New Poetry by Les Wicks

Tom Collins

I fall beneath my cart of names

leave colour in the wound.

There is consequence in each unanswered call

silence beyond glance.

So, leave colour to the wound up

Eat feathers in the shade

silence any glance

open up this clever fade.

I eat feathers into shade.

Among birds I am a dog,

silence any chance.

We rut beneath applause.

Among birds I am a god

but children mock my graves.

We cut beneath plausibility

to deliver only ether.

But children are only grapes

we harvest their despair

delighted under ether, a stumpy photograph offered

to the gyprock lusts of life.

We divest their despair

then lose our hair

before their gimpy loves of looting

we are the kings, tossed out of town.

We lost our air

nobody is there

we were the kings, lost in brown

claim nothing just here.

We all fall beneath our cart of names…

consequence assured.

- Les Wicks 2011

Weather

In February, the grey-tinged cuprous-green distinctive black scaled

juvenile Dugite Snake seeks out new territory on the dunes west off

                                                                                                             new money.

One looks for the linear.

Container ships shuffle,

Rottnest Island stakes the horizon. Abandoned leash,

a clipped Husky understands that

Obedience is just

a tufted philosophic conceit. Our owners call.

This contended lasagne

sees the colour of tomatoes, or rust

in paving & bricks.

We refuse the hazard

of lemon light, cornflower

laps along the lapis

our venomous build beside all careful repair.

To remove one’s clothes, we

accept the sun like leaves.

Sand beds, sand castles,

the invert birth each immersion.

The dunes seethe with otherness –

take my photo, take your time –

these minor plunders

are the least we can do perhaps

an aspiration

in our complex little tides.

Melon Hill stands above

our wriggling constructs. Like

the dugite territorial,

we are the seams of cloud that ride

a thigh, radiatus 360°

the tablets of life not

mostly us. Straight can’t

be busy, can’t be still.

These are the lines we own, we

are inked. To understand

sometimes burns, scarification

that passes for writing.

Sunset queues into the Indian Ocean,  to

cave-art Bobtail Skinks on the sand

their indigent homage to the tones around -

gamboge faces above a pale blue belly.

We map the streams of grace,

our hunger paints in the names

that fail to actually affix

(they call this river Swan).

I wait for the colours

we bathe in everything.

- Les Wicks 2011

Les is one of Australia's most consistently interesting poets. His latest book is Shadows of the Read (Krok, 2011) Ukraine $10.00 (Aust) in Ukrainian & English http://krokbooks.com