New Poetry by Tug Dumbly

Two Poems Selflessly Offering no Solution


1: With Big Respect to Dylan T

O save me, save me
from embittered old age
from being some poor
old mildewed sage
always storming the beach
maintaining the rage
a toothless old dog
barking at waves
an all knowing, all naying 
em-bickered old prick             
picking through a dump
with a pair of chopsticks
in search of some last
precious ember of rage …
O save me, save me
from embittered old age.


2: An Anchorite Gives Thanks, Silently               

You get so sick
of putting things into words,
having to conceptualise, make concrete,
or concrete as words can be
as they pour forth into the formwork
of sentences

that mad stampede of tongues

So much nicer, don’t you think,
to let thoughts roam freerange,
so much more natural and humane
to let ideas peck and scratch
about the yard of the mind,
kick over a corn cob, take a dust bath,
munch dandelions unconstrained           
by the electric fence of paragraph
and sentence, the barbed wire of print,
the novelty cereal box
of all that bloody utterance.


- Tug Dumbly 2020


Tug Dumbly is a Sydney-based poet, musician and broadcaster.