The Republic of Heaven

My iMac crashed and whether or not I'll be able to recover my data is a big question, so I should post some of my poetry from memory before I forget it all:

Winter Affair
Warm vinyl crackles,
Soft curtained nights,
And you drawing circles
By muted gold light.

Inky-white snowflakes
Forgetting our wrongs,
Typewriter tapping
Secretive songs.

Civic (Civic is the cosmopolitan centre of Canberra)
Sultry summer, Civic nights,
Tangled cobbles breathe warmth
On last season's Converse.
Bright buses rush in angrily
At all the wrong times,
Puffing like excited puppies.
We're used to the late ones.
We're used to the early ones.
It's Canberra - why hurry?

The Soup Kitchen sets the scene
For tonight's entertainment:
Disagreements with the police,
Buskers watching fire dancers,
Abandoned people telling secrets
To the merry-go-round.
In the square, power is sliding.
The kids watch you suspiciously.
You're too neat. You don't get it.
Once, weren't you the one being
Suspicious of them?

The Soup Kitchen is a weekly charity stall that provides soup and tasty bread for the homeless and has been in Civic for as long as I can remember.

Silly (written for the end-of-session in-class creative writing task. It got a ridiculously high mark I feel it didn't deserve.)
They jumped, silly, into the waves,
The salty tassels drenched their pants,
Sea spray marked their holiday-clean shirts.
They gambolled like seagulls
And the seagulls looked on, confounded.
They let go of sanity but not each other,
They giggled like freedom was significant
For a vast glorious second.

They pulled each other further in as father
Looked lost, sunbathing safely on the shore.
Achieving holiday from holiday,
They danced till dizzy in the wet wideness
To which the beach was just a thin dry crust:
A lane of well-intentioned lifesavers arrayed
By traffic cones of icecreams forgotten in the sand.

The rollers rushed in grand confusion
Like a festival caught in the rain,
And they partied with the party,
Until laughter and cold were the same thing,
Until a mother and her son were the same thing,
A happy dripping creature which ran away
From a thousand cloned holidays.

And lastly, a haiku:

Shakespeare wrote by night
Because theatres should be
Dark and reflective.

They're worth preserving, Raphie. Get yourself an external HD!

Joy of joys, I managed to get all my data back with no damage done! I bought an external SATA enclosure and it all worked out. As a bonus, I now have a new external HD.

I like, Ralphie. Especially the imagery in Winter Affair. Remember WS wrote mainly for the globe though..

They should be dark and reflective. It's sad that many are not.

A prose poem which is wonky and wobbly.

Marshmallow
There was once a boy who thought
Sliding doors opened when he clicked his fingers.
That marshmallows grew on marshmallow trees
And chocolate came from chocolate mines
And snails became turtles when they grew up.
He thought birds fell asleep on clouds
And that is why they all vanished in winter
(Because clouds migrate).
Nobody ever had the heart to tell him he was wrong
Because his mother died of cancer and he visited her
In hospital every day like always, even though there was
Another lady there now (but she didn't mind),
And anyway, everyone wanted to think he was right
And grow a marshmallow tree in their backyard,
Right next to the pansies.

that's so sweet and sad!

So apparently this new-fangled 'blank verse' is all the rage these days! I hear the cool kids are writing lines to look at not read aloud while riding on their 'skates-boards' and typing into their 'calcu-laters'. So here's my new attempt to get with the times! I am afraid I am but a simple soul, and wrote it on good solid paper, not any of this fancy gimmickry they've got nowdays.

The Drought
The drought is forever.
We dream it and
We dream with it
In sullen sun-glazed surfaces
And wide breaths of dust
The drought dreams of us:
Bright dry exalted dreams.
It steals our water in plain sight
In suns that linger with the air
Long after hazy darkness comes
The drought always wins.

Silly made me smile, and I was only 3 sentences down

Competition it seems