New Poetry by Les Wicks

Episodic Gratification

Kill the cat.

Your name is not enough.
Trust your hands.
Kill the cat. Make It.
Don't let prayers have all the brightest stars, roll your lips.
Your choice one-day one-day.

The secret is layers, one cannot endure…
good life is an accretion of layers.
By the time you have attained
spouses, mortgages, power or esteem
there will be nothing exposed to the certainties of cold winter.

And you'll have killed the cat

which had no name
maybe once sleek
preposterously proud in its little menace.
Worse then, ginger dimmed
scars and missing teeth
but still a tomcat howl
to rake a sleeping night.

He had no humans of his own
but his kind all know the predictable call for food.
Geoffrey allowed. The approach, the grab
then throttle. A vicious, short-term fight -
scratches before a death.
This man dropped the orange, empty carapace -
it lands like exhausted breath (which it no longer had).
He could almost see refugee fleas as they packed for diaspora.

That empty ball of bone
buried in a #4 blade plot of lawn.

Next day had a paper-cut wind
his own belief in comfort
warmed the Sunday hands.
We know this choice. The end.
He becomes the intended comet
of primary happiness.
Grass grew brighter.
Everything important wins.

Each page
in the Gehennic biographies -
more food, more garbage
sleep at the edge of charms.
Thieves, chains and Hugo Boss
strange children home from school
becoming just like daddy
and the wife is toning thighs
in rooms full of energy.


- Les Wicks 2008



Kurraga City Council

The lords of local politics fly spotlit under lamps.
A desk can bluster them lazily above crowds,
stinking contrails above the craning lumpen necks
of almost-concerned citizens.
Expertise is rusted on
our mouths are angry nests as waves
corrode beneath untended sun.
There's a 1940s lemon slumber in the halls
as lesser grades sick lankly over tea.

Pyramids of waste
cacophonous hymns
cracked roads like mousetraps
with chasms at the verge.

Art projects primped then launched in a
municipal wine to an audience of three -
ossuary of the new.

Pensioners get bussed to parks
where they're mugged then rushed to hospital.
Like People's Liberation Army troops at harvest time
blue uniformed Rangers march out to reap fines from those
whose junk-pump cars go everywhere
"for the ride".

Each civic plan has kernels for the next
while good intentions seep like limescale
in a great impotent bowl.
Envy no one this choice
when they one-day raise their hand;
Australian suburban jihadis
on an asthmatic campaign.

Me too, complaint becomes habit
then every day is caught up
whining into nitre.
Overheated phones placate iconoclastic codgers,
complaints are passed up into space
until no one rings and no one answers.
There's just the fart-oomph of spent words
folding all the air.


- Les Wicks 2008


Bondi poet Les Wicks appeared in the March issue of America's Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, one of hundreds of publications that feature his work.