Tuesday poem: decant
January 29, 2019
decant
sax snaking
between notes,
tonguing air for directions,
poisonously honeyed
ears overflowing
quick thickening
and her voice,
both glacier and moraine
digging cool deep graves of swoon,
lowering us in,
willingly, longingly
noise-swaddled
now punctuated
by exhortations of snare,
the metal finesse
of the cymbal
jaggedly round —
its clanging infraction
PS Cottier

Writing about music is never easy; it always escapes being pinned down by meaning. Hope that you enjoy this attempt to write jazz. I have posted it once before, but I thought a reprise was in order.
Very happy to be back, by the way!
Tuesday poem: Ursa major
August 8, 2017
Ursa major
Some old ones blow up
and some contract into themselves.
Crab nebula or hermit crab
seems to be the question.
Surely it’s better to reach out,
even with pincers, than to ban light’s
customary caress, its kissing blush of face?
I want to be the crabby old bear,
stained with purple,
snatching berries like song.
Bulking up for my Winter’s
last diminuendo.
PS Cottier
A middle-aged poem about age, first published in 2011 in The Mozzie, edited by Ron Heard in Queensland.
Tuesday poem: No streets, or maps to find them
October 18, 2016
It’s by link to Tim Jones’s site, where he posts a poem from my new chapbook Quick Bright Things: Poems of Fantasy and Myth. He also gives some commentary on the poem and the book, which is cool as a sea cucumber. (The poem is about a sunken city, hence the sea imagery creeping in there. Or sliding, or however sea cukes move.)
I was thinking of posting an appropriate Atlantis type image, but here instead is the cover of the book once again, with the cricketing fairy drawn by Paul Summerfield. You can buy a copy here.
Tuesday poem: He wouldn’t know a poem…
August 9, 2016
He wouldn’t know a poem…
…if it had a business card that said A. Poem
(‘read me and weep’) which it presented to him
while waving a bright purple beret under his nose
(which organ is unable to detect the whiff of poesy)
while reciting itself, excitedly or coolly,
while pouring itself a sixth large glass of wine
(which would be hard, because of clutched beret and card case,
except that it would first return the beret to its poeting head,
at such an interesting angle, and would put the card case back
in a voluminous tote bag, full of its brother and sister poems
gathered into slim books which are now remaindered)
while squatting and shitting lines of the purest gold.
He just wouldn’t know it,
for what it seems to be.
P.S. Cottier

Talk to the beret
Now I could have the heading ‘nasty little poem’ for that but I’ve become a tad bored with that self-generated meme.
***
I’m been working on a little manuscript of fantasy poems at the moment; more about that anon. Speaking of that type of thing, there’s a nice competition on at the moment, run by the Science Fiction Poetry Association in the US, for poems of all lengths written in a speculative genre (fantasy, horror, science fiction etc.). If you write such things, why not have a go? It is only $2 (that’s the ‘somewhat more valuable than the Australian $ at the moment, but we’ll see after their election, American $’) to enter. You don’t have to be a member of the SFPA to enter (I am a member), and it would be lovely to have more Antipodean entries.
It closes at the end of the month, and entries can be lodged on-line.