tincture - stuart barnes

tincture

our prickly pear’s
eleven copper
suns have expired.
bellies of Rainbow
parrots flare against
a Henson sky like
matches. fireworks
ridicule horizons. a
stray cat blackens.

stuart barnes
http://bluepepper.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-poetry-by-stuart-barnes.html

We Raw Muggers Haiku - Shane Jesse Christmass

We Raw Muggers Haiku


lying bathe bridge of his
nose one of the other
patience


rapidly into an insole
fall to his
knees


to lie swivels around
in trouble
this comet is useless


the taps off and then
murder these
what do you want?


the water turned trusses are
casing and us coming from
the bathing cautioned


textual some unceasing
plucks off the night
it’s him to hog into what is right


l walked the corridor well
doesn’t mountain bike in the amulet
crackled himself


I’m a bit nervous
she ; the milky cup
of tea

Shane Jesse Christmas
http://luparapublishing.blogspot.com/

Modem - Stuart Barnes

MODEM

London by night all alone,
London by night on my own
The KLF

3 a.m., 3 a.m., 3 a.m. Eternal like
those Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
I snap awake, buzzy from my
purple shrinking pills, to stagger
to the loo to take a piss. Passing
the computer it startles
me still, this little black sarcophagus
with the boisterous proboscis and
kaleidoscopic lights, electric blue.
May it mourn for a tampered field
of corn? Is there something more?

Stuart Barnes
http://www.pool.org.au/users/stuart_barnes

Phillip A Ellis - 15 August 2009

15 August 2009

Over lands, seas, and oceans, the stars rise
steadily, into night and the dark sky
unmarked by any moon. When the stars fade
from the heights, scratched as it is by streets' lamps,
houses, other buildings, then no eye knows
what was once seen, in the open night sky:
seasons, directions, legends, and fair lamps
hung from the heavens, and from a dark vault.

But the night is still young, younger than time,
younger than the lands over which it's hung
like a veil of unseeing, emptiness
kept at bay as by gossamer star-veils,
clusters of flaming gas, fields of burning,
fragile wards facing entropy, heat death.


Phillip A Ellis
http://phillipellis.f-snet.com/

Jeff Klooger - A Brief History Of Getting Smashed

A Brief History Of Getting Smashed

Emotion is chemistry, and alcohol
is love ― here especially, or anywhere tropical.
Tonight we will get drunk like scientists, our heads bursting
with untested theories, facts
whizzing past our eyes
and into the sunset.

We don’t care. Without fear or forethought,
we gaze into the magic heart of things. Reality
is what we see when we close our eyes,
sure as physics, sucking us in
like gravity. If you lie flat out
and stare straight up at the stars, you will get dizzy,
but all that whirling still makes sense somehow.

God is a dry martini, shaken not stirred.
Proof is a toothpick
piercing the olive of the world.
Einstein understood: the faster you go
the heavier you get.
Intoxication is a formula
that escapes to infinity.

Jeff Klooger
http://walleahpress.com.au/FR37Klooger.html

Michael Lee Johnson - Charley Plays a Tune

Charley Plays a Tune

Crippled, in Chicago,
with arthritis
and Alzheimer's,
in a dark rented room,
Charley plays
melancholic melodies
on a dust-filled
harmonica he
found abandoned
on a playground of sand
years ago by a handful of children
playing on monkey bars.
He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,
relieving himself takes forever; he feeds the cat when
he doesn't forget where the food is stashed.
He hears bedlam when he buys fish at the local market
and the skeleton bones of the fish show through.
He lies on his back, riddled with pain,
pine cones fill his pillows and mattress;
praying to Jesus and rubbing his rosary beads
Charley blows tunes out his
celestial instrument
notes float through the open window
touch the nose of summer clouds.
Charley overtakes himself with grief
and is ecstatically alone.
Charley plays a solo tune.

Michael Lee Johnson
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000058168

Landscapes - Stuart Barnes

LANDSCAPES

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes
Marcel Proust

(I) Collingwood

the Magi are imaginable

a poultice for sizzling footpaths

jasmine’s in clusters like jellyfish

or brains over ramshackle wooden

fences – missing pales, missing teeth

sepia light smogs broken warehouse

rooftops, cracks the jade-green eyes

of stray white cats you stalk,

face ringing like a church bell

(II) Clifton Hill

alarming palaver! blue Mary,

grey child OshKosh B’Gosh

buggies, brown and black – they pass,

slow as hearses birds-of-paradise

fly fabulous crests’ molten colours

at the air; I stare and stare the light

of the day is starry, and comes

from the eye of the cardinal mountains

you come out of nowhere

(III) Abbotsford

a shock-haired man rubs lamps

of Technicolor glass graceful

as giraffes, nuns unfurl dark habits

hands rub like papery leaves

in November there’s mayhem

at the manger last winter I witnessed

a froth of hops, like sheep or a crime,

across the water you in white

across the water fire in the sky

Stuart Barnes
http://pool.org.au/users/stuart_barnes

in the things we hold and the things we cannot - Mark William Jackson

in the things we hold and the things we cannot


the bottle paints it perfumed image?

_________________days of empty despair

while the light that guided

smiles as I talk to her

___________________about poetry


Mark William Jackson
http://markwilliamjackson.com/

Three Poems - Majena Mafe

Always…

_____you’d become still
_____before the jump to ____here

_____O laugh out loud...


-


so sue me

‘Doesn’t she look goo-ood
her full-blown-self…’
Ridge Forester bloats.


-


cut

the placing of flowers inside
presupposes a confidence in water
and the dubious assumption that kept
water will beauty provide


Majena Mafe
http://www.majenamafe.com/

Looking Back - Ron Wilkins

Looking Back

A thump with the heel
of the hand forcing entry,
then the metal ripper jacking up
the lid in levered steps until
with a twist,
the jagged disk snapped loose.
It was hard preparing a meal
of sausages and vegetables
in those student days,
filling up on a chunk of bread and jam,
a mug of tea.


Now, the opener is half the size.
It grips the rim and by successive turns
of a wheel at the side,
the can rotates et voila –
a perfect reflecting circle drops,
neat as a freshly minted coin.
How much easier life has become,
though as I gaze at the pale beans
glowing in their pink sauce,
I wonder could I be viewing the present
through rosy-tinted spectacles?

Ron Wilkins
http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/changsha-beauty/

Beloved - Shonni Hodge

Beloved

The lies have wrought their own piece:
Intricate curls, gilt and glamour
to showcase the shame.

Glass beads set in the mask
reflect years.
Contorted husk
of animation,
carved dream of humanity:

Her perfection is without equal.

How I despised her, and her magpie eyes.
Unyielding presence, a thing possessed – she watches
And knows.

Empty shell! Your partner quit your side forever.
How he must have loathed your
porcelain, so cold beneath
mere flesh.

But now my heart is merely sickened
to watch you sit and stare.
Skin once flush and heated is now
Chilling, startling to touch.
Eyes whose life once boiled, flooding my heart,
reflect the world without wonder.

Shonni Hodge
http://disorganisationanddiatribes.blogspot.com/

The Words That Fell To Earth - Amelia Walker

The Words That Fell To Earth

Thirty seven pages.
Thirty seven miles.
The diary of Ilan Ramon,
Israel's first astronaut,
found, wet and crumpled,
in a field just outside Palestine,
Texas. Words:
scrawled survivors,
the only survivors of Columbia,
the space shuttle that disintegrated
upon re-entry, February 1st, 2003
- the newspaper says.

Disintegrated.
Such a newspaper word.
Distintegrated.
All that metal.
All that flesh
and blood and bones and organs
and thoughts -what thoughts?
Any?
Where did they go?

How is it ink and paper escaped
the explosion, the heat,
the ice cold plummet,
the dirt and damp of the field
to be found, two months later
and returned to Ilan's wife?

All that ink.
All that paper.
All that metal.
All that flesh.
Thirty seven pages
and how many words?

Amelia Walker
http://www.freewebs.com/ameliawalker/

Mark William Jackson - These Days that Play like Toothaches

These days that play like toothaches.
dragging each breath in
then pushing it out
like a cheating lover.
Breath upon breath until
the day is drawn up
and spat into a waste basin
by the straight syringe of time.
Day upon day until
we are left
to sleep with worms.

Mark William Jackson
http://markwilliamjackson.com/

Ron Wilkins - A Matter of Life and Death

A matter of life and death

While walking down the street
I surprised a girl and a boy
in passionate embrace against a wall.
Nothing strange about that, you may say,
but she was dressed in school uniform
and it was during school hours.
Ah, that’s life I said to myself.
Hey, guess what I saw in The Boulevard
I said to my wife.

Next day I was carrying
a ring-tailed possum by the tail
as I walked along the road.
Schoolgirl heads
swivelled in unison as I passed.
Burying the possum
in an unmarked grave next to the last
and beside the graves of my two cats,
creating quite a cemetery,
I thought to myself, that’s death.
Hey, guess what I saw down the street
I suppose a schoolgirl said to her mum,
completing yet another
life and death tale.

Ron Wilkins
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/4/worm

Running - Vanessa Page

Running

When roadside has turned to red
and desert oaks are stenciled
neat on car window canvases
you’ve run far enough - to where
dust folds over to new thicknesses
taking with it every trace.

It’s too late for the maps, left
unfolded on the passenger seat
you’re lost in odometer’s slow roll
passing bloated marsupials
with legs stiff as tent poles
grasping the sense in endings.

Vanessa Page
http://vanessapage.wordpress.com/

A Free Verse Sonnet for Freya Buchanan - Phillip A. Ellis

A Free Verse Sonnet for Freya Buchanan

With the sun slowly
growing through winter,
till the spring comes at last
with its crop of birds,
and the earth itself wakes
from the somnolence that is frozen soil,
it is not strange that some may
look to the long suns of summer.

But, before you do, think on this:
each element of snow is unique,
and will never be seen again,
just as is each mote of dust
strangely attracted along the shafts
of summer sunlight on sleep-dealing days.

Phillip A. Ellis
http://phillipellis.f-snet.com/

Separation - Stuart Barnes

Separation

As if echoing feverish
prayer, she held the black comb
to her temple, fought to drag it
through the knots
and ampersands. She
stopped, stared into the glass,
and cracked my eyes,
and cried, "Tomorrow!" -
touched the baroque pearls
wetting her neck, and stepped into
crisp new blacks.

Stuart Barnes
http://www.pool.org.au/text/stuart_barnes/the_fourth_floor

Bite - Graham Nunn

Bite

how close a minute ago had been
young girl in the sand
pulling off wet clothes
red on white
beautiful but for the horror of the moment
the frenzied tide
pulling out and around
as the people piled up
a simple example
of twenty-first century fascination
the screaming hell of flesh
humanity's reaching arms
sand sticks to everything.

Graham Nunn
http://grahamnunn.wordpress.com/

The Measure of All Things - Ros McFarlane

The Measure of All Things

Man has made himself
the measure of all things.

Stars are measured by the distance
from him.
Mountains are conquered
in feet.
Oceans are only as deep
as his ships can travel down.
Sunlight is dissected
into manageable portions
of sleeping, waking and working hours.

Animal intelligence
is compared to his.
Infrared and ultraviolet light
to colours visible through his eye.

Women measure their intelligence,
assets, education, prospects,
by his ideal;
and find themselves lacking or overachievers.

Man has even made himself
the measure of love
with “normal” (heterosexual)
“aberrant” (homosexual)
and “erotica” (hot lesbians).

But when man has even
measured God in relation to himself
(an outdated, primitive concept)
what is there left to measure up to?

Ros McFarlane

Your Mother's Hands - Vanessa Page

Your Mother’s Hands

In the kitchen

you are slicing fruit

with hands

that remind you

of your mother


Deliberate,

and lined

they betray you


So too,

these beginnings

of crow’s feet

and pursed lips


as you hover over

autumnal hued

laminex


Careful, for

the influence

is catching


First the hands,

second, the

confused diplomacy


a tapping foot

closed gestures

the economic effort


We are all reinventions;

skin, papered

over skin

Vanessa Page
http://www.ipswichpoetryfeast.com.au/2008/winnersother_4.htm#hc4