Selected poetry
Spare a thought
Spare a thought for the humble fruit fly (gnat) the next time you visit your pub
Incepted on fermented yeast nectar to protect itself from parasitic wasps
Hotels attract them like moths to a flame
Its flirtatious, licentious and has poor judgement with partners
One nighter denial
Hitting the bottle with hangovers, withdrawals commonplace
Haven’t we all known someone like that or been through such an episode?
We do have 60 per cent identical DNA ironically
These silent winged socialites and I must be kindred spirits as they surreptitiously sip at the rim of my beer glass
Not a word is said
'I’m only here for the alcohol too,' I say to them
As we both flutter away to a new meniscus
The net casts a broad sweep
Ayah for bambinos
Platforms and forums for the conceited
Paradisical banter decadence
Item providing purveyors
Inspirational mood motivators
Piranhas trolling for a byte
Minnow schools of thoughts with barbed wired mouth hook conspiracy theories
Snaring even the colossal inked squid gangsters with interwoven noughts and crossed algorithms in gendarmerie trawlers
Devoured paroled miscreant herrings
Served up on a seabed of tomato and saffron basmati ‘Chump’ digitalized rice
Toowoomba
In a stilted, modest Queenslander in Cumming Street we lived
Pets, organic alimentation and perishable bartering
Egg producing Cackling Rhode Island Reds, Leghorns and Bantams
Freedom to explore the countryside without fear or anxiety
Long conversations over low fences
Minimal obesity and cancer
Milk bottle and newspaper deliveries
The concrete incinerator that was stoked with household waste
When it kept burning at night Brian and I would run up throw an empty aerosol spray
A steel water tank repurposed as a cubby house
Barbeques on the Besser Brick Spic 'N Span
Dad expertise was the written word and food cremations
The garbo darting in to grab the galvanized 60 litre bin with a six pack at Chrissy for his efforts
Visits from Con the fruiterer with pails of fruit in his grey canvas covered Bedford
Saturdays, the pieman playing Mozart’s 'GreenSleeves' with the speaker on top of his white Thames van
The frequent hum of the Apis Millifera collecting pollen from the Geraldton wax trees
Choruses from the April Starling squadrons roosting on the telegraph wires
The onomatopoeia of grain filled railcars shunting at the Willowburn yards
Dad on his Olivetti typewriter stamping out a new poem for his publisher
Mum with her evocative blooms drifting into the house
No fabricated screens, complex alarms and locks
An unhindered door to a quality life
Crime scene punctuation
Ellipsis is missing presumably foul play
Full stops have come to a disastrous faux pas accident
Exclamation points are on high alert
Apostrophes abandoned in grammatical dump sites
Parentheses have become anchoritic fearing a pogrom
Brackets and braces assassinated with gapped spaces
Hyphen is in disjointed solitary confinement
Dash is associated now with illegal camera footage
Quotations are victim to protracted litigious court proceedings
Commas parachuted into Chairman Mao’s Yangtze River education camps
Semi and colon live in S bend witness protection
Asterisks inhumanely caged in the 1980’s video game ‘Asteroids’
With ghostly chalked outline question marks
Asking how did we let this happen?
Jamie Dawe is a poet.