Béatrice Machet # 9 GOODAFTERNOON

To follow in Ali Jane Smith’s footsteps

(https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/ali-jane-smith-nish-manjunath.html)

# 9 GOODAFTERNOON

And now it is today. You emerge from behind what could be seen as bad dreams.

            (And you know many would understand this screen of yours as a beautiful life). 

Today is when you whisper in my ears telling how good my hair smells. But this you, even though somebody, is no one or anyone: this doesn’t count although felt as hitting it off.

         Now today tries to stich outside and inside together so as to unfold the screen and play the dreams.

                                  Bad and beautiful are the borders beyond which now is today. 

Today is a day to consider a method in order to measure wounds and pain when not suffered under torture.

                                     Now is a period of time inside which people are “suicided” and others “genocided”. It’s a period of time during which my heart leaks out black blood to become red voice in my mouth pouring white words of peace. 

                                                                                                    And now a door is blown open by winds in numerous threads like undone nests. No possible rest: which is precisely the reason why now and today expand till the coincidence of time between birth and death as it is said to accept and conform to, whatever it costs you. It might scratch your skin: memories that forgot to be neutral.

                                                                               Today is a high tide day of storm: when land is flooded and it’s no daylight and no night either. A dark now of elevated waters. It might be a moment to reinvent one‘s self through trespassing. As if bad and beautiful in this renewed now were lost in translation but woven with waves for unseen braids to form a mat. And now sailing away today loses any taste for autobiography. 

 

It’s no self-surrender but rather existence. The aftermaths of a lightening that stroke to a certain agony: a high quality of tiredness. Exhaustion and a weight on the chest stealing your last breath. A quartering allowing some suspension back and forth between life and death that produces an alternating current: the power of today.

Now: a horizon as hard as a wall like a whitewashed bone inside me. No flesh for today’s tale. No paraphrase and no quote either. Just a ray of light for a basic beaming. This will make my day.

                                                     Afternoon already…

Melinda Smith #3 DIY after Angela Gardner #1 Three Fragments

DIY

(after Angela Gardner #1, 'three fragments')

Trust is getting more expensive. I know

how those people in the Weimar newsreels felt

(except that I don’t) but I kid myself I can empathise –

How barrows-ful of cash were required, and yet

insufficient

Never bring a screwdriver to a drill fight, you will only

go down, under-spun, orphaned by light

Every moment so irrevocable, a nail in a nail-gun, and yet

we live our whole lives pretending otherwise,

extenuating

At the going down of the sun, the cashbox must be reconciled    the greasy coins

laid out    we are short      there are dozens of zinc-ed

lips insisting, they will not be silenced, and so I

heave myself into the promotional wheelbarrow, naked but for cheesecloth

artistically arranged   I am moon-like and perfectly bruised, but with

no means of locomotion – perhaps I am hoping to be

grabbed like a dangling handbag, possessed as recompense

for all the uncalled debts, the collapse of

Rome, everything taken and sullied – OK perhaps as the first instalment

only, just enough to cover one tree, one creek, one family

man-handled

(the above is an acrostic on Angela’s last line ‘the hinge we all hang from’)

Ali Jane Smith – 'Nish Manjunath'

after reading KitKelen #11 - heart (for and after Kerri Shying, following the bulbul) 

first thing in the dream

I'm standing on a giant giant cane reed

arundo donax

the grooves are enormous

thoughts do what they're supposed to do

when you don't want to have them

kind of melt

it's the heat maybe

or the hot chips

the two black coffees

improvisation, Sue's tshirt

this old thing!

the adrenalin dump

after a morning of ordinary

exhausting wrangling

second thing is, it's not a dream

it's music lending me a trampoline feeling

good afternoon goodafternoon

goodafternoon

Kit Kelen #11 - heart (for and after Kerri Shying, following the bulbul)

11

heart

for Kerri Shying, following the bulbul

https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/kerri-shying-3-and-bulbul-means-heart.html

on the upbeat

on the down

heart means country

take it to here

hello

with first thing

from the dream

for magic

there's no further journey

here in all the years at home

yet found

a swirl of world

knocks it about

up trill

must be a birdsworth

it's long since we agreed to this

and always sniffing out

you'll follow

sit, heart

beg

give me your hand

nestle in chumpup

tummy for rub

brave as brief

these are words from

up above the mud so high

you neither see nor feel the lice

you won't find crossings out

we breathe again

and it's this country

mattock shaped

and hammer, saw

it's we who stood it up

no one scratched the land before

I was always here

you're the pill

dissolved in it

sun shines from this

other stars

catch each as it falls

by heart

peace upon the given thing

it's all of us reaching

all of us trapped

in here 

 

Kerri Shying # 3 - and bulbul means heart

Kerri Shying  # 3 after Magdalena Ball #8 High Wire Step in response to Angela Gardner #1 three fragments

 

and  bulbul means heart

songbirds  woke me

this morning   absent  the alarm

no wonder I forget things  

I look down

into a clothes morass 

 see my brain pill

nestling there    

a small synaptic fowl

doing    not much good 

to torn pyjama pants

all of us who take them

wonder

why  make a pill so small   to treat

the loss of feeling    in your hands

sometimes the skull

is a bone cup

holding words

on paper slips

my big dumb hands go diving

in Awabakal

bulbul  means heart

 

Greg McLaren #3, White-faced heron, After Judith Beveridge, The Herons.

 

White faced heron

After Judith Beveridge, The Herons

 

Crooked River’s tidal this close

to the sharp wind’s Pacific. Stone-

still, among cragged oysters, dipping,

stalking pale shadow, lost as you

 

look away, found squinting again,

neck waving the way bobbed wind makes

the reeds move in these small cool gullies

of rush, spattering the river’s

 

silvery twist of neck, scalloping 

bright thousands of shells, just as the coast

road tears through the flat few ks of dark

arched blackbutt, of sand-sound bangalay,

 

the shining black curves, they fatten

and taper, curl away into

the late sun’s needling light, the fade

overhead now loose grades of sky, of cloud.