Tuesday poem: Forty-league boots
June 6, 2017
Forty-league boots
We cross the Pacific
leaping between plastic islands.
Great ballooning whales
squeak beneath our soles,
harpooned by our heels.
We are the waste-walkers —
everyone her own Jesus.
PS Cottier
So we’re contributing to the flooding of small Pacific nations, while creating huge floating islands of trash. Gives a whole new meaning to the word recycling. ‘We’, in this context, refers to all the industrial economies that refuse to take global warming seriously.
And I know Jesus walked on water, not convenient piles of trash, but it seemed to make a kind of sense.
And because it’s nearly 2017…
December 31, 2016
I feel almost forced to reflect, like a cross between Narcissus and the kid in that eye device in Clockwork Orange.
Achievements:
I leg pressed 200kg, which is pretty damned good.
Lots of publications. Lots!
My chapbook Quick Bright Things came out.
I did more live readings this year.
I was highly commended in many a poetry competition, which is winning’s peculiar cousin, sitting in the corner playing endless games on his device.
Not so achievey:
I spent too much time worrying about the news, and letting it affect me.
My budgie won’t talk.
My canaries won’t sing.
Irresolute:
I don’t do resolutions, partly based on the fact that I heard two very fit people at the gym sneering at those they called ‘the resolutionists’, who join in January and are never seen after February.
But I will continue with the poeting, the gym, and letting the budgie teach me budgie. And this blog will continue as long as blogging is a thing, and Tuesdays exist. Back to Tuesdays after the celebrations end.
Happy New Year, and easy on the Rabbie Burns!
Tuesday poem: There are five poets in my garden
November 8, 2016
There are five poets in my garden
— and they think that they are bulbs.
But the first one smells carcinogenic,
and he is clothed in ancient brown,
as if he stole the mud-flecked jumper
from the very body of a bog-man.
The second is talking about
the fervid dangers of Pokémon,
and how in her day, they looked
for birds, and birds were quite enough.
She has a collection of empty eggs,
pilfered in her day, which lie
in an ancient purloined nest —
a weird eunuch’s severed balls,
placed in a stolen cup of misery.
Number three is being thoughtful.
He never utters a sentence without
a French theorist’s name —
like a pigeon (of stolen eggs) he says
Bourdieu, Bourdieu, and oui, he bores me.
Number four is addicted to rhyme.
He knows he is somewhat out of time,
but like a tune you know too well,
he is married to the villanelle.
And the fifth? She plants sarcasm
in a weedy succulent garden,
where such thin green tongues
poke like wee prickly dragons.
She’s fully awesome, and awfully sweet.
P.S. Cottier
I’ve been thinking too much this week about how any field of endeavour contains exactly the same percentage of unpleasant people as all the others. Whether it be poetry or painting, rugby or beekeeping, there will be the same proportion of selfish people and the likeable. Perhaps politics is a genuine exception, and contains more of the unlikeable, but generally speaking, anywhere there are people there will be all the character types, regardless of whether it is a profession where a certain amount of empathy might be expected.
Indeed, the type of poet who bangs on about his sensitivity to nature (in the sense of a convenient green strip outside his window, sans history) often seems to lean towards the arsehole side of the equation. If equations really have sides. Or arseholes.
Discuss.
Tuesday poem: The home for ancient memes
October 31, 2016
The home for ancient memes
Where they can haz cheeseburgers all day
Where jokes of nuking each other from space crack
Where everyone fusses over a grumpy cat
Where the cry of Ermahgerd echoes
Where an overly manly man flexes, endlessly
Where sad hipsters say many things
Where planking takes place every evening
Where the X all the Ys, and Y all the Xs
Where ice buckets become challenging
Where smugshrugs shrug smugly
Where seals have awkward moments
Where they debate the colour of a dress
Where they still Netflix and chill
Where…I’d definitely continue, but
Ain’t nobody got time for that
PS Cottier
Discuss the colour of this Tudor, dress-like thing.
Tuesday poem: Greyhounds release
July 25, 2016
Greyhounds release
Let them run —
but run as they would
chasing the wind or their mate
not a screeching curl-tailed baton
flung round the track
in a circular curse.
And let them live —
just as long as greyhounds live
not dispatched for slowness
and spaded into the bush
in a quotidian slaughter
nose to tail, tail to nose.
P.S. Cottier
So weird to find myself agreeing with a Liberal government…But the Baird Government is right in banning greyhound racing. (As is the Labor — with a sprinkling of Green — ACT government.) No decision is ever totally pure, but this ‘sport’ is undeniably cruel, and the sooner it is abolished, the better.
To all those whinging about the attack on the working man (and it is usually categorised in that gender specific way) that the ban represents; note that there is something incredibly insulting in this thinking. Working class does not mean cruel and unthinking, and unable to act ethically. Most people with pet dogs would shudder to think of them being treated in the way this industry has treated greyhounds (and other animals used as live bait) for years.
My PhD on images of animals in the works of Charles Dickens touched on the history of the RSPCA, and around the time it was created, there were people mounting exactly the same arguments against bans on cock-fighting and the like, categorising such activities as important recreations for the working man. Implying that the ‘working man’ is necessarily a brutal moron.
The NSW Labor Party, in defending the greyhound racing industry, is showing that it is pathetically out of touch with anything progressive.
The ban, which comes into effect 1 July next year, does open up thinking about how we treat other animals, and that has to be a positive development. Go, you good thing!
(I know there probably should be an apostrophe in the title, but it looked so bad I removed it. Fussy.)
UPDATE: October 2016
The Baird NSW Government has changed its mind and decided not to ban this cruel and outdated ‘sport’. Weak and very sad.
PS Cottier 