Louise Nicholas
T.S. Eliot's couch
There was once a couch in the Grolier Poetry Bookshop
in Cambridge where T.S. Eliot snoozed.
Send out scouts to track it down and when they do,
stand two strong men, one at each end.
Let them count and on the shout of three
lift ...
One minute the bird is cutting a curve – blue
in two, the swift repair of air – the next,
it’s glottal-stopped in the throat of a dog.
Beyond lies the dog’s muscled tongue-hug
forcing the bird in a slavered-leather
slide past the pharynx, down the gullet
into the gunge and gore of a slaughterhouse floor.
From their front row seats in the corporate b ...
Peter Roget suffered from depression, disconsolation,
gloom, melancholia, pessimism ...
He lived a life of bitterness, desolation, grief, irritation,
lamentation, misery, pain ...
Not that there weren’t periods of bliss, exuberance,
happiness, joy, light-heartedness ...
Not that he wasn’t awake to the wonders of the world,
to its beauty, brillianc ...
After Karin Gottshall
Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my mother just because
I like saying it. I like it for its mouth feel and pleasure:
... meet my mother.
It was a phone call at 3 am drove those words away.
Three years later, with no conscious effort on my part,
they followed an overgrown but still navigable path
all the way t ...
London 2016
At the National Gallery I pay sixteen outraged pounds
to view the Beyond Caravaggio exhibition. No chiaro
to speak of, only scuro, each canvas caked in mud-brown
and bad-blood red on a background of black black black.
I dodge the ladies of the U3A religious art class, decline
the complimentary depressive illness, and in a quick s ...
Louise Nicholas is a semi-retired teacher and long-term member of the Adelaide poetry community. WomanSpeak, co-written wi ...
