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    Midnight Radio: ninety meditations on love and desire
    Midnight Radio: ninety meditations on love and desire
    Midnight Radio: ninety meditations on love and desire
    Ebook89 pages48 minutes

    Midnight Radio: ninety meditations on love and desire

    By Michael Sariban

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    About this ebook

    Midnight Radio explores the complex landscape of intimate attachments, offering nuanced, original perspectives on the ambiguities that pervade them. The collection reflects a clear-eyed intelligence and a sensibility at once ironic and vulnerable. Often conversational in tone, satisfyingly varied, these compact yet multi-layered poems,

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDebbie Lee
    Release dateFeb 20, 2024
    ISBN9781761096877
    Midnight Radio: ninety meditations on love and desire

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      Book preview

      Midnight Radio - Michael Sariban

      Midnight Radio

      MIDNIGHT RADIO

      ninety meditations on love and desire

      MICHAEL SARIBAN

      Ginninderra Press

      Midnight Radio: ninety meditations on love and desire

      ISBN 978 1 76109 687 7

      Copyright © text Michael Sariban 2024

      Cover image: Clive Robertson

      All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

      First published 2024 by

      Ginninderra Press

      PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

      www.ginninderrapress.com.au

      CONTENTS

      Midnight Radio

      Acknowledgements

      In memory of my wife Joan, who seriously pushed me;

      for poet Mark O’Connor, who read my first manuscript;

      and for Martin Duwell, most attentive of critics

      MIDNIGHT RADIO

      After Dark

      It’s after dark and raining. Every car that

      passes just passes the water around, a muffled

      hiss that drowns in our ears and revives

      and is drowned again.

      Rain sprays its trademark graffiti over cars

      texting at lights, mixes itself into a soundtrack

      that slows or speeds up like heartbeat.

      Let’s go inside and turn our backs on

      the neon signs flashing their gospel above

      half-empty towers – advertising reality,

      telling us how to connect.

      Telling us what to expect. Virtual reality’s

      so real, it can take buildings out

      in broad daylight.

      Our own reality’s still hardwired just the way

      we like it – unaugmented, but enhanced

      rediscovering primitive skin.

      Let our avatars rehearse their roles,

      tonight we won’t let them in.

      Long Way Home

      Outside, the streets are dismal with rain,

      cold with early nightfall.

      He thinks of the music waiting at home, music

      that warms him like Scotch, and some nights

      makes up for his life.

      Home is a train ride away. The streets, as if

      designed for this, convert water into light –

      the roadway shimmers, cars shine like trumpets,

      their engines muted by rain. Neon signs are

      washed clean of their sin.

      He’s waiting for something to cut through the

      talk, through the competing perfumes, through

      the beer woven into the carpet.

      Out of nowhere a pair of hands sets about

      turning smoke-filtered light into sound, which

      some will convert into colours.

      No trumpets bleating, no sax repeating

      some pain he’d rather ignore –

      just a piano picking its way through a forest

      of snow-laden pines;

      just footsteps by the side of a road,

      a hitchhiker smudging into the dark to be

      neither murdered nor saved.

      Dead of Night

      When most people have unfolded like cartons

      into the flatness of sleep – brains

      cocooned in delta waves, bodies rocked

      only by breathing –

      the night bird appears as if to remind us

      of the dense beauty of darkness;

      perhaps to seduce us into believing

      that the dark is all there is.

      Wedged deep in the trough of the night,

      we reach for whatever picks us up before

      setting us down again.

      Some lose themselves in a screen;

      some introspect, start confessing things

      to the only witness around, though only

      the fabulous night bird can be totally

      believed.

      Ghosts are such a tease:

      there you are, hand on hip, acting as if

      you still lived here, hearing the night bird

      with me – I’d reach out and touch you

      or put my hand through you, if only

      you would stand still.

      Outlines

      You’re tracing the outline with lipstick

      as if there wasn’t the slightest chance your

      hand could get it wrong –

      there’s confidence, if you please.

      You are giving your mouth its shape, your

      arm at the angle I know so well – this

      is who you’ll be for the day, and I’m not part

      of the conversation you’re holding with

      your double.

      I follow your hand, the line of your wrist,

      an intimacy no less frank than nudity’s

      full frontal –

      and the mirror that watches you so closely

      has nothing on my gaze.

      At your age, I suppose, you’re not as

      wary

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