Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards; But It Must Be Lived Forwards." – Søren Kierkegaard
YOU WHO PAINT SCREAMS
Whether you've been layering anguish
in pastel streaks, retouching the sky’s hysteria,
or smoothing the jagged edges of despair –
that’s between you and your palette.
All I know is that while others marvel at the frame,
admiring brushstrokes, concocting theories,
you love/hate the canvas before you,
sometimes admiring the terror you’ve captured,
sometimes scowling at the flaw you missed -
a scream too regular, a horizon too serene.
I get it. This figure isn’t a person, but a mannequin
of panic in a shop-window of art.
Yours is a world of feeling as palette,
and bodies scaffolding for color choice.
The rest of us can only stand and stare.
SCREAM
air cracks and shivers between pulses,
red sky and fractured sound -
silent echoes - a shriek rides the
spine of dusk - hold breath - hold frame -
the fjord grinding thought
a flock of hours rushing past,
rattling the sky – warped tight
carves us into primal beings - we clutch
at panic, ripple and collapse,
turn ourselves into something
approaching raw noise
BEGATTING
I wonder if my parents had second thoughts
when they begat me –
got to love that word begat –
like something brandished by a begangster –
looking back, it hardly sounds rational
being long after my three sisters drew breath
but maybe they thought,
as they were getting on in years –
like both being 32 or the like –
that it was last chance for them to produce a male
with his brains and her looks
or his fishing skills and her way with a lemon meringue pie –
they never told me of any weighing and measuring
in the leadup to unprotected sex - procreation –
or it could be it was just animal spirits
overriding sound judgement
on some otherwise uneventful day in mid-November –
actually, from my own experience,
I am in no doubt that 99% of what we do
is totally irrational
and children being like a tax on the flesh
that can’t be written off as a loss
occupy the realm of –
poverty and
so what if they were all girls
isn’t three enough?
I was the last
so they did finally wise up –
I was happy enough without any younger siblings –
I was happy enough to end the begetting there –
and I still wave my begat at people –
aside from my nose shape,
that’s all my parents left me
PHONE CALL
Life looks better backward.
Hindsight makes for a much more likely truth.
A pane of glass: push becomes pull.
Grief twists simple physics.
Dad says “Drive safe - watch for kangaroos.”
I hear what he won’t say.
I say “love you” to end the call
before regret speaks out of turn.
You said I only saw
after things left. Too right.
You packed. I fumed.
The light dimmed
but I didn’t see
until the bulbs went with you.
The bowls – yours –
only noticed when the pasta
needed some place to hide.
Don’t remember me
blue-lit in the phone’s rectangle,
stirring last night’s waterlogged regrets.
Don’t picture the pot - no plate, no pretense.
Picture me at the wrong side of the door,
pulling what only ever pushed.
Still here.
No dial tone.
No way off this call.
The shoreline waits.
LIFE IN TIMES OF FUNERALS
I’ve been to many funerals.
They do not vary.
The regrets, the sympathies, are interchangeable
The facts of life, by my reckoning, is really the fact of life.
Or, as my grandfather would say, “The only certainties
are death and taxes. And you can cheat on your taxes.”
Life is this lifelong flood, famine, earthquake.
There are no survivors.
Somewhere, someone at this very minute
sits at a desk, is confronted by two trays.
One contains causes of death.
The other is awash in birth certificates
They look the same.
They are the same.
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