Stop it

Get off your stinking high horse for just one second,

Of course heart break hurts, what did you reckon,

that just cos it took you so long to say those words,

that it would hurt a little less and the words would be less

burdened?

You already knew this going into it,

that the break at the end would stink like shit

and your heart would fall into a million little bits but

 thats how we appreciate how each piece fits,

this mosaic of love and life and hope,

is the smoke of the dope we hold in our lungs,

we know that the moping will come

but that makes this high feel that much lighter, the laces that much tighter before they come undone.

Yes you’re in pain, at a little heartache,

It wasn’t in vain and you made no mistakes

but don’t for a second think I’ll reward you depression,

with ‘aw honeys’ and ‘I’m sorrys’ and egg on your obsession

with the story of entitled angst, that these pangs of tear-stained love letters will make you feel better,

cos I won’t.

I’ll say, stop feeling sorry for yourself,

you’re creating your own worries and mental health problems,

you’ll need your tears in future over burst arteries and condoms,

 you will need your pain to cover you when life dies away,

you’ll need your hate when you begin to question fate,

and you’ll need a hole to crawl to when the world is bitter, cold.

Don’t wish it on yourself right now, cos one day you won’t even see how

to make it out of bed when you realise all your friends are dead,

or nothing attaches you to this world, trust me,

you’ll need your depression one day girl.

Don’t pity yourself now, when the worst thing is how

to see the light after the fight and the breaking heart remains.

You were lucky to love at all,

 given the crazy percentages of tales told

of those alone and grown so old that their hearts

forgot how to fold love letters

and whether or not you agree with me,

 just be grateful and thankful to love so freely,

instead of denouncing the world around now you see shadows instead of sunshine on the ground,

and when you look up to the trees remember

that the reborn leaves need to die off once a year

but they don’t waste their springtime with depressive tears

knowing that this path led them here

and the winter leads on into the summer,

you cannot have one without the other.

I won’t coddle you and indulge your sadness,

nor will I model a perfect life to follow,

for madness breeds love and love breeds heartache,

but what other path would you choose for fuck’s sake?

If you want to be happy, as we all really do,

remember that happiness comes down to you,

your thoughts are your choices and the voices within

are the good and bad sides of identical twins,

feed the good wolf and walk away from the bad,

else you’ll forego all our beauty and end up raving mad,

There is no point to love, but to love itself and

being bitter and cynical sitting up on your shelf,

will obviously do you a wealth of good,

if you want to continue to be misunderstood. 

Get up off your high horse hug yourself and be done,

leave the sadness behind and look into the sun,

you can attract beauty and love and goodness and all,

just step out of the shadow and get ready to fall – again.

Love makes the world go round

It is easy to slam about trivial things, isn’t it,

To give wings to little ditties about the girl you fucked and the titties you sucked

And the life you lucked upon and oh! How you could have sworn you connected with heaven the moment you came. Yes, people will listen to that, and cackle with their heads thrown back, able to connect to you through the most tenuous of all links, through sexuality. Well done. High five. No seriously, well done for striving to make this world a better place when you’ve actually got 50 faces staring at you and all you can do is entertain them with the bodies you’ve lain with, the times you came and how her body makes you insane.

Then again, you’re nearly outdone by the angsty, angry poets, those sons and daughters mortified by the truth of life and feel the need to pass this ugly side onto the rest of everyone, blocking out the sun and seeing only shade, their hope and beauty faded away giving way to cynicism, and unrelenting decay of the only reason we all woke up today.

You see, underneath all this crap we espouse, of those poems that tickle, of those poems that shout, there’s a reason we’re here and we write for hours, to carry out some sort of destiny of ours, to use our powers for good not evil, to give up this medieval race towards hate and fall back on the innate knowledge of fate, that we’re meant to be here, we know where we’re going, and each poem is a positive seed that we’re sowing, to spread love at each slam, and I don’t give a damn how gay that sounds, because man love makes the world go round.

Grapefruit

‘Eat grapefruit’, they said. ‘It’s good for you’, they said.

So I cut open a ruby red, carefully cut away the shreds of skin

And peered at the berry-like colour within.

Surely something so pretty on the inside

Couldn’t taste like something has died

And spread it’s rotting bile throughout this vile growth?

Ken oath it does, making the fuzz on your neck stand up

And applaud at your reckless abandon for your tastebuds, screaming,

‘Hey Muz! What about us down here?In case it ain’t clear to you yet,

That stuff tastes like regret!’

You know what grapefruit tastes like?

It tastes like an orange who has lost the will to life.

The bitter stabs of living becoming too much

As you suckle those unforgiving juices, you start by thinking, this fruit ain’t so bad,

But the puckered face at the end reliving every drop of sadness that ever led

You to eat it in the beginning, tells you that grapefruit is the enemy,

It isn’t your friend.

They call it the forbidden fruit, a title suited for biblical themes,

But the truth to me, it seems, is that this fruit is the root of all sin,

And within its heart the truth of this never finished fruit

Is that though its s’posed to make you feel light, it kills off your very appetite.

‘But your metabolism!’, they cry out, that fitness guru shouting at you,

Spouting the many virtues of this foul-tasting, nerve-burning yield of Barbados,

No matter the shades of fruit, whether yellow of flesh or red of ruby,

The freshest of fruits will still taste like death or the breath of a meth addict

Wasted, tricked into his first training sesh –

I beg you, don’t go near this nest of supposedly blessed and sour flesh.

Did you know they use grapefruit to eliminate head lice?

Nice huh? That the food you’re treating yourself to

Kills off lesser beings and sends them screaming.

It’s used as well for diarrhoea and dysentery and for topical treatment of facial acne,

Don’t get too excitable be warned, it’s also used for dandruff, warts and corns.

How revolting to have this fruit exalted for its benefits when it still tastes of acid,  

Come on nature, give me a break and make for me a sweet thing

That will bring nutritive relief instead of food grief.

Why is the rule that that which is good for you,

Must always taste so rude?

Global Family

And then it went silent,

The breeze whispering sweet nothings in my ear,

The leering shadows of yesteryear are all but vanished in this new history here,

I see glimmers of young boys, Balloons in the air,

Chasing away days to come,

The futures delayed for these moments of youth in my community park,

These moments of truth in the spark of unity

I’ve never seen such green in teh sky before,

Falling about trees leaves dancing

Taking their stance against cold night

And fighting for the right to be free to be sunny,

These leaves are in their element,

Defiantly staring into the eyes of those

Who dare walk their shadows cast,

Who dare walk the darker path,

To have the courage that the sun will flourish

In the leafy shadows aftermath

I see the twinkle of the eye of the gentleman wandering by,

An older sir just searching earth for the essence of his her,

And barefoot the dirt carries him and urges him quietly on,

To believe this beauty of her now belonged to the beyond.

Whistle bird you heard me,

The same stardust as his her,

And you learn from me as I do you,

That we’re all connected, whistles and words,

Your view a little higher and your wings a little wider,

But thats about the very last thing that properly divides us.

Several years in sixty seconds,

Elastic bend of time and memory,

The misty mines they beckon us,

To revel in their geology,

The stars they reckon they can direct us in their inky black astrology,

And yet you think that man and beast are dissimilar in their biology.

We all think, we all breathe, we all need air and food and sleep, and

Our caring of each other weaves a web of global family.

These heartbeats thickcn,

A quickened pulse how I long for the winter solstice,

Theres things you cannot see that get their purpose from divinity.

Sew it into the very fabric of your life,

Write an excerpt of poetry on the whites of your eyes,

So when people look at you, they collide with

The thousand words your pictures and lies are creating,

Make this the only type of constant state.

Gently Choking Nooses

All I see is a sea of gently choking nooses,

I loosen the stone in my suffocating throat

And note the tone of conformity, forming around me.

Dying eyes hide political lies as these

Drones carry on meaninglessly,

Cleaning their gleaming teeth with debt and dirty money.

This is all so fucking boring!

At the core of it, you’re humans who

Have let your inner child die away

And now you try and form meaning by the daily assimilate

Don’t tell me you love your life when your waistline grows and grows,

Don’t tell me you’re happy to be promoted to deputy so-and-so

I know the truth, the fruit of life now rotten, decomposing,

I suppose you think success means posing with the president,

Accumulating so much shit, you dont’ value what you’ve spent,

Your morals as disposable as your floral office arrangements

And you clock in clock out every day,

Praising such corporate derangement.

Did any single one of you wish for this as a kid?

Did you wake up one day,

Rubt hose eyelids and say,

I want the highest office in Sydney!

I want to earn half a mil a year,

I want to self-medicate on whiskey and fear

I want peers of smarmy lawyers and board members far and near

I want 18 hour days filled with contracts and staff lay offs,

I want grey hair, a smokers cough,

A double chin and a bald spot,

I want failing health at thirty five,

And cynicisms welcome knock,

I welcome the death of dreams and hope,

Creation’s  joke for us mature folk,

I want to stop believing in miracles,

Santa Claus a distant memory

What happened to hide and seek?

Imagination’s ambitious peak,

I can’t understand this no man’s land

Of a life half lived, you freaks

Do any of you dream,

Do you paint or write or sing,

Or do you waste your life away,

Forgetting the child of your dead yesterday?

Constellations in my skin

As my eyelids close on my Tupperware eyes,

I sift through past foodscraps of memories and lies,

And as I see your face held in my pupil disguised, I close the lids lightly,

Holding you closely inside.

As my minds floats away on sunny beach days,

Shoulder to shoulder, summer shines on seastaring faces

I say, ‘Why is the water your happy place, girl?’

Smiling reply, ‘Because it’s all behind us, this world’.

You hold my freckles in your iris,

The colour of hidden files,

Holding secret gold from years grown old,

Now buried in lovers’ paradise.

Searching somewhere in my mind,

You look for signs of lies

Or unkind words,

Finding fires burning through my life,

Of prior times, I am undefined,

By all those things I already left behind,

Love, so much I left behind.

When you see, darlin what you see,

Don’t stop looking at me, please

See if you can win this competition, staring

Eye to eye, palm to palm,

Feel that mix of crazy of calm?

That’s the perfect split of ray and summertime,

Just smile lady, stay.

I hold constellations in my skin,

The universe and stars spinning without within,

I’m all Venus but the scars show where

Mr Mars has been,

And my sight rests on the moon,

Lunar lenses, nightly friend,

Send your orbit back to me,

I’ll feel your dreams and the heat of the sun

In the rhythm of my heartbeat.

And as you pulse beneath me, eyes wide lips sigh

And heavy,

I will slowly pass on this passion to the

Depths of your biology.

If you’re the summertime welcome,

With the season opening wide,

Then I’m the ray of sunshine,

I’m the burning ball of light.

Without you, I wouldn’t shine and throw some warmth around,

And without me, you’re simply spring,

With a chill still on the ground.

Cosy up and build a tan,

Spread those toes out in the sand and

Yes ma’am I will respect you,

If you respect me too.

I will kiss your skin, leaving shadows of darker melanin

As the only indicator that I have been there, sinning

Fair lady, sway, like the summer tree,

In the warmest of balmy summer breezes,

Finish out your dreams under my light and

Wake in the hazy afternoon light,

You know those thing you use for sight, she whispered?

Well I miss them

Cliche

I have a bone to pick with you,

You cliché-spitting, fool.

Who kills birds with stones anyway?

And two at once on top of that,

Seems a waste of birds, said the curious cat,

Oh no that’s right, he died, didn’t he?

When you let him out of the bag, or something..

Why not let the early bird catch the worms

From the can you opened, I pondered,

And let things be as they should be,

As light breaks dawn through that window yonder,

I smell a rat in the race that has funded the

Pillage and plunder of us bulls

in the china shop blundering through,

As old dogs, you cannot teach us new tricks,

Your sticks and stones will break my bones,

But your words can never hurt me

You heard me, it’s time to nurture neuroplasticity,

Old dogs too, can learn easily,

Didja know superglue puts China back together again?

But what does that have to do with the price of tea in an emperor’s communist country?

Superglue also works for Humpty Dumpty

Though just as a side note, what a joke that nursery rhyme was,

His yoke would’ve leaked on the king’s soil,

Unless of course, he was hard-boiled,

In which case why do you need a shell anyway,

When you can just bounce from place to place.

I like apples, though they keep handsome doctors away,

Patience is some sort of virtue, they reckon,

Good things come to those who wait,

So I’m trying to sit tight though I wanna tempt fate.

Someone once told me, oh so condescendingly,

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,

But I say suck the lemon down whole,

For nothing ventured is nothing gained.

And sometimes, you gotta let your hair down they said,

So I chopped it all off, cos down hair’s depressed,

But my hair’s happy, flying high like a Mohawk,

The wildside’s the only side on which I’ll.. stroll

And here’s the thing, Fat ladies used to sing,

But they never do anymore,

Instead they weep and

But, you know, horses for courses they say,

Yeh racecourses for our human entertainment I complain,

The poor horses are not taught that slow and steady wins the race,

Unlike the tortoise facing the hare,

No, the horseshoe is on the other foot,

And we put it to the test, that old adage of,

First in best dressed,

But I say,

What a sad fiesta,

If you’re superbly fashionable,

But not enough to arrive just a little late,

Means you’ll have to wait and line up with us.

Is that a sign of the times or what?

From day dot, it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game,

Bullshit everyone wants the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

So they teach us to go fast rather than take it slow.