2011+, walk

scones

What time is it?
8:40am.
My feet hurt.
I don’t have a typewriter.
I’ve been reading Beat poetry again, getting lost in it.
I have to make scones for Poetry Kitchen.
Power tools howl on both sides of the apartment.
Cars stumble down the street.
I am thinking this in the I am voice of Allen Ginsberg or Jack Micheline.
All those men.
Outside Simon works with the leafblower clearing up the leaves.
He makes a terrible noise at least once a week.
I wish I were him. His life looks simple. He does the grounds and the building.
I have to bake scones for Poetry Kitchen.
I have to do this. I have to do that.
I want to sit here writing poetry letting my mind think things as my pen records them.
I want to sit with the writing of Jack Micheline enjoying the rhythm of it.
I want to live on the streets like he did begging from village to village with my poems.
A man could do that and retain his dignity.
A man could do that.
A woman has more sense than to do that.
A woman makes a nest to come home to. Somewhere to keep her books.
Micheline can’t have had many books living like that.
I suppose he died happy or perhaps unhappy but we shall never know.
It was the 1960s. The 1950s.
In San Francisco. In New York.
It was a whole different time.
It was McCarthyism and now we have Tony Abbott.
He makes a terrible noise at least once a week.
To maintain my sanity do I have to maintain my apartness?
I don’t have a typewriter.
My feet rest on a synthetic persian carpet.
I bought it in Lifestyle Furniture for two hundred dollars.

From The emptied bridge

This poem was written in late 2013, not long after Abbott became the prime minister of Australia.

Reds

After Devon Miller-Duggan, “Oliver Leamy (10 months old) spending the morning waving a red sock”

Today we spent the morning around
     a red table
     on a red carpet
     We ate tomatoes and carrot sticks
     and capsicum dip, creamy orange
     flecked with red
     I wore a red bra
     to hold my white breasts
We talked about a poem whose white baby
     waved a red sock and took it
     on and off his foot
     It referenced a famous
     poem about a wheelbarrow
And I thought of how many reds
     I seem to need
     to counter the grayscale of things,
     the black sofa, the white walls,
     the black amp and speakers,
     the white ceiling, the light fittings and shadows there,
     the dark gray screen in its pale gray plastic frame,
     the sky,
     the people’s hair,
     my charcoal dress, my black woollen socks,
     all the paper,
     my cold morning fingers, my eyes

From The emptied bridge

If only a woman

If only a woman could get a jacket
     with an inside pocket
     an elegant fit around her broad shoulders
     and sleeves that didn’t expose her wrists
If only a woman could get some gloves
     to neatly sheath her gracile hands
     without webbing
     her long fingers
If only a woman could get some boots
     to let her walk wherever she wants
     without hurting her back
     or binding her toes
The world might be okay, after all, if a woman
     could do that

From The emptied bridge