Peter Yowie Poetry
A Windows seat in a Brunswick Street bar, I watch the human traffic pass by, I’m a wizard with a goblet of fire. The blood sucking cold is here, the wind, hand sewn and frivolous, the privileged few are with us. Tranasaurus Rex on a lady’s jacket and I try to strike up a conversation.
When the lady sings her jazz, some fantastic melody in Vegas where we’re all on holiday from our sins, someone screams out sing it bitch and the audience whips the horses on a fast moving chariot in a show only for the 18 carat gold and over.
A winter night in Melbourne after the rain fell all day. The fine line between pleasure and pain. A forgotten memory, a fantasy that became flesh. She was singing love songs and I was lonely. She was doing to music what the ancient Egyptians did to their dead. It was just synthetic pop but they made them into immortal Gods. That lady and her poker face, now she’s the girlfriend of the joker, because life imitates art, and dreams don’t intimidate..
Happy hour still happens even for a sober man. I was struck by lightning, inspired to write, addiction makes a great story. Through adversity, seeing angels. I saw jesus, I saw Jack kerouacs Doctor Sax.
There’s no stopping time, there’s no going back, the poem marches forward towards it’s reward, memorised by a schoolgirl, read at a funeral.
From hopeless drunk to sober, the week I turned my life around. I’m not a slave to the merry-go-round, I let it go. My addiction, the teddybear in the attic. Alcohol was the promise of heaven only to end up in hell, pretty bottles full of poison, making me forget my reasons for living. I vomit, smash my car,black out, fight, have sex I regret, forget my manners. Jesus’s turned water into wine but maybe he shouldn’t have. I go to a party and by the end of the night pig’s might fly.
The house from hell on the corner, decorated with gargoyles and skulls, by the crossing where the lollipop man shepherds me across. I take my opiate, a dose of blue sunny skies, with an insatiable appetite for poetry, I find myself at the Cafe with coffee, toastie and open notebook. Maybe the devil will offer me a deal, maybe with God it’s not a level playing field.
Is Lady gaga the energizer bunny, soft, pink flesh and sunglasses or is she a fairy who leads me out of the forest, singing with her honest songs because we’re all a little lost?
An American woman on the tram talking with her friend about setting a trap for a mouse, you use chocolate not cheese. I’d just been at the Hive shopping centre, shopping for my addictions, a deal in my pocket, a six pack of beer. But they were a couple of ladies in laughter trying to live happily ever after.
The truth is I have to change, it’s like a light bulb hangs in my soul. There’s shivers on the surface of the river and I’m delivered from another night of drinking. In the thinking man’s Cafe I sink back a coffee with a copy of a book. I think the great poets have a name for it throughout history, it’s called publish or perish.
