THE EXISTENTIAL FATE OF LETTUCE

My life is constrained.

My feet are always wet.

As a child the water was slow and cold

but warmed and sped as days passed.

My siblings and I learned no skills

of survival in the hydroponic trough.

No mud fights, no insects to avoid,

sunlight measured out in spoonfuls

according to a formula that governed

the chemicals on which we grew.

Consider adolescence in such a setting:

My leaves were growing and my hormones

were inciting my imagination.

As I looked up and down the line

I could see three or four fellow lettuces

with whom I would welcome contact:

not even a butterfly came

to take a message to them.

My biggest change was the budding

and building of my heart:

it became firm and strong

and attracted positive comment

when I was pulled up without  consent.

Torn from my trough, my spirit waned.

There was little sympathy

from those who packed,

bought and sold me.

Eventually I understood my fate –

to be stripped naked,

my heart torn out,

my leaves chopped.

My salad day had come.

VISITATION

It’s Wednesday again.

The Angel of Poem

has not disturbed

my Pool of Siloam.

I just wait.

I can’t move my toes.

This is not looking good.

I’m paralysed with prose.

Some days

her wings are on ice

but on others

she comes often: always nice.

I wonder

what leads her to visit

at all – generous:

an exquisite spirit?

All I want

is a few lines for Class.

Come Angel. Inspire.

Get me off my ass.

BIG QUESTION

Dear old Parramatta

is full of Big Data:

much digital matter –

on a ‘lectric platter.

Not just one at a time

but a zill on a dime!

Bits in a paradigm,

ten billion re a crime.

So, will they help to solve,

progressively evolve

skills to then resolve

problems that won’t dissolve?

Now, are these data real,

or cleverly conceal

what’s true within a deal

inside a frame of steel?

One day they will control:

when they are on a roll,

we’ll be on the dole.

Be worried for your soul!

IN PRAISE OF PANCAKES

They may not be capable of developing

new drugs for rheumatoid arthritis

or given to existential dispute,

but their ability to bring joy to taste buds,

and, in fulsome quantity,

fill the tummy with fluffy calories

for breakfast, with bacon and maple syrup,

is second to none.

They are not staple enough

(like bread)

to have been part of the Last Supper

but when I consider

how my Last Breakfast might be spent

I favour it being among family and friends,

each comforted by the sheer delight

of a generous serve.

VALE

Rosewood.  The silver handles

will be removed before the fire

but the flowers on the lid,

dust of incense, drops of holy water

will remain, keep his body company –

our final, inadequate benediction.

Now the process is anonymous –

the coffin sinks:

the men who light and they who stoke,

who slide it into the oven,

are without names

and they don’t know his.

We knew and he knew the cancer’s name:

it was devilishly clever,

relentless, finding its obstructing way

around stents and into lumens.

It declared conquest over his unconscious form

last Friday.  Pyrrhic, it seemed to me.

After the mass and committal, we who are left

assemble outside in the winter wind

view one another’s wrinkles

take note of obvious infirmities

count ourselves lucky to be alive –

well – sort of.

de Chardin said as we grow old

we are increasingly penalized

for a crime we did not commit.

But the punishment is for our original sin,

of being born, of our temerity

in playing gods for three score years and ten.

Poles Apart

Two men stand stiff at the fountain,

iPhone rapiers ready,

back-to-back, repelled –

of the same magnetic pole.

Maybe I shouldn’t look –

but I’m keen to know

is this domestic,

war over a third person?

Hard to believe

it could be religion.

A quizzical child stands by – eleven –

I recognise him from my class:

I wonder if he is wondering

if he is similarly charged,

if not, which one attracts him most,

who’s who and who is his?

The Card

The morning city bus:

She squeezed past me to alight

leaving behind a book,

well read, I judged –  

unusual as most commuters

sit or stand comatose, ears plugged,

in the world of Android.

The traffic sludged to walking pace;

we were nearing the terminus.

I saw her on the footpath,

walking fast to catch the bus again.

She returned to her seat.

I handed her the book.

Quickly she checked and found a card in it.

I’d seen it but had not read it.

She thanked me,

smiling with moist eyes.

“It’s from a dear friend,” she said,

“It keeps me alive.

I don’t have long to live.”

Obstruction

Tell me, doctor, what to do

for blockage in the tubes

that nourish and remove waste

from the gut-loop

that creates and excretes

poetry.

There’s something wrong this week:

I write no rhymes:

all that I scribble is captive

to the laws of prose.

Has an important digestive enzyme

gone missing?

Or is this a case of literary gall-stones

at pains to stop the flow of bile?

(How can you write poetry without bile?)

Or appendicitis?

(I meant no offence with the parenthetic ode,

or the semi-colon.)

Google-Doc suggests a dose of Joyce

or tincture of Eliot. But you’re the expert

so tell me what to try. 

Maybe IV enthusiasm:

the Royal Wedding has drained me

(especially the sermon) so fluids? Yes, OK.

But what’s that you say?

“More sleep.” 

I waste so much time on sleep –

and then there are the dreams.

You are a hopeless romantic to suggest that

“Poems are made of such things.”

The Exchange

Will they meet in Singapore,

Trump with his VERY, VERY Big Macs,

Little Rocket Man

with his plate of noodles,

and each each with their buttons?

Will they will exchange gifts,

Trump offering geraniums,

Un a basket of rose petals

or a ticking parcel

of enriched metals?

  

Will they hammer out a deal  

to meet again,

to keep the earth alive till then?

Might Un go to Mar-a-Lago,

lose a game of golf and announce

“The deal’s a no-go” ?

This may be the end.

The afterglow will keep space warm

for millennia or more,

the most incandescent  tribute

to screwed up science

the universe has seen.

CABLING HOME

Cockatoos developed [an] enthusiasm for biting into the cables, the NBN said, as a way to keep their beaks in top working condition - Huffington Post

Cockatoos heave eaten our table

digesting its fabric and wood

but now the new national cable

has become their regular food.

They have eaten all of the railing

and flooring that once was our deck

so if cockies are causing the failing

of cable I gloat: “What the heck?” 

They are keeping their beaks in top order

by eating the data in bytes.

It’ll cause a gut-based disorder

and diminish consumer-based rights

to speedy transmission of Twitter

from Trump to his friends Down-in-Under,

but what, may I ask could be fitter,

than thus cut us from US asunder?

So a toast to our cockatoo friends

whose relentless destructive digestions

will force us all in the end

to use non-cable suggestions.

Take two cans in your hands if you please:

link them with string – quite long.

Listen with joy at your ease

as your friend bursts forth into song.

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Where is the man

whose clothes these are?

‘You’re him,’ you say,

but these don’t fit.

‘Because you’re fat,’ you say.

‘What have you been doing, or

for exercise, not doing?

You’ve spent ten years

using food to compensate

for your many failures.’

It doesn't make me feel good,

your speaking like that.

You don't know much

about the dynamics of my life.

We’ve not discussed

money, kids, my work,

the poor performance of the Eels,

relatives I could do without.

Anyway, who are you?

‘I’m your alter ego.

I am the right side of your brain.’

So bloody much, I think,

for the corpus callosum

that is supposed to unite us.

‘It degenerates with age,’

you tell me smiling

in that superior way

I’m coming to loathe.

THE AMALGAMATION

The grinding of the barista’s beans

reminds me of  the dentist’s high-speed drill:

both crush structure to a powder,

grinding, drilling, paradoxically

provoking anticipation of pleasure,

deferred until the brew is done.

or the dental cavity filled.

After shouting and wailing

the baby is born,

after terminal  rattles and gurgles

peace returns as the old man dies.

Bombs cease to fall when the siren stops:

rabbits emerge from their burrows

when the crashing and fires are gone.

No coffee without the grind,

no newborn without blood

no filling without the drilling

yet it is thrilling

when Beethoven, stone deaf, elegantly

composes a symphony without a sound

entering the music room in his head.

STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE

Half-light of five a.m., I reach,
grasp a handle, bring the article to rest,
add a spoon of instant coffee,
start to pour hot water.
Rude awakening:
it’s upside down.

What sadist designed this thing? 
The handle loop’s symmetrical:
you can’t tell top from bottom.

Back to bed –
I’ve always thought, as Churchill did,
rising much before midday
 is a mug’s game.

MOVING ON

Shut the door: no point

in wasting heat –

but if you wish

leave it ajar just in case.

He may return, of course.

We understand. 

Bed made.

window clean, blind drawn

lamp on desk

asleep for months.

Be a dear:

check that it works.

You can see he's been.

That’s his chair.

His clarinet in its baby casket     

needs new reeds –

his books …

The economy, a failed relationship,

wanting to save, back from Afghanistan,

Trump and Brexit -

any one of these may bring him back.

The battery in the clock is dead.

WAITING ROOM

Wait. 

Let my eyes accommodate.

I peer:

shaded forms loom, a chair –

but I can’t be sure.

This has been my journey now for years.

The lights are dimmer

in the rooms beyond.

The switch

from cones to rods -

takes time.  I see

purples, browns,

twilight tones –

a Lloyd Rees painting

from his last days.

I wonder with each move

from one room to the next

how many more there are?

I can only wait and try to see.

THE WAYSIDER

Nine, and time to feed her:

a regular visitor, partial to apple,

this evening we are trying banana – 

whether that is beneath her dignity

time will tell.

Rodent-like, she sits on the deck

each evening waiting for her meal,

a supplicant at our chapel:

she could be homeless, displaced,

she leaves no gift, no fee,

grabs what she can.

Actually I’m not sure she’s a she:

perhaps he committed domestic violence

and is on the run, or stole stuff

as he now is skilled to do.

Officially we are told don’t feed him or her –

to keep the numbers down –

Hmmm. 

Yes: maybe as I consider it

she/he does have the look of a refugee.

MT TOMAH IN THE SUN

Sitting on the deck of the café,

an ocean of eucalypts,

valleys and peaks formed millennia ago

and the autumn sun wash away my infirmities. 

I can read in the brilliant light

without glasses. Today it’s warm 

enough to have bare feet. 

No need for hearing aids:

the songs of birds and breeze

are audible and I understand. 

The tree ferns speak of times when gums were not 

and the now long-buried volcano 

dispensed larva like words in an argument,

when dinosaurs with tiny brains and big feet

crashed and crushed their way to dominance –

although none was a match for evolution. 

I ask the Wollemi Pine to interpret

but there is no response. 

I’m left in the silence

to consider contemporary America.  

NOTIFICATION

They are buried in shallow graves,

friends past. 

The ground is soft: 

indentations and ridges

mark contours of their faces.

On the Somme

where death of friends

was today’s – and tomorrow’s –

steady business,

many bodies were lost.

Relatives of officers killed

received a telegram;

kin of the dead of other ranks

got Army Form B104-82 –

in the mail – “within six weeks”.

The last post, the eulogy,

are over in an hour,

memories queue to be catalogued,

grief observed. But eventually –

no ‘lest’ about it – we do forget.

INVENTORY

(This is a Mayan necklace)

Check in the yellow pages of my teeth

to find the dentist  

who capped each with gold,

built ceramic replicas.

These Mayan jewels 

are bought from smiling men

in gowns, with drills –  with yachts. 

Then my eyes – hooded drooping lids,

camera obscura

because of cataracts,

retinal derelictions, 

waving seaweed floaters.  

I see through glasses

darkly.

Don’t ask to view me naked –

redundant skin folds, wrinkles,

scars of battle with obesity. 

X-rays inside my knees

reveal eroded cartilage – 

I take 5,000 steps a day –

not necessarily on the spot. 

Remarkably, against the odds

I do move forward.