Most All My Bearings

photo- mathew Brodeur (Unsplash)

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I cheat
When Honestly I call on love
W/ Poetry

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Too soon after I’m loved to support
By one that I’m with
Here at this space.

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Waves miraculously roll in
When I’m standing 
More surely now
In a sinking sand

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Me without all my bearings

surrendering you senseless

Schlafwagen und Wunderkammer (Richard James Allen)

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Verity La in Heightened Talk

(‘Schlafwagen und Wunderkammer’ is German for ‘sleeper’
or ‘sleeping car’ and ‘cabinet of curiosities’ or ‘wonder room’)

you are on the night train to Vienna
and you have already arrived in Berlin
you are about to walk home in Sydney
and you must dash back out to see
the play that is now more popular
than Hamlet in London

you are cold in your high sleeper bed
that you collapsed into
when the night heat came on
suddenly in a rush
without getting under the covers
that are now cold
that you collapsed into

you are wrapped in an old overcoat
you don’t remember owning
dreaming of trying to stay warm
in a high-raked hall of a tall-walled university
listening to a lecture on the mechanics of flashback
and your mind keeps wandering to a back shed
somewhere beyond the Wall in East Germany
full of homemade contraptions that were far too unreconstructed
ever to be sent to a Dickensian-looking patent office
piled high with yellowing documents
that curl like nineteenth century moustaches

you are in the long tail of a tall tale
a cat coiled up in itself asleep
the way those big ropes
that secure ships to their ports
are coiled into perfect circles
by nameless foreign seamen
the forever migrant workers
circling the globe
only one of whom
ever gets off the boat
to become Joseph Conrad

you are being asked by your roommate
your bunkmate your companion
what do you call someone
travelling with you on a night train
in one of the lower bunks
a person who for reasons unknown
shall remain nameless
to set an alarm so that she yes she
that much you can know
can wake up before the guard
who has no English comes with the croissants

you are sure you are reassuring her that you have
and it may be that you have
but you don’t remember in which country
or time zone you would have have-have-have done so
though you like the idea
that this act of thoughtfulness
may have occurred
and you being the enactor
if not the instigator of it

you are thinking that you may have to be the alarm clock yourself
though your clock hands are wrapped inside your imaginary overcoat
and not a lot about the rest of you resembles a device
for the capture and distribution of time

you are of the opinion that when you fell into this  sleep  in  a  cocoon  of  vibration  you
were  sure  or  at  least fairly certain that  it  would be a normal sleep that  is  to say just
like any other sleep but on the contrary  it  feels  as  if  you have been having the whole
history  of  consciousness downloaded into the data banks  of  your  body  which for an
unspecified period  of  time have replaced your usual cells but this  is  most odd as you
are  not  sure  if  you  believe  any more that consciousness  has  a  history  though  you
might  go  so far  as  to  offer  that it gets woven in to history finally realising that it was
only ever  a  visitor  to  the aforesaid state  of  you are not sure what really playing hide
and seek  in  the winding corridors and hallways of time and personality a game  it  got
caught up in but now understands it can step away from any time it wishes to exit
time that is to say whenever it no longer wishes to be part of
the here and the now
and the then and the to come

Knock, knock, knock!

so the question the guard asks you
in English by the way
is not would you care for some breakfast
but are you ready to be awoken from this dream of timelessness
or would you prefer to remain in a room of marvels
a disembodied spectacular down the rabbit hole of the fantasia elevator
taking up semipermanent residence in the cross-eyed manifesto
of time masterpieces of continuous previousness
a conspiracy of angels flocking in all directions at the holy speed of intuition
as you learn to live in the fantastic space

 

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Richard James Allen’s ten books of poetry, fiction and performance texts include Fixing the Broken Nightingale(Flying Island Books), The Kamikaze Mind(Brandl & Schlesinger) and Thursday’s Fictions (Five Islands Press), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.  He won the Chancellor’s Award for most outstanding PhD thesis at UTS.  Widely published in anthologies, journals and online for over thirty years, Allen has been the recipient of numerous awards, nominations, grants, as well as opportunities for presentations, screenings and broadcasts, in a unique international career as an acclaimed writer, director, choreographer and performer. Further information: http://ww.physicaltv.com.au & http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/allen-richard-james.

TRICKLE DOWN VOODOO ANTICS

We say bad things about people who hurt us.

That way they’d let up to haunt & to curse us.

We didn’t dismiss their nonsense,

just cruelly,

We vent  and vanquish their malevolence.

& thus  Renewal.

The Infinite Up Against The Finite, Up Again

After a rain

I have to stand straight

As my back pain

Will let me  and  wait

To take note.

Take it all in,  Breath first.

“Skin second,”  He wrote,

Then Worked to recall.  All by breakfast.

HOW THEN THE HEAVENS POURED

Should I get older

I recognize me,  more blind,

Crinking my neck back, there, as

I look up at the cliff terrace

And A windowed hideaway behind,

Not so unapproachably high,

Fixed over our Pacific, finally,

That we thought might couldn’t be.

Hard rain, hell, wept down a wet

that mixes well w/regret, on my shirt

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2

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One can look past all our four shoulders

From inside the glass wall

On the backside of our Adirondacks

And maybe just make out

What we’re watching and talking about.

A man closely following his own footsteps

The long stretch of the shore,

But looked up at the both of us,

Here Hand in hand, and how then the heavens poured.

BIT OF A RECLUSE

It could be I got bit

Three times by a recluse spider.

Here in the sub-tropics

Where recluse spiders are risky.

But I’m a bit of a recluse, too.

I like the dark,

My own time, & whiskey.

Oh, the friends and kin  call me;

They go “Cool Guy!”,

They might  “Night Falls” me.

The three red moons on my arm,

They do enthrall me,

Almost with their own flow chart.

It’s  dangerous  art,

Three red, full moons on my arm.

NO HOLDING BACK

Stoicism is a prison

Though I break out

Though I break down

Through the pull of a merciful act

Then I’m old and too weak to hold back

I can imagine a troubled

Panicicked angel tangled double;

One cat caught in a grate

A girl unfair in a wheelchair

Nears and dares her balance, her endurance, her tolerance

Strains all of her weight

Shows the pain that she’s used to on her face

Then relief, and they’re both free

She and the cat both refuse to

Cry more,

Like those that might see

“BAG” from Jim Harriison

Bag

BY JIM HARRISON  (From JH’s upcoming volume of poems, Dead Man’s Float (Copper Canyon Press, 2015).

I LOST MY MEDICINE BAG

from back when I believed

in magic. It’s made from a doe’s stomach

and holds grizzly teeth and claw,

stones from Tibet and the moon

the garden and the beach

where the baby’s ashes are buried.

LEG LIFTS JUST BEFORE THOSE SWIFT DOORS CLOSE; AN EXERCISE

The next step/ waiting maybe  too wrong

into  dark matter

An other thing/ a rung on a dark ladder

A nothing/

As it happens/ not to happen/

The next step/ leg stiff/ fixing to flex

to a leg lift/

I’m fixing to find/ A gift of intentions

To move me to move/

given/ attention enough

to move on/ away from the station

Happy Birthday, Billy Butler Yeats

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering-witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

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.from “Two Songs Of A Fool”, William Butler Yeats,1919

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