Writing on a Brown Bag in Freo

i.m. John Forbes


I write on a brown paper bag,
The Collected Poems of John Forbes inside.

See, over there,
a young man in everything black
waves his guitar, present tense,
at the traffic in Freo's High Street.
He crosses to New Edition. Perhaps
I bought the book he wanted
to spend his busking money on.

How our days are The Collected,
our faces in the street, poems
pinned to each page
reverently. I want to put
coffee rings on each one, a little
weed here and there, sprinkle
a proprietary pharmaceutical line
over all …

Our busker doesn't have
a guitar case, his strings open
to the weather, face grimacing
at the exhaust of buses before
a night playing in human exhaust.

In our exhausts of life we had
furniture removal in common -
mattresses, beds, wardrobes,
jarrah drawers, even old Frigidaires
with their round shoulders and weird handle,
too heavy for the wages.
Already the myths need regassing.

So now I write on a brown paper bag,
John Forbes inside. I shake him
like a rattle: echoes spill, click-clack rhythms
of the heart. I take The Collected out, put
the bag to my lips, fill it with air
and burst it on my knee.

~ ~ ~

This poem, in an earlier draft, appeared in 'foam:e', http://www.foame.org an ezine which arose from the works on poetry esresso a couple of years back.

From the site: We invite submissions for the next edition of foam:e to be published in March 2008. Please use the word foam:e in the subject line and send your poems as text in the body of an email to the editor.

Submissions will be accepted between March and November 2007