Peter Yowie Poetry
I'm a poet who thrives in the wilderness, seven year career as a Madonna magazine writer, managed to secure a certificate in professional writing, started my life as an airforce cook
Go back to your mad hatters tea party in New York Lady Gaga, for all I care. And the next time any of these singers step on stage they can spontaneously combust for all I care. I listened to Princes love you so bad and it seemed appropriate.
The death of my father brought sadness. In his demented old age and in my own childhood we were like lost children looking to be found, we were both bound by that. Now they’ll spread his ashes in the rolling hills and the wind will blow and the sun will shine, carrying him away across all time. They came and collected his things, souvenirs of a holiday to the world, and memories play like panpipes in a rented car on a drive through childhood. I want to say rest in peace old man, yet there are pieces of me that will never heal. I couldn’t steel myself for the loss of innocence, can I feel forgiveness. I hadn’t seen him in over a decade but time doesn’t fade the scars. The raised eyebrows and voice over a crying baby. He had a choice back then but I didn’t. The house in Black Rock, the branch of a gum tree that broke off and fell down during a storm. The family tree is not normal and that’s why I broke it off with him. I can’t say sweet things when I feel such a bitter sting. Harmless old man, full of charm in his younger days but armed with a secret he carries to his grave and I’m the slave to the memories. One redeeming fact is the stray animals he adopted as pets as a boy. Too many drunk nights playing chess with his mates and the jade and marble chess pieces glued back together are as precious as the children from his own loins. Do we ever learn our lessons or do we just repeat them?
A celebrity crush is not love, but I learnt a lot about myself. Love songs and pop songs, like water they shaped the rock of my heart and loneliness is not so bad, in my life it’s been a step away from holiness. You can carry a pop princess in your pocket, you can be in new York in a minute, you can have the attitude of a cynic and think every song she ever sung was a lie. Spinning in a turntable universe,
Early morning a prince kisses his sleeping beauty, keeping his duty to her he tells the truth about where he was last night. Later when he phones her she says this marriage is a hole in the cinnamon donut.
A smiling clown’s face is shining in the sky and I drink my coffee among pot bellied poets and pigs that fly. There’s a chalk outline around my dream of New York. I listen to the small talk. True love waits for me A New York doll who yells at the traffic, goes left if you say go right. She fell in love with this poet whose heart is a paperweight on an unpublished manuscript. Raindrops in the puddles, kissing and cuddling in the mad huddle. I found out you can take the girl out of New York but you can’t take New York out of the girl, whether she’s putting on her make-up or ordering takeaway, she’s a Cinderella in stilettos. New York in the winter is the big apple the snow white country took a bite out of. New York is not America said David Bowie once At night I shed my clothes, full of deciduous desire, moonlight bride shines through the windows ,sometimes with my poetry I feel like that boy selling frozen lemonade in a truck in New York in the summer who says this job fucking sucks.
A quiet night. The starlight poets are at work with a mixture of burning words the emit light. Poets and ghosts haunt the night. I drank beer until bed and the woke and stared at the walls. The words crawled from my pen to this paper. The world ends. Brittle happiness and the little moments when I held your hand are gone. I am alone. I have always been alone. The poem says so.
My friend works as a barmaid and is studying to be a teacher, and drives a valient and rides a motorbike. She knows all about women in rock, my bandbuddy. She suffered sexual abuse and still gets sexual harassment. Now I’m hearing Lady Gagas song, it ends and the rain rings out on a tin roof. A songwriter in the wilderness, a deer in the headlights. I have followed these divas, and tried to find reasons. There’s a song for all seasons.
People were yelling, one man was barely standing and looked like he was about to drop dead. It was like the tram was riding to hell and I just wanted to get off, only this wasn’t hell this was Melbourne. People seemed like zombies, some had just finished shopping. A lady with dolls, wearing voodoo mascara was playing at happy families, I looked in the pram at her lifeless baby.
Don’t tease me Lady Gaga about an old lady who gives me Valentine’s day gifts because I never teased you about Tony. I’m a Jesus freak and jazz fanatic. I might have to go into the Upper Manhattan chrysalis, the lives of the rich and famous. The days when we wrote our songs on cocktail napkins and no one knew our name are long gone, abracadabra it’s the magic of the creative process
