Sitting on the Fence - Sept 20 2024

 

Sitting on the Fence

Sept 20 2024

Chain link

topped with razor wire.

Perhaps electrified,

and too high off the ground

to hop down lightly

or clamber easily up.

Or less forbiddingly

built for privacy;

solid wood

looming high overhead,

gate chained shut.

Better yet

a white picket fence

around a modest bungalow

and its small plot of grass;

an unassuming claim

on my piece suburbia.

But in a world this complex

there’s no simple divide,

no bright line

between two sides.

And it doesn’t take long

until sitting on the fence

in indecision

begins to hurt,

its precarious edge

digging in

to your sorry posterior.

Not like back in the day,

when flagpole sitters

lasted for months,

and marathoners

danced ’til they slumped

in each other’s arms

asleep on their feet.

I look out

through galvanized mesh,

uncertain

whether it’s keeping them at bay

or me in.

Because chain link, in gunmetal steel

has the carceral feel

of a car impound lot

or stingy prison yard,

an asylum

for the criminally insane

where every door is locked.

Of course, I could hop it any day.

Or, like the flagpole sitter

balance there,

gazing out from the heights

at a binary world

and choosing sides.

Because what could put one more at ease

than on or off

in or out

them or us?

When the choice is between a middle-of-the road Democrat and Donald Trump, I find it hard to believe that there can be any fence-sitters left: the undecided voters who, apparently, will decide the 2024 Presidential election.

I also recently installed a tall chain link fence around my house (dogs!), and still have my qualms about its institutional look and feel (although no razor wire or electrification!)

So I suppose a coming together of these two things is where the poem began. And ultimately, it’s about the black and white worldview of the demagogic populist: one that divides the native born from the foreigner; the regular folk from the elites; the ins from the outs and the us from the them.

Blocked - Sept 17 2024

 

Blocked

Sept 17 2024

I have run dry.

The tap turns

and spurts of murky water

squirt out

like a hacking cough;

orange with iron oxide,

black

with finely crushed gravel.

Soon, nothing at all.

The rocky seams

once torrential as Niagara

now echo emptily

in their dark cavernous depths.

Guzzling marauders

have pumped the aquifers dry;

an offering

of fossil water

harbored over eons,

now spent

in our brief and reckless profligacy.

So we look up, imploring the skies

but no rain falls,

while parched earth cracks,

the air fills with dust,

unstoppable fire

razes the land.

But while all the elements, it seems

conspire against us

we are our own worst enemy,

profiteering,

stealing and hoarding,

squabbling over rights.

Even poets have lost their voice,

gone as dry

as a scorching earth.

Because what’s the point of words

when thirst

is all you can think of?

But refugees still wander

and water wars go on.

And over all, the smell of death

lingers in the air;

cattle

left to rot where they fell,

bloated bodies

scattered on the road.

I fear the old are next

when the rations get too small

and the strong help themselves.

The ones who remember

cold clear water

and taps on full.

While standing by, like an empty faucet,

a wordless poet

lamenting their loss.

Lately, I haven’t felt moved to write. I never really understood when writers said they were blocked, because words have always come easily to me. (Actually, I can’t stop them!) Which hasn’t changed: making sentences is as compulsive as ever. So I suppose it’s more the feeling I have nothing worthwhile left to say. Certainly not anything anyone would want to hear. Or hear again.

Which, of course, is its own solution: why not a poem about being blocked, going dry?!!

But when the analogy of the tap came to me, I couldn’t help getting immediately sidetracked into (another!) poem about climate change. Especially since it’s an exceptionally hot and rainless September, and I find myself once again worrying about a dry well and forest fire.

I apologise for the apocalyptic tone. If only I could write love poems and uplifting paeans to nature. But that’s just not me. No matter what, my dark brooding pessimism almost always breaks through.

Hands in the Soil - Sept 12 2024

 

Hands in the Soil

Sept 12 2024

He is at his happiest

under a big floppy hat

kneeling on the grass

with his hands in the soil.

Toiling in the sun

on a hot summer day,

wrestling with rocks

heaving timbers into place.

The landscaper

I hired to rescue the flower beds.

Which are a botanist’s fantasy

of metastasizing plants

in compacted soil,

battling with leggy weeds

that are steadily edging them out.

Which, despite the fancy Latin names

I’m sure they have

look disturbingly alien,

as if trafficked

from a faraway planet

to my backyard.

I want him to build a garden

worthy of a photo-spread

in some glossy magazine.

Which is an unlikely ambition

for someone like me,

who prefers simplicity

and doesn’t care what others think

     . . . or so I smugly tell myself.

Perhaps a corrective

to my wilful blindness

and years of neglect?

But I suspect my happy gardener

prefers the doing

to the having done,

no matter how beautiful it turns out.

Because he’s all about the journey,

the being,

the moment in the sun;

the labour

in and of itself.

I know that destination vs journey

is a tired cliché,

but how better to say

something so true?

And looking out

from air conditioned comfort

through tinted glass,

I must confess I’m feeling envious.

Because has found his place and purpose,

while I’m still searching

for both.

Sure, a presentable garden

and showplace home.

But no sweat and toil and healing sun.

No sure grip

on time worn tools

that come easily to hand.

No rich black soil

under my nails

I can’t scrub out.

And certainly not the sausage fingers and callused skin

of the working man

who has worked all his life,

the strong hands

hardscrabble farmers

and master carpenters have.

Big hands

that make mine feel like frail little birds

lost in theirs,

bony cold appendages

in warm generous flesh.

Hands

so practised

in the landscaper’s art

they could almost do the job

all by themselves.

Clown Car - Sept 10 2024

 

Clown Car

Sept 10 2024

All my life

gamely trying

to keep too many balls in the air.

But I’m a bad juggler

and even 3 is too much,

soon dropping a couple

or spilling them all

in a frantic game of catch.

So who knows how many times

I’ve had to bend down

pick up

and go at it again.

While the more adept

eyes rapt and hands a blur

glide cat-like

keeping them all  in the air.

But like the showmen they are

don’t just settle for balls,

defying gravity

with chainsaws

burning torches

sharpened knives.

While I struggle

to keep 3 balls from falling,

let alone risk death.

And now, after having spent my best years

on this carnival trick

have tired of the sideshow.

Not when in the very end

even the experts drop their balls,

and like the rest of us

watch them roll to a stop

while the world goes on

with its weighty affairs;

a life’s work

of little consequence.

And to think

I could have learned high wire

lion taming

clown car.

Even the bearded lady

is having more fun

than us jugglers and easy marks.

While the carnival barker’s a star,

pulling in the crowd

with his rat-a-tat patter

of fast-talk, wisecracks, and fabulist teasers.

Billions of balls in the air,

and their billions of breathless jugglers

dancing badly under them

while straining to look up;

gamely trying to do

just as we were told.

No Standing Still - Aug 10 2024

 

No Standing Still

Aug 10 2024

Once again, the days get shorter.

People come and go.

Things are found and lost

and found again,

or lost and then forgotten.

So it can be hard to tell

if time moves in one direction

or elastically back and forth.

Inexorably forward,

or stretching and rebounding

so things come round again.

But either way

there is no standing still.

So every morning

when you look in the mirror

and don’t seem any older

you know it can’t be so.

Just as every season’s different.

Just as history doesn’t repeat.

And just as there’s no going back

living life out of sync

undoing the past.

But with shorter days come longer nights.

The replenishing darkness,

when your eyes open wide

to take in the world

and time seems to slow.

When, far from artificial light

a man looks up

at a cloudless sky

and sees more stars

than he ever imagined.

All of them

travelling outward

faster and faster,

receding

until even at the speed of light

their shine can't catch up.

So in the fullness of time

when another man looks up

all he will see is empty sky,

an infinity

of unbroken blackness

without a single star.

We may believe

that there is no other life in the universe,

but he will think

there is only earth.

And that it's always been so;

a solitary planet

enclosed in a cold black void

alone in the universe.

A rumination on the arrow of time.

It has not only been observed that the universe is expanding, but that the rate of expansion is — instead of constant — increasing with time. Which is why it was theorised there must be some unknown force at play that more than overcomes gravity. They called this “dark energy”: "dark", because we have no idea what it is.

So in the fullness of time, the universe will be a dark cold place, where all matter -- down to the most elemental particle -- will be spread infinitely thin.

(This poem is being posted out of chronological order because it was lost for over a month, and only recently recovered.) 

Boredom - Dec 17 2024

 

Boredom

Dec 17 2023



If it's a sin to be bored

then I must look iniquitous.

Boredom.

When you're either filling time

or killing it,

impatiently waiting

for the next big thing

to come rescue you.

Guilty of wasting

not only time

but potential.

In my teens

I affected world-weariness,

and would have been please to know

how bored I looked.

After all, it was cool

to be jaded and detached.

As a young adult

life couldn't come soon enough;

I felt trapped

in the margin of things

before real life began.

But now

at an age I’d rather not mention

my small world

has gotten smaller;

interests pared down

to what I truly enjoy,

focus contracting

in on itself.

So am I living well

or still adrift,

existing

as if I have forever to live?

Is the simple day-to-day

a full enough life

or the path of least resistance?

A busy person

who never has time to be bored

would sniff and raise his nose,

judging me

for my drift.

Yet this fallow state

when the mind is free to wander

and the eye closely observe

is worth much more

than mere busyness.

A chance to pay attention

with all your senses

to what was always there,

the small things

that hide in plain sight.

To think deeply

about whatever comes to mind.

So I watch the rivulets

zigzagging down the glass

against the setting sun.

Think about regrets

and the power of forgiveness.

And looking into the soft brown eyes

of my beloved dog

wonder what it's like in there.

I have found

it's fine to be bored.

That we all could use more of it.

That you may think me absent

yet I’m fully here;

mindful

creative

engaged.

That time, whether slow or fast

doesn't matter all that much.

Because now is all there is.

Because open-ended time

frees the mind to wander.

And because saving time

isn't like banking it;

there's no getting it back in the end.

(This poem is being posted out of chronological order because it was lost for most of the year, and only recently recovered.) 

Together - Sept 7 2024

 

Together

Sept 7 2024

We sat together

not saying a word

for what might have been hours.

But not the awkward silence

of too anxious to speak.

Not caught in an open field

by a fast moving storm

too paralyzed to flee;

loud thunder, getting louder,

and the cold shadow

of a black anvil cloud

towering overhead.

Instead, we were perfectly at ease.

The simple pleasure

of being together

and being ourselves;

accepted

despite our numerous flaws.

Yet I’m a talker.

For me, it's as if a silent space

will collapse on itself

if words aren’t there to fill it.

As if my duty

is to inform

delight

amuse.

As if I'm being judged,

and a wall of words

will impress,

or at best

entertain.

But when we sat together

I felt fully at ease,

nothing like

the flush of discomfort

I almost always feel.

So not like a thunderstorm

bearing down

with hail, lightning, and pelting rain,

but more a steamy day

in a tropical summer,

when the rain we've been desperate for

finally falls

and the humidity breaks.

The feeling

that there was no need to talk

was like a cool balm

in a feverish world

swamped in noise.

Resurrection - Sept 6 2024

Resurrection

Sept 6 2024



He said fire burns uphill.

That balsam fir are torches

and should be culled.

That the litter on the forest floor

is perfect fuel,

sun-dried kindling

hungry for its spark.

The forest

arose from fire

and in fire it will die

give birth

resurrect itself.

But now

like an elderly man

who has buried a wife

outlived his friends

and has no children left,

the forest

is on borrowed time.

And like that frail old man

who rages at death

and will not go gentle into the night,

it will burn with ferocity,

turning trees to torches

and scorching the soil

down to its roots.

The land I own

and the home I possess

are but temporary guests;

only here

in this small clearing

hemmed in by woods

at the pleasure of the trees,

and not so much welcomed

as tolerated.

They stand regally, high overhead,

indifferent to my presence

and appearing to me

as if they’ve been here forever

and always will.

But when the forest burns

along with the world

it will take us with it.

And I can only hope

that there is enough time left

for me to grow old

before it consumes itself.

Knowing I will leave no successor,

nothing

to be remembered by.

While the forest will leave behind

replenished soil

and fertile seeds

with which to resurrect itself,

already beginning to green

beneath the cooling ash.

Lost Socks - Sept 4 2024

 

Lost Socks

Sept 4 2024

Like lost socks

you could swear

you put in the machine

but seem to have vaporized.

The emails

that were confirmed sent

but never got to their intended,

somehow vanishing

into some quantum dead-end,

the bottomless void

of cyberspace.

Which makes me think,

if socks could dematerialize

between washer and dryer,

emails

languish in limbo

in some zero dimension

apparently forever,

what else is possible?

Could ghosts really be?

Do we have past lives

buried deep in our consciousness?

And what about an afterlife?

Perhaps not everything is knowable.

Perhaps what we can see

isn’t all there is.

And while I’m at it

perhaps things really do

happen for a reason.

None of which is easy

for me to accept.

Because rather than a mystic

or superstitious

I'm a hard-headed man

who believes in practicality,

and isn’t comfortable

living with uncertainty;

mysteries

mere mortals can't solve.

And after all

it’s simple enough

to pair up orphaned socks

resend lost messages.

So forget about hidden dimensions

and spectral planes.

Just get on with it;

assuming every question

has an answer,

and that all things

can be explained.