Auckland Poetry

Senryu

Death is brainless
Commits senseless acts of harm
Just like a hooligan

Let The Night Commence.

The drops that fall from a leak on the roof
down into a bucket on the floor, are not equal,
because each one has a different ping and
vibrating echo, but each drop harmonizes and
together make enchanting water music.

No concert should last longer than two hours,
more and the mind numbs, this ignominy can
be avoided by putting a towel in the bucket,
(sotto voce) and the business of sleep can begin,
because that is what nights are for.

But before going under, not knowing whether
I’ll wake up or not, I think of the loves of my
life: Edith Piaf and Marilyn Monroe, both
unobtainable, both tragic heroines; so should
I not ask myself why I love famous losers?

Perhaps I should but not tonight, beside I’m
not a psychiatrist with a diploma on the wall,
only a tired, elderly man who has to go to
work painting other peoples houses at dawn,
to pay doctors big bills for my longevity.

So Bring Light Then

My body had been interred in the prairie
landscape, I stuck a steel rod down soft
soil till it met the lid of the coffin; so it was
true then, yet it was eerie that I was here
above ground while my body was slowly
absorbed by the earth.

There are many red Indians about, they all
have droplet horses and one, small as a pony,
nodded friendly, yes, I had seen it before in
western movies it had been especially good
at falling, so I mounted it and of we trotted
away unseen by the indigenous people.

Further on men in jeans and big hats, called
cowboys, were fencing in a watering hole,
they were men with secret desires that were
biologically a blind alley, but the only time
they touched was when they fought in the bar
or when sharing an Annie-get-your-gun.

The prairie was as big as an ocean and at
the horizon I saw a bright yet welcoming
light that I noticed the Indians was walking
towards, bad on my feet I kept on riding till
I was inside a light that was free of mortality,
and it was good to be amongst the braves

Dawn.

I closed my eyes and saw
another universe,
millions of stars,
red and green planets,
gigantic faraway eruptions and
clouds of cosmic dust.
No life there, eternal night
and empty silence.

Opened my eyes and
saw through curtains
a square of light, dawn was seeping in,
a new day, a beginning, renewal
and the hope of peace.