The poet saw beneath the skin.

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

--Remember the War poet: Keith Douglas.

Sticker Herd

Paper over the lines,
Paper around the edges,
Sticker behind the signs
and hidden above the ledges.

Fragment 2006

I'm sick of buying and selling rubbish,
I'm sick of watching you do it.
You look pretty vacant to me.

Outside the rain is falling in stair rods.

"Outside the rain is falling in stair rods. But in Athill’s room, all is cosiness. There is a bed, a desk on which stands her battered laptop and a comfortable armchair in which Athill sits, a handsome woman, her striking profile framed by a halo of silver hair, elegantly dressed in a brown-linen trouser suit. The two hundred or so books she eventually deemed as 'necessities' are arranged in a case – the collected works of Chekhov, the letters of Lord Byron and the first editions by V S Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Margaret Atwood and Brian Moore"

Excerpt from Mick Brown's Interview with Diana Athill
The Telegraph

Hanging From Flory's Shoes

We will all experiment
With different ways
To an out-of-it State
Mainly an escape
But really a mind rape

And at the mad gate,
We're in and standing
Down
Having our silvery gown
Hoky drug boy clown

We might be feelin'
But
It's shifting though
And everything smacks of an LSD glow

We was all snaky climbin'
Through craters etching
Tunnels through the chambers
Of his heart

Falling Faster than the Stars

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

Kerouac - On The Road.

"Falling star"
Witold Pruszkowski 1884.

Max Snap Dreaming

When we were kids Maxie spoke frequently of making a snap kick on goal during tennis ball road soccer. And so it came to pass one drousy Perth summers eve that he found himself there in position and conquered the strangeness of the game and the glowering unforgiving stickiness of the tarmac and blew that volleyed kick through the goals, mercurial Flory and snapped its reality goalward so that the heavens gave pause and the birds stopped twittering and we were suspended in time. Yokes for all before us. It was two-on-two dynamics and he and I roared around the empty stadium slapping imaginary hands and being hugged by the invisible crowd that spilled over the hoardings as only invisble crowds don't.

We all slept on the floor that night and I replayed moments from the day in flashes of golden eternity…a brilliant spotlight that cloaked all matter around the spot where Max picked up the ball and looked long into the sky. “Oh my eye…oh my eye”

The last thing I remember before I fell into sleep were the final words of a poem…a poem written for us as kids forever lording over the declining years…
The voice in soothing timbre: “A thing of beauty, a thing at rest, a thing asleep o’er the top of the nest.”

Max mumbled far-off sonnets as he slept content that the long long days numbered ahead.