Melbourne

** Melbourne **
In Melbourne fair city anchored around by the bay
The breweries still stand yet no sign of the horses and dray
Transport by car bus train or even rattling tram
Commuters in morning and evening do cram
Has fine sandy beaches on which populance quite keen
The people are frugal nice and quite clean
The main river the Yarra has a grubby validity
Its colour arises due to silt rolling sedimentary
Some streets are board thoroughfares wide
More than a hint of the 1890s remains
Buildings of stone built when gold was our king
Now Melbourne tends to do a bit of everything
A gallery national just for the State
A sporting ground our most sacred place
Wiry and cunning and clever and quick
Every niche filling these Melbournians slick
Their fashion is cosmopolitan and music is live
The winters are chill yet not too hard to survive
The summers can be hot and dry as a bushfire
Melbournians turn to the sea when mercury soars higher
Not overly generous or overcome with greed
All they require is all that they need
A book store or four and a barista to provide
The elixir of coffee on which Melbournians survive.

Before

** before **
These days looking out
Trying to catch tide past
All about the debris
Of those I met before
All about the lost and fallen
The unable to be contained
Memories seep across the landscape
Obscuring what is now here
And if truthful clarity returns
I see a disfigured landscape
Though those younger than myself
Never viewed any other scene.

Cafe sojourn

** cafe sojourn **
Holding hands over a coffee
Exchanging looks of need and longing
Trying to find places we once knew
The deeper truth in me and you
Are we seekers of simple satiety
A few moments drinking pleasure's lotus
Plucking petals precious of time
Moments memory shall never lose
Or is there some deeper intent
A call to arms or call to soul
To bond and meld beautiful
Dance a dance of loving sweat
Do the movements without regret
Light a fire deep inside
Incinerate past mistakes
As in moment collision make
Supernova intensity of life
Which sees through all we have done and lived
To those times selfless and more devote
As we find ourselves
And let those truer selves back out.

Beach heart

** beach heart **
Drawing lines in the sand with stick
Piece of driftwood this man's artist tool
No paint palette or chunk of rock
Just damp sand at the tidal border
Sketching wavy lines approximating
The girl in my memory once was knowing
Flowing lines from stick's tip
Rendering in strokes thin and quick
Seems to be better that way
Recalling her in abstract strokes
A dash there for an eyebrow
Shell placed so she can see
Dressed in simple summer dress flowing
As if caught by this sea breeze
And she lies there completed
These lines I fill with memories to complete
Always has been the way of almost artists
Representations taken from the heart
Appear to others to be lines unshapely
Yet knowing in your heart these lines
So beautiful would make heart stop.

This meld of fact and fantasy

** Meld of fact and fantasy **
Weaving of facts and objects of fantasy
Magna Carta for the rights of men
Appendix added by Jerkyl and Hyde
All of this Spring madness
Fake euphoric chemical gladness
Smiles spread wider than Pollock's palate
Sadness of the widows of war
Both sides feels the grief and woe
No one gains when war passes go
And the White Rabbit runs late
A drip drip of red fate
And the blue hand waves adieu
To the green hand exiting
In gun smoke banjos and saloon doors
The slap of leather on salt water
Sailors lost beneath the sea
In U-boat or submarine
All these pamphlets of dreams
Merchandise schemes of neuron disclosure
Which in waking cannot be held to you
These escapees of fact and fantasy
Where mushroom lift the sky
Reveal Atlas cowering at mortal power
And every cold war hour an eternity
Waiting for the bomb to drop
Or Khushchev to hurl the other shoe
And the Mad Hatter rushes by
So late late late for the dawn red day
The strings of all the passes and bribes
Exposed as the journalists imbibe
Rich draft of political hypocrisy
And the streets running purple
Blood of the royals and ideals perfect
Such beliefs and fatal fascinations
Of crowds and nations great
Lead to ends to horrible to contemplate
We take the Dormouse and kick him to death
Over a pit of spitting vipers
Or a nest of Wall Street securities
Set alight for heat
Only shows emptiness of monied promises
And the ghosts of facts and fantastical objects
Sink to where the dead men drift
And Nemo pilots the Nautilus
Beyond sea bed mining claims
These declarations of sovereign rights extend
Digging profit holes fantastical
Holes of environmental consciousness
Down which pretty Alice will always tumble.

From then to now

* from then to now *
Marching feet, marching feet
Through the South's precious heat
The death and destruction
Pillaging burning eruption
Of Sherman's army burning all
Despoiling and reducing all
Glory of the South to ashes
Atlanta erased to stumps
Always will rise again
Burnt this time by future friend
Soon all will be united
Fresh foes of Union find
Outside the borders of North and South
In blood spilled by properly unified
Defy the old order of Europe
Build and to homelands travel
Not as captor of history but victor
Across battlefields from where ancestors came
Mark them all with blood and fame
Turn back Continental blight of Fascism
Match and overwhelm Asiatic imperialism
A new world order by bloodshed gain
Still nothing of value earned without pain
In victory benevolence display
Preach your marketplace habits
Sway hearts with democracy
Export your culture and fast food processes
Populise the sweet and swift
Teach world how to idolise
The lion heart of the young
Your naivety optimism and sense of fun
As world rulers be the grasshoppers
Enjoying this Spring for all its worth
Blessed by forefathers and fortune
While rest of world ant role takes
Slave away for colder less shiny days
For so long you can hold them back
Defy the inequalities of life
Until another learns your deeds
Practises them better than you do
As they grow as once you did
Blessed with energy which seems so young
For a nation older than every other one
We take your throne and your un-worn crown.

Rodeo days

+** Rodeo days **+

Hey fall away cowboy
Yee-hahh-aaying cowgirls
Caught in the rodeo whirl
Each stip the firststop
Every show a new show
Dealing with ready and rough
Fellow actors animals
Untrained in lights or crowd
Reverting to instincts raw
At bulldust and sawdust paw
Hornd filed down for safety
Things can still turn nasty
The arena can be escaped
Yet never questioning fate
Broken bones and bruises fresh
From the duel unleashed
Cowboys hollering loud
Cowgirls holding proud
Madness and chaos reigns
Against technique of reins
In cowboy life lived raw
For cowgirl fresh and cowboy poor.

This total God

** this total God **
Religion I think of
As an organised bureaucracy
Which is being unfair on God
Who by making omnipresent
Omnipotent and omniscient and all knowing
Has no need for bureaucracy at all
Can be where-ever he or she decides
Though gender may not be God at all
God being all genders and all places
Of and in and outside and around
Us and the world and the universe
In such a case must be demanded
If we are God then how can we worship ourselves
Seems a little self-congratulatory
To make offering to ourselves
Which is where organised religion enters
Providing a proxy distant between ourselves
And the projections of God we would acknowledge
Though as all and everything are God
And God knows all sees all is all
God must comprehend this artifice
Of religion to keep ourselves
Which are God
A distant from God
Which is everything
By the impeding spacer of religion
To keep from God that is of God
Which is of God by God and for God
A cheer squad of clerics
Formed by God for God
Celebratory in their support of God
Indeed devoted to only offering support for God
A support God created
And an all knowing God must know
Is of God supporting himself
Which makes these word of God
Divine perspiration of thought
As much a prayer as a poem wrote
Which God all knowing could already quote.

Waiting for

** waiting for **
Godot, waiting for.
Train, waiting for.
True love, waiting for.
Contentment, waiting for
Fulfilment, waiting for.
Satisfaction, waiting for.
A good night's sleep, waiting for.
Morning newspaper, waiting for.
Coffee, waiting for.
Person in front of me, waiting for.
Doctor, waiting for.
Treatment, waiting for
New sheets on death bed, waiting for.
Priest's graveside eulogy, waiting for.
Lowering of coffin, waiting for.
Decomposition, waiting for.
And Life?
Life is waiting for you.

In dark

** in dark **+*+
Bottled stale it grows
Invaded with vines and disease
All this good inside ourselves
Heart desires not let out
Optimism and silver hope
Held inside the dark imprisoned
What was beautiful becomes twisted
Trying to seek out the light
Any sign of any recognition
To that place body turn
Seeking heat and warmth
Nurture of understanding
Little wonder such parched lives
Badly formed decisions make
Count the good they see
Ignore deep rooted bad
Into sadness perpetual and dark
A permanent frost upon the heart
Withered torn and broken
Forever more seems life has spoken.