Selected poems
The misanthrope on New Year's Eve
Half past ten, I'm off to bed.
One more whizz around the sun.
Ho hum, I'm thinking. What's the point?
If it were the solstice, maybe.
All that nonsense on TV.
And fireworks, celebrating what?
The triumph of chronology?
This year maybe I will die
and then again may not.
There's my birthyear with its dash
followed now by four new digits.
It's said that I'm cantankerous.
Curmudgeon is a word that's used
but that just means, more truly put,
I have an eye for folly.
Ten, nine, eight, seven ...
How good to sail serenely through
their universal moment
which leaps, in any case, by zones
as if compelled by law to give
an even break to every sucker.
Can longitude be so important?
Or our middling sun or planet?
Our Milky Way's just one of many.
Why is everyone so febrile?
I'll read a while; then kill the light.
By three or four my prostate
will be less sentimental.
The misanthrope at 5am
Don't bother me with reasons.
I know why they persist,
those early-rising plumbers and
those fervent electricians —
and CEOs, of course,
who need to get there first
to terrify their minions.
Each of them must start his day
by ripping through the gears,
aspiring, it would seem,
to podia of sprayed champagne
and bimbos bussing cheeks.
Each cylinder I hear
is singing to the max.
Ah, so quick from from zip to sixty —
or just a bit past that.
Their madness knows the rules, yessir,
and throttles neatly back.
Alone with my imagination
I'm conjuring their faces,
their knuckles on the wheel,
those nifty little gearsticks
crafted to the palm.
The show begins around four thirty.
By six the street is calm.
The misanthrope considers Facebook
Once it was the Herald only;
a letter every year or so
would claim your right to speak.
Once a month, or twice a week,
would brand you as a crank.
In those days syntax was involved;
even the unhinged would use it
and add some flourish of their own.
Opinions now are universal;
everybody's bound to have one,
often several times a day
as if by peristalsis.
Ah, the pleasure of the vent!
Not too unlike a fart
though more intelligent perhaps
and slightly less organic.
Catechisms, doxies, credos,
velleities that float a moment,
all in turn dispatched right now
upon a digit's pressure.
Hear the whoosh of its departure!
Ah, yes, that'll sort 'em out —
My own opinion, long-considered,
is 'Let's have fewer of them'.
My own will be enough.
The misanthrope considers hamstrings
Grand Final flags are up again,
just when we were done with winter.
Ah yes, the trinity of football,
Union, League and Aussie Rules —
Union once for private schools
or aspirants thereto,
League for scrappers west of Leichardt
heroic in the mud,
and AFL, that game of chance,
for dropkicks with a talent.
Now