Les Wicks

Two poems:

Understand / Anne

Understand

Kicking something novel is soooo yesterday
feel been done?
Words flap beside a copse of inert upright cellulose.
Trees grow by a failed runnel underfilled by a tasteless common chemical.
The parched stream merges with a contaminated saline solution.
Ocean is lifted; its life seems an improbable whistle.
We are air, our ink is damp
clouds are tramps like us,
we travel deep within the feathers of itchy birds.

This comfort is the big dumb question
temperature’s up
a remarkable forest
is upholstered, much improved.
Impertinence in the mouth
our minds are rising
towards that joke of home.

Steel eggs, cartons of quiet
the leaves are left
our towels become capes.
Riding this red,
the enviro crusader
bows too latte
in circles & a perilous linebreak. I won’t crack another one
though there’s some surgery involved, forgot
to bring my glasses. The risk is always sitting in the room,
admonition in a white coat, no sterile mask
to bamboozle infection so
say the words then back into wood


Anne

I last saw him in John’s car
swatting demons from his hair (that
choice of a horror movie
was not a good idea) the marijuana
was a blessing.

Emails come in from Mexico she
almost died after the sex change operation
but still gardens a dry-climate peace with
fronds of fellow complexities, paints
out front of her gallery.

The art is a blaze, saw
this cascade on a website. Her
girlfriend is famous, not least
for those wings tattooed across her back.
Aloft, everyone, no decision.
That promise of cash & burn.
our children playing in the scars.

Les Wicks’ 8th book of poetry is the Ambrosiacs (Island, 2009). He has performed & conducted workshops across Australia & is still smiling often. He runs Meuse Press which focuses on outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry published on the surface of a river, latest publication being “From this Broken Hill”. Les has been judge of numerous competitions including the New South Wales’ premier’s prize.
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm