breakfast euphemisms

Click the title of this post to get the link to the news story

boxing day paints itself in sunlit boxes
with tiny decorated trees leaning towards windows,
tinsel curving lazily around the roofs
like forgotten streets on mountain peaks
and a public park, wherein grown men speak
in heated tones that grow from grass and stumps
to bottles and a cricket bat death wish.

This is another Australian summer
spent with children’s faces shielded
a day spent in another Cronulla,
waiting until evening to ask
of the lines between the tabloids
of the six thirty news hour

what kind of anonymous pride is this?

An old crow on the orchards
out the back beaknibbles,
scratching the wrinkled skin of
bark for luscious fruit,
a day’s worth of life wrapped in juice
and pulp, rolled with a stem
and hung.

A snap and the shot is done,
exposed and left, composed.

The backdrop of a black photo album
with too many creases, fingerprints
and an artist who will be gone
by the time we seep into nostalgia.

You and I in our long backed,
bone bending leather chairs
(with holes and moth mansions)
smiling like we used to.

In the evenings we try to match
the squeaking of our rocking
to the click of nightfall poetry
whispering off cliffs and pantry shelves.

Our fingers, together, form a leathered
flesh chessboard, your hands painted
from waving at the morning sun coming,
and my own, white from hiding
until I was dry and hanging.

We should take a picture
in this evening light
but it is much too dark
and mourning is not too far.

a work in progress

“heard of centaurs?” he says,
stirring a pot of coffee in a cup,
overflowing onto bone china and sipped.

“half man, half horse,
trotting on two legs.”

and with that brief explanation
he begins to divulge the very
essence of a non-political
conspiracy theory, that man is
like this mutant in hind.

but where the beast was cleft in twain
and human joined to equine,
man was borne to man,
but not to man the same.

“You see,” he says with a grin
“I have the legs of Freud
which is why, rather than walk, I lie;
astute, sweaty and coy.”

the entire sexual prowess of a man in his mid fifties
summed up by Austrian geneology
and a rusty upper lip
“you see, it’s not just a horse thing
to go around wearing someone else’s head”

he eyes the stuffed noggin of a moose above the counter
contemplating just how many stitches it would take
before he too (by two) could be transformed
into one who is worthy of mounting

I desire/need a typewriter for many reasons.

Watch the video explanation by clicking here

If you have one you want to sell me (for under $30) please e-mail me: sam AT samuelwebster PERIOD com

otherwise, it is to ebay I will go.

More details and explanations to come soon.

Just thought i’d share an idea with you.

a few years back I freaked out that maybe all my poetry (in .doc files all over this laptop, the last laptop, and my desktop computer) might be wiped and I would have none of my work. You just can’t trust digital files. That said, my house could burn down and paper wouldn’t hold up too well either, but one is definitely more likely than the other.

So at the time, cafepress.com just started printing books. These days, there is lulu.com as well. Both work well. So i created a pdf file with all of my poetry up until then (2005) and made a book, paid for it myself, and had it delivered. Now i have a paperback hard copy of every poem i wrote over those years. Very cool. Additionally, you get to see how your work would be set out in print, which is a very useful exercise.

Anyway, I decided again this year that I should re-archive stuff and today cafepress delivered (after only a week and a half - not bad for international orders) the book. The design is minimalist on purpose. It has a picture of me so in 25 years I can remember what i looked like when i made this specific book.

(click the image for the larger version)

very very pleased. I definitely recommend this as a form of backing up and archiving your work.

Tip:
Set the selling price to something ridiculous like $500, because you don’t want passersby on cafepress picking up your complete works, before you’ve had a chance to publish them the first time. cafepress will automatically deduct the mark-up because they give you your own products at cost price. But it will prevent other people from buying them.
Don’t leave a poem or a story out because it’s half finished. This is not for the publisher to see. And that half a sentence might come in handy somewhere.