PS Cottier

Love letters

I love you poetry because all I need is an old envelope — Telstra or power bill or guff — and a pen

And you wait there hidden between the grains of paper like a wee tiger, pouncing, or a huge poodle, primping

I can write you for everyone, or just for me

And through you I have met clever people, and some even good (and also pricks, but let’s not dwell in embroidery)

Poetry you keep my mind in the top fifteen percent of my generation

And you make me embed my thought in Real Words™ like a bloodbug in a mattress, burrowing

I weep for you when some use your name to produce pungent advertisements for self — ah! the faces I have slapped, the duels I have fought in your name (if only on paper)

You allow me to take a word — say egregious — and handball it back to myself with slicker hands than Hawthorn

And you stretch back and forward as far as music

And you adapt like Galapagos, but quick

Tourniquet and snake, you bite and comfort, and I love you like a convenient maiden aunt loves her old cat, who miraculously survived the pitbull

And you are the very pitbull, and the pitbull’s teeth.

P.S.Cottier

***

And in vaguely related news, I was just highly commended in the Poetry category of the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing, organised by the New England Writers Centre.   Very nice.  The winner of the poetry prize (which I won last year) was  Ian Hood, with a poem called ‘Drowning Satan’, which I look forward to reading.  Paul Prenter was commended.  All the poems (and stories, etc) will be published soon at the New England Writers Centre website, and I’ll link to that when I can.  My poem ‘On average’ was about domestic violence.

The judge was John Foulcher, a fellow Canberran.  (Judging was, of course, anonymous.)

P.S. ‘Hawthorn’ in the above, is an Australian Rules football team, who have dominated things over the last five years or so.  (Until this year, in fact.)  Another helpful guide to Australian culture for benighted foreigners my lovely overseas readers.

P.P.S. Pitbulls are awesome dogs, and are only vicious if abused.