DEAD TREES

Bonsai Australian native trees tied to
Kant's aesthetic cage, Aristotle's way
turquoise grey reaching for the limits,
training a juvenile trunk, compliant
as a youth not yet able to grow a beard

Semi arid nutrient depleted half dead
trees slowly moving hope for better soil
and dead trees quintessentially Australian
said a queen's photographer out on the tiles
under tables in purple onion late night bars

Would you be upset as this happens to you
and impertinent questions, how annoying
in cold lecture theatre initiation sites
written lyric graffiti blue pen ink, digging
into old black varnish hard wood bench seats

Memories of adolescent first loves
while they last, dementia takes them away
leaves this shivering heart feeling, forget
his name. Was it really like this, that
question, again; the garden needs weeding.


PIPELINE OF OUR SOUL

There are rumours in the pipeline poison gas
has got away and all emergency services
in divisions, have come to evacuate
our bodies and souls from a risk too great
that we are not to be permitted to stay
they come wearing gas masks inside airtight
white plastic suits; we are tied into masks
and we are promptly wheeled out, they broke
through our back door, always the easiest
they tell us across electronic laughs

Two metre thick reinforced concrete walls
up against earth's ancient dry sandstone
ten floors below ground beneath a building
fifty two levels high, so highly stressed
it will take off like a rocket launched
to space without making a hole; we get told.

I wonder what our book bound poets are saying
on the polished hard Australian cypress pine
shelves, left alone in the cold poison night

and alone will they barricade
against looters who enter
our broken back door home?



COLD SHOWERS

I need cold showers to reset my head, trip-switch needs
of electronic brains making intelligent chatter with human
minds saying little else.

What can be said. Must I say it all again?





[more for the Bar-B-Q novel, Chris Jones. PS, I am listening to
Thelonious Monk.]