Author: Doug Jacquier

Kerosene

/ Doug Jacquier / 22 Comments

This piece was written for the weekly Six Sentence Story with the prompt of Clip.

In my old world, nits were removed with kerosene. Mothers bored into your ears to stop the potatoes growing in there and rubbed at your face with their spit on a handkerchief. Fathers twisted your ears as they dragged you to the scene of your latest sin and the local copper handled juvenile delinquency with the toe of his boot. Teachers clipped your ears to instil learning. I tell my grandson but he just scratches his head. Now where did I put that kerosene?

Word prompt stories – The lifesaver

/ Doug Jacquier / 12 Comments

This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge with the prompt ‘In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about life savers on any body of water. It can be a formal Coast Guard, historical or contemporary. It could be an individual who unexpectedly takes on the role. Go where the prompt leads!’

Around midnight, he would walk down to the bridge and wait, with one foot resting on the bottom rail, staring into the tidal shift below. He would wait for a stranger to appear at the other end of the bridge, mirroring his stance. ‘Time to go’ he would announce and hoist himself onto the second rail. The stranger would come running, yelling ’What are you doing?’ ‘Ending the pain’ he would say. And the stranger would pull him down and take him to the all-night coffee stand just off the bridge. He’d lost count of the lives he’d saved.

New Poets 21

/ Doug Jacquier / 7 Comments

Proud to have been part of the launch of Friendly Street’s New Poets 21 collection last night, in company with Tarla Ritchie and Mark Kramer. If you’d like to buy a copy, they’re a bit old school on payments and there are no e-book versions available but we’d all be pleased if you could see your way clear to having this collection on your bookshelf. 

http://friendlystreetpoets.org.au/…/new-poets-21-now-avail…/

New Poets launch

Word Prompt Stories – Kurdaitcha man

/ Doug Jacquier / 6 Comments

This piece was written for the weekly 99 word Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge with the prompt of ‘write a spooky tale told around a campfire’.

I suggest you read this link beforehand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdaitcha

This was the first cattle drive for the Arrente boy the whitefellas called Jimmy. The whitefellas couldn’t care less for blackfella names. They paid themselves with money but paid the blackfellas with tea, flour and tobacco and their campfires were separate. Jimmy sat silently with the older boys and men. A rogue willy-willy suddenly blew out and then re-lit their fire. Old Tarpot said ‘Kurdaitcha man point that bone. Bin come for him tonight.’ All eyes turned to Jackie, who had been sick for days. Jimmy watched Jackie’s eyes glass over and then returned his own to the fire.

Words of Warning

/ Doug Jacquier / 7 Comments

This is my response to the prompt ‘Warning Labels’ from The A Mused Poetry Contest

The fridge magnet letters spilled out on the table,

followed by the numbers and then a WARNING label.

‘Some more advanced children may well be prone

to spell out things you may not condone.’

Piffle, I snorted, as I added them to the door;

my kids are more adult and their taste is not poor.

What I hadn’t allowed for was their merciless wit

and their ability to give visitors an apoplectic fit.

Thus ‘HELLO BABE’ was what greeted tubby Mrs. Foster

and her balding hubby got NICE RUG. WHAT DID IT COST YER?

The Reverend was rocked by DO SHOES HAVE SOULS?

and Granny by HAVE YOU TRIED SHAVING YOUR HAIRY MOLES?

I gathered the clan and in a voice loud and ringing

said that any more pranks and their ears would be singing.

All was quiet for a while but you can’t stop temptation;

I was greeted with KIDS ARE CAUSED BY MULTIPLICATION.

Despite myself, I couldn’t stop laughing and arranged my reaction

ALL PROBLEMS CAN BE SOLVED WITH A LITTLE SUBTRACTION.

Game over but they must have the last word they decided

with the finale WE CANNOT STAND A HOUSE DIVIDED.

The radio kills people

/ Doug Jacquier / 16 Comments

This piece is in response to this week’s Carrot Ranch prompt to write a 99 word story that includes something heard on the radio. It can be from any station or era. What is heard? A song, announcement, ad? Think of how radio connects people and places. Go where the prompt leads!

The radio kills people. I was 12 years old when the radio killed JFK. Stunned, I rushed out to tell my father. He was annoyed that I’d interrupted him mowing the lawn and just grunted and continued his grass cutting. I was 13 when the radio killed Winston Churchill and National Geographic published a floppy plastic record of his funeral service. I was 29 when the radio killed John Lennon, who I was hearing on the radio as one of the Beatles in the same year that the radio killed JFK. I’m convinced the radio is a serial killer.

What’s a metaphor you, alphabetically speaking?

/ Doug Jacquier / 2 Comments

You’re like:

Abseiling (if you could teach an abalone to seil)

Busking in Brunswick with a balalaika,

Cats who only eat Dine,

Dancing (strictly no ballroom),

Ease (only accomplished without practice)

Fencing without a face mask,

G, but with no strings attached,

Honesty (often unseemly and embarrassing),

Intelligence (seldom found disappearing up itself),

Joy (beware of limitations),

Knowledge, useful for renovating prejudice,

Love, proudly irrational,

Milk, wholesome but abandoned in hot weather,

No (there’s no part of it you don’t understand),

Outrage, the truly righteous emotion,

Psychology, but only if you want to be,

Quagmires, only dangerous to quag dancers,

Romance, but more boon than Mills,

Similarity, except for the differences,

Treasure, unreachable to those without a clue,

Us (fascinating, witty, and cultured)

Vulgarity, forgiven when delivered with panache,

Water (but only when the champagne runs out)

Xanthippe, (the wife of Socrates), the real inventor of Socratic irony,

Yoghurt, just off enough to be attractive,

And, finally,

Zero, rounded, whole,

and nothing more nor less than what you want to be.

A mother’s lament

/ Doug Jacquier / 3 Comments

In the outer suburbs,

in the space between the bush and the town,

therapy is what you get from a physio.

When the cracks appear in the plaster

and they start to match up with your mind,

because the foundations have slipped,

you ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls

because it never tolls for thee.

In the silence you can hear Death whispering

and your GP says ‘take these’.

You scream at the TV and the three-piece suite

and the made-to-measure lined drapes,

‘I invested in you, where is my dividend?’

And these things scream back their nothing response.

Your children, who abandoned your church

tell you to take up yoga and your mouth says ‘yes’

and your heart says ‘is that all there is?’

You’ve played the game

and did what you had to do

and you come to the end

and your kids feed you mumbo jumbo they’ve picked up

with the education that cost your world to give,

their clever minds and dumb hearts

deaf to your rhythms and your reality.

You wish to God your own parents had owned up to this swindle

and that you could stop counting the ghosts

that fill in the gaps in the queue of your past people.

And that your grandchildren knew more about you

than your bottomless pit of little presents.

And that that bastard who mows his lawns at 7 a.m. on Sundays

would stop without having to be asked.

And that any of it made any sense.

And that everything would just stop for a while

while you get your bearings

so that you could know …….. not everything

but just one thing that you were sure was true

for now and for ever

instead of watching the cracks spreading

in all of the plaster.

Some morsels of pasticherie

/ Doug Jacquier / 7 Comments

Sonnet: Be still, my swell-ed heart

I did but see her glassy-eyed, astride

her pied ride as she wended to her home

sighing in her saddle set to the side,

clutching her cask of wine to her bos-ome

Full sore my lovesick heart (and other parts) swell-ed

as Cupid’s arrow shrived my mortal soul

and I resolved to plight my troth once held

by the Fair Young Maid at my watering hole.

Dark Lady, I fulsome cried, be my bride

and let us to Lethe flee and there be wed.

She fix-ed me full-faced but gimlet-eyed

and intoned words that ‘minded of the dead.

“Marry, not marry, for I am wed to Sid

but as to your other needs, whatsay twenty quid*?”

*British slang for a pound

Shakes peer

‘Now is the winter of our wet cement’

quoth Lucy in her sty with diamonds in her silk-purse ears.

Meanwhile, in a battlefield far, far, away, Dicky Three hunched his back,

despairing at the sward strewn with sordid, sworded bodies in his path

and cried ‘A hearse, a hearse, my kingdom for a hearse’.

Hearing nothing but the sounds of silence he bellowed

‘Unleash the dogs of war. Out, damn-ed Spot and yes, you, Fido,

and you, frumious Bandersnatch.

And let no-one ask who let the dogs out.’

But alas, alack, the dud plan of attack now needed a patsy stone.

He roared so all could hear,

“Cry ‘Harry (and Meghan), England and Boy George’ ”

and hied himself to the tintinnabulation of the belfry of Notre Dame.

Thus it was left to the immoral bard, TS (George) Eliot to record,

on a cold, bright day whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

and the clock was striking thirteen,

“This is the way the world ends,

not with a clang but a boom-tish.”

God ignoring the bleak midwinter

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

but I don’t think God did.

A magnetic personality

/ Doug Jacquier / 2 Comments

Your healing,

random,

magnetic,

barely understood,

as you intend.

Home to refugees,

your face reaches in

and palpates (like a surgeon)

that fluttering life muscle

behind their eyes,

and leaves them anaesthetised

with wisdom.

As your moon-tides wax and wane,

these words,

the iron filings of my own secret armour,

cling to your magnet eyes

for company.