BRICK Through The Window
Collection of Poems
by Trevor Poulton (published 2018)
Several were published in Redoubt, Verandah, On the Page, and the like.
Several were read on invitation to two Melbourne Writers Festivals.
Collection of Poems
by Trevor Poulton (published 2018)
Several were published in Redoubt, Verandah, On the Page, and the like.
Several were read on invitation to two Melbourne Writers Festivals.
Sample of Poulton poems from the collection.
SCULPTURE OF IDEAL (Lynne E)
A sculptress deciphers white from true white
in a rough-hewn limestone block.
With fall of fragments, a bulbous woman
disrobes. Rubenesque thighs, reclining
voluptuously between gum trees within hand’s reach of tools to smooth her hair. Surfeiting on H2O and stone, she’s a rock eater brimming with whiteness.
Contrasts with her maker - petite, vulnerable.
This other side of art has absorbed the grief of stone, ascends the rubble of falling men ...
falling, falling, I am falling
CITIZEN OF THE WESTERN WORLD
First, loss of Freedom of Speech.
Now losing Freedom of Movement.
Soon to lose Freedom of Body.
Then to lose Mind.
CITIZEN OF THE NEO-WESTERN WORLD
I am not here to Question.
I am here to Comply
And I will defend that Right
To the Death.
DRIVING ME MAD (ADDICTION)
Mindlessly I drive streets to where they want to go.
My car is my body. We acknowledge stop signs argue with traffic lights circle around the sun map pipe lines. The car is my hit and I am its day we are in tune the radio doesn’t talk back.
I am the wavy line behind the steering wheel that needles the car in multiple directions. The motor doesn’t care as long as it’s churning and the seat doesn’t care as long as it’s occupied. I am a particle of tiredness shooting thru a gallery of streets
my mind flat as a blown out tyre
yet the car stays in Drive.
GETTING YOU INTO MY STAR SYSTEM
Blackberry hair branching out
across the lands, she’s falling from a star with only a compass of bones to determine which way.
She lands at my feet.
‘I want to make physical contact with you,’ she says, touching my forearm. She documents her discovery rising like water about my waist, rocking gently at my sides till darkness comes.
Black rings inexplicably withhold light.
I walk with her through blocks of buildings and books before the sun sets on Brunswick Street, stalking her doorway to doorway to clarify the dimensions of her world, strange to me.
She is anointed princess of the poetry scene. Her sycophantic new earthling friends tell her to be wary of bastard men.
She looks at me with her eyes turned on.
She speaks of flower essences and of karma, and the passage of birds whose names exist in intergalactic books, and of pages of the day turning over, and of her star dogs diving at airborne Big Bang sticks.
Critics corrupt the atmosphere outside, looking to jam her star, me, us.
She’s from a galaxy called DESIST!
On the beach at Somers the sky light cracks the waves.
We run for cover as it starts to spit.
I confess.
‘I want to love you forever.’
She offers me affinity instead of infinity.
Sea-birds disembark the sea leaving an impression of our absence as she determines to take me on a voyage into deep space
vacating Earth for the winter.
THINKING
I start thinking and then stop again; this is a mistake.
I stop thinking and then start again; this is a mistake.
Thoughts line up against me dressed for battle.
I change my mind.
INTO NOTHINGNESS OF WAR
I am as a weary soldier in a war arrested by anger
twisted by turns.
While tongues whine of nothingness
I squeal to the void stuck in a shroud of noise.
Down to shoe boxes in boots sweating and drenched I turn to turn.
Rockets reel by on a wind, shifting my weight
my body does not sink or swim.
The dead are dead the living
the living confirmed.
A rotating steel bolt-action angel comforts me
discarding my corpse as we turn.
CITIZEN OF THE WESTERN WORLD
‘First, loss of Freedom of Speech.
Now losing Freedom of Movement.
Soon to lose Freedom of Body.
Then to lose Mind.’
CITIZEN OF THE NEO-WESTERN WORLD
‘I am not here to Question. I am here to Comply
And I will defend that Right
To the Death.’
LETTER TO A COUNTERFEITER(Long Bay Prison)
The light would be unbearable forfeiting a generation of skin, sandstone corridors with peeled paint steering your convoluted mind. So far to the sea that bangs the eardrums.
Eventually you’ll overtake the corridors, to once again pedal the rocky seas beyond the sandstone walls; out into the years of light halved, manic over lost projections, more bitter.
I remember you arched on the edge of a river mirror, your wet hair chanting to Vishnu, joking with the refracted sunlight that higher powers are really bent, and that India is the cock of the world.
You returned home
rejoicing in theories of the Big Bang. Such was your artifice, to make psychic shifts:
stolen bicycles manifesting in hallways of your several addresses.
The prison walls tunneled with little squares of light shape the air.
When you get out we’ll have a drink - even if it’s no longer to pedal along the edge of society veering towards vast truths.
SEARCHING FOR A HIT
We are a factory of nerves between street lamps and the moon.
Hit from behind we stagger to our rooms.
Memories flush red on a pillow.
Pain stops the clock.
The time has come to remake our broken world.
SUIT & TIE
‘Do you have a brother Tim?’ I asked the detective, ‘Why?’ He replied, ‘He’s dead.
Dead. Killed last night.’
You could not resist the soft caress of smack wheeling in money and lies a harness for your suit & tie.
Money on the table fluorescent powder on the floor the haughty laugh of success wasted youth in a darkened recess.
I was told you died last night found standing against some wall.
You said you were too big to die.
Well, why then are you dead
if you fitted into your father’s suit & tie.
POLICE CELLS
Put on the uniform and you’re a different person.
You have power.
It doesn’t matter how young you are.
The jangle of keys, the spotlights, the concrete floors staring back up at you.
The needless denigration of humans comes naturally after a while.
Nothing in the system to really stop it. No higher power.
Anyway,
who’s he/she/it to guarantee justice - a young constable, socially spoon-fed,
promoted by constituents of the public -
broken down car salesmen greedy bank managers helpless social workers ignorant school teachers shallow land developers crummy rock singers drunken hotel licensees
lonely taxi drivers
CHEAP NOVEL
The pages flipped open for me to see the print, intellectual motifs and a lion’s head. Although I’d resist reappearing
in the unprintable pages
mind and body disparate, I still stroked your spine, capturing serifs of your breath. Then you pulled me into the pages, chagrin tightening your grip.
HAUNTED FLESH
The dead inhabit our shadows walk servilely beside our flesh. Little time remains when shadow flirts with death.
Of others’ footsteps - the lovers, the procreators of time, their shadows merge with museums and hotels, stations and clocks, moving imperviously.
Outside the museum, there is a statue of a soldier shot in bronze, from morning till afternoon his shadows parade across the lawn without breath.
In the beginning human beings rose up from shadow
to redeem flesh, but flesh clings to flesh.
Time is binding.
Time is unwelcome. The soup eaters slop their soup into crooked mouths. No! Time has no time for time at all.
The dead inhabit our shadows clinging to our flesh.
There is no time.
The bowels are drying.
Listen to them as they walk - the lovers, the procreators of time, their shadows merging with discos and hotels,
wine bars and clocks,
easy lovers in an easy time.
Time boiling dry.
The dead are dead.
The living confirmed.
HOUSE FOR SALE IN CASTLEMAINE
Gold rings threaded through a wing of your nose matted hair city mouth massaged by an estate agent marrying you to a house garden encircled with granite irises plunging in and out of dirt
conifers saluting a corrugated roof
Climbing into the nucleus of a magnolia down its stem and you’re inside the house laid in stone hollows in walls where spiders camp floor-boarded railway tracks
stopping at all rooms
A miner’s cottage on an era of land many lived here before making love in cooking smells brushing hair back into mirrors you wander about in striped stockings the rising damp of your flesh
sticking to stone walls as an offering
SOULD!
You’re the new proprietor the cottage windows
have been looking for
CAITLIN, I REBELLED
As you grow older, the petite body must learn to share its room with more and more refuse from parents that feed their children and use them as a dumpster to deposit psychic mess.
Rollers of white waves tumble over your bathers flattening your back, you become a hair-clip joining water to sand and then you rise up on your soft white feet to scuttle along the beach up to your father boiled dry under the sun.
Courts roller-blade in:- social workers, judge-speak, solicitors.
Your two-mothers-in-one revolve about you. They dress you up in tunics and Sportsgirl clothes. You love the female attention, the glue, your days now structured from morning till night.
I rebelled, knowing your sacred garden beyond the slate mines where you run wild, where trees rattle in a chaos of dreams, and you have a special rock to sit on
which secretly moves when you disappear.
If you ever need me I am standing just at the end of your sleeve. I’m your dad looking across from the other side of the street.
ILCHMAN
Zilch! Your view is twenty stories up with a plaza at the bottom, and a water fountain that washes cash into gobbledygook. It’s corporate culture. You don’t have to deal in facts ‘cause a fact breeds facts and that would take up your time, your envelope would become too expensive.
One day you took your umbrella to a meeting because you speculated it might rain, it was nothing more than a possibility. And you left papers behind, didn’t really know what was happening, did you Zilchman, just posturing, filling in time between drinks.
You’re not street wise, more into illusion, modern culture favours skyscraper crime, inoffensive bravado, give more than you take, you're a member of clubs and on boards.
Down in Williamstown the sea foams like a bubble bath. Waves catch the attention of mates - self-promoters and prophets. You’re comfortable residing there, close to the foreshore where new bodies roll in.
There are other classy suburbs, Mont Albert, Parkville, Templestowe. But it’s the necklace of the bay, gives a feeling of grace.
Renovated wine bars with skillion ceilings, skylights that hold in the weather, and bay windows with nostrils that snuff cocaine.
Zilch. Zilch.
A sculptress deciphers white from true white
in a rough-hewn limestone block.
With fall of fragments, a bulbous woman
disrobes. Rubenesque thighs, reclining
voluptuously between gum trees within hand’s reach of tools to smooth her hair. Surfeiting on H2O and stone, she’s a rock eater brimming with whiteness.
Contrasts with her maker - petite, vulnerable.
This other side of art has absorbed the grief of stone, ascends the rubble of falling men ...
falling, falling, I am falling
CITIZEN OF THE WESTERN WORLD
First, loss of Freedom of Speech.
Now losing Freedom of Movement.
Soon to lose Freedom of Body.
Then to lose Mind.
CITIZEN OF THE NEO-WESTERN WORLD
I am not here to Question.
I am here to Comply
And I will defend that Right
To the Death.
DRIVING ME MAD (ADDICTION)
Mindlessly I drive streets to where they want to go.
My car is my body. We acknowledge stop signs argue with traffic lights circle around the sun map pipe lines. The car is my hit and I am its day we are in tune the radio doesn’t talk back.
I am the wavy line behind the steering wheel that needles the car in multiple directions. The motor doesn’t care as long as it’s churning and the seat doesn’t care as long as it’s occupied. I am a particle of tiredness shooting thru a gallery of streets
my mind flat as a blown out tyre
yet the car stays in Drive.
GETTING YOU INTO MY STAR SYSTEM
Blackberry hair branching out
across the lands, she’s falling from a star with only a compass of bones to determine which way.
She lands at my feet.
‘I want to make physical contact with you,’ she says, touching my forearm. She documents her discovery rising like water about my waist, rocking gently at my sides till darkness comes.
Black rings inexplicably withhold light.
I walk with her through blocks of buildings and books before the sun sets on Brunswick Street, stalking her doorway to doorway to clarify the dimensions of her world, strange to me.
She is anointed princess of the poetry scene. Her sycophantic new earthling friends tell her to be wary of bastard men.
She looks at me with her eyes turned on.
She speaks of flower essences and of karma, and the passage of birds whose names exist in intergalactic books, and of pages of the day turning over, and of her star dogs diving at airborne Big Bang sticks.
Critics corrupt the atmosphere outside, looking to jam her star, me, us.
She’s from a galaxy called DESIST!
On the beach at Somers the sky light cracks the waves.
We run for cover as it starts to spit.
I confess.
‘I want to love you forever.’
She offers me affinity instead of infinity.
Sea-birds disembark the sea leaving an impression of our absence as she determines to take me on a voyage into deep space
vacating Earth for the winter.
THINKING
I start thinking and then stop again; this is a mistake.
I stop thinking and then start again; this is a mistake.
Thoughts line up against me dressed for battle.
I change my mind.
INTO NOTHINGNESS OF WAR
I am as a weary soldier in a war arrested by anger
twisted by turns.
While tongues whine of nothingness
I squeal to the void stuck in a shroud of noise.
Down to shoe boxes in boots sweating and drenched I turn to turn.
Rockets reel by on a wind, shifting my weight
my body does not sink or swim.
The dead are dead the living
the living confirmed.
A rotating steel bolt-action angel comforts me
discarding my corpse as we turn.
CITIZEN OF THE WESTERN WORLD
‘First, loss of Freedom of Speech.
Now losing Freedom of Movement.
Soon to lose Freedom of Body.
Then to lose Mind.’
CITIZEN OF THE NEO-WESTERN WORLD
‘I am not here to Question. I am here to Comply
And I will defend that Right
To the Death.’
LETTER TO A COUNTERFEITER(Long Bay Prison)
The light would be unbearable forfeiting a generation of skin, sandstone corridors with peeled paint steering your convoluted mind. So far to the sea that bangs the eardrums.
Eventually you’ll overtake the corridors, to once again pedal the rocky seas beyond the sandstone walls; out into the years of light halved, manic over lost projections, more bitter.
I remember you arched on the edge of a river mirror, your wet hair chanting to Vishnu, joking with the refracted sunlight that higher powers are really bent, and that India is the cock of the world.
You returned home
rejoicing in theories of the Big Bang. Such was your artifice, to make psychic shifts:
stolen bicycles manifesting in hallways of your several addresses.
The prison walls tunneled with little squares of light shape the air.
When you get out we’ll have a drink - even if it’s no longer to pedal along the edge of society veering towards vast truths.
SEARCHING FOR A HIT
We are a factory of nerves between street lamps and the moon.
Hit from behind we stagger to our rooms.
Memories flush red on a pillow.
Pain stops the clock.
The time has come to remake our broken world.
SUIT & TIE
‘Do you have a brother Tim?’ I asked the detective, ‘Why?’ He replied, ‘He’s dead.
Dead. Killed last night.’
You could not resist the soft caress of smack wheeling in money and lies a harness for your suit & tie.
Money on the table fluorescent powder on the floor the haughty laugh of success wasted youth in a darkened recess.
I was told you died last night found standing against some wall.
You said you were too big to die.
Well, why then are you dead
if you fitted into your father’s suit & tie.
POLICE CELLS
Put on the uniform and you’re a different person.
You have power.
It doesn’t matter how young you are.
The jangle of keys, the spotlights, the concrete floors staring back up at you.
The needless denigration of humans comes naturally after a while.
Nothing in the system to really stop it. No higher power.
Anyway,
who’s he/she/it to guarantee justice - a young constable, socially spoon-fed,
promoted by constituents of the public -
broken down car salesmen greedy bank managers helpless social workers ignorant school teachers shallow land developers crummy rock singers drunken hotel licensees
lonely taxi drivers
CHEAP NOVEL
The pages flipped open for me to see the print, intellectual motifs and a lion’s head. Although I’d resist reappearing
in the unprintable pages
mind and body disparate, I still stroked your spine, capturing serifs of your breath. Then you pulled me into the pages, chagrin tightening your grip.
HAUNTED FLESH
The dead inhabit our shadows walk servilely beside our flesh. Little time remains when shadow flirts with death.
Of others’ footsteps - the lovers, the procreators of time, their shadows merge with museums and hotels, stations and clocks, moving imperviously.
Outside the museum, there is a statue of a soldier shot in bronze, from morning till afternoon his shadows parade across the lawn without breath.
In the beginning human beings rose up from shadow
to redeem flesh, but flesh clings to flesh.
Time is binding.
Time is unwelcome. The soup eaters slop their soup into crooked mouths. No! Time has no time for time at all.
The dead inhabit our shadows clinging to our flesh.
There is no time.
The bowels are drying.
Listen to them as they walk - the lovers, the procreators of time, their shadows merging with discos and hotels,
wine bars and clocks,
easy lovers in an easy time.
Time boiling dry.
The dead are dead.
The living confirmed.
HOUSE FOR SALE IN CASTLEMAINE
Gold rings threaded through a wing of your nose matted hair city mouth massaged by an estate agent marrying you to a house garden encircled with granite irises plunging in and out of dirt
conifers saluting a corrugated roof
Climbing into the nucleus of a magnolia down its stem and you’re inside the house laid in stone hollows in walls where spiders camp floor-boarded railway tracks
stopping at all rooms
A miner’s cottage on an era of land many lived here before making love in cooking smells brushing hair back into mirrors you wander about in striped stockings the rising damp of your flesh
sticking to stone walls as an offering
SOULD!
You’re the new proprietor the cottage windows
have been looking for
CAITLIN, I REBELLED
As you grow older, the petite body must learn to share its room with more and more refuse from parents that feed their children and use them as a dumpster to deposit psychic mess.
Rollers of white waves tumble over your bathers flattening your back, you become a hair-clip joining water to sand and then you rise up on your soft white feet to scuttle along the beach up to your father boiled dry under the sun.
Courts roller-blade in:- social workers, judge-speak, solicitors.
Your two-mothers-in-one revolve about you. They dress you up in tunics and Sportsgirl clothes. You love the female attention, the glue, your days now structured from morning till night.
I rebelled, knowing your sacred garden beyond the slate mines where you run wild, where trees rattle in a chaos of dreams, and you have a special rock to sit on
which secretly moves when you disappear.
If you ever need me I am standing just at the end of your sleeve. I’m your dad looking across from the other side of the street.
ILCHMAN
Zilch! Your view is twenty stories up with a plaza at the bottom, and a water fountain that washes cash into gobbledygook. It’s corporate culture. You don’t have to deal in facts ‘cause a fact breeds facts and that would take up your time, your envelope would become too expensive.
One day you took your umbrella to a meeting because you speculated it might rain, it was nothing more than a possibility. And you left papers behind, didn’t really know what was happening, did you Zilchman, just posturing, filling in time between drinks.
You’re not street wise, more into illusion, modern culture favours skyscraper crime, inoffensive bravado, give more than you take, you're a member of clubs and on boards.
Down in Williamstown the sea foams like a bubble bath. Waves catch the attention of mates - self-promoters and prophets. You’re comfortable residing there, close to the foreshore where new bodies roll in.
There are other classy suburbs, Mont Albert, Parkville, Templestowe. But it’s the necklace of the bay, gives a feeling of grace.
Renovated wine bars with skillion ceilings, skylights that hold in the weather, and bay windows with nostrils that snuff cocaine.
Zilch. Zilch.
Brick Through The Window
Copyright © 2018 Trevor Poulton
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:978-1986991797
ISBN-10:1986991792
Copyright © 2018 Trevor Poulton
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:978-1986991797
ISBN-10:1986991792
