Poetry by Pip Wilson

Page 12

All poems Copyright © 2001-now, Pip Wilson, Wilson’s Almanac

 

 

Attention please shoppers. Would the gentleman in Aisle 3
please come to Checkout 6. We still have your umbrellas.

They shouldn’t let so many gorgeous young women go shopping at my supermarket.
No matter how far or how near is my car, I wonder “Where the hell did I park it?”
If I go in for milk, some sister in silk starts inciting me near the potatoes –
My consciousness haunted, I forget what I wanted and I load up the cart with tomatoes.
How often I’ve moaned in the shower at home, “Oh no, not again, there’s no hope!
Will I do it once more, a special trip to the store, and come home without buying soap?”

I invariably part from the Coles Supermart with foolish unneeded expense:
What the hell do I do with a packet of two Swedish herrings and six pounds of mince,
'Cause she who I’ve seen by the coffee machine looks like Claudia Schiffer, but taller?
There was a girl who’d out-chest Ms Loren or Mae West, but the rest of her form was much smaller;
You could see from behind what she had on my mind, and I pretended to be buying cotton.
Yeah, I went home alone. Yeah, my socks are all sewn. There was something else. I've forgotten..

Who taught them to shop in a miniscule top and nothing from tube-top-to-trouble?
Just a pierced-navel pearl – man, don’t look at that girl if you don’t want your yoghurt to bubble.
It’s not very nice, and I think once or twice I’ve seen other men caught like myself:
With a cart load of crackers and artfully stacking their kids on the cheap tuna shelf.

But it’s not just the dolls and the honeys at Coles that distract from the errand at hand,
My mind can unhinge near a turnstile or fridge, from one poignant word on a can.
There’s no illness worse – this congenital curse, of verse, the compulsion to write,
And the packers all know that I put on a show when it’s getting on late into night.
You know what it’s like you get hijacked by haiku, epithalamiums by Keats, odes by Shelley
Just near the linguini, transfixed on zucchini, or a Zen moment down by the deli.
Or some little old lady, says “Dear, could you maybe, just reach up and get me some thyme?”
And there in Aisle Seven, a bolt from the heavens illuminates meaning – and rhyme.

At nights it’s ourselves: just the guys stacking shelves, Pip blissed-out, engaged with a pack
Of Weet-Flakes. The guys – 'cause by now they’re all wise – mutter something like “Flaky Man’s back”.
Do you find that yourself? Or you’re next to a shelf of smoked oysters and one seems so hip?
I do. But what really I find touchy-feely is the knob on a can of Creme-Wip.
I admit, with a sigh, that a blueberry pie, or a pizza-base loosens my head;
And some products by Birdseye do conjure up words I must write there and then. As I said,
It’s a damn sort of curse, and it only gets worse, when groceries blaze out life’s beauty,
And the Muse’s trump wakes me. But what really shakes me is the Muse getting trumped by some cutie.

They shouldn’t let so many attractive young women go shopping at Coles Supermart.
Toilet paper and bread, they sure mess with my head, but those shoppers … they mess with my heart.

 

 

 

The valleys of the moon

The valleys of the moon are cold
but warmth lies still tonight
on two who are embraced to hold
the white moon in their sight.
Sweet frangipanis charge the air
until the warmth is gone.
The tree will soon again be bare.
The cold goes on, and on.

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t clone me until I’m dead.
Better still, after the Raelians are.

 

                         News item: Raelians claim cloned human

 

I’m glad I was born an Australian

Not the clone of some lesbian Raelian;

I’d feel rather weird
To put dye in my beard.
To an Australian, that’s really quite alien.

 

I’d hate to be somebody’s lackey

Especially to someone as wacky
As a shyster rapscallion
Who wears a medallion
And a moustache like some Boston Blackie.

 

It’s a picture that’s better unpictured,
A moustache like Little Richard.
Little Richard was hip,
But that upper lip –
Well, I can’t think of nothing more wretched.

 

I don’t mind the company of aliens;
Nor Buddhists, nor yet Episcopalians,
A Rajneeshi or Jew,
Even a Muslim or two --
But they can punch it, all of them Raelians.

I suppose I’m a narrow Australian
(they say that we're all sub-mammalian),
But I’d die if some bloke
in a white satin cloak
had me cloned into an alien Raelian.

 

 

 

 

if i snuff

 

 

if i snuff,

ok         when i snuff
you can put my carcase in a cardboard coffin

leave the hearse door                            unlocked

drive around town hall corner

corner of george &         park sts
busy lunchtime

squeal them wheels

drop me out

maybe fly me from a mcdonalds flagpole
i wanna go out with a laugh

scatter my ashes
scatter my ashes
scatter my ashes
around some non-smoking restaurant

frequented by arts administrators

there’s a double whammy for ya

when I snuff

invite the literarsi

to

       my

                                          wake

someone get a couple of pages of my prose

take out the punctuation
read it out                &   &   &
break at every                               few words

like this                     got it
                 they’ll love it                     i’ll be famous
i’ll be dead plus a poet now
                       you’ll make a million bucks

want my autograph
  do enough of that
we both might get nobel prizes
i think they have one for poetry editing

                      yeah

                                        when i snuff
bury me not on a windswept hill
overlooking the shimmering sea
i’ve got allergies
hide me at express publications
somewhere near mr vella’s office preferably
don’t plant an apple tree on my grave
plant                                     

                   tall weeds and busted rocks

walla!
    instant pioneer

 

 

 

I have

A lone currawong calling the chimney and me singing the mossy roof.
Seven blessings from healed urchins and vagabonds of sonnets.
Radiance of cornflowers. Crimson Gymea lilies bolder than bonfires
And tall as blue-gums! The sanctity and important lullaby of crickets.
A million Einstein suns exploding from my bedroom’s pallid paint.
More friends than I have time for. More rubies in children than you know.
More spirit in this flesh than 1,000 millennia in every heft and hue.
But not you, not you. Not you, not you, not you.

 

A mansion of mind behind each dictionary word.
An eyrie of salvation-sculpted air and palpable ideas.
Precious miracle of joy in relationship of space.
Epiphanettes as constant as my blood’s unceasing flow.
Sweet and salt, bitter, sour, like colossal friends in gold.
This body infinite, this temple inordinate, this incorrigible fascination!
Purpose; centred; rock unrocked in everything I do …
But not you, not you. Not you, not you, not you.

 

Mysteries of metaphors that float around my eyes.
Bliss reliable. Ecstasy workable. Eternity voluble! Theos on demand.
Babies first met remembering me. The key to my hilarity.
A planet all mine. Waterfalls. Medieval moons. Paleolithic suns.
A heart so gardenia its bubble holds the world in care.
Sheets of love. Volumes of beauty. Horses of majesty. Avalanches of serendipity.
Priesthood of abundance. Raindances honourable.
Cedar forests of wonder. Granaries of dew …
But not you. Not you. Not you, not you, not you.
Not you, not you, not you.

 

 

 

 

January 22, 1561 Francis Bacon, early British philosopher, Lord Chancellor of the realm, and man of letters; author of the utopian New Atlantis (1627). 
  He died in 1626, a victim of scientific inquiry. Since he observed that cold foods did not go rotten very readily, he tried stuffing some dressed chickens with snow to see if that would retard spoilage. He caught a death of cold stuffing snow in the hens.

Against cold meats was he insured?
For frozen chickens he procured
brought on the illness he endured,
and never was this Bacon cured.

 

 

It ain’t me, babe

(Click for Dylan midi files)

 

Go ’way from my kitchen,

leave at your own chosen speed.

You are not the one I’d turn to
anytime I need a feed.
I think you’re looking for someone
with their taste buds unlike mine,

a tungsten-lined digestive tract
and intestines made of iron.
I’m sure we’ve been over this before –

it ain’t me babe,
no, no, no,
it ain’t me babe,
it ain’t me you’re cookin’ for, babe.

 

Go lightly on the salt babe
you always give it a nudge.
There’s nothing in there moving,
not like the chocolate fudge.

I think you’re looking for someone
who drinks tea with milk that’s turned,
who’ll agree a blackened omelette
is “just a little sunburned”.
Someone who will die for you and more –

 

but it ain’t me babe,
no, no, no,
it ain’t me babe,
it ain’t me you’re cookin’ for, babe.

 

Did I tell you you’re good looking?
And you tell a very good joke.
And your career is going like a train.
I’m a new age kinda bloke;
I think I’ve been male chauvinist,
I think I’ve been unfair.
I really feel so guilty –
Wow! I love what you’ve done with your hair!

I should do much more of the chores –

take a break babe!
Have a night off,
put your feet up,
cause you needn’t cook any more, babe.

No it ain’t me babe,
no, no, no,
it ain’t me babe,
it ain’t me you’re cookin’ for, babe.

 

                                         

 

 

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