I Do Not Live As Myself

I DO NOT LIVE AS MYSELF

- (SELF PORTRAIT @ AGE 61)


I do not live as myself, for
I am that lonely
family man living in
the shipwrecked singular,
one raised to
the comings and going of many
siblings of homestead bustle,
one once well used
to be for wife and children,
as to grandchildren,
alas, all flown,
and anomic of me.

For I have become
as one chosen for a sentence
of exile in the wars
of culture and value against
that family, one chosen
to be an example
as if It was I asked and risked too
much in the domestic
of uncivil war,
cared too much for
old ways even then being despised,
cared for the old hat
of the anomalies of eternity that
break through the times
in this time I have ever ready
to use on my hands like
a loaded gun which some want to see
as having only blanks
in the ticking breech, and yet,
my potency is still by me as
I do not live as myself - for I am
the the father, an old man
before my time in a time made not mine,
alive as if in Latin,
exiled to being solo as witness, for
making contemporary
a testimony to what went down here
in a world that wants
to forget that to testify in true
testimony only comes of
such testes with which I still hang
- and give out thus.

* * *

Lost Bunyip Song ?

Old Bunyip Song


Gin Gin Been n Ballanrong,
Balla Balla n Carnmallam
Tooradinn n Narre-Narre Warren
Kardinjyarr t Toomuc

Kannanook n Langwarrin,
Toomah n Nar Nar Goon,
Eummemering t Karrum Karrum,
Wannackladden n Mordialloc

Tjantjenong n Yannathan
Koo Wee Rup n Warneet,
Lang Lang t Carrup Carrup,
Tyabb-yabb n Moorooduc

Sunk into the swamp
The lost bunyip song
Who said the soft palate
place names are unsung?

There is a Look

THERE IS A LOOK


There is a look
in creation;
a face not fazed
by cajoling,
a stare not amenable
to seduction
nor accepting
of excuse

Eyes that sharpen to see
and verily don't turn
aside from watching, nor flinch
aside in surprise
and do not shut lid-closed with shame
and neither
wonder nor ask
but look hard
at seeing the wantonness
as opportunity

A face that sees only that pity
in its waste
for those fledged nanoseconds
before
the eye's winged beak zooms and tears
that thing
apart as a divine provision
of a meal
in that drama of hooked piercing
with blood
that redeems the waste.


- Image: Aquila coronata- the Black Crowned Eagle of North Africa

Peacock Spider

PEACOCK SPIDER

Itsy tiny,
eight-eyed,
finger leggy
and grey

A thing of
arm and leg
hair plus the
 body fur

With two
pale tipped
brown antennae,
but hey

You have
to see the
umbrella of tail
he keeps for her.

The Winged Room

THE WINGED ROOM

The winged room is in a secret part
of the house, a soul door leading apart
from the clamour of a living opens up
out of enclosed walls to far revelations,
the vistas you often dreamed as a child
and the lost words you wanted to say
are moving on the read pages like music
played by heart, the pictures are drawn
in true colours, and the hope that yearns
ascends again, on its wings in live story,
call it centring, it is your genius at prayer.

- WDK

FOREST KINGFISHER

Forest Kingfisher

It flies between a tea-tree-bordered shallow reedy lake
And the weeping willows spread by a small farm dam,
Like a dart missile behind the spear wedge of officious nose
With a navy uniform jacket of coloured sky or water blue shining like
A blazon flag to herald its double periscope in submarine sniping
Like a creature built with a radar of eyes set over and after fish.

Five Winged Forms of Life on Planet Boolook

FOUR LOOKS AT LIFE ON PLANET BOOLOOK




1. Forest Kingfisher

It flies between a tea-tree-bordered shallow reedy lake
And the weeping willows spread by a small farm dam,
Like a dart missile behind the spear wedge of officious nose
With a navy uniform jacket of coloured sky or water blue shining like
A blazon flag to herald its double periscope in submarine sniping
Like a creature built with a radar of eyes set over and after fish.






2.


3.



4.





5. THE WINGED ROOM

The winged room is in a secret part
of the house, a soul door leading apart
from the clamour of a living opens up
out of enclosed walls to far revelations,
the vistas you often dreamed as a child
and the lost words you wanted to say
are moving on the read pages like music
played by heart, the pictures are drawn
in true colours, and the hope that yearns
ascends again, on its wings in live story,
call it centring, it is your genius at prayer.

- WDK

Corrugated Watertank

WATERTANK

A corrugated-iron watertank is unlike a beach
of sand where the tide has rippled up the skin,
for the galvanising breaks up the light in shards
like a platoon of silver-curved swords thrust out
above inside shadow, each glint of light on edge
is sharp as the dry dapples that hold the water in
strengthening the arm of the arc of flow-through
as the metal swings its left hook and its right to
join hands in the victory drink on the other side.

The gradually diminishing dull-echoed rungs were
the grim ladder rungs with which our grandparents
climbed up out of the droughts of summers past
each pewter-coin circle of stored rainwater a pool
of common use to be meted out by a careful glass
so even a dish of washwater carried splashless out
was lipped across a lettuce patch as dose in salve
for green stuff in the palate, it rung of no idle cream
familiar of beaches: frugal priority had real draught.

CHANGING WEATHER


The sun shines as it did;
high summer cloud wisps
up like summer cloud does;
as a birthday candle breeze
puffs the green leaves aflicker
and aglow as if a mind played
with a gift of light just like it was
another morning of the world.

Things Are Not What They Seem

THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

Things are not what they seem
Appearances are fabricated just as easily as poor
Mummers costume & make-up as queens and kings.

Things are not what they seem
An old deceit is on the make, the all too human default
too much likes to climb the cock's dunghill and sing.

Things are not what they seem
The mirror displays only reversals, the opposite is true
as a barbed lure glitters, as a baited fishhook swings.

Things are not what they seem
The seeming is the very trap set for green and naïve hunters
as the mother duck wrong-flies on her broken wing.

Things are not what they seem
Seeming is not the thing. Seeming is all too often
only seeming. Seeming is the sport of living things.

Things are not what they seem.


* * *
6th February 2015 - WDK

In the watches of the night

IN THE WATCHES OF LAST NIGHT

In the watches of that very last night
small thumps came from the rooftops
as small furry animals, still or hurried for
their own reasons and in their creaturely
right took over the place like an occupation.

It is just as if all our dire concerns that night
were as nothing at all, fourlegs sat and took
their own mean time, or scurried in the quick
of the aged moonlight as if their spectacles
were glazed with light fully needless of news.

-4th Feb 2015 WDK

The road is pause

THE ROAD IS PAUSE

A road gone mute is a pause as traffic
ceases far out beyond where icons of it go;
a common road now most empty as folks hurry
to stay near to where love or habit answers,
and back! as a road is pause in the traffic rattling
by like death, like hungry death on the make, on the take
as if it has a go away clause in its contract, its mission
to crash the bright lights, to flash on and off for code, gone;
gone, gone then binary stars give back their old look-out
in light shot out like cars on an astral highway
that keeps a going on and on, off, off forever
where final love or rote childhood will answer.


5th Feb 2015 - WDK

What's new in Kiev?

WHAT"S NEW IN KIEV ?


As they do
as if it was yesterday,
a Greek writes today:

"Basil II purposed
to give his sister
Princess Anna Porphyrogenita
as a bride
to the king of the Rus
Vladimir because
he wanted his help
to face the two usurpers
of the throne, Vardas Fokas
and Vardas Skliros.

From Kiev,
Vladimir sent
the Varangian guard of about 6,000
to Byzantium,
and Basil II
won the civil war.

After that time
the Varangians
took pride
of place as
the personal guard
of the emperor."

* * *

5th Feb 2015 WDK

Princess Anna Porphyrogenita. Daughter of Emperor Romanos II and the Empress Theophano. She was also the sister of Emperor Basil II and Grand Princess of Kievan Rus (989–1011)

THE NEXT TEXT

The text truth

Your next text
might lose you your licence,
as you lose your life.

THE NEXT TEXT

The next text
might lose you your licence,
as you lose your life.

REST NOT IN PEACE

REST NOT IN PEACE

Offspring, word: hatch here, take flight, grow devote
Rise of ashes in sackclothed backbone from the mud
For freedom's sake in goodness reject all that's base.

Let me not like father Abel be so casually Cain-smote
Nor see this decried word diluted in any moment's flood
But let abiding light shine out in its every true trace

As the patriarch, our father Job of holy legend wrote*
O earth, cover not thou this pain, this hope, my blood,
And let my cry have no resting place.


* * *
28 Jan 2015 WDK - (* Book of Job 16: 18)