P.S. Cottier #30 (and last) ‘…neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.’

‘…neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.’

Life is walking the dogs,
squatting after them
with a roll of plastic bags
unrolling like an unsavoury tongue.
It happens unexpectedly,
as you try a new recipe,
or opt for the reliable tomato,
always close to hand, and
toss it through a thoughtless pasta —
an old squishy friend
long run to seed, half-seen,
through being seen so much.


Revelations happen,
but most of us are not
St Joan, and God speaks
on a muffled, cracked phone
when we are half listening,
marinating in the mundane
in our accustomed way.
The pause between heartbeats
is more eloquent than any sermon —
that flicker of self; the bandwidth
not quite enough for all the data.
We are walking into God
each day, as we smell the onions,
or squat for the mutts in
a strange, mimetic act.

One day soon, I’ll obtain a clear line.
One day soon the very last walk,
and the darkened screen
pure light, and a meal,
such a meal, as will never end.

P.S. Cottier

The title is from John 10:28 KJV

***

After 30 poems in 30 days, I am very tired.  I'll leave it to the rest of you now!  I blog at pscottier.com, and it's best to visit on Tuesdays.

P.S. Cottier #29 Glastonbury, 1994

Glastonbury, 1994

When they invent time travel,
whether DeLorean or phone box
I won't go forward, but back.
There’ll probably be strict laws
about interference
and the paradox
as explored in science fiction
forever, and yet, a visit
to Glastonbury in ’94
surely wouldn’t be a threat,
or trigger Bradbury’s
butterfly effect?
(Unless someone already did,
and that explains the Trump.)
I’d blend into the heaving crowd,
a very happy, sunburnt piggy.

I want to see Johnny Cash live.
I want to watch the Man in Black
and hear him walk the line.
’69 at San Quentin
is out of the question,
but ’94 will do fine.

A simple time machine and off she went,
pausing momentarily to buy a tent.

P.S. Cottier

The ‘butterfly effect’ mentioned here refers to the short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’ by Ray Bradbury, in which the accidental killing of a butterfly in the distant past results in a very different future world, not least in political terms.

Apparently it was hot at Glastonbury in 1994, with no mud.

I messed up the numbering of my posts, having two marked as #24.  Today is #29.

P.S. Cottier #27 12 quotes from an annoying (and imaginary) desk calendar

12 quotes from an annoying (and imaginary) desk calendar

Failure is success dressed in a bad tracksuit.
Today is not tomorrow. Tomorrow is today’s foetus.
The best trips are taken into the soul; no passport required!
Don’t let easy credit become tomorrow’s greasy indigestion.
Ask yourself — am I doing the very best possible?
Answer yourself  — yes! yes! yes! yes!
If good prose if silver, poetry is purest woven gold.
A rose is God’s way of saying I love you.
Take time to feed your brain with mindfulness.
A baby is swaddled in her own invisible wings.
Never is every, with a y added and an n removed.
Clouds are nature’s make-up, hiding a smile.

P.S. Cottier

(Please insert a sickeningly positive image here.)

If anyone wants to contribute another line, do so in the comments.  Because 'comments are wee segments of rainbow fallen from the text above.'

P.S. Cottier #26 (flogging a dead haiku)

flogging a dead haiku
with a cat of three tails
no aha! moment here

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #25 Just now and then

I have thought
maybe I should get a British passport
because I was born there
and I cherish the idea
of living in France —

maybe on a canal boat
or maybe a year in Paris,
if I just improved my French
which is, as they say, bad.

Just the other day
I felt these maybes disappear
because a British passport
became more just that,
and a lot less attractive
to one spoilt Francophile
cherishing houseboat dreams,
and moored rather further South
than lavender Provence.

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #24 (Tight blonde curls)

Tight blonde curls
each a spiral staircase
twisting perfection

P.S. Cottier

Here's my tiny contribution to the Rapunzel fest, although I was thinking more of Shirley Temple curls when I wrote it just now.

P.S. Cottier #24 9am

9am

is wrapped in commuter cold
hunkering into bus seats
or nursing cars through bowels
of constipated traffic.
9am is the cruellest hour.
See the people made beige
pushing through scarfed
awakening, the workday’s
reckoning, swapping
presence for credit.
The swaddled brutality
of 9am, the coffee clutched,
the earbuds distracting
with a different rhythm.
Stomachs grumble cereal,
phones bring news
of elsewhere, but here
and now is the relentless
decanting of the day
through the funnel of 9am.
This is the vampire hour,
not dusk. The light husk
of possibility drifts,
quite drained, no later than
9.10.

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #23 All praise the cut-off gloves

In cut-off gloves I can cup
my phone; the oblong light,
and message and swipe
just as I would with only
pale thin gloves of skin.
The poetry anthology,
just arrived from Adelaide,
can be flicked in cut-off gloves.
The flat white slowly sipped,
the necessary bling displayed
on cool growths of fingers.
Those crops of pink asparagus,
embedded in the cut-off gloves
sprout towards the glowing words,
etiolated, and punctuated
by the warming medium
in which I plant them.
This very poem can be written
in what it seeks to praise —
woollen, orange, cut-off gloves.
And stuff these Canberra days.

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #22 On the egregious absence of my muse

My muse has taken a sickie
My muse is a fake tradie
My muse is now someone else’s muse
My muse has taken up a hobby
My muse just skipped to Bali
My muse is committing adultery
My muse is severing all ties
My muse is exploring his options
My muse is at a health spa
My muse is running a campaign for Mexit
My muse can’t keep it in his pants
My muse won’t even Skype


P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #21 (Dead galahs)

Dead galahs
roads planting feathers
pink blooms stink

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #20 Four times a week

Four times a week

The heft of it The set of it of it The nausea of it
The number of it The form of it The core of it
The glance of it The bruise of it The push of it
The back of it The mirrors of it The wind of it
The callous of it The iron of it The rope of it
The smile of it The spotter of it The floor of it
The dumbbells of it The sweat of it The pump of it
The rip of it The pain of it The trackies of it
The failure of it The strong of it The grimace of it
The towel of it The bench of it The joy of it
The chest of it The habit of it The groan of it
The pull of it The fear of it The legs of it
The kilos of it  The runners of it  The reps of it
The gloves of it The ache of it The racks of it
The barbells of it The stretch of it The blood of it
The grip of it

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #19 Telegony

Telegony

Not a lost poem found
but waiting waiting waiting
on the phone
for the phone company.
Is that what they call irony?
Even a Penelope,
even a Mary,
would react quite testily
and throw her phone angrily.

Profanity! Profanity! Profanity!
Circuitous.  Circus.  Circe.

This call may be recorded for training purposes
This call may be aborted for braining porpoises
This call may be thwarted for blaming surfaces

In thy rhymes may all my puns be remembered.

The agony!  The telephony! The telegony!

Hi! This is Godot.  How can I help you today?

I am dead.  Now go away.


P.S. Cottier


The Telegony was the name of an epic poem about Odysseus’s son Telegonus.  His mother was Circe.  The poem has been lost for a very long time, if not forever.  My theory is that Circe have cursed a well-known Australian phone provider, and the curse will only be lifted when the poem about her son is rediscovered.

P.S. Cottier #18 Not the poem's shoes

Not the poem’s shoes

This poem flaunts no dainty slippers
This poem never warms itself in ugg boots
This poem does not work in steel-caps
This poem can’t totter in stilettos
This poem has not embarrassed in sandals and socks
This poem slaps with no Brazilian thongs
This poem dances in red shoon (but only in dreams)
This poem won’t stomp in black Docs
This poem wears no shoes at all.
But it does go wee  wee  wee

                                               all through the town.

P.S. Cottier

the poem likes this though

    Image by MOs810, CC-BY-SA-3.0

P.S. Cottier #17 Not very epic

Not very epic

Penelope pauses in her unpicking and thinks what the fuck
Penelope pauses and pictures Oddie and wonders as to luck
Penelope remembers how he always preferred his mates
Penelope puts down her fibre, and grabs a fist of dates
Penelope recalls and recoils at the portrait of that absent groom
Penelope thinks she prefers the silence, and her loomy room
Penelope calls to the Moirai to finally cut the thread
Penelope sighs and yawns, and goes to comfy bed
Penelope pats Argos, who has jumped up for a pat
Penelope sleeps.  That’s her story.  Just a this then that.


Mikaela Castledine #166 ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ inspired this one. That and having the first name Penelope.

P.S. Cottier #16 And enterprises of great pith and moment…

To erase all my poetry
To drown all my i-things
To throw away all my cards
To cancel my gym membership
To unsubscribe from everything
To donate my clothes to an op-shop
To find a great retro patterned dress there
To dig in my pockets for folded notes
To find a matching pair of blue shoes
To post about them on an old phone
To decide that the gym is needed
To retrieve my binned credit
To laugh at my feeble will
To write a new poem



P.S. Cottier

Title is from Hamlet.

Not the poem's shoes

P.S. Cottier #15 Blinky

Blinky

Australia was home to the first mammal species possibly made extinct due to recent climate change

Some ugly little rat may no more
pronk at the side of a coral cay.
We’ll plonk fuel in the 4WD
to take the kids to school,
and pick them up for soccer.
And after soccer, we’ll scoff beef
corralled in such convenient buns,
as we stay wrapped in bullish car.
And yes, oh yes, we will have fries.
Some ugly little rat is drowned —
we never learned to say its name.
Who would miss the melomys,
which even spell-check would despise?
Mere melanoma on far beach’s skin,
excised by surgeons of blunt bliss.

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #14 Going soft

Going soft

patchy rain — granny blankets
a comfortable sleet falling
onto the lap of the land

ugg boot precipitation
all the naked sheep
get back their fleeced skins

P.S. Cottier

All totally true

P.S. Cottier #13 Queen's Birthday long weekend

The whole of Australia
boasts a grim hangover —
headache a tight crown

P.S. Cottier

P.S. Cottier #12 Ink and erasure

Ink and erasure

My shoulder boasts a palm —
palm cockatoo, all music and crest,
slapping my skin in a punch line.
I shall sell my piratical skin
for historic ornithology.
Bauxite is singing
on history's grey shoulder,
sweet and repetitive
as any canned soda.

P.S. Cottier

Apparently a sub-species of the remarkable palm cockatoo will be further threatened by a new bauxite mine.  We value aluminium more than birds, it would seem.

This bird, which plays music on trees with sticks it fashions for the purpose, has long fascinated me, as the tattoo might indicate!  An earlier poem I wrote about the palm cockatoo can be read here.

P.S. Cottier #11 'fairy-floss macaws' (after Robert Verdon's #169)

fairy-floss macaws
cracking marshmallows
toffee shard beaks

‘fairy-floss macaws’ is taken from Robert Verdon’s #169, ‘Nameless Numberless Nightmare’ (published yesterday).

Poor person's macaw