Melaleuca

Number 2: August 2009

Table of Contents

Editor: Phillip A. Ellis

Black Cockatoos Death's Honeymoon Wolf Spider Memento A Free Verse Sonnet for you, the Reader The Lakes Sipped The Tightwires

Stuart Barnes Stuart Barnes Stuart Barnes L. S. Fisher L. S. Fisher Les Wicks Les Wicks Les Wicks

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All works are copyright by their respective creators, 2009; the arrangement of this collection is copyright by Phillip A. Ellis, 2009. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/au/>.

Black Cockatoos Once upon a time from Wordsworth's Fields the night sky froze. Orchids under ice Marbled from The Pleiades to the edge of the deep green sea I traced the sexes, the spirals with my powdered fingertips. You turned your head, looked through me, Spoke only once, a strange, twisted horror On your lips - then I knew we'd never Darken the afternoon sun Like black cockatoos. Stuart Barnes

Deaths Honeymoon On Thursday October 23, 2008, The Cairns Post published photographs of a Golden-Orb Weaver devouring a Chestnut-breasted Mannikin. Suspended in the spider's web, the lifeless bird echoed Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini's Angel with the Crown of Thorns. Stuart Barnes

Wolf Spider At Deep Rock a burrow in the wet, brown, winter earth, and in its bell no mad and claustrophobic Wonderland - but eyes of Argus, shiny and bristly and black. A year since my veinal blood cried darkly, like Abel's, from this soil - my heart almost dried out like an Edgar Allan Poe fan's hanging red rose. It first came for me when I was ten - Charlotte, Charlotte Sometimes, so far away, glass-sealed and pretty, bitten above her left knee by a bee, anaphylaxis (twenty years later my Gemini would joke about a drag queen, Ana Fflaxis); bulging eyes, a swollen, red throat; stalking through the school playground's pine bark like a German soldier, scaling my hand frozen like a lake. Again at twenty - I was raped. Then at thirty - by the Yarra, I tried to get closer to God. * Almost thirty-two. At Deep Rock - and I'm no longer in the market for another banner, to kick another dog.

Lyrics quoted by: Smith/Tolhurst/Gallup "Charlotte Sometimes" Fiction Records Limited 1981 Stuart Barnes

Memento At the museum of folk memories, I pause as I pass amongst the exhibits. Collations of gemstones, Iceland spar amongst them. It says still that the sun is here, indoors, the sun that is streaming through windows behind me, impresses upon me the depths of my shadow. I, a moment, forget if ever it's morning or if afternoon has come, my breath caught in the sunlight on stones, the Iceland spar amongst them, as a memory forms. L. S. Fisher

A Free Verse Sonnet for you, the Reader I have not been playing as fair as I might, the rules have been bent and broken in my favour. Such is life, according to the cliche, the words of the famous man once hung till death. And for that fact I apologise, not so much abased and and grovelling, as pure apologetic, pure with dignity, as befits a poet of free verse sonnets. But still, I will work towards a compromise of sorts, lines of suppleness and delight to the reader, even if marked with my customary enjambment: such is life, and so I repeat myself, and that is the mystery of the artist explained--so I repeat myself--no defense, just is. L. S. Fisher

the LAKES Dank wind hobbled by cobble stone wanton water mountains tamed by sheep. Rest is the distance, sliced jowled polo necks shepherded pie. Shelter is a mayhem and the only goal remaining. Loose teeth grinding by the water wheelclouds are stained by tea and our knees displease. The compost of suns everyone. Beside a tectonic fire, argent flux reflected on each corrective lens. Les Wicks

SIPPED

Sydney wanted fresh but sick and blemish had etched that day.

Then our eyes were healed drank the black tincture of a harbour seconded by night, fettled under starsplay. Les Wicks

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the TIGHTWIRES Fear nothing more than young men's passion. It smashes the teeth, the brittle delineation, words slipped between great loves and rape. They invented sport and war to keep it in the lines. Call it quits, eh? The heat can eat the oxygen in an old car. Great art with big tits and spaceships. Anti-politics, cheap gossip, the put down. Led - stoned and frantic. Despite everything, to still see this as the moment alive your self emerging from the sculpture of fists or an outbreak of truth. You and your mates Saturday night. Les Wicks

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