A slight little poem about a couple of different variants of love. (Also the first poem I’m attempting to post/upload via my phone rather than desktop).
candypants
finally finished moving house yesterday after three & a half long years
rediscovered my old yellow purple pink & blue 60s psychedelic striped skin-tight Saville Row pants
back from when legs were thin gut didn’t exist & butt was defunct
i’d love to be able to fit into them one more time
but even more than that i’d die to be that man again
A list poem, that in turn, contains several ideas/lines that might themselves become their own poems this month.
the weird love,
the tyrannical distance, the disparate time zones, the clashing schedules, the near twenty years, the roller coaster that never coasts, the bicoastal bipolar, the unromantic romance, the life-is-not-a-fairytale, the beautiful beast, the beastly beauty, the attractive repulsion, the anxious agony, the unmated souls, the singing universe, the sparkling shiver, the cold silence, the nagging thorn, the out-of-sync hearts, the half-made promise, the broken chain, the joke that bombed, the unequal exchange, the one word reply, the stranger in the bed, the intimate inmate inside the head, the reluctant endearments, the belligerent confessions, the definitions of love, the expectations on love, the ramifications if it is love,
A somewhat lighthearted pome for an otherwise rather emotional day. It’s also 9 years & one day since my housemate brought Chester home to live with us.
me or the dog
high on one of my shelves a book titled as per this poem
jokingly perhaps or perhaps genuinely concerned
my significant other bravely asked: which would you choose?
i told her i’ll call you the very day the dog dies
Written early enough but owing to the exhaustion brought about by the poem’s subject matter from the day before followed. by two tiring shifts the following day meant it was unable to to posted before the allotted hour due to the poet falling asleep almost immediately upon arrival home.
moving love (for Sarah)
everyone dreads that phone call from a friend or loved one who wants to know if you’re free on Sunday (just for a couple of hours)
so when someone actually helps you: pack carry load bags boxes crates ungainly ugly furniture tatty bric-a-brac & misc junk that honestly should’ve been ditched decades ago
but most of all: wait patiently while poor logistical decisions regarding the stowage in the trailer are trialled fine tuned & discarded before again gently suggesting the idea they first shared 15 minutes earlier & which works — perfectly —
In my Glo/NaPoWriMo world, Sundays are generally reserved for some poetry fun & games … still it feels a little weird to be playing games already, only three days in. None-the-less, rules be rules. Today’s poem was pretty easy because I’ve been listening to him a lot lately — & love is pretty much all he writes about. However, I also set myself some additional rules with the structure itself which complicated things somewhat.
Prize for the first person who can guess who & what I’ve done (except you Mike 🤣🤣🤣).
for the love of Murray 1 pronouns
let you go no more
you pick me up you give me something because of you fly with you with only you thought i was
My housemate & I saw the play Constellations tonight. It was his choice because as the program states: Payne’s script presents a series of vignettes centring on two characters across various parallel universes — the same setting & conversation, but different outcomes each time. This unconventional love story set in the quantum multiverse has us asking: What if there are infinite versions of you & I? And what if there are multiple universes pulling our lives in a myriad of different directions? — & he has been toying with similar themes in a play he said he wants to call the final last night of our lives. (I think it’s a great title & might even pinch it if he doesn’t produce something soon. Fair warning given!)
Tonight’s play was interesting without being awe-inspiring. But given it explored themes of love in occasionally unusual ways, there was some useful material that had me both thinking during the play & on the drive home. With that in mind here’s a pome-in-progress; structural inspired by the play — ie, in vignette form & using rhythm, repetition & some images from the play.
lessons from Constellations (vignettes about love)
i. love is knife edge sharp love is knife edge hard love is a knife i am knifed Et tu
ii. the dangerous act of loving someone leaves you alone with your fragility
iib. perhaps even frail, guilty for there is always one other who comes between us & our egos
iii. we remain perpetually lost among the great mechanical quantumness of love forevers
we blithely step through those ever sliding doors some into happy afters some into miseries unending some into sunlight some into death supernova bright
we still try
iv. night ships titanic dinghies missing their chance thieving time as they crash into everything but the ice
v. always peeking doors of death despite the possible multiplicities & symmetry of circles
there is no formula for love all we have are our imperfect hearts & fireflies brief lives
April again = Na/GloPoWriMo. Normally each year I debate about if I should put myself through the somewhat excruciating agony of participating, but not this year. I knew I would months ago. Because something has recently happened to me which has meant I’ve been churning out new poems (some of them even quite good) at a furious rate since December. Why you might well ask. Good question.
And so to themes.
In 2020, every poem explored corona, plague, pandemics & virus. In 2021 it was heat, denial, climate change & extreme weather. This year 2022 the theme is even bigger. And also infinitely more intimate.
You soon work out what it is when you start reading.
an old romantic on a new seesaw
i don’t begrudge you
your silences your lake swims your long walks
your reading of books or baking of cakes just to cook something not work related
whatever needs to be done to stay sane, find calm detox, disengage, downtime needs to be done
i can cope with you
running soft & hot sweet & giggly mere moments after ice & distance business & banter
the seesawing between soul mates sizzling with sparkles & endless iterations on the various types of falling rain
all the talk about romance & romantic gestures & the most romantic things done have been leading to one place
this place:
where all i need is a message every sporadic so-often (say every 30 minutes or so)
a simple bit of ascii binary code with a “missing you” here & a kiss emoji or a purple love heart there
one of these will keep me off the saw for half a dozen bliss-filled hours at least
after talking the new year in in two time zones you belatedly go to your bed while i drive to the lookout cool breezed after the hateful heat of the old year’s anger lie on the oversized table hewn from local eucalypt & stare up up ever up
so many stars in the blistering sky they cram the eye allow myself to float away delighting in a dozen minor shooting streaks & two tears of light so bright they leave scars the tingling thrill they fibrillate almost equal to the glowsong my soul sings every time i hear your voice that raucous chuckle that wicked sassy firecracker wit that tender admission of love
I’ve been considering this idea for the final poem of the month almost since the first day (I’d love to say Day 1, but it wasn’t, so, truth). I’ve had nothing more than the title (phoenix, you see how well that turned out) & the basic vibe of the thing. I also knew I want it to be a bit less literal/sledgehammery than some of stat/fact based pomes have been (usually stat based pomes are that way because I haven’t had enough time to find a way to “hide the facts”/tell the story in a poetical way.)
That said, I knew I wanted it to be a positive hopeful type message after a month of almost unrelenting desperation. Sadly I could not muster that outcome. Poems often take on lives of their own once you give them the initial kickstart & this little brumby definitely roared off towards a far different horizon than the one intended. Almost everything about this was unexpected …
*****
the second, & worst, species of phoenix
so the myth goes there are three species of Phoenix two of them do not really concern us
Phoinix immortalis resides in the temple of every sun predominately goldenfire shines with a star’s brightness shatters darkness cos it can & when she dies the universe folds completely in upon itself & is re-banged
Phoinix communis equal parts red & gold rosecoloured wing feathers tufts of iridescence spot fires of sunshine lives 500 years & dies ablazing yet born from the same ashes just days later
but Phoinix conflagrare is to be feared — feathers so red they are as living flame neck a gleam of gold golden crest crowns its head lavaflow with each movement lives 10,000 years — but beware when he burns, he burns the world consumes it almost entirely
the earth recovers, for that is her way but we humans, will no longer be around to witness to meddle nor to play god
I’ve saved writing this one till almost last because I know it’s going to be somewhat controversial or confrontational for many people. As mentioned in my pome plague species from last’s year’s pandemic suite, humans & the beasts we own as pets/property or product are somewhere/between 96-98% of the entire biomass of the planet.
Even more unsustainable than the 8 billion humans on Starship Earth are the 1 billion cows, 1 billion sheep, 26 billion chickens, 700 million goats, 680 million pigs that exist at any one time, because, for example, while there’s only about 26 billion chickens alive at any one time, the world eats about 50 billion … every year.
*****
meat & milk
setting aside the many moral & ethical considerations
as the world gets richer it eats more meat & drinks more milk
without seemingly understanding rearing cattle
~ puts more heat-trapping gas into the air than every car truck train boat & plane
~ causes a tenth of CO2 derived from human-related activities
~ two-thirds of human-related nitrous oxide (300x the Global Warming Potential of CO2)
~ a third of all human-induced methane (23x as warming as CO2)
~ two-thirds of ammonia a key factor in acid rain
~ uses a third of the earth’s entire land surface a third of the global arable land to produce feed
~ about a fifth of all pastures are degraded through overgrazing, compaction, erosion
~ forests are cleared to create new pastures & so is a major driver of deforestation
~ threatens our scarce water resources through pollution from animal wastes antibiotics
hormones chemicals from tanneries fertilizers & the pesticides that spray crops
we may think we’re raising them to feed our appetite ~ but ultimately
our hunger might kill us all as well
NB Humans kill 50 billion chickens, 3 billion ducks, 1.47 billion pigs, 545 million sheep, 444 million goats and 300 million cattle every year. All in all, 72 billion land animals & over 1.2 trillion aquatic animals are killed for food around the world every year. We drink around 600 million tonnes of milk every year. & these numbers continue to rise…
gareth roi poet boi 