Bogong Moth by Joe Dolce

A Bogong moth

darts out of darkness
to seize fire -
it’s burned away its tarsi,
yet continues to swoop,
kiss, careen, sizzle,
fluttering and candle-banging
like fawn-crazed Nijinski.

I look up from my book

accepting the immortal,
fatal dance
of life and light,
like Icarus’s father
resigned to watch
his flying boy
hurl against brilliance.

When you were a baby

night crying,
often the only way
to pacify you
was to bundle you
in your satin blanket
and walk along
Seventh Avenue.

The percussion of traffic noise,

street lamps, flashing head
and tail lights,
opened your brown eyes wide.
You were intoxicated
and I soon lost you to sleep . . .

O my little son, cocooned there

in that middle-aged man
who hasn’t spoken to me
for years –

what flickering galaxies

do you fling yourself against now
for sleep,
far beyond my reach?

posted with permission from Joe Dolce
editor: Jennifer Compton

Now Joe Dolce is probably most well known for 'that song': Shaddap You Face! And I do play a game of Joe Dolce sightings around the place — a bus driver in Kingsville singing the refrain —and in a UK cop show! Amazing. But now Joe, who lives in Melbourne, has turned his hand to poetry and essays, with frequent appearances at readings and festivals, and in respected literary journals. Anything more you want to know about him, check out his website. The link is below.  

http://www.joedolce.net/

P.S. I am not absolutely sure what a tarsi is but I can guess.

A bogong moth is a big old night flying creature that arrives in hordes when the weather is right. It is supposed to be good eating.

This week's editor is Jennifer Compton, a poet and playwright who also writes prose. She was born in New Zealand but, like Joe, is now a resident of Melbourne. Most recently she won the Newcastle Poetry Prize for her poem Now You Shall Know. In this pic she is open miking in Westword — at the Dancing Dog in Footscray. Pic taken by Michael Reynolds (thanks Michael) who has stolen all the local poets' souls and keeps them in his machine LOL. 

When you've got to grips with Joe Dolce and Bogong moths, do check out the other Tuesday Poets in the sidebar. Great to have you drop by! 

Thoughts of the Father by Philip Salom

Thoughts of the Father Ku / Work on What Has Been Spoiled
… Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. Danger. No blame rests upon 
 the departed father. He receives in his thoughts the deceased father. 

It hurts when you know thoughts of the father are in the son
 like a repertoire of non-events.

Thinking how the father spoiled the son, the sons
of broken marriages, my own.

Not 'spoilt', something lost, indefinably, gone missing
when he was spoil between them.

Demanding too much of him, bringing home a second mother
in place of the first? 

Work I have done wrong? He moves in a film of slow
postures, the strange mime

which adolescents make when practising annulment.
And keeping for themselves

enough to make of the self some stern amazement.
Sons are everywhere spoiling

their fathers’ art and craft! No blame. Hormones hit
like a room of conscientious

kick-boxers. The brute beauty of vocabulary reduced
to monogrunts and every ing 

now sounded un like feints, and blocks, and side-steps
language taken on the forearms.

Years later, I watch him from the airport as he leaves,
know I love him, know he knows it,

but finds it wrong in public, forcing off my arm. To
whom would I pray?

It is my father who has rowed across my body’s
nine-tenths water, to my son,

in spoiling for the simple life, of his before him, the bones
of my father lie satisfied and said

as thoughts in the son, a setting right after the break
like breath free now of the words

like a hull brought in over water, the river, the rowing,
his breath a repertoire of oar strokes

between the banks of birth and death. Echoes on the surface.
When thoughts of the son are in the father.

Posted with permission, also on Stillcraic.
Editor: Jennifer Compton

We had a Melbourne launch for Notes for the Translators, a collection of 142 Australian and NZ poets of which Philip Salom was one.  And I was very taken indeed by Philip Salom's reading of this poem. By some strange oversight, some infinitely mischievous work of the printer's devil, his notes to possible translators had been left out of the book. So the intended notes appeared on my blog post last week and appear again here.

Philip is an Australian poet and novelist who began publishing in 1980. In 2003 Philip Salom was recognised with the Christopher Brennan Award - a prize given for lifetime achievement in poetry, recognising a poet who produces work "of sustained quality and distinction". There is more on Philip on his website. And to invest in a copy of the fascinating book – Notes for the Translators – please email KitKelen@gmail.com

Notes by Philip Salom

In the mid 90s I wrote a sequence of poems prompted by the Commentaries of the I Ching. In this case (Thoughts of the Father), I wrote in response to Ku, the 18th hexagram. Above the poem, as epigraph, I have quoted those selections from the commentary that struck me most closely — in this case having an uncanny relevance to the estrangement from my son in the years following my divorce from his mother.

I felt distress and guilt over my son’s changed behaviour and personality, and I could not explain how unlike himself he had become. My son had been loving and extroverted as a child and now he was withdrawn, monosyllabic and sometimes angry; but the divorce coincided with his adolescence, and therefore it was difficult to know whether it was the separation or adolescence itself that had changed his personality. He was uneasy living with me and then with my new partner and eventually moved back with his mother (even though it was she who had initiated the divorce).

Still, I felt it was my ‘fault’, that the trauma had ‘spoiled’ him in some way – spoiled as in damage to his psychological state. Then I began to realise that he was far more like my father; they had more in common than I had with either. My father was modest, reserved, even withdrawn, and though he was rarely angry, he was markedly uneasy with his or other peoples’ emotions.

Themes

The above
themes run through the poem as the main continuity of behaviour, feeling, estrangement and sense of ‘spoiling’. This puns on spoils as in spoils of war, ironic in this case, as the spoils may themselves be broken, damaged. Another pun on spoil as in spoiling for a fight, expressing wildly, etc.

The nullity, annulment, non-events in feelings, communications, bonds, the sense of things gone, lost, missing, or kept back rather than shown or expressed. The Yin? And if so, then spoiling for a fight is the Yang. Ironic couple.

Adolescence, anger, change (this is the I Ching, after all!), uncertainty. The martial element: fighting feelings, restrained or controlled violence, kicking out at, fighting back, Kung Fu which the boy was learning, also related to Chinese culture. Repertoire as in learned acts, and behaviours, but also actions, fighting or resisting or defending. Blocks. And later in the poem, the un sounds come as the cruder phonetic/aural/vocalised version of ing verb endings, so fighting would become fightun and how these sounds are like grunts or fighting noises, or blocks (of both emotional and kung fu kind).

The ‘River’, rowing across, Charon, the boatman, the Styx or the waters leading to an afterlife, or the waters between birth and death, parallels here in the metaphor of the body (which is mainly water literally, and the wide water of parentage) and the genes of the deceased father (my father) crossing my body to be expressed (which is ironic, too, as a less expressive form) in the body of a son (not my body but my son’s ie the grandson). And the circular sense of the form in the poem which seems to ends as it began except with the reversal of knowledge (gained?) in the phrase — thoughts of the son are in the father.

This distancing device of the poem and the I Ching makes the poem poised above the personal and the impersonal, which is what I wanted from the poem and is in keeping with my ongoing critique of the too-easy lyric poem. Two line stanzas could signify: the father and son form, the shorelines of before and after, life and death. The mime of action without words, behaviour without response.

Line Notes

It hurts when you know: here the poem (firstly) addresses the poet, but then also addresses the reader, to consider the observation that follows. 

thoughts of the father are in the son like a repertoire of non-events. The son thinks of the father, but in this is a paradox, the acquired acts, behaviours, skills of repertoire – are non-events, ie: seem empty, null, denied perhaps.

Thinking how the father spoiled the son... Refers to father and son of the I Ching epigraph and the formal, distanced sense of definite article and then the change through broken marriages as situation to finally the personal: my own. 

Spoil, spoiled as in my notes, plus missing referring to lost and departed, and the bond spoiled...but the son is not spoilt (as in indulged, over-rewarded, etc)

Demanding too much of him, bringing home a second mother in place of the first? After a broken marriage, the father brings home another partner, a 'second mother' who could be perceived as 'replacing' the first. 

Work I have done wrong? He moves in a film of slow postures, the strange mime which adolescents make when practising annulment. Here enters the father as lyric subject, and the son denies him by movements, like the above repertoire, but this time movement of adolescent-style (universal!)
indifference to a parent through body language.

And keeping for themselves/enough to make of the self some stern amazement./ Sons are everywhere spoiling/  their fathers’ art and craft! No blame. This keeping back allows the naive and surprised engagement with world and self, but gives nothing much back to others. Natural (many sons do this to fathers (ironic repeat of spoiling) and not blame-worthy (and this no-blame directs to son and to father).

Hormones hit/like a room of conscientious/  kick-boxers. The brute beauty of vocabulary reduced/ to monogrunts and every ing/ now sounded un like feints, and blocks, and side-steps /language taken on the forearms. Here the movements take the specific form of resistance and violence, of martial arts, (also note the echo of art and craft, but against...) which is a metaphor of what the son is deliberately doing and also learning (perhaps). And a fairly likely echo or association here of martial arts with Chinese culture. Turning ing endings of English words into un - the grunt, the out-breath of hitting, sounding uncouth, as he extends his resistance even to language.

Years later, I watch him from the airport as he leaves, know I love him, know he knows it, but finds it wrong in public, forcing off my arm. To whom would I pray? The major time-shift, the retrospection and assumption of an easing of the above tensions, denials, etc, but not the denial of love shown, still fended off but not fought off... It is now reserve about emotions, and even language. And note the rhetorical question following as an echo of Confucius: When you give offense to heaven, to whom can you pray?

It is my father who has rowed across my body’s nine-tenths water, to my son, in spoiling for the simple life, of his before him The sudden realisation that the reserve, simple rather than complex life, etc, of my son is very like that of my father, as if the DNA of my father has moved/rowed across my body (which is a body of water: biologically, symbolically, mythically - and metaphysically?) to my son.

of my father lie satisfied and said as thoughts in my son, a setting right after the break, like breath free now of the words, and this knowledge satisfies my father (who is deceased though the poem doesn't say this) and the grandson, a homecoming of tendencies, which make sense, perhaps set right the break (not of bones but bonds) and is breath now, more elemental than complicated words...

like a hull brought in over water, the river, the rowing, his breath a repertoire of oar strokes between the banks of birth and death And this is where the feeling, the knowledge, the breath is going, across the elemental water, and again a repertoire of behaviour, of being, in the gap or river of life between birth and death.

Echoes on the surface. When thoughts of the son are in the father. The echoes are all these insights and overlaps, and recurrences, and of course the repeats in the actual poem of lines and words, such as repertoire, spoil, art and craft, rowing, water... and here too is the final, major, reconciling reversal of the first line - thoughts of the father are in the son which now becomes thoughts of the son are in the father. Where, of course, they have been all the time!

When you've read and enjoyed Thoughts of the Father, enter into the world of the sidebar on this site to find more Tuesday poets ...

Jennifer Compton is Tuesday Poem editor this week. Born in Wellington and living in Melbourne, Jennifer publishes poems and play scripts and has just been announced the winner of Australia's distinguished Newcastle Poetry Prize. She has also won NZ's prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award with her manuscript 'This City', which was published by Otago University Press, and other numerous prizes and residencies including the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington. 

Marco Polo by Ali Alizadeh

Marco Polo

Maybe it’s the natural
extension of immigration.  Maybe

it’s the awesome travel
bugs, making my wife’s feet

uncommonly itchy.   I’m not
surprised, at any rate, to hear

the paediatrician’s nickname
for our son. ‘Marco Polo’ suits

his - in utero - trajectory
along the Silk Road, from

Kublai Khan’s Forbidden City
to the snow-covered stones of a caravanserai

in central Turkey.  Not to mention
the Australian interregnum

where ultrasound scans
revealed his sex.  But our Marco

probably won’t pen a Travels
as he won’t know the other

of unending expedition, say,
cherished waterways of Venice, in short

a concrete home.  Are we monstrous
parents?  Why have we conceived

and delivered a life into the world
in transition?  If held to account

by a solicitous young man
with my eyes (and my wife’s better

eyebrows) one day, accused
of depriving him of his deserved

comforts of sedentary genesis
(motherland, mother tongue

two ebullient grandmothers, etc)
I can only offer an image: removing

picture frames, tribal ornaments
from the hooks; clearing the drawers

of wrinkled notepads with withered ideas
and perforated socks; tearing

the hooks off the walls.  And then
the bright outline of the picture frames

vacated on the otherwise drab
dust-darkened surface of the wall.  It’s this

record of the passage of time
the contrast between the original

preserved shade and colour
and the rest (ditto our lives) dog-eared

by mould, sunlight, scratches
of nature and accidents.  It’s this

visible discrepancy between
what we were and what we’ve become,

the possibility to uncover
and see it.  The nomads treasure

wisdom; the reality of aging
towards death.  You see, Marco

- I’ll tell him - if we can see
death looming, like a dark island

on the navigator’s horizon
then we won’t be shocked when

time’s run out.  This means
a life without our primal fear.  That’s why

we travel.

© Ali Alizadeh
from Ashes in the Air (University of Queensland Press)
Reproduced with permission

Editor: Kathleen Jones (UK)

Ali Alizadeh was born in Tehran in 1976 and migrated to Australia in 1991.  He graduated with Honours in Creative Arts from Griffith University, Gold Coast and holds a PhD in Professional Writing from Deakin University, Melbourne.  He has taught at universities in Australia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and has also worked as street performer, hair-wrapper, and delivery driver.  He is a writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama and literary criticism and this is his sixth book.  He lives with his wife and son.

I love this poem - the elongated shape, like a journey, and the progression of thought.  Instability, repression and conflict have brought a flow of refugees from the Middle East across the globe, and it shows no sign of slowing down as the area becomes increasingly turbulent.  A sense of belonging is very strong in human beings - knowing where and who you come from helps us to know who we are. Giving birth to a child in a foreign country, realising that the child is never going to know their grandmothers, or the everyday details of the lives their parents have left, is a strange experience.

In the poem Ali Alizadeh confronts the questions he feels his son may one day ask.  Why?  Why did you leave and deprive me of my cultural heritage?  In return the poet presents the child with the images of hurried departure - seizing possessions, tearing even the hooks from the walls.  Hooks attach us to places, to material things.  The emigrant must leave them all behind.  But then he tells his son that it is death, the primal fear, ‘looming, like a dark island’ that is the real reason for the transit across the globe to live in a foreign country. ‘This means/a life without our primal fear.  That’s why/we travel.’

'Marco Polo' comes from the collection Ashes in the Air, published by Queensland University Press.  The collection covers a wide range of subject matter - much of it hard-hitting and political; cultural contrasts, the History of the Veil, Sky Burial (for John Kinsella), and personal poems that recall an ‘archaeology of suffering’ as well as the ecstatic joy of new landscapes and relationships - love ...

‘we flew from the profane towards a paradise

and earthly constellations, stirred by something
like the love that moves the sun and the other stars’. [My Divine Comedy]

Emigrants and refugees are nomads, often by force rather than by choice - a life of 'unending expedition'.  The loss of the Motherland creates a hunger, an empty gap between 'what we were and what we've become'.  But being a nomad also presents opportunities and a richness of experience.  As Ali writes in the poem, 'The nomads treasure wisdom'.

But that wisdom is hard-won.  In Ali Alizadeh's poem 'The Suspect' he describes what it feels like to be 'the other'.  In Iran

'I was an "apostate", principal's term for
the boy who failed Koran Studies and wrote

an essay on Leonardo da Vinci.'

But in the west, he is someone who makes other people nervous, '. . .   shackled to a passport

etched with Born in Tehran.  There I was
suspected of perfidy to the Faith, an Infidel

-wannabe.  Over here I am suspected
of terror.'

There is a bleakness about the conclusion, that someone with a Middle Eastern passport, and an interest in Western ideas and literature, can find themselves between 'the Islamic Republic's

Evin Prison, pliers pinching their finger
-nails;  or sleep-deprived and hooded indefinitely

in the dark solitaries of Guantanamo Bay.' 

'Ashes in the Air' is a brilliant, unique, collection.

Kathleen Jones is a poet, novelist and biographer, living between Italy and England.  She spent almost a decade living in the Middle East, where she began to be interested in its literary traditions, and to realise what it's like to be nomadic. Her latest collection 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21', published by Templar is about belonging and departure.  She blogs at A Writer’s Life and her website can be found at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Please take a look at all the contributions in the sidebar and read what the other Tuesday Poets are posting. 

If you liked this post, you might like the memoir, by Marjane Satrapi, called 'Persepolis'. 

A Garage by Robert Gray

In one of the side streets

of a small hot town

off the highway

we saw the garage,

its white boards peeling

among fronds and palings.

The sun had cut a blaze

off the day. The petrol pump

was from the sixties—

of human scale
and humanoid appearance
it had a presence,

seemed the attendant
of our adventures on the road,
the doorman of our chances.

We pulled in, for nostalgia,
onto concrete. From where
did that thing's almost

avoidable sense of
sacrifice, or remorse,
arise? One felt it

as though a line
in the hand, drifted far off
somewhere, unweighted.

Who was this, in faded
cream outfit, with badge,
expressionless small head,

and rubbery hose laid
on the breast, dutifully
or out of diffidence?

Were arms being shown, and in
servitude or consent?
The stoic discomforts,

suggests a rebellion.
Elusively, such feelings
are wafted through us, but how

interpret them? A person
relied upon and yet
dangerous. Was this

another, or oneself?
Were we familiars of something
never to be known? I looked

down a blank street, of pines,
lightpoles, old houses
in shady yards, where it made

a genuflection, in approaching
the gentian-coloured hills;
then at the long workshop, a dim

barn, or empty corridor,
in the galaxy, with somewhere
far along it one star

crackling and bursting.
Then at the greasy
dog, in its narrow shade;

and at the old bowser—
a sense still proclaimed but
ungrasped, though everything

lay open. Someone shouted
acknowledgement, so we sat
quietly. The light

had become an interest
of this place, pronounced
in contrast with the peculiar

matt blackness of sump-oil
that was soaked widely
on earth, gravel, and cement—

an obscurity as opaque
as the heart's, which was keeping on
with its tunnelling there.

Editor: Jennifer Compton

Robert Gray is an Australian poet I always intended to get round to and read deeply and tick off my list, but somehow I never did. It wasn't until I read his translucent prose memoir – The Land I Came Through Last (Giramondo 2008) – that I was fired up to tackle his body of work. And luckily Cumulus (John Leonard Press 2012), his Collected Poems, had just been published so I had a handy volume for the task. I say task, because I had got the idea into my head that he was a 'difficult' poet. I was so wrong! He is the very antithesis of 'difficult' although no one would ever describe him as 'easy'.

I was on the train travelling from my home in Carrum into Flinders Street, and I was reading Cumulus, and, as we hit Mordialloc, I lifted my head and looked out through the train window, up at the sky and the light from the sea mirrored up in the sky, and fell into an abundant meditative state. I didn't want to read any more for the moment, but I held the book as if it was a psychometric object.

I chose this poem to post without fully understanding why I chose this one out of all of them. I thought that maybe it was because of the word 'bowser' which I haven't heard being used for a long time. I never stopped to wonder as a child why that was the word for a machine that dispensed petrol, so was delighted to find out quite recently that it was named after the inventor of the first gasoline pump, Sylvanus F. Bowser. But as I was typing the poem up I recalled (and it is strange how you have to recall something that has animated most of your life) how fearful and suspicious of cars I have always been. 

For instance, I have never learned to drive. I have never owned a car, or used a bowser. I would rather walk, or ride a bike, or use public transport that get in a car. A car is my last resort. Cities that have areas that don't privilege cars delight me. And of course, there is now a global consciousness that makes my stand against cars much more reputable than it has been in the past. I chose this poem before recent events in Lac-Mégantic, and because I am posting it now, my appreciation of the theme of the poem has been considerably sharpened.

THE POET
Robert Gray was born in 1945 on the north coast of New South Wales. He lives in Sydney, where he has worked in journalism, advertising, as a buyer for bookshops, and more recently as an occasional teacher of literature.

Since 1970 he has published eight books of poetry and six selected editions of his work. For these he has won most of the prizes and literary awards available to a poet in this country, including the Australia Council’s Emeritus Award in 2011. He is also the author of a prize-winning prose memoir, The Land I Came Through Last.

When a landscape is sparsely populated, the eye is favoured over the ear. Robert Gray spent his childhood in the brilliant coastal spaces of the mid-North Coast of New South Wales, and he has spent his life looking at things, and in searching for the words for them.

Take time to read more poets searching for the words for things, in the sidebar - as Tuesday Poets, we post a poem we admire or have written on a Tuesday.

This week's editor, Jennifer Compton, was born in Wellington, emigrated to Australia in the early 70s and lives now in Melbourne. She is an award-winning playwright and poet, with 'Barefoot' shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award in 2012 and 'This City' (Otago University Press 2011) the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award in NZ.  She has also been awarded a number of residencies including one at the Randell Cottage in Wellington, and blogs here. 

Someone forgot to tell the fish by Hal Judge

Someone forgot courtesy and politeness. Someone forgot to rinse off the weed killer. Someone forgot to turn off the billing software. Someone forgot to rent the crowd. Someone forgot to tell the owners of the 4 million cars sold in China. Someone forgot to bring the Zombie-Killing Manual. Someone forgot to tighten the sidestay shackle. Someone forgot to tell Rocky. Someone forgot to strap down the ammo case. Someone forgot to install it. Someone forgot to tell the Arabs it’s our oil under their sand.  Someone forgot to use lube. Someone forgot to tell me about labour pain. Someone forgot to declare 60 share transactions. Someone forgot to plug my biohazard suit. Someone forgot to shut the door. Someone forgot to tell the one million little snot-faced kids. Someone forgot to wax. Someone forgot to chlorinate the gene pool. Someone forgot the rivets. Someone forgot to tell her he was gay. Someone forgot to bring the griddle. Someone forgot to flush. Someone forgot to separate their whites. Someone forgot to socialise the dog. Someone forgot to lash the damn thing down. Someone forgot to invite the wind. Someone forgot to read him his rights. Someone forgot to do the Voight-Kampff test. Someone forgot Sun Tzu’s little maxim. Someone forgot the roots of liberalism in liberty. Someone forgot to invite him to some lawn party. Someone forgot their humble beginnings.  Someone forgot to use her diaphragm. Someone forgot that “pastor” means shepherd not wolf. Someone forgot to de-magnetize my purchase. Someone forgot to plan after the invasion. Someone forgot to put in the thingy. Someone forgot to take her meds. Someone forgot to check the “looping” feature. Someone forgot to remove a piece marked “Remove before launch”. Someone forgot that capitalism is a system riddled with contradictions. Someone at NASA forgot to convert meters to feet. Someone forgot that meth-heads can buy the stuff in bulk online. Someone forgot to disarm the killer dolphins.

                           Editor: P.S. Cottier

I love this poem: a slippery little thing that evades easy categorisation.  There is an ecological awareness here, but it does not drape itself in simple robes of green.  There is a gender awareness, that refuses to simply shout about anything.  There are drugs and sex ... and dolphins.  And peculiarly badly-informed fish.  Perhaps they, like all of us, are subject to killer sharks, in one form or another? But killer dolphins that need disarming?  Flipper of a last line that seems to refer back to the title of the poem.

Australian poet Hal Judge cannot be described as a fixture in the Canberra poetry community, as he is far too mobile for that.  He writes (obviously) suggestive and ambiguous poetry.  He performs such poetry very well.  He organises so many things for other poets, and is very generous with his time.  For instance, he agreed to launch a book of poems I had written, without really knowing me.

Here is how he describes himself (when asked to do so for this blog entry): 

Hal Judge is a versatile writer—poet, spoken word performer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist.  Having lived and worked in Canberra most of his life, Hal is imbued with the city’s culture, politics and literature. Six of his plays have been staged. His poems have been published in over 30 literary journals.   

His award-winning poetry collection Someone Forgot to Tell the Fish is available on Amazon’s Kindle. He has featured as a guest writer at many writers’ festivals in Australia and Indonesia. He has run writing workshops for students, soldiers, prisoners and homeless people. 

Hal is a person, it seems to me, who is willing to take risks.  Apart from daring to write the line, 'Someone forgot to put in the thingy', I have heard him read a poem in Bahasa Indonesian, for example, and he is not a native speaker of that language.  He is willing to cross over between art forms; a recent reading at Manning Clark House here in Canberra, for example, featured music and a live dancer to a poem about a snail...

As a poet, it is a real joy to meet other poets who are experimental, generous and just plain good at what they do.

Chase up his work if you can.  It's well worth the price of a can of worms. And make like an educated fish, and gorge yourself on poems.  World Poetry Day occurs this week, you know. 

This week's editor, P.S. Cottier aka Penelope Cottier, is also from Canberra. She has worked as a lawyer, university tutor, union organiser and a tea lady. She wrote a PhD on animals in the works of Charles Dickens. Her most recent book is a suite of poems called Selection Criteria for Death. She blogs on pscottier.com. 

Fortified by David Vincent Smith

There's a stone wall around this heart.
A moat, a marsh, various misleading traps.
The finest model of modern man
I've become. If you wish to touch me

you'll need the skills to siege a castle,

use the backs of alligators as a bridge
to cross the moat. If you want my love
you'll need to navigate past towers. Do this
and perhaps

I'll let you know my name.

There's a drawbridge to this soul, shut and bolted.
I even check the locks twice a day.

My father gave me a shovel at twelve,
and I've been burying my emotions ever since.
So if you leap over the holes, fill them as fast
as they're made, maybe you and I
could hold hands.

I am man, mute of all emotion.

I'd like to think I've done rather well.

I am emotionless, hoping this stone wall won't erode in this forum of openness. I take the truth and start choking it, coping with the slope that leads to a lone abyss. I'd rather have my throat slit than phone home and be open with my folks and shit. I'm speaking the truth. Every man will start quoting it, and every woman will nod her head because they've all grown with it. These broken lips are a growing cyst reflecting the neglected cancer, constantly provoking it. And you'd best believe that I know that it's

the WHOLE damn reason THIS fucking MOAT EXISTS.
The modern man wears his suit like a protective shield
assassinating emotions 'til he forgets to feel.
And yes, [raise fist] this is a weapon I wield.

Men use it to stop
any relationship from getting real.
If those who know me could actually get to know me
I'd deal with the blows dealt then left to fade slowly.

There's a drawbridge to this soul, shut and bolted.
I even check the locks twice a day.

I am man, mute of all emotion.
I'd like to think I've done rather well.


                 Guest Editor: Janet Jackson

David Vincent Smith, or DVS, is a performance poet, emcee, screenwriter and film director from Perth. David's performance of this poem won him the 2010 WA championship of the Australian Poetry Slam. You can watch a rough video of David's performance here.

David's poem is used with permission. Note stanza 9 'I am emotionless...' is supposed to be one long line, but we're not wide enough for that, so five lines it is. 



Tuesday Poem thanks Australian poet Janet Jackson for being our guest editor this week and bringing a performance poet along with her! Janet says she writes poems, songs and prose, performs poetry and music, teaches poetry and creative writing, coordinates Perth Poetry Club, parents and sometimes sleeps. Her publications include 'Coracle' (2009), ‘q finger’ (PressPress 2011), her website Proximity and poems in Fremantle Press's forthcoming eleven-poet volume 'Performance Poets'. Janet was the editor of David Barnes's collection 'Prayers Waiting for God' (Mulla Mulla Press 2011).  


After you've enjoyed David's poem here at the TP hub - visit the sidebar where up to 30 poets from NZ, Australian, the UK and US post poems by themselves or other poets they admire.