Breath

by George Anderson

He dies slowly by degrees
as if each breath is his last

his lungs shithouse after decades
of smoking & foundry work

attached to his oxygen machine
each strangulated snort a reprieve.

He sits there on his bed, his eyes
darkening, ‘Why do you live way

the fuck down there?’ he asks.
I shrug my shoulders. Beats me.

I guess I like the weather. I don’t
tell him how I like being away from

family. How they screw your mind.
How they limit you. He struggles

to sit up on his bed positioned by the
back door. He can’t make it upstairs

anymore. ‘Don’t get too fucken fat’,
he cautions, his belly flopping over

his pants. Later in the night I sit at
the kitchen table in the dark & stare

at the red light of his monitor, the old man
sucking, gasping for each goddamn breath.

Writers’ Festival

by George Anderson

I beg you to come with me to the readings
at the Wharf. Some big guns of the
Oz poetry scene are to be there:
Beveridge Kalafa Ballou Jones
You bet me I can’t stay awake.
As we listen to the crinkling new manuscripts
on the grey sobering day I hear you yawn
beside me.
And again.

The readers are tentative.
Serious. Almost apologetic.
Reading their listless verse.
Acknowledging the polite clapping of the audience.
A couple of lesbians take digital photos.
I listen intensely but no images strike home as memorable.
One poem uses a large block of wood as an extended metaphor
related to the creative process & one collection is set entirely in a Buddhist commune in Tibet.

At the end, a greying bespeculed publisher of ongoing
government grants mumbles a few words of tribute and
says, ‘I guess that’s all the time we have’ and the people
quietly file out.
I would love to punch him in the fucken face to gauge his reaction.

I shake you awake.

It’s true what you say about the marginalisation of poetry in this country.
At the top it’s a closed shop reeking of passionless, humorless academic verse.

But I stay awake. You owe me one.

We listen to Coltrane’s ‘Crescent’ in the car
& as you take me in your mouth
his wordless, defiant search for meaning becomes widely apparent
growing ever so bold and swollen-

soon splintering

spluttering
into the moonless drive of the take-away.