New Poetry by Tug Dumbly

Holding Pattern

Certain days sanity is a smile
traced with a finger
in the condensed breath
on a window pane.
         
Resolution is WASH ME
fingered in dust
on the back of a car.

Love is fighting hard
and winning the battle
not to slam the cutlery draw.

Certain days Hell is in a sneeze
a wrong turn
a mis-shot word.

We are built upon faith
in limbs and eyes
in work, liquor, a lover
a yielding sky.

But conditions always apply.

Certain days that tiny asterisk*
will expand
like a sphincter
to swallow you whole.

The rich man
ignorant of his sudden poverty
is not unhappy
nor the woman laughing with friends
who is yet to hear
of her drowned child.


- Tug Dumbly 2018

Tug Dumbly has performed his poems, songs and monologues on radio (as a regular on both Triple J and ABC 702), in schools, venues and festivals, both in Australia and abroad. He has released two spoken word CDs through the ABC, once won the Spirit of Woodford storytelling award, at Woodford Folk Festival, twice won the Banjo Paterson Prize for comic verse, and three times won the Nimbin World Performance Poetry Cup, most recently in 2017. He was runner up in the 2015 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, and recently completed a project writing 12 Christmas-themed poems, based on historical documents, for Housing NSW, which were displayed in installations around Sydney’s Rocks area in the 2017 Christmas season.