by Doug Jacquier

This piece was just published by Meuse Press in Australia.

Dear ‘Bring Back The Lash’,
What is it that you want us to do?
To witness for the children
(who live with the ‘monsters’
that dwell in the mysteries
of mythical ‘other’ suburbs)
while saving the Family?
To seek remorse from the children
of beating, beaten fathers
for spraying your walls
like strutting, rutting tomcats
prowling your memory lanes?
To firmly guide the child-mother
to the double-breasted state,
in the secret hope of confiscation
of the child-father’s heir
for replanting in the middle ground?
To guide the steps of the dispossessed
to the paths of committee righteousness
where the swords of primal anger
can be beaten into submissions,
the ploughshares of the damned?
To muffle Black voices
and stumble into families
two hundred years in the breaking
and steal back black youth’s Dreaming
at two hundred k’s an hour?
To hear your rage in silence
as you birch us for our weakness
and hang us from the headlines,
while the raiders of the lost economy
brief lawyers in tax havens?
As we stumble to the millennium
doing more tricks with less,
we scan the darkness of your charity
and our own wounded, winding road
for a light to guide us home.

The wonderfully named Rat’s Ass Review just published these musically ratty efforts of mine.

BUS STOP DREAMING
 
Sitting at the bus stop,
the bleak midwinter arrived in
the middle of winter
and it was bleak.
Not moor bleak;
more bleak than that.
The wind was keen,
not in that American neat way
nor like mustard,
but sharp
and bleak
because it was midwinter.
I watched it being bleak midwinter
until I nodded off.
In my dream I saw her
through the glass darkly
of the doors of
the bus to nowhere
and I knew I had to
make her mine, make her mine, make her mine.
I leapt aboard and raced up the aisle
dodging the mardi grass dancers,
knocking over old men that looked like Keith Richards
and trampling on the children of the revolution
until I could see her
gazing out the window at Itchycoo Park.
I dreamed that I jumped off at the next stop
and ran through fields of wildflowers
as if in slow motion
until she fell into my arms,
heels in the air,
and we kissed in the heat of the night.
Later, we would perform Shakespeare in the park.
She would wear a yellow cotton dress
foaming like a wave on the ground around her knees.
I would sport a strip-ed pair of pants
and follow her in the dance
as the park began melting in the dark,
with pea-green rain pouring down and
our passion would flow like pea soup in the sky.
We would take a magic carpet ride
and travel with birds
like tender babies in our hands and
look down on old men
playing chess by the trees.
Until I awoke
and it was still mid-winter
on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
 
 
IN EXCELSIS
 
Patti, the Horses-faced harbinger of rock,
who was a girl named Johnny
who said let’s dream it, we’ll dream it for free, Free Money
who kept Mapplethorpe and Shepard a-muse-d
who birthed children and watched men die too young.
who wrote with Springsteen ‘Because the Night’ said so,
who lost the plot to ‘Hard Rain’ singing Bob at the Nobels.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not hers
People say “beware!” but I don’t care
the words are just rules and regulations to me
and her name is, and her name is, and her name is
G-L-O-R-I-I-I-I-A
in excelsis day-o.