Melaleuca

Number 10: April 2010 Table of Contents Cold Mullet Dawn Unremarkable Wonders A Free Verse Rispetto for Chris Mansell I Think I Might Die In My Sleep Tonight Still Birth Justin Dent Justin Dent L. S. Fisher Mark William Jackson B. J. Muirhead 3 5 6 7 8 Editor: Phillip A. Ellis

All works are copyright by their respective creators, 2010; the arrangement of this collection is copyright by Phillip A. Ellis, 2010. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/au/>.

Cold Mullet Dawn This cold mullet dawn reminds me; of your frightened lipstick hovering in apricot mists upon my lips & sprayed over the distant, small & gentle carbuncular nodules of Mt. Cootha with their gouged, graphite TV towers; or the faded tea-stain blotches of old blood on the wall above my bed in the East Brisbane boarding house I never made it home to last night. Ugly lean bed I hate. Passed out on the streets again cigarettes &wallet stolen & even the bony headed junkie walking past disdains to look at me. I need a cigarette & a drink real bad Johnny Cash is wheezing in my head while the junkie struts past like hes Lou Reed, just with longer hair. Heroin elitist! But his hair reminds me of your seaweed strands bound together by sweat and your green eyes scratching my remorse with such intensity; a crooked stylus, swerving on a scratched LP. The sky was just as lonely as this, that day; we ate greasy, battered, cheap, fish & chips by the esplanade at Wynnum, where the perfect grace of the seabreeze lifted sorrows from your ploughed features & dumped them on the stained butchers paper I scrunched up & threw away Because the wind wanted everything that day. 3

Even the living bodies of gulls punched hard into the air but there you are, or were, a lost diamond fallen from its cluster in the setting never collected from the jewellers. Cold mullet dawn & pretentious junkies & you! Go fuck your frightened lipstick while I wander further, looking for choice discarded butts because I have no coin & Christ I need a cigarette right now, & once more the wind wants everything again. Tarragindi, 7 March, 2010. Justin Dent

Unremarkable Wonders I am harvesting the first fruits of a long despair; a time of feeding on dust and grasshoppers; of chasing the paper rasp of moth-wings in the dark. Gnarled carrots, bitter as rancid aniseed, the deformed foetuses of capsicums and shrivelled phalluses of wilted cucumbers. How many times have I refused unlovely food? Leaving their subtle flavours to rot and fungus into these abominations! What have I lost? Vegetables for vegetable ontogeny, growing slowly underground. The unremarkable progress of a cabbage until its sweet leaves are ripened. Something here is old, always present, and therefore overlooked, marking long spans in the signs of glaciers and rocks; ordinary and inconspicuous. One must know the elaborate and laborious lengths a cabbage takes to grow. Great things accomplished unnoticed; like the tenacious insistence of water drumming over stubborn granite; slowly chiselling with deft exclamations, a canyon, for a million clandestine years. Elizabeth St, Toowong,1991. Justin Dent

A Free Verse Rispetto for Chris Mansell I am tired of waking in a morning more tired than I was the night before, I am tired of not waking to poetry, I want sunny-side-up sonnets alongside my eggs. I want to carry poetry for forever, alongside the essentials of life: pen, paper, and a copy of your latest poems is antidote to boredom, I have found. L. S. Fisher

I Think I Might Die In My Sleep Tonight I think I might die in my sleep tonight, I might close my eyes to never awake, Today may be the last chance I have to kiss my wife, Enjoy the last breath Im to take. I think I might die in my sleep tonight, Never again to play games with my child, Laughter will fade with the setting of time. And the games will reside in the mind. But what could this final day restore, That all others have let astray, When days of average are no more, What hopes for a final day? I think I might die in my sleep tonight more to live this day as I might. Mark William Jackson

Still Birth I Staring through mist on highway, To stars obscured above, flicking OnOff; a semaphore of hope advancing Some ideal presence in the night sky, an Emotion, a sensation drawing mystery, Closer than the moons halo. An Astronomic event, no more: a refracted Light ring to startle perception. Not So rare an event in this rivulet, spread As fast as life, deeper than fear: My leap to calumny, the alone of winter Night, some derisive self-knowledge And the mist, thickened in distance, Shallow above me, a shifting tunnel to Beyond, held deep, absent, longing With some human ending. Bear witness: We cannot see the end, nothing to be had To prove the way forward is not the way back, To prove there is a beyond to present knowledge Of prime movers boring down the bitumen. How is it possible to know? Should I seek in stars or earth dark prayers Longer than life, turned inward To some fire in silent cave of mind? More important than existence From which non-existence is the only view. We may seek, though you may not exist Except in paradox: the turn inward To outer limits of self. The mystery draws close, The encompassing cold of night derides, Though the mystic waits for dawn rising

At far east of valley, hidden by mist Floating from river below. Sight caught By accepting eye and promised revelation. Living in frail expansion The believer enters transition: land, sky, Trees and distant ocean blend thought, a Moment, the Godhead defined before Creation point. All men without, eternally Within some point of still birth. Imagine This sensation is your God, the glory of all, Within which all are without, always at Some stage of God birth. Everything moral rests here, in dimmer Cave of awareness, where wild thought Groans with perception: the within God Also is without. Knowledge cannot carry This weight nor truth the burden, While excuses are found to hold belief, Reasoned, in the non-rational holding pen: While one can talk, with deepest logic And spun glass argument, about this thing, It is not within the observational realm to say Such a thought as God exists, apart From the psychology of need. Perhaps A biological imperative, like a house wired And powered by managerial Gods of supply, Counting the killowattage of dream. That, I can accept, within the bounds of science, Of understandable explanation, of cause And effect, and what we can declare: In mathematics of soul, of rats Nibbling through maze. Of what We can describe: Too much imagination Built into language like weeds. Of what

We can do without plan and worry. I Count morals by fist-loads in gaps Of argument worn by faith and time, While the believer quietly prays: In the dayspring of my creation O Lord, I witness that thou art God, That thou bear this world for my joy And future days. Thou art the Lord, God. The only God; no other God hidden Within time, and incommensurable Space, measured, but unattainable. Even science transfigures in the face Of it, counting particles inward. Nothing remains, but it acts at Perceptions edge: death reborn, that Point at which we cannot speak, a Leap into faiths subjectivity. Let us name it: dark matter, quarks; The Gods of science do not remain Silent, but cast theorems deep, where Others skim the abyss
II

And then he said: Every thought The consequence of the preceding Sophistry gone wrong in faith and Time, no time we can hold separate Selves unified from each other Images of marriage and children Intrude: the slow growth toward death At distance: a medical instance Of laughter to barricade pain And futile thought

And then he said: I play With faith, and the children of belief Dance in the stillness of breath Held innocently short. I have known You in grace and gore; have listened In faith and silence; prayed in Hope and happiness. Answered In kind and dumb luck, bitter In roll of days and booked hours. Answered or unanswered, bear Witness to the scale of life at Far height of middle C. Only dogs Hear, and ignore our calls. And then he said: There is something Hidden in night cave and sun Spot dragging itself across earth, Never leaving day behind Something in the tilt of eye and Wrinkle of smile that follows, Logically, to God or other festival Of life. If I could hold it now, I could hold answer in twinkled eye, Or a child again, curled in future Promise If I could laugh at thought, Or something in starlight not burnt, Hollow in the still, point of faith. But how do I know you God? In the prayers of the dead, cased by Maggot inscribed skin? I have seen Your messages. They do not comfort me. And then he said: I see the order Of death beckoning. No saviour but

The sum of life and a well of dark: No water, no air, no fire-pit warmth In the belly of shadowed death: I eat my fill and drink unconsciousness In the spirit of love and eternal dusk. If you must be, then one God is enough to wipe tears From deaths crank Pouring acid in the wound.
III

In time, with recourse to reasoned Knowledge stacked neatly against Wall, or magnetically scored truth And falsehood, answers emerge: In the beginning, a lump, pressed In itself, by itself, without Form or shape. An exploded nothing, With which to guide life. A spatter Streaked through night, eyes caught, blind. Steel antennae seek deeper, sounding Dark where no prayer murmurs. Ghost Hope collected, measured against silence. Hear me! Let there be some call, a Screech in the night to waken faith! I Will hear no explosion, though light, Spread through dark, is answered by Sounds of belief, calm, persistent. Do they know you, God? Do they sing? Plead? Entreat in vain? Do you whisper, More silent than sound, to light Within? Save me from small victory And bliss of certainty asserted: In the beginning was the bang,

Bigger than God. A scientifically Announced egg of belief spread By the measurement of faith. There is no life in this time, just Star light, and knowledge to tell God. Standing naked in the dark, I count wrinkles, lifes time keeper Marking bodies. Is death the answer? Everything moral trembles here, Waiting some final death within Non-existence, to wave guiding Hands where reason, alone, builds Behaviour And then he said: He has discovered himself who says: This is my good and evil. ThereBy he is raised above all praise And blame. From their moral height, Nothing but self, hysterically drawn Back to thought, where annihilation beckons Through night, and seeds of light bind Hope to skin: dimpled, cold limit Of embodiment, in the dark of hope Lit only by spray of death across sky. An ideal presence, reminding that death Leaves influence in the rank of life, Where death ranks higher than each life Held in twined hope. And then I thought: Reason holds us in blank indecision, The uncertainty of knowledge, the I dont Know cramping life in the still point Between death and hope. Between dark And dawn, the mist thickens. I see no Way forward, but the roar of commerce

Continues. I stand, waiting, still Life surrounding future death. B. J. Muirhead