank of hair is
clenched in tiny fist that’s anchored in
her ever-brimming heart.
© 5 December 2006, I.D. Carswell 2006

Will Be Summer Again (rev)

It hasn’t rained for days
the last band of misty cloud
fled East whimpering –
blotting out the sun in an
afternoon of doubt before
the cold invades

it seeps out of ruthless blue
promising nothing; a barren
landscape chilled with icy air
and silence clear as the soundless
beat of bird-wings seeking trees
touched by the last rays
of a defeated sun

ears burn in a rare
dissonance of blood-heat
stolen in benign larceny
wisps of woodsmoke
gently dissipate from a flue
which heats our home –
radiating into nothing

three months, you say,
three months and it
will be Summer again...
© 19 July 2007, I.D. Carswell

Shades Of Grey

No philosophic shades of grey
for me to muse about today,
it’s more a case of rising late
and missing what has run. A
cloudless sky displays its face
in brilliant sun although I think
I see a calloused blight beyond
the right extremity; I turn about
to blot it out, deliberately – it’s
on my left I’d guess but I won’t
peek to be secure. Adversity can
wear my back before I’d seek to
spoil this day’s perfection pure.
© 24 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

After The Rain (rev)

Resurgent greens and stronger hues
within the colours in-between will
spring again; the reddish brown has
nearly gone and silver greys erased
in darker shades now gleam with
slickly natured sheen from gentle,
gentle rain.

Clouded skies unite and demonize
the dry and dusty plight of days of
brutal sun and scathing wind, the
thin veneer is quickly peeled and
puddle-swamped in muddled swirls
of slushy earth to tinge the tracks
of heavy wheels.

A welcome cold at first conceals its
chilling bite, and in the icy shades of
night frigidity invites less welcome
sentiments – until a wrap of insulation
seals its warming heat, sanctifies the
stolid feet and frigid toes with subtle
sweep of warming blood.

At morning sun’s return to claim
the earth a mist surprises, rising
unabashed and clean to grace
the nascent waiting skies.
© 11 September 2006, I.D. Carswell

Not Alone (rev)

Formerly: Abandoned, But Not Alone

Abandoned but not alone
in a carnival kaleidoscope
where the beat goes on – sure
and steady rhythms strong
tho’ the dance is not the same

Abandoned in a fractal frame
shapes unfolding fern-like
fronds debasing a rigid plan
of our sometimes strained but
still amiable relationship

Abandoned by the ways
this late growth gained
credence taking precedence
over ambient years of benign
untutored friendship

Abandoned but not alone
with memories of you
a flower in bloom
renaissance of spring
scent of my dreams
© 27 October 2006, I.D. Carswell

Glades And Shady Places

Illusionary states of grace
are commonplace as jasmine
scented memories here on this
land – a song thrush sings
its melodies in softwood trees
with limbs embracing timeless
spans of yesterdays

we take our place in grander
schemes beyond the reach of
tenant plans and mortgagees
the madness lent to keep the
peace escapes our avid sanity
in just release – its words are
less than salutary

a radio pours urban angst of
voices chained to emptiness
a harmony that ranks beneath
our conscious span – voices
sing in foreign words without
surcease in every hourly news
release – competing anxiously

our price for being free erodes
each day a nether world invades
– the tranquil glades and shady
places left to rest are wakened
in a raucous chorus deftly
tainted – the birds will flee
and we must surely follow
© 23 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Warning Will Robinson!

Must’ve got it wrong, silly me,
thought the way to poetic decency
was doing the right thing – writing
deferential poetry not boring pants
off punters with endless re-runs of
slavish, pseudo-onomatopoeic rhyme.

But you can’t help see a breakneck,
boring-to-death race where the rules
of the game must be fifty posts daily
of garden waste clipped, sorted and
weighed in miasmic meanderings of
naively misguided surplus energy.

Or is it all that unseemly? Maybe an
agrarian revolution is underway and
composted vegetable matter is indeed
today’s poetic currency! Must brush off
the garden gloves wield a pair of pruning
shears and get myself started properly.
© 23 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Perfect Past (rev)

Formerly: A Past You Can’t Reclaim

you’ve had
the lines aching
like wisps of want
waiting in the corners
of your conscious mind
for days

lissom lines that sway
with rhythms poignantly
melodic lines a-play
in echoes of
a half-remembered
never quite forgot
coda to a past
you’ve not
replayed enough
to succour
satisfaction

time to
write them down
has come and
gone again

they linger on
languishing
fragments of
a fascinating realm
that’s lost
a perfect past
you can’t regain
© 28 June 2007, I.D. Carswell

Age Of The Shorter Poem (rev)

It must be the trapdoor of age,
the gap between short-term
memory and supposed sage-like
qualities we’re reputed to gain
as we get on in years.

For wont of a name I termed it
The Curse Of Sagacious Brevity,
an affinity for shorter verse as an
inverse of advancing age. Jesus –
don’t let it happen to me!

When a thousand words was tame
writing less suggested a lack of wit.
Now it’s an effect of attention span,
say it in ten words if you want it to
command any blessed interest.

You understand I’m not making
waves or commenting out of the
Kirk – but I observe poets who’ve
written 1000 or more poems fade
short in a dash to the line.

The reason I gauge and opine
is once you’ve reached a certain
age you can’t remember what
you wanted to say beyond
one line at a given time.
© 2 May 2007, I.D. Carswell

Recurrent Themes (rev)

It is a vague, recurrent theme, an
imperfectly recalled chorus from
a song perhaps; no words remain,
no claim to theses of significance.

It plays repetitively between those
half-remembered moments when
the brain disengages, returns there
again ere silence invades.

I see it a salutary companion who
competes for space without demands;
I’d say a benign copy of me to play
second-string with no complaints.

You shake your head amused, say
no way. Two of you could not survive
in close captivity. If anything, tinnitus
sounds agreeably much more the case...
© 27 October 2007, I. D. Carswell

Etches Your Face

it irks to see timeless
ideas of lyrical beauty
counterpoint to this
crass indecency of
dishonourable self-
aggrandisement

yet we were drawn in
by similar pursuits of
sweet voices sounding
all too familiar words
a praise of poetry we
knew came but freely

thus it was here where
we seduced you easily
saw clear possibilities
for poetry to discover
your voice within –
until things changed

scales fell from your
eyes as forms of falsely
forged humanity disgraced
liberal views with the
damning evidence that
we are merely pawns

you may not want to
play the game that way
but there is no excuse
it pays rent and less a
hint of shame – its fame
already etches your face
© 20 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Plastic Truth

How many hits you had today?
Enough to make your ego take
a bow? Oh, come on now, blush
or sigh or humbly say, oh well –
I’ve earned it anyway!

It’s not as if you haven’t done
the work to win a major prize,
you penned a million sweetish
lies disguised as laudatory
praise – words that had to pay

in time, or raise an eyebrow
here and there on how you’ve
made a vital play on who and
where you placed your name –
staked a claim to vapid fame!

But sadly see esteem decline
by better words than yours
maligned in mad pursuit of
plastic truth – forsooth not
every word you wrote eludes

a critic’s eye for long. Shit is
shit no matter where its writ.
It clings to pages ever yet, &
truth be said, best left unread
than thrown at your vanity.

And there it rests. You say if not
a poets’ ass then please be kind
tell me why the case for rhyme
excites a reader’s geste but
blinds a critic’s unmoved eye!
© 22 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

.

.

Waiting Game

The waiting game begins;
scene is set, actors fresh
and ready for the fray but
not a word is uttered yet,
nothing heard to start the
play on words of warring
genders set in clay, fixed
in clefts absurd by never-
ending septs acclaimed
as proof to win the day

the mood begins aloof in
gauzy femininity a word
they say exists as truth in
speech so one may seek
without a need to prove a
right to speak and yet still
say the things one thinks
agreed without explaining –
and you must hear or lead
yourself at peace away

and where the power to
disagree demurs in shades
of masculinity the words
offset from lips redressed by
blows of fists which asked of
whose authority this came
we level fields and fill the
cavities aware the peace
is merely temporary until
she says – you will desist
© 21 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Monument In Words

And so I had a glaring revelation;
I couldn’t find the poet in the man
I read by writers true disposed to
tell us of his life composed with
great veracity.

Although they built a monument
in words and deeds, a shrine of
writers’ reeds inlaid with fine and
proper quotes – they were motes
I thought and hardly real.

I couldn’t find the poet in the man
they wrote about, but when I found
alone the man within his poetry by
reading fast and furious
at last I was in verse replete.

Perhaps they can’t compete these
counters of the dusty grains of sand,
there’s more evoked within a ball of
dimpled clay on any day a sculptor
lends his hands to shape a face;

I’m pleased to say I’d rather read the
poet than the man who elevates his
august name and will not place my
future faith in such abstruse scatology.
© 16 August 2006, I.D. Carswell

Piglet’s Balloon

"Well, that's funny," he thought. "I wonder what
that bang was. I couldn't have made such a noise
just falling down. And where's my balloon? And
what's that small piece of damp rag doing?"
Piglet, from Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne 

Two bits of damp rag – indeed!
Redressed from breasts as large
as Granny Smith’s were meant
to be; in red no less, and huge
in Piglet’s view of worldly things,
as big as he, deflated yes, limp
and wasted – dishonoured in
munificence pneumatically.

We remember them with Piglet’s
eyes my dear; Eeyore, surprised
was duly blessed, a birthday gift
which burst yet satisfied a simple
need. It never lost its charm and
nor will yours in fondest memory.
© 19 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Poet Allison Cassidy claimed her once
pneumatically magnificent breasts
were rather like Piglet’s burst balloon
these days... I really should have let

the matter rest there

Should Have Been Grotesque (rev)

Formerly: Could Have Been Grotesque

By any other dialect it should
have been grotesque but we
managed to celebrate without
the mass protest expected of
drunkenly gauche revelry;

and we wrote more words on
the cigarette papers, lit them
singularly with matches
scratched on surfaces suiting
the expression, cast them into
the breeze.

What was the purpose of that?
I have wondered to this day but
nothing replicates the ease and
contiguity of that night, the flow
of our feelings, an exorcism of a
mighty burden we’d lived with
for five years.

We were worthy, we were free
and we wrote those words with
lipstick stolen from the purses of
gifted girls, or begged from the
same with promises. Our words
were supposedly sacrosanct
offerings in privacy of a makeshift
shrine on the overbridge between
the library and the student union.

It was a communion of feelings,
offerings and forgiving. I wrote
with feeling – F.U. – there wasn’t
room for any more...
© 4 December 2006, I.D. Carswell

A Call We Can’t Resist

A sun that barely warms appears
to raise our hopes before the day
returns to misty showers. It isn’t
rain that keeps us here but clouds
which won’t invite us out into a dull
and grey ingrained ambivalence.
The tune we play – a sombre hymn,
a dirge to wait the sadness through,

a lay that quavers restlessly to be
away from walls imbued in fat and
static thoughts. Yet there between
the fluffy clouds and taut striations
loudly etched a wedge of fragile blue
resounds. It is a call we can’t resist...
© 15 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Duly Burned

Whinging bastards are at it again
because, to put it genteelly – it’s
feeding time at the Media Zoo! A
budgetary inspired maliciousness
unveils entrenched stupidity and
we arraign ourselves accordingly.

They, survivors of John Howard’s
ultra-bitchy school of excesses are
freed as born-again eye-openers
of moderation, so hard to believe,
but you have it immortalised and
Turnbullised on radio and screen.

Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, a creation
of Rhodes conservative dementia,
double degree in Law and Arts,
makes a play on all things plain &
ordinary – which plainly he isn’t
and manifestly never will be.

But on Budget Day 2008, MBT is
on record playing his lush media
connections to obscene perfection
in a hot credentials display which
might awe all but the charred
corpses of duly burned investors.
© 14 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

Palmer River

Call it what you will, that they ate the
gold rush coolies was no secret time
withheld – tasty meat when normal fare
was spare. The feet of many thousands
tramped the valleys where their food
supply was sought; in lieu they merely
caught an easy pigtailed prey, roasted
it on open fires and feasted anyway.

Yet to this day our Histories abstain
from stating facts, demurring episodes
as random acts of grievous memory. Or
were the scenes of natives eating coolie
meat illusions too displeasing – bones in
middens proof of no such thing?
© 12 May 2008, I. D. Carswell

From ‘River Of Gold’ by Hector Holthouse
(The Palmer River gold rush 1870 – 1878)