Concourse

Discourse is flighty and faltering on the concourse.

Intercourse variously memory for those decently at present

Crossing the concourse. ‘Of course’ comes to mind for all those

Moving from their A to Z where concourse intersects.

Off course is location for many a visitor turning their map round,

Consulting their screen, staring at destinations in golden lights.

Someone left their myki at home. One hundred years later

Spencer Street went Europe.  Gone, wind-blown platforms,

Tin tray cafeteria and poky new-stands. Gone, tunnel warrens

And the mural hall Age of Steam and Locomotion.

Terrorism contributes a sculptural oddity [concrete] [cubes]

To smooth bluestone concourse, glass walls, wavy ceiling.

No man in a van shall mount the trim kerb and accelerate

Fast forward at city’s odd mixture of crowds.

Ego

Fearsome as cities O monster of loud,

Imposer on grounds with your honour due,

Stubborn minder, what’s to be done with you?

Your name in papers sourced by a crowd,

Words that mean something else mean only you.

Your paramount will overheats sockets,

Insensate to mood, subtle as a rocket.

Till now, under the sun, there was nothing new.

This that we time in our wanderings,

Tiptoe around, tread past with a breath,

Discuss like a statue with shoulder chip,

Flesh we laugh at as it gives us the pip,

Question does it end at lunchtime or death,

Is a man tattooed through with sighs and wantings.

Pigeon

A man tattooed blue with signs and wonders
Fed pigeons at his front door and windows.
Pink and grey knew time of day and the toss.
The moral of this story is stay close.
Upon cobbles they wobbled and slept on sills
That monitored his movements with soft trills.
Company on a cold day suns its due.
The moral of this story is thank you.
Gone now he's gone, it's an old city scene
Minded like thousands, a picture too soon.
Birds have flown when there's no-one awaits.
The moral of this story is keep watch;
Take time with strugglers, strollers and stragglers;
Free associate with peaceful settlers.

Past

Free association takes red rattlers

Past classrooms of girls’ plaits and boys’ short hair.

Taught to be polite and the clothes to wear,

The world in real time childhood manufactures.

Names of those who were your feature film

Phase to a phrase, a story or mannerism.

They alive strode the globe and spoke the truism

Who’ve passed to a halo, hello, hollow, hymn.

Bold as a lion and only a pup,

There you meet your father handsome and young,

Younger than you yourself will be again.

And your mother, wise and well, as when

Making a world welcome whence loveliness sprung.

Queenscliff holidays where we would wash up.

Permafrost

Dying to feed us all, the planet beset,

This massive bend, stone curve, big drop

We have flown above mellifluous earplug hours

Enjoying inexplicable contusion of stars

And below orange clusters of megacities years

Microscopic at the porthole in close dark,

Imagining ice plains where no one may land

Or ever visited, so far from our landing.

O we say and what now of this to be

That kept us once awake with science names,

Now permafrost thaws, gases sky rise,

Waters swell up from under, heat expanding

As the moon softly in its cloud

Beckons us away from lunacy.

 

Bloomsday

 

Ocean Grove is where you would wash up

Kitchen window view, parrot in a pear tree.

Compose the facts into plain poetry:

Women stuck together, men had piss-ups.

You went for a future more than a crust,

Home fire burning, the stockpot bubblin’,

This second Dublin all outside Dublin

Wherever exile took you, as it must.

You made your own Bloomsday of stories found

In Northside, Rose Bray, Cabra in your prime,

Questions back and forth to get the words fair:

How high are the railings at Mountjoy Square?

When did the gates close at evening time?

This was survival come from a background.

Finite

Crossing the finite tracks seraphic blue

Arabesques and oculi below unpart

To make new rivers and mountains like an art.

Green food is home to traffic out of view.

Even flat earth promised the infinite

Compared to this, an ocean on contract,

Wounds pouring incapable of retract,

Us not knowing what we do, indefinite.

Nailed it, as we say of a summary

That controls the bloody mess we can’t control

Our comfort short-lived, the meaning grotesque.

Horizon after horizon at risk

Strain with thirst, speak to beauty like a soul,

Dying to feed us all, no Plan B.

Track

The route, the features are sensational.

The path is planted with especial claims.

The drive is start-up for this worldwide game.

The road counts countless cars as rational.

The tarmac exes earth for jumbo planes.

The airway tires of their daily sound.

The railway effortlessly gets around.

The sidestreet keeps old secrets for its pains.

The argument here wishes to reach you

With an ambler’s aim and a tourist’s zoom,

The well-chosen words the good best better,

The ultimate very last airmail letter

The sentiment of which is stillness of a room,

Crossing definite tracks with something new.

Gullible

Vote for more unguarded relight devices

That brought for your information Death Tax

In unsigned delivered serial attacks

Laboured with untruth, remote as Isis.

Your vote is a fine and private place

To stave off the prospect of the axe,

That final and most certain of facts

Powerless you sometime must embrace.

Authorised deceit of Anonymous.

Number your boxes to avoid the box

And hand your power to the Prince of Lies.

The penny will drop and rest on your eyes

Sometime soon, parting this world of shocks

Where one’s vote and future are synonymous.

 

House

This rarity of house for which you made a choice

Opens its fish-luck door to passage of air.

Child-like island paintings beckon here there.

Whistle of kettle, built echoes are jazz noise.

Books ask to be read, they picture the world

Those windows hint at, squares of plum and elm.

Cat on cushion is averse to overwhelm,

That’s for the doona through winters, warm curled.

Kitchen’s the best room, pantry of spices,

Or bless’d studio maybe, laughter and quests:

Any room with habits rather than rules.

You don’t envy people with towers or pools.

You live in your own tower of charmed suggests,

Float from door to garden, free of devices.

Voice

The timbre is the timbre is the timbre in time

As the face changes, familiar but lined

And hair is lined light and dark combined

That night and day do, since their fairest prime.

He looks at her changes, she at his change

And it is she and he new, that others call age

Mobile or resting and never just a stage

Though skin thins, bones wear, cells break passing strange.

Consistent is the clear tone of their voice

Charmed and distinctive. That someone always,

That only one, never just one in the crowd,

Reading this moment quiet or aloud

These words where the throat deals displays,

This rarity of sound for which you have no choice.