Is it all sweetness?

from a retinal dewdrop

on the poultry coloured forearm

in a train carriage

in private.

 

Is it all sweetness?

the twitching of one's body

underneath goliath’s breath

churning the soul into

 vapid butter.

 

Is it all sweetness?

those soft fleshy feet

on the brittle ground

which hums statically

like Parkinson’s disease.

 

And that the sky, and that damned sky

which conspires with the gleaming wet light

to anoint a thousand heads in convalescence.

 

 

 

ii.

Cross the road quickly:

There’s a yellowed finger of a man grieving for clarity

who knows no sky?

on the ground outside the TAB

in a pair of 30 year old denim-jeans.

 

Change seats:

there’s another whose frame tore with each cough

whom I offered a sip from my water bottle

and in thanks told me he had 8 months to live

because his lungs were starched with mould.

 

Pretend there’s a friend ahead of you and jog towards them:

there’s a paranoid schizophrenic with a bandaged hand

and crow matted hair

urinating in a McDonald’s cup

only to drink it later.

 

Smoke up.

I think there’s a horde of welfare recipients

living indifferently in a

thousand unused ashtrays.

-somewhere out west

 

 

 

iii.

 

Pick ya self up by the bootstraps

stop being such a pussy, and have a beer.

 

Pick ya self up my the bootstraps

stop being foreign and weird with ya weird hair culture.

 

Pick yaself up by the bootstraps

get educated, get a trade, get a big nose. Hell, get a big face.

 

Pick yaself up by the bootstraps

stop crying over the unfortunate state of most things.

 

Pick yaself up by the bootstrap

collectively wank over the graves of the disenfranchised with ya mates.

 

Pick yaself up by the bootstrap

and exonerate the shit.

 

 

 

iv.

I think everybody’s a little bit too drunk.

 

There always assaults and death

Madness and chivalry

Infused like cheap medicine

In the drinking water

 

And there we were thinking it was E coli.

 

 Maybe I’m a bit too much of an introvert

I mean, I haven’t devoured a smile in weeks

although I don’t mind unhappiness or Kuru for that matter

Its just all those sneers are starting to give me the willies.

 

I can’t read a newspaper without having a panic attack

sitting like a widow in mourning

until the charred bench dissolves

so I use the front-page to wipe my ass instead.

 

 

 V-

The twitching

in the tourmaline basin of the sea

a discordant twitching

can be remedied by conception

and not perpetual eating

for you is not a worm.

 

The sun dilates and contracts according to the natural laws.

-not the depth of your life acquired pantry.

 

The soft fleshy autumn ground whose gentle murmurs

are stifled with this collective arrhythmia.

were melodious to the archaic long ago

-haven’t yet ceased to sing?

 

The world continues to become and become

it hasn’t once stopped

by volition or will of man

and nor will you.

 

Do you realise?

it is all sweetness, my sweetness..

from the perspective of a retinal dewdrop

on the poultry coloured forearm bound in skin

-the sacred mother of us all

begging with amphetamine cobalt eyes

in a train carriage

In public.

By James Kenneth.