Tug Dumbly - Without Mystery

Without mystery the heart a husk

a piece of dull percussion

rattling with dried peas

metronomically beating a span

of desert sureties. 

A land lies beyond

sunk in undiscovery,

pristine, virginal, primordial,

a continent containing a flower, 

a plant, an animal, a lifeform,

to set an elkhorn

sprouting from the heart.     

Imagine it enough

to know that somewhere lies

a beauty unprized  

that we can never touch. 

Reasons to Quit # 117 - Tug Dumbly

Reasons to Quit # 117

Take drugs and go to a cemetery.  

Who hasn’t seen Easy Rider?  

Fresh waves of Goth fledgers

night picnic on the grave

of another harbour drowner.    

An ice pipe by the light

of the silvery goon.

Tag a headstone, kick a cross,

pull the wings off angels.

All those quaint old rituals.

Kids these days …

In my millennium it was simple:

booze, pot, acid and speed.

Know your limits. Apart from that time

I crowned a New York triumph 

with a return to town

straight into the arms

of Grievous Bodily Harm,

Oxblood amphetamine

and a litre of off-duty Smirnoff.

It put the grin on, then wiped it off.

They could have dropped me

         from the plane straight

                 into the cemetery

                     over Newtown.

I taxied home

and woke the Sunday corpses

of my house with demands that

we instantly feast my return from Troy.

I wear the wounds still

from that psychotic picnic

bounding about the boneyard.
Though the memory’s just a sunlit gash 

of playing Lizard King reanimator,

bescreeching the dead,

rutting on slabs, getting impaled

on a rusty grave railing

but neither knowing nor feeling the spear

in my side till coming to in a bloody sheet

in Holt Street, like Christ three days dead

in the tomb

                 waking to piece together

the blackout

                 of his crucifixion party.

Ah, the hijinx of youth.

I think I was forty.

Canis Minor - Tug Dumbly

Canis Minor

Comes the phonecall

in the dead of night

that can mean only limited things –

wrong number, prank

another country

or death.

The phone it rings.

Death don’t wipe no muddy shoes.

Kicks in the door

spits on the floor

shoves to the front of the queue.

Someday the call will come

to break you harder

than any other.

And who will make the call?

This call wasn’t caught in time

as I tumbled from bed

with a headful of fog.

But when the news came later,

recalling the call, I knew

it must have been the dog.

Beanbag - Tug Dumbly

Beanbag

She said 'my heart’s a beanbag
people crash into for a while
before getting up, rested

in the cosy dent they leave behind.
But you’, she said, ‘you I like.
You’ll never fully disappoint me.
You’re like something good
that constantly fails to arrive'.

All Greek to Me - Tug Dumbly

All Greek to Me

The unbearable sadness

of a novelty singing fish.

The wasted life in a rusted wok.

The surrendered hope                

in a dumped exercise bike.    

The cry in the cracked slime

of a kid’s clam shell pool. 

All that broken, copulating

shopping trolly army.

And this just the start.

There’s more, so much more

of this gentle grating raw

that Sophocles never saw,  

because there was no Aegean K-Mart.