Qualia Soup

Might not know your blue
Know you have sky
Stipulate to your desert priest
Know you have storms
Your suffering dog-silent I admit
Like the girl sang it: you’re star.

Star stuff, no desperation
None available to matter
Nor kindness but a pinprick
Too bright to see alone.

A storm is best mended when it’s past
And if it takes the roof from your head
Listen for the signs in circling, groaning gale:
In the morning prepare to take advice.

Your sky is mine as well my dear,
It’s always there, a wide surprise
Stepping out of our limestone caves
With timing only sensible in the wash-up.

Exhalation once blood is now air
Once rust is now bird
Its colour as pertinent as mud’s
Its qualia holding aloft button quail.

Pituitary Blues

for Karl

It’s a sunny day in Melbourne
The rain is pouring down
I chased the nurse around my bed
I did it sitting down
I think I know just what to do
But I’ll put it off till spring
Easier to wrestle
When them alligators sing
For the minute think I’ll just relax and listen to the band
The pituitary blues has got me by the gland

Oh when them hormones come a knockin’
And the thyroid does the talkin’
It never works out pretty anyway
So go on and do your drillin’
I’ll just be here chillin’
It’s not as if I want the job today

It’s a great day to be going home
Lord knows I need some beauty sleep
This hotel’s got good service
But the barber isn’t cheap
My whusky days are over
Least till my brain begins to set
And women like a bearded gent
Though I knows I makes ‘em wet
So it’s songs I got and I’m gonna sing don’t give a fuck if you can’t stand
Them pituitary blues have got me by the gland

Makeshift Heart XIX: productivity

The heart it melts constantly
You would think it had a limit
It proceeds from some southern glacier
Kept climate change regardless
In the sticks.

Apart from the melting constant
It keeps time rather badly
Operating as if tuned by some other
Alien duid with a set of auto tools
And an ape.

It anticipates your great ideas
And, like a canine weatherman
Your woes, and yet throughout beats
Within quite narrow parameters
Of a muscle.

Like vongole it has no brain of its own
Dependent on the tide and shifting
Sand for a meal, only squirting departure
For defence, and clamming up
To the knife.

Still it’s got me. Wanders when it should sing
Clamours when silent running is the order
Not about to let me do the needful
Perfect in every way as long as there is no world
To be saved.