Tuesday, January 25, 2011

High Street

High Street

I remember the early morning milko.
Clip clop! His horse’s hooves rang out as
its breath misted in the cold morning air.

Further back the baker also came,
his steed as brown as crusted bread.
Will that be a loaf of white today ma’am?

Dragging mum by the hand to street’s end.
Look – there – a steam train hauling grain.
Wave, just in case the driver sees us!

Pennies were no longer the currency,
but polished up with fine steel wool,
we dove for their glow in the blue-green depths.

These are some things from my past,
when I was just a fey wide-eyed child,
unsullied by life’s foul realities.

Just a few reflections from my childhood when we lived on High Street.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

spider's haiku


I found this female Garden Orb-weaving spider frantically spinning a web just on dusk and managed to get a reasonable picture of it.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Rain


drumming, thrumming
percussion on a fibreglass skin
beneath which I sit
while kettledrum thunder
rolls in the distance
as rain hammers down
relentlessly

toxic black natural poisons
flooding rivers that swell,
rising against banks
gathering pace
foaming like crazed latte against levee walls
sweeping people away when the levee breaks
desperate fingers clinging to street poles
while a frog rides a snake's back to safety



Inspired by sitting beneath a fibreglass shelter during the rain while up north, Queensland suffers a staggering degree of disaster by flood. During all that, a frog was actually observed clinging to the back of a snake that was swimming to safety.

To help those affected by the terrible floods here in Queensland Australia

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

This poem was published in the speculative fiction anthology, Masques back in 2008. I might as well share it here as well now. It was inspired by an unusual self-portrait I saw where the subject was actually hidden behind a strange, plastic mask.

Outside the frame

Hidden behind multi-coloured plastic,
shaped as molten wax -
devil’s deal to hide a world?

Eyes agape through carven holes as
bare mouth hides behind that slash.
A scream or laughing out loud?

Might you be sneering at the world
within your visored fastness of
flesh and petro-chemical bricks?

Or screaming to be freed from
plasticised alien embrace
in colours like bad acid?

Maybe it is ET’s dreams,
drawn across your human face as
beautiful, insane nebulae.

Hey – any room in there for me?