"And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale…"
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II:7
The Age of Innocence
“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hand”
T.S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady
Birth Certificate
Maternity ward.
Father and doctor: anxious,
But neither is as anxious
As the mother who will bring
Into Eden, a son, hopes
He will make her proud…
Her sleepless lashes meet his
Faint brow. She smiles,
As if to say, “I don’t mind
That you suck on raw nipples.
I do not mind at all…”
Mother
With a warm bottle,
A shrunken blue blankie,
The big brown teddy.
Sweet Dream
The stars twirl and twinkle overhead.
She wonders what they are.
A mechanical lullaby reminds her
That it doesn't matter.
She dreams of cotton candy skies
And chocolate covered rainbows.
Sweet dreams...
Perched swallows sing, each to each.
And they all sing for her.
Their song reminds her of mother's.
She wonders where mother will get them:
The mockingbirds and diamond rings,
And thinks about how she'd like a swallow.
She wants to ask mother if she can
Take a swallow home.
‘Have you seen my mummy, swallows?’
But she is all alone
And up to her knees
In the melted rainbow.
She wants to cry for all the times
She didn’t when she spilt the milk.
Mother said there was no Seuss in it.
Blue eyes squint at the sun outside.
She wonders where the swallows have gone.
Mother's voice reminds her
That it doesn't matter.
Mother Gave it to Her
She watches her shoes;
They grow smaller
And then
Grow once more.
The wind picks up
The sand, throws it
Amongst red and orange.
Her nose twitches,
The chains shudder.
She sniffles,
Bursts into tears.
Mother hears her,
Comes running.
The lollipop is melted,
Stuck to the plastic.
But she doesn’t mind.
Mother gave it to her,
The sweetness mixed with tears.
Father
On Sundays at the park,
His lap down the slippery slides,
His toddler strides.
An Eight Year Old Watches
On the radio, he hears about people
Blowing themselves up.
The prime minister calls it “terror”.
The turbanned man calls it "jihad".
He asks daddy "why?"
And daddy tells him
He's too young to understand.
On TV, he watches people
Bouncing on beds together.
They curse and sound in pain.
He asks daddy 'why?"
And daddy tells him
He’s too young to understand.
In the city, he sees people
Squatting on street corners,
Trembling as they ask for money
To support families,
To support habits.
He asks daddy "why?"
And daddy tells him
He's too young to understand
Because he is just
Another eight year old
In an R-rated world.
To Paddington
Beneath the blue plastic
The threads unravel, exposing
Soft innards.
The hazel eyes that shared
Many skies, blue and grey;
Faded. Still,
The reassuring gaze:
I’ll be right.
First, one.
Then another and another.
Droplets upon the old rug.
It was time to say goodbye
To Paddington.
On the Bus
Knowing no better,
I laugh at the one legged man
Glued to bus windows.
Pickings
Finger sneaks in,
Wriggles around and withdraws.
Delicious habit.
The Age of Turmoil
“And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions”
T.S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Dancing with Alexandra
To the lea where monarchs danced
To the despondent waltz of crickets;
Where the one fern was
Always green.
Only the Queen eluded me.
Alexandra always found a way -
A hole in the net,
A crumbling log,
A tickle of my palm.
She oft flirted with me.
She’d kiss my forehead,
Smile and wink;
But she only danced
With the gibbous moon.
I only ever used those dancing shoes once
To swat her from her throne.
The cries of my wing-clipped cupid
Broke the deafening silence
And woke me,
Screaming
Because I was never asleep.
She Reminds Me of Coffee
Every time you look my way
Your doppic eyes reflect the smile
Of the lady serving us decaf.
But you’ve yet to prove
You are not as shallow.
Every time you step out of the shower;
Your long black hair in its smooth flawlessness
As it spills to the floor
From the shattered glass.
Every time you laugh;
Your cappuccino smile;
Sprinkled with warm snowflakes
Bearing a joy
That I can not return.
Every time you cry
I will wipe away the drops of noir.
Like vapour condensed on the lip,
I know they will dry
But I will still wipe them away.
Why did she leave me
A note, “I love you so much…”
And bitter coffee; cold.
For X
Your laugh, your smile;
Do what alchemy can not –
Turn my tears to gold.
February 13
[Log In As:]
id_peace_87
[Password:]
382548 (fuckit)
Status: Online
[Compose New]
[To:] themorningafter@hotmail.com
[RE:] tomorrow
Tomorrow is February 14.
As always, we’ll be the only two
Not having a one day stand
With Hallmark and Miss Violet.
The last time I opened my heart
You left me standing
Outside a closed door.
But I don’t blame you;
Two V-Days ago you fell
In love with a girl
Who never knew
Your name.
I’ve no more roses,
Only a longing to be alone
Together.
A.
[Save Draft]
…
[Log Out]
Cryptic
To find 18 down,
Sit at Jesus’ table
And learn origami.
The End of Love
Frequent tears have run
The colours from my life.
So weeping did I witness
The ethereal figure.
“Guess who it is that holds thee!”
“Death; naught else
Should be as cold
As the frozen lake”
But there, the figure did reply,
“Not death… love…”
How I wished it had been death!
Come with scythe to bring repose.
But love? Nothing could be so
Torturous as a beating heart,
Punctured by a hundred thorns.
Betwixt faint cheeks – a smile
Held an uncomfortable warmth
Where a great fire once burned.
He would spread his wings
But for the burden of my heavy heart.
A flawed view of heaven;
Exchanged for earth
To hear “I love thee” once
And “I love thee” once more.
He has become but another victim
Of my lustful violence.
Like a smote soldier who yields
His sword, so shall I relinquish
The memory of love.
Portrait of a Girl
I burnt another hole in my lungs,
Slashed my wrists
Just to see if I was alive.
And now I’m drowning
In this crimson tub.
They feel sorry for you,
Ashamed of me.
It would have been great
If I had grown up,
Spat out two point three kids.
But I can’t do that now
Never mind
The laws I have to break;
The pills I have to take;
The smiles I have to fake
Just to be happy.
But you wouldn’t know that
Unless you look inside
And imagine lying
Dead in a world that thinks
You’re still alive;
Admiring the beauty.
The Age of Estrangement
“And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all the way for
Birth or Death?”
T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi
Shrink
Your father was an abusive drunk,
Your daughter was hit by a car –
You were wasted at the time,
Your wife was caught in bed
With another woman.
Your stomach wakes up on the couch.
The tuna casserole
Twirls to an artificially lit hum
As your stomach develops
Motion sickness.
You don’t remember her name
But that doesn’t bother you
As much as your impotence.
The sunlight illuminates the one
Wrinkle on your designer suit.
Pinned to it –
Gone shopping
Be back at 5
xoxox
The silver Beemer gives you a devious wink.
Today’s agenda:
1. Slash budgets
2. Sign retrenchments
To: J.T. Robins
To: A. Sanderson
To: P. Marsh
It is with great regret…
You have served us for fifteen years…
Your services are no longer…
There is a pause between each letter
As you look to the heavens.
Your signatures aren’t as dry as the whiskey
But they leave the same aftertaste.
The fifth angel strikes its chime.
Her heels lay on separate steps;
Red, like her over-showered skin.
Another day,
Another suit,
Another note –
Visiting Paris
Don’t know when
I’ll be back.
Your Nokia vibrates.
“Yeah…
Uh huh…
Tell them to start…
I know, I can hear them…
I don’t care.
Start at nine”
The Beemer glares at protestors,
Hurling bottles of abuse.
You glare at the girl
Chained to the acacia at 8:58.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Her blue eyes ignore
The revving of engines.
Her white eyes widen,
Crushed by yellow Death.
She closes transparent eyelids.
Shackled, you are escorted away
By a blur of red and blue.
After your release
You find all that was yours
Is no longer.
Only the red leaves remain.
Somnambulance
Look upon the mirrored landscape!
In shallow puddles –
Ephemeral moons
Have not forgotten how to smile.
But there can be no mirth in lamenting
The day you turned in your wings
For a diamond encrusted dream.
See how the stars await the return
Of your nocturnal gaze;
Keeping their ancient places
Until the sun appears
And they become a memory;
Like a creased photograph
That can never be perfect again.
And it is your presence that lurks
Behind the gilded bars
While your estranged smiles
Miss the many-splendoured thing.
The Widow
Cockroaches scuttle across the flaking paint,
Tracing out a tale from memory
Of promises she buried an age ago.
Have they been released from Winter's thralldom?
Will they bloom tomorrow?
If they are destined to rest beneath white sheets;
The nightingale shall drown
In the pibroch of dispirited cats, crawling
Across cob-webbed ebony and dusty ivory.
These floors remember the dancing of two lovers.
The million steps I have taken since, made them cry
A million times to make up for each one missed.
There is little left for my chilled fingers to hold;
Only a phone that has forgotten to ring
And a black and white photo of a girl, hanging
By a thread as thin as my greying hair.
Even if flowers bloom tomorrow, I will never
See the opened petals nor smell the vialed scents.
It would only be a reverie;
One that can not be touched,
Should not be remembered
By the quill that scratches against white parchment.
Epitaph
By rights, you died
In war at twenty,
Of shame at thirty,
Of drink at fifty.
But the devil is good
At looking after his own.
Seven pounds of ash
Drifting on a western breeze
Will find its way
To Him.
Abyssus est vestry sepulcrum
Reflection Statement
While undertaking the Advanced English course I became interested in the concept of ‘inner journeys’, particularly the idea that life itself is an inner journey. As humans progress from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, it is inevitable that the ways in which they view their relationships will evolve. This evolution is something that is often overlooked or misunderstood by a society which is becoming physically closer but more emotionally isolated. The purpose of my major work is to explore this progression in attitudes towards relationships as well as the effects our isolated modern society has upon them.
Of the mediums, I was most comfortable with poetry because I had analysed quite a large number of poems and because the majority of my short stories are almost lyrical in nature. I also felt that poetry would allow me to write about distant events without having to bridge the gaps as is necessary in short stories. I read several guides to writing poetry and browsed The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, both which served to reinforce what I already knew about various forms and techniques as well as introducing some new techniques such as alloestrophe and synecdoche. I considered several poetic forms, such as sonnets, villanelles and sestinas, but each was too restrictive in terms of rhythm, meter and rhyming patterns. I opted for free verse poetry because while negating these restrictions it also allowed me to integrate the strengths of each.
The subject matter of the poems came from a vast range of sources. Childhood memories, general observations made in public, song lyrics, films, words picked at random from dictionaries, conversations with teachers, the works of other poets and my own idle musings provided the subject matter for most of the poems in Ages.
While the majority of the writing is based on emotion, research needed to be conducted into the minute details of the subjects, such as the mass of human ashes and the mating period of butterflies, in order to provide depth and realism to the poems.
In order to find inspiration in terms of style and subject matter, my research involved reading the works of various poets. I focused mainly on modernist poets because I had previous experience with their work and because the focus of the modernists was on the individual, much like my own work. I found T.S. Eliot’s poetry to be the most influential because it is thematically similar to my own and because of its cryptic qualities which I have integrated into poems such as ‘Cryptic’, which is about the difficulty of completing the crossword in the Sydney Morning Herald while also satirising the seemingly nonsensical clues given in cryptic crosswords. I also found that Eliot’s poetry contained a large number of allusions such as “Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) / brought in upon a platter” from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ which alludes to the story of St John the Baptist. This influence can be seen in ‘Shrink’ though the line “The fifth angel strikes its chime” which is an indication that it is 5 o’clock as well as alluding to the Book of Revelations and the seven angels, whose trumpets each bring forth a different curse.
While researching Biblical allusions that I could use, I came across Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Lines, such as “Winter’s thralldom” from ‘The Widow’, are directly influenced by his imagery of a frozen Hell (The Inferno, Canto 34) while “the pibroch of dispirited cats” is an example of the influence of Dante’s dark tone.
Having studied the poetry of Seamus Heaney in the English Extension 1 elective, ‘Retreat from the Global’, it seemed like a good place to gather some ideas. Heaney’s style focuses upon appealing to all five human senses and this provided a large contrast with Eliot’s cryptic images. Poems such as ‘Digging’ and ‘Funeral Rites’ have personas reflecting upon the past and helped in writing from the perspective of adult personas reflecting upon their past relationships in The Age of Estrangement. In addition, the word “somnambulant” from Heaney’s ‘Funeral Rites’ stuck in my memory and became the title of one of my poems in which the persona is ‘sleep walking’ through life because he is trapped by his material desires and has forgotten what life is about. Poems such as ‘Shrink’ also have links to ‘Retreat from the Global’ in that they deal with the excessive importance society places upon money and the detriments this causes (in this case, imprisonment for manslaughter).
A number of online poetry forums also proved to be an invaluable resource in the composition process. First of all, I received some useful feedback on my own work from other users. An example of changes made as a result of this feedback can be seen in the poem ‘February 13’. Originally, the email is sent but somebody commented that this was “typically teen” and didn’t leave the reader thinking very much. The comment resulted in the addition of the lines “a one day stand / with Hallmark and Ms Violet”, to highlight the superficial and fleeting nature of Valentines Day; as well as the poem ending with the persona saving the email but not sending it, which leaves the reader to question the conviction of the persona’s “longing to be alone/ together”.
The second feature that made the forums a useful was the ideas drawn from the works of other poets and discussions on poets and poetic techniques. One poet described his work as being “influenced by Elizabeth Browning’s ‘Sonnets of the Portuguese’”, which led me to investigate the works of Browning. I found the magic realist personification of “love” to be a very striking image and so used it as the foundation of ‘The End of Love’. Her influence can be seen in the lines “To hear ‘I love thee’ once” and “naught else / should be as cold”, both which use images from ‘Sonnets of the Portuguese’ as well as mirroring the archaic language.
The humorous tone adopted in the poems from The Age of Innocence were necessary in order to highlight the innocent aura of the young personas. The main influence behind this was a collection of poetry for children entitled A Cup of Giggles, A Saucer of Dreams by Annette Kosseris et. al. For example, the poem ‘Four Bears, Or Three?’ inspired the childish misunderstanding found in my poem ‘Sweet Dream’ in which the persona understands her mother’s wishes of “Sweet dreams…” to mean “cotton candy skies / and chocolate covered rainbows”. This air of childish innocence can also be seen in the lines “She wonders where mother will get them: / the mockingbirds and diamond rings” which alludes to the lullaby ‘Hush Little Baby’.
The intended audience for my composition are adolescents because they possess the maturity to reflect upon what is presented while also lacking the maturity to think about these things without prompting. They would be able to empathise with The Age of Turmoil and also reflect upon the innocence they have lost in The Age of Innocence. The Age of Estrangement, for adolescents, would serve as a warning about the future and aims to prevent them from suffering a similar fate to the persona.
Unlike most writing aimed at teens, my work does not rely on the use of vulgarities and innuendo in order to get across to the audience. Rather, the aim was to build empathy between the personas and the respondents through the use of universal childhood memories in The Age of Estrangement such as the “shrunken blue blankey” in ‘Mother’, through the use of everyday settings in The Age of Turmoil such as the email in ‘February 13’ and through using the second person perspective to make the reader the subject of the poems in The Age of Estrangement. In order to appeal to both genders, I created two personas: one male and one female. While males will be able to better empathise with the male persona they will also be able to empathise with the plights of the female persona and vice versa for female respondents. Despite this empathy, neither persona is given a name and this hints at the social isolation prevalent in society.
The compositional process of Ages was one which challenged me to think outside the square in order to create a piece which would help both my self and my audience to better understand the evolutionary process of human thinking and human relationships. In this way, composing Ages has been a liberating and enlightening experience; an experience that I hope carries over to the reader.
