Against the Grain
Somewhere across
town
remnants of
smoking jackets still endure.
Known cocktails
& liaisons
pad up a life
cursed by an excess of money
in this tiny
world cluttered with vile new ideas.
Somewhere
across town they still make things in factories
& the
churches march meek families to their decline.
Harry retired
at 65, came back to the warehouse gate every week
until the heart
attack. He missed the camaraderie & purpose.
He was too old
for new-fangling.
Fresh graduates
with a baseless certainty
draft KPIs,
strip away the deadwood
that’s been
statistically dragging productivity down.
It’s the brutal
“modern world”
& there are
still slaves.
Further south
Davo & Choolee are in their wetsuits year-round,
waves rise
& are certain of collapse.
Surgeons snip
away the couple’s skin lesions,
whales go
north, then back again.
You don’t have
to listen to anything.
Nobody watches
the news
which never had
any anyway.
Opinion flows
briefly past social media
where likes obscure the fine print.
Why is Elise
laughing?
She’s got wind
of an inevitability, she owns those new ideas,
weeds that
shove past the leaflitter.
Can’t predict,
she runs but it comes from all directions.
Struggles,
& in that very struggle change is generated.
Tomorrow is a playful monster & it’s hers.
Report
Violent night, holes in light.
When I let myself
go I went.
For a while there
was no trace,
not even an email.
Another marooned
fogey upon the fields of Bali.
In town sport
streamed live in the tourist bars
but I hate sport.
It’s been said
communication & reflection have broken up.
They were never
comfortable,
that couple in the
briars.
Absence can be
hard work,
jaundiced moon
across the waves.
Upon my return
discovered people
had been looking
on me more kindly in absentia…
the missing
troubadour, flawed parent & nagging polemicist
all now in washed
tones. A book was likely.
There were pardons
suggested
perhaps a sinecure
at some modest campus.
I had previously
been unpestered by fame.
Not that I was a
remarkable homeless person
or an honest
leader with ideas.
My ditties are not
prophecy.
That time of
solitude
self-scurry &
doubt
didn’t make no
hill of beans.
Know you wanted
apocalypse from me
but I’ve now
settled for a kiss.
Won’t regret
anything.
If you want a
secret
the trick is to
make one up yourself.
Stand by your plan.
What is Believed
Minoans didn’t
kill the bulls,
those young men
& women leapt between the horns,
their ladder to
the goddess.
No more
suffering for the beasts than
the slap of
sandalled feet impossibly dropped from sky.
This useless
sacrament
if athletes
survived
led to yet
another masterpiece on the walls.
To the artist
it was process.
For the rest,
bread.
Lars turns on
his keyboard,
Claudette’s
lips seize the saxophone.
Paint stained
hands grasp brushes manufactured from bovine tail-bristles
as poets
quibble with quills as sharp as the moment of jump.
Another ritual
limbers up.
Cities expand
down the coast,
they smother
the old ones
pluck up the
ancient limestone blocks for pergolas, pavements.
“Real” work
always has destruction near its centre.
All those
sheaves of grace & eloquence
that art-serfs
toil to harvest,
they wouldn’t
feed one baby.
But there’s
still the leap between fears
to sawdusts of
wonder.
Centuries on
there’s nothing left in Crete
but beauty & olive trees.
Time Taken
Sure this wasn’t
love
it was as one
sided as an angry wank back home
after that
party where fights uncorked beside the laughter.
A teenager, outer
suburbs boys’ school
beauty was
hard, was holding the smoke in.
Nothing arty.
No one discussed “girly types”,
they would have
been targets.
Watched him
cross the quadrangle
he was trimmed
as a paling fence, smooth as a cricket pitch
those eyes
line-marked the school boundaries
his lips lacked
only kisses.
We never even
spoke,
I talked pussy with the mates
& already
felt the yokes of the watcher —
those of us who
cannot do outside our heads.
There is a
freedom, this unlatchment
but always the traitor hands.
The Session
Funny, when an
obnoxious shithead
carries your eyes
to the colourful
corner.
He’s fat
& a little
drunk.
his potbelly is
squeezed past shirt buttons
like icing from a
piping bag —
that battleground
of a sweatstained cotton.
But I forget all
the nonsense. His music.
No one image
contains this:
the immobile
journey off along
cobble lanes
candled by bell-floss…
away to the edges
that matter.
Piece by piece
drop confected
consistencies
that glued me to
my linear life.
Doesn’t want
followers, a set’s
extraordinary
won’t last long enough
to scratch any
atlas. So don’t look.
It finds you.
He goes home, the
audience becomes homeless.
There’s the hum of
true circles.
If we sleep at all
it will be in
hammocks of undirected insight
strung between stars.
Les Wicks Over 45 years Wicks
has performed widely across the globe.
Published in over 400 different magazines, anthologies & newspapers across
35 countries in 15 languages. Conducts workshops & runs Meuse Press
which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry
published on the surface of a river. His
15th book of poetry is Time Taken – New & Selected (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm
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