Pages Cafe ’05
I’ve discovered that AustLit have a full bibliographic listing of my publications, including this chapbook published in 2006 to say thanks to the poets who performed at my Poets Corner events between 2005 and 2008.
Each poem is now registered and available to read, including a poem by Jack Thompson’s (the actor) father from an out of print book which I later gave Jack, re-published with his kind permission:
The Sunbather “I shield my face. My eyes are closed. I spin“ 1935 poetry (p. 41)
AustLit requires certain hurdles to jump if you want to read the poems, so I’ve copied one of my poems from the book “Pages ’05”:
Suits and Ties
Your corporate wardrobe titillates.
Challenges me to abandon –
invites you to swim with me –
in a sea wet with desire.
Throw off your hard shell,
your calm, controlled exterior
and reveal the let-go you.
The knot of your tie,
like seaweed trapping
the unaware swimmer,
restricting your neck –
choking. Stopping words
that reveal your heart.
Speech splinters jab at me
– stabbing me with purpose
pricking my memory of
a shipwrecked love
laid low in my sub-marine.
I want you to loosen your tie
with purpose, invite intimacy,
soul revelations as you
breast-stroke in deep water –
prove the want – the known need
to be swamped by passion.
The three-piece suit necessary
clothing – layers hiding…
Providing warmth, weighing
where sun shafts can’t penetrate
or offer paths of lighted guidance.
Relinquish your quintessence!
Allow this sensual drowning
– while arms cleave in swells
of touch, taste and heat –
liquid languishing laid naked
to my reciprocal need.
Dismiss the discipline
of habitual analysis?
Take off those polished shoes –
shake off the weight and surrender
to feelings incomprehensible
to the clever business brain.
Allow unknown, unrehearsed,
unrestrained actions –
releases of reason, to win.
I watch you purposely dive
our murky, bottomless depths.
Hands locked together, arms
pointed straight above your head
protecting – patiently proving
your commitment, your leap
with one compulsive breath
into our eventual eternity.
Frances Macaulay Forde © 2003
(First appeared in “Hidden Capacity ~ a poet’s journey” published in Ireland, 2003.)
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