
murky memories slide in daily about my muddled stint here years ago i grasp on fearful but well-prepared performing my show wasted in a run-down bar to drunk after midnight audiences three nights a week for a month a twisted thing with the body-builder security guard from the twenty-four-hour club and the passing friendship with a famous painter who i’ve heard has died of cancer and how one dusk we sat on a silvery lake in a broken boat drinking whisky from the bottle and making up poems about what we were feeling in the very there of then as a pair of white swans glided with us blue heron called above us and the sky turned orange-pink and whispered to us through our thoughts and words if life ended now we’d know we’d experienced far beyond what many ever will a heart-felt bond between two misplaced artists un-restrained creative chaos and life pushed as far as possible regardless of judgment and consequence by those who live to box and punish and these hazy fragments i decipher through anxious bouts of reflection crawl closer bit by bit i thought they had vanished forever and a single tear dances down my cheek as a messy recollection of waking up in a dirty gutter savagely appears shocks to remind me makes me flush burning hot and if you’ve never jumped on a train of indulgent destruction to find out who you are and lost almost everything to a washy game of anarchy punctuated with humiliating dysfunction you can never understand about coming back slowly and gradually and coming back is what i’ve done since then i think
Stephen House has won awards as a poet, playwright, and actor. He’s received international literature residencies from The Australia Council and Asialink. His chapbooks “real and unreal” poetry and “The Ajoona Guest House” monologue are published by ICOE Press. His next book drops soon. He performs his acclaimed monologues widely.
http://apt.org.au/author/?authorinfoid=58
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