Tonight the sorrow came,
Forgotten waves of sadness
Lapping at the back of my mind,
The sweet, joyous songs
Of childhood
All haunted and curdled,
The whispers of lovers
Like ships leaving ports,
Never returning,
Beautiful memories
Swimming off
Into the sky.
I closed my eyes
And let a single tear
fall,
I pulled on my heart
And sat back,
I looked down
And then swallowed,
Lost in the carpet,
Embarrassed
And sombre.
Resolved.
He never knew
All of their names
And he never knew
Why they all came,
But something,
A little nagging doubt
In the back of his brain
Said ,
Kill them,
Kill them all,
Until their tears
Rise as steam from their bodies,
Until their lying at one
With the soil;
They’re not like you,
They don’t have souls,
They’ve never sung,
Never felt love,
They don’t even have a language,
They’re vermin,
Poison and pointless,
Kill them all.
They were ants,
He was gardening.
Here they go
Looking through
Slits in
The curtains,
Whispering
Routines
On the
Pavements,
Looking for
Anything
That isn’t
Their own
Again.
The same people
Who hid food
Under their beds
And took photos
Each day,
Compiling
Their rotting food
Scrapbooks,
The ones who wrote diaries
And dissected muesli,
Collected ceramic figurines
And avoided the world.
They’re looking at you now,
Watching you eat
And asking faint questions;
They’re online and bored,
Quite often
It seems.
Scribbling your furrow across continents,
Fizzing with political injustice
And frothing with sociopathic rage,
In this strange modern age
We see your thoughts
Like the slogans on billboards,
We read your grim, ugly stories
As they spill from your
Chipped varnish fingernails,
And we watch as you stutter giddy
From town to town
Cloaking the need for love
In shocking pink headlines
And freedom fighter prose.
There is a shiver in your fury,
A shudder in your eyes
And a rumble in your stomach,
Amidst the journey to find yourself
You’ve found cloth squares of intrigue
And stitched together a blanket,
You’ve picnicked on the thoughts of others,
All poker faced and bilious,
Hunting through voices,
An electric need for the unique,
Ignoring the uncertainty
Of songs that have already been sung,
Roads weary from wandering,
Such sorrowful fun,
On the run from
No-one.
The broken man,
Down and lost,
His sandals splitting,
His trousers torn,
The defeated bow
And the clasped skull,
His loose tongue
Wandering in circles,
Honour,
Bravery,
Strength,
Worry,
Defeat
And then sadness;
Unravelling his life
To anyone who’ll listen,
Piecing together his downfall,
Fighting his thoughts
And battling tears.
Injustice curdles
As the night drifts by,
And as the stars
Try to shine
And offer
Hope in the sky,
A silence descends
Ushered by why?
Cross-hairs scan the land
On the hunt for something wild
Rising from the sun
No pressure,
Just the thoughts,
The thousands
And thousands
Of thoughts,
Red and white
Warning signs
And the scars
That sit tut-tutting
All cluttered
On our hearts,
The muttering
And the fluttering,
The stuttering
And such.
And the irony is
It’s the tut-tutting
That keeps
Our hearts beating
Most of the time,
There are moments
We’re just hopeless,
We can’t even rhyme
Without rhythms
And signs.
Slacker Shack
Dunstan Carter : Poetry 