I had driven the 2 hours out of Sydney to inspect a small cottage for rent. You had caught the train from the next suburb to have a haircut. We walked through the café door at the same time. You were bringing your coffee in from the rain. I was bringing my road fatigue in for a caffeine hit.
There was one table left. It was in the back corner, and had two empty chairs. I asked you if you would care to share a table. You opened your notebook and hoped I wouldn’t think you rude if you concentrated on your writing. You offered me your newspaper and sheltered your notebook. I ordered a flat white and turkish toast with apricot, and opened the arts section of the paper to a piece on the Dalai Lama and something about a third book. I wasn’t reading it with any real intent.
I asked you about your writing. You had written some poetry and had it published in a few places. I told you about my recent interest in poetry blogging. I told you my name was make it so, but I didn’t spell it out for you. You mentioned that you don’t have internet access. I imagined how liberating that might be.
It was time for me to leave. We swapped first names. I told you that I would like to buy you lunch if you were still around when I got back from the viewing. You started to ask for contact details, then suggested we leave it in the lap of the gods. I said that I would like that, then I shook your hand and said goodbye.
I returned an hour or so later and visited the local bookshop. I chose a book from the shelf at random. Russell Hoban’s ‘ The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz’.
“In a not-so-distant future when lions are extinct Jachin-Boaz, a middle aged mapmaker, leaves home with the wonderful map that was to tell his son where to find everything.”
I ordered a mug of coffee and drank it outdoors with the rain and read while glancing up at passers-by. I thought of my beloved wife, who left me then told me to leave. I thought of my adopted son and daughter, who do not return my calls. I thought of you as I finished my coffee and walked through my book drenching rain to the car, drove the 2 hours to Sydney, plugged in to the net and deleted my Twitter account.
Categories: Creative Writing
Tagged: synchronicity, writing
If you love your life,
set it free.
If it comes back
to the one that you love,
it is yours.
Original quote by Richard Bach
Inspired by a photo of Rainbow Lorikeets by Gabrielle Bryden
What – when we take a statement to its critical extreme?
Categories: Philosophy · poetry
Tagged: freedom, loss, poetry, writing
Grandpa loved orchids, and he cultivated them by the dozen. He kept them in black plastic flower pots; each one identifiable by a hieroglyph that he would chisel hammer first into a tin strip stake, then replicate in a tiny columned notebook with various historical details, expected colour and actual colour.
I inherited a few of Grandpa’s orchids when he died. They haven’t flowered since – and I don’t know where his notebook ended up.
Categories: poetry
Tagged: orchids, writing
Recognition n’est pas aussi simple que le découpage, adherant et soumettant à la traduction.
Categories: Philosophy · poetry
Tagged: recognition, writing
If that was dinner,
I think I’ve had it.
May I be excused
from the table please?
“Kant defines art as “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.”” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, Guyer translation, section 44)). – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Definition of Art.
Categories: poetry
Tagged: art?, poetry, writing
Alaka Yeravadekar posted this question to the Writer’s Cafe’ group at www.linkedin.com during the week.
“Who are your favorite poets? What is it about their work that you like? Do they influence your poetry in any way?”
When I see questions like these, I tend to shrivel away from them. These are the sorts of questions that a reviewer might respond to, and there are plenty of great reviewers out there who are better equipped to handle these questions than I am. I am neither widely read, nor am I widely read; and I am not widely trained. My previous attempts to put the voice of authority on have generally ended with me feeling like a douchebag. [CAUTION- Don't hit that link if you are easily offended]. Nevertheless, I imagine that this fellow who calls himself Maekitso is, at worst, a digital douchebag: and this blog is therefore a necessary series of zeros and ones.
Hi Alaka. Many of the poets who have influenced and inspired my own work are contemporary Australian poets with an online presence in blogland. Maxine Clarke writes brilliantly from her West Indian-Australian perspective on politics and identity. Paul Squires of Gingatao.com fame/infamy has created what has been described at the National Library of Australia’s Trove database as “a non-linear multidimensional text based on the relationship between sound, music and language”. Apart from the fact that their work engages the reader with a past, present and future; they engage directly with their readers and offer incredible levels of support. There are so many other great writers and poets to discover in online real-time. These are the two that I believe will lead a student and lover of poetry and writing to discover their own potential, and a wealth of new favorites.
Happy New Year!
Categories: Reviews
Tagged: Alaka Yeravadekar, Maxine Clarke, Paul Squires
The owner of the premises hereby declares the Evolving Blogroll to have officially died in the arse. Thanks to all those who participated. (31.12.2009)
Evolving Blogroll
The evolving blogroll is a C Wright Mills inspired experiment designed to quantitatively measure the intersection between a biography of The Massive Minority and world history within society.
Cocktails and coffee are free. Help yourself. Every experiment should start with a point of contention, don’t you think?
I contend that space and time are borne of emotions at opposite unendings of two, or more, competing thoughts. Chambers in motion tumbling colours from visible parties to enlightenment.
Categories: Genre Challenged
Tagged: evolution, online communities
If there was no internet
I would runningwrite you
a crescent moon with negligee.jpg
I’d fold it near the bottom
and I’d fold it near the top
into a little runningwritten
circle envelope.
Upon a piece of stretchie string
invisible but true
I would fly my runningwritten crescent moon
across the sky to you.
It would spill in through your window
and light upon your hair
with all my runningwritten love.jpg
for you.
Categories: poetry
Tagged: love, poetry, writing
A promise is the only solid truth,
intended here and now as nothing but
the oxymoron whole that you expect
from those you love or like to give your trust;
but if you take the time to read their lips,
you’ll notice that they hold their tongue between
their teeth and that defining moment when
truth at once is spoken into silence.
Unwilling or unable to express
conditions that they carry in their blood,
they speak behind their bitten lips of truce
when doctors spin the cure for all their ills,
then leave you with a curable disease
that’s easier to drink and smoke and die with.
This sonnet contains no solid truth,
for I have promised nothing with these words.
All I offer here are public facts.
You always have my love, and that’s a private act.
Categories: poetry
Tagged: poetry, promise, sonnet, truth, writing
I took to a chair in the garden.
You took to the paper and settled inside.
I watched a honey bee plucking the pollen
out from a flowering Kangaroo Paw.
I don’t know what you saw.
Categories: poetry
Tagged: poetry, writing
