Tuesday poem: Oppressing the gnomes
July 11, 2016
Oppressing the gnomes
The garden gnomes are downing tools
all over Australia, and whimsy is plummeting.
No more riding snails and pushing barrows,
or fishing for strangely ecstatic cod,
who gape for hooks in a pornography of cute.
The gnomes are turning nasty, attacking
the flamingos who continue to strut —
elegant pink scabs over the quirky lawns.
Gnomes piss on succulents and smear
foul gnome shit on the guinea pigs.
What do we want? they ask the air.
But they don’t know what to chant back —
their dissatisfaction is merely existential.
Even their industrial action raises a laugh,
with their crooked green caps slipping,
and their endless pipes twixt ruddy lips.
Their signs are egregiously misspelt.
Nome’s R Us is at least legible,
but the kerning is much worse than that,
and the punctuation speaks volumes.
Get back to it, gnomes, I say, imperiously.
Ply those forks, and play that accordion.
I bask in my elevation to exploiter,
swaying in a complacent hammock.
Surly yet amusing, the wee green men obey.
The ringleader rides a frog to the pond,
and casts in his line like a sigh.
P.S. Cottier
This is probably a weird commentary on the zeitgeist. Either that or the gnomes have been putting things in my tea.
Tuesday Poem: Walking out of the bar (Seventh…)
June 20, 2016
Walking out of the bar
(Seventh in a long series of nasty little poems)
There is a place that humour goes to die
like superannuated elephants.
The three part joke:
first this
than that
then punchline.
No final mild tingle
can ever atone
for the violence done to the ear
the appalling cringe of taking time
and parking a huge lump of
premeditation there.
People, mostly men,
dump these jokes like turds
to mark the boundaries of thought.
This is a funny! It moves like a funny!
So it must be funny!
You never shed boredom, m’dear.
You just packed it into a new shape;
a triangle of sludge, which you call
a joke. There is no jazz
to such a thing; no quip.
You play your lardy triangle
with a tardy limping tongue.
I listen for inadvertent puns,
or simply walk away.
Far better rude than bored,
says the woman in the beret,
unbearably self assured.
She’s walking out of the bar.
P.S. Cottier
Over at Project 365 + 1, I just posted a poem about the gym which I like quite a lot. It has the optimistic name ‘Four times a week’. Aspirational, one might say. This was poem number twenty for that project, so I will do another ten days. It makes the gym seem easy, I must say.
Tuesday Poem: Up
February 15, 2016
Up
To look up from cracks
to see two joined
fifty years by love,
cemented into couple,
completed by time;
To feel sudden sun’s lick
render you gerbera,
face stroked by light petal
eight minutes old
caressed by time;
To see dog raise hairy flag
of flesh and wag
a fan in smell-poem air,
simple and clear,
careless of time;
is joy.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this ages ago and can’t remember if it’s been published. Not on My List, so probably not! (My List is all the publications and awards I’ve had, and is a kind of memoir. But listier and with rather less angst.)
A simple poem with a bit of repetition for those who like that sort of thing. The dog in the photo likes the same line of poetry being thrown out again and again. We’d call it a stick.
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Tuesday poem: Heron’s formula
February 8, 2016
Heron’s formula
A lesson in trigonometry,
the white heron forms triangles
with legs as she inches forward
< obtuse, acute, obtuse >
and reeds write the shape’s third side,
grass and leg linked by my needy eye.
Each retraction from stillness
seems a matter of regret;
a fall from Greek statue
into hungry, stalking GIF.
Silent as a wish, she moves
towards the modest,
root-dwelling fish.
A split triangle
wedged into head axes down,
teaching the dumb water
a critical formula: working an equation
on softer bodies.
Heron swallows, then cries triumph,
and the noise is the croak
of a thirty-a-day frog
krarkkrarking imperfection —
a broken kaleidoscope of notes —
a pocket full of clashing change.
The breath of the eager teacher
who tried to show me the
dubious wonders of triangles,
to draw them on my brain,
swings into memory
with a scalene sharpness.
Sound conjures smell;
ear and nose separated only
by a stretched vinculum of years.
Angel microbes swarmed
in his every exhalation,
armed with gleeful mallets
for playing smell croquet —
sulphur tapped through nostrils —
blunt, yet sharp and jangling.
He could not know that
he was Alice with stink flamingos;
heroic feathers tickling
before, and after, each own goal.
How could I breathe and think
under such an unnumbered cloud?
A limp fish, I soon failed.
The elegance of herons
undercut by noise;
the perfection of mathematics
negated by disgust.
I paddle off, towards firm ground,
away from the sharp, white assassin,
and the chopped pools of recollection.
P.S. Cottier
This poem was just commended in the World Wetlands Day Poetry Prize, judged by Sarah Day, so I thought it would be nice for people to be able to read it. The winning poems are posted at the link, and very good they are too. The site itself is as cool as a rockpool and thrice as pretty.
This is an unusual poem for me in that it combines the natural world and memory and mathematics. I am innumerate, so the maths is the most freaky part. The poem recalls someone being turned off the so-called Queen of the Sciences for life. Sometimes the division between authorial voice and real author is pretty swampy.
Heron’s formula has something clever to do with triangles, I think. Personally, I am satisfied that the sail on the swanboat in the picture above is a most definite triangle. I passed Shapes at kindergarten with flying colours.
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Tuesday poem (early!): Two containers
January 10, 2016
The two items above are the subject of the following poem, written at the Green Shed in Civic, which is a store selling items mainly found at Canberra’s tips. Late last year, as part of the Design Canberra festival, punters were asked to write a response to objects at the Green Shed. I was the first to have a go, and set myself a ten minute limit. Here’s the poem, with just a couple of typos corrected:
Two containers
Black rectangle of leather,
simple silver clasp. You smell
of clean secrets, of transparent glue,
or a genie addicted to soap.
Gold lettering spells ‘Lodge Elata’
but your elation long fled the bag.
She searches for crumbs, carolling.
Banana jug — cracked as if you were
yourself a punchline — jagged haha
or an inappropriate smirk,
yellowing a funeral with muted glee.
Three bananas. Two are thick lips,
and one a self-tasting tongue,
enjoying the flavour of milky jokes.
P.S. Cottier
The masonic bag did become transparent after the poem was written, in the sense that I hear that someone stole it from the shop! Not a genie, either. Or so I suppose.
Thanks to Kaaron Warren for alerting me to this event.
And happy 2016!
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PS Cottier 