BRICK Through The Window Poems by Trevor Poulton

BRICK Through The Window

Poems by Trevor Poulton

(published 2018)

(Selection drawn from BRICK Through The Window)

CORAL AND ME

Picture a white-faced Celtic woman with a
scroll of black hair spilling onto shoulder
blades, a body stiff and eyes that are round like
that of a quadruped. Imagine her standing
next to the doorway of her lounge room. My
head, is placed on top of her shoulder, with her
back sticking to the red brick interior wall. She
swivels like a compass to her left, and then I
hold her against the door. ‘You prefer wood?’
‘Yes,’ she replies. I then put my lips to her
unexplored ear hole, and chew on a banana;
she likes the sound of blood rushing under the
roller of my tongue,

close to her tightening throat. We separate
and move downwards to the centre of the room
where we exchange vision and connect again
by touching feet and then fingers. ‘I want to show
you my bedroom,’ she says as she uses her legs
to elevate herself, and her poetry hands which
appear small and crooked, and are painted with
red varnish, elevate me to the level of one of her
floating hexagons. I submit to the mysteriousness:
a black and tan cattle dog with its acute face, parked
on the most expansive couch in the dim lit room, its
eyes tracking her bare feet; and, a scant sheep
dog with manic eyes attracting anything that has
life in it. I am inside its pupils.

She opens the door to the bedroom. There are
several lit candles all the same height; painted
photographs of elders sidled along the skirting
board and a double sleeping bag spread out on
the floor. Picture me, placing my hands, on top
of her shoulders, applying a little gravity and
we are down on our knees, with the candles
flickering about us, and she is just pivoting
on her base, rocking backwards and forwards
whilst I am trying to get her to straighten up,
or flatten out, and her body has lost all
elasticity and has become monosyllabic.
‘I think you should leave!’ she says.

So I walk out the front door out into the
Collingwood night where houses are just
houses and the streets don’t have much to say.
She is a breath behind me as I  exit
the short square black wrought iron gate.
She says: ‘I’m just putting out the rubbish.’
I look back at her. Is she talking about me?
The Yarra River bends my Mercedes home
to Hawthorn. Picture me in my bed
penetrating white sheets, I am in love and
imagine her. Imagine now, a decade of love
and  torment set to burst on the scene.

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.

FENTON DIES

Life is an accumulation of deaths.
Bodies enter and leave this untimely world.

An Australian terrier leaps through
the damaged window of home,
a jagged ring of broken glass
that comes with another whiff of after-life,
following his concentrated dream
to a ring of green pellets
glittering beneath the neighbourhood rose
and its carapaces of snails.

He eats the poison

and flings himself back through the glass, into
this last house
that protects him from stars, his face
flinching on one side,
a throat given to tiny vowels -

running out of living

northern walls telling Fenton to straighten up,
his body unleashing itself
until the snails and the garden
and the stars shut down on us.


READ THE KNEWS 2-DAY

Planet spinning, listless and god-lost,
days of conglomerate deceit, of
electronic new age lies, smiles
of crashed Vishnu and rising seas,
images of men and women dying
on polished factory room floors,
high-rises piercing acid skies.

Read the knews 2-day -
extinction, extermination, expiration,
elimination, evisceration,
all end-words, harsh alliterations
or revelations, nerve touchy -
pleading climate exchange.

Least thoughts on an expanding concourse,
life’s mixture dulled to spume,
insuperable engineering of emptiness,
the world in its death throes
with no place to go,
call it climate change.

6.00pm Tuesday

‘No denying it?’

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.

(Dedicated to poet and artist Coral Hull)


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
tunnelled 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.

ROYAL PARK (1993)

We enter Royal Park
with otherworldly dogs,
Binda, Kindi, and Fenton,
chasing away stalkers,
misogynists, psychos
and (my) superficial truths.

Stars give birth to the night.
The giant park to ourselves
we interweave our aloneness,
wrestle over a spread of grass.

When too much space intervenes,
your brown eyes
with rings of green
topple on me.

PIC OF FRONT & BACK COVER

Trevor Poulton 's poems mostly written during the 1990s. Several have been published in Redoubt,
Verandah, On the Page, and the like. Several were read on invitation to two Melbourne Writers Festivals.

Click on link to buy copy of book through Amazon.com.au

https://www.amazon.com.au/Brick-Through-Window-Poems-1990s-ebook/dp/B07FCN25G1

BRICK Through The Window Poems by Trevor Poulton(published 2018)

BRICK Through The Window

Poems by Trevor Poulton

(published 2018)