Les Wicks

Poetry

Contents
About Les Wicks

The Session

Requiem for a Squid

Time Taken

What is Believed

The Compassion, Rut & Self Proposition

The Euthanasia Workshop

By the Wayside

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About Les Wicks

« Me – what can I say? Poetry has been a core part of my life since I was about 19 with a largish
gap in the middle pursuing career and family. At its best, poetry can say things unutterable
anywhere else and I’m completely committed to it. I really am now a one trick pony even if the
beast is as thin as poetry is. I edit and run workshops which provides a bit of income but is much
more rewarding on deeper levels. Most of my publishing work is aimed at getting new
audiences rather than “clogging up” pre-existing outlets. Varying approaches, but some
extraordinary outcomes in terms of getting poetry in front of people who wouldn’t normally
encounter it. As for my own work I feel blessed that I have seen publication in rather a lot of
places/countries/languages. I’ve had 14 books out and still love them all despite their attitude
problems, the latest being Belief (Flying Islands, 2019). If you buy a copy you’ll make me very
happy. I constantly work at bettering my poetry, I don’t share (a surprisingly common) delusion
that I am a (grossly unrecognised) International Treasure. Compared to say actors I have
occasionally said I am not a Streep or de Niro, but I aspire to be maybe Brian Dennehy. But
heard today he has died!
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm »

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The Session

Funny, when an obnoxious shithead

carries your eyes
to the colourful corner.

He’s fat
& a little drunk.
Potbelly is squeezed past shirt buttons
like icing from a piping bag —
that battleground of a sweatstained cotton.

But I forget all the nonsense. His music.

No one image contains this:
the immobile journey off along
cobble lanes candled by bell-floss…
away to the edges that matter.
Piece by piece
drop confected consistencies
that glued me to my linear life.

Doesn’t want followers, a set’s

extraordinary won’t last long enough
to scratch any atlas. So don’t look.
It finds you.

He goes home, the audience becomes homeless.

There’s the hum of true circles.
If we sleep at all
it will be in hammocks of undirected insight
strung between stars.

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Requiem for a Squid

A solitary pelican cut the moon

reflected on the implacable still
of the Hawkesbury River.
Atrociously white,
that glide on the surface with barely a ripple.

Perhaps this scratch of night

was peace for us,
hand in hand on the jetty.
We’d already shed unnecessary words.

But for the bird it was lazy predation.

Does each moment carry
these opposing aspects?
Like estuarine erosion
does death & catastrophe seep
into all our lives’ careful abutments?

A dive, the pouch writhed with its catch

like some kind of answer.

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Time Taken

Sure this wasn’t love

it was as one sided as an angry wank back home
after that party where fights uncorked beside the laughter.

A teenager, western suburbs boys’ school

beauty was hard, was holding the smoke in.
Nothing arty. No one discussed “girly types”,
they would have been targets.

Watched him cross the quadrangle

he was trimmed as a paling fence, smooth as a cricket pitch
those eyes line-marked the school boundaries
his lips lacked only kisses.

We never even spoke,

I talked pussy with the mates
& already felt the yokes of the watcher —
those of us who cannot do outside our heads.
There is a freedom, this unlatchment
but always the traitor hands.

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What is Believed

Minoans didn’t kill the bulls,

those young men & women leapt between the horns,
their ladder to the goddess.
No more suffering for the beasts than
the slap of sandalled feet impossibly dropped from sky.

This useless sacrament

if athletes survived
led to yet another masterpiece on the walls.
To the artist it was process.
For the rest, bread.

Lars turns on his keyboard,

Claudette’s lips seize the saxophone.
Paintstained hands grasp brushes manufactured from bovine tail-bristles
as poets quibble with quills as sharp as the moment of jump.
Another ritual limbers up.

Cities expand down the coast,

they smother the old ones
pluck up the ancient limestone blocks for pergolas, pavements.
“Real” work always has destruction near its centre.

All those sheaves of grace & eloquence

that art-serfs toil to harvest,
they wouldn’t feed one baby.
But there’s still the leap between fears
to sawdusts of wonder.

Centuries on there’s nothing left in Crete

but beauty & olive trees.

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The Compassion, Rut & Self Proposition *

There’s news just in from neuroscience

& it’s not pretty.
By some scholarly criteria we don’t exist.

Music is a tingle in the nucleus accumbens

right between the eyes
but no one can truly hear or see.

Circumstance, experience is data. The soul

is a sweeper for the mind which
fools itself or with itself the difference:
breadth of a blade.

Thalamo-cortical system collects the toll thinks itself

motorway though it’s a lane that feeds elision.
Our complicated machine, the cheating circuitry so busy
but creates only those baubles
& babbles we call insight.

Violence at a distance satisfies completely.

After everybody worked hard to make them, those
sweating divinities in their beach cottages have
no option as they spray supplicants
with their briny amnesties.

There’s deceit in each choice, psychiatric hygiene.

Forget your education.
Crippled primates on a new tangent
have fallen from the trees into office cubicles.
Ali al-Sistani says Quran okays
masturbating in front of one’s wife
so long as she helps.
Torah lets you eat locusts, but not oysters.
Look at those switches —
the processing of speech, facial recognition,
social emotions like shame — click, click.

*
This and the following poems are from Les Wick’s book Belief.

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The occipital lobe censors out
the rubbish streaming in through eyes
that wear their black spots like a promise.
Consciousness — that narrow light,
flange of brain — a frilly dress for agony, desire.
Therese’s swearing pertly, symmetrical bones —
just looking at her lights up reward centres.
She’s thinking about work the next day.
Adrian’s conditioned rape response kicks in.

Amygdala screams as easily… all connected —

polysemy pile-up towards the narrowest of consensus,
if we’re anything perhaps we’re cabling & fluids
senselessly cooking in the brainpan, bubble’n’squeak.

Accelerant intellects across the globe ignite tiny suns

yet still are astounded by xmas lights…
toddlers & meddlers all of us. The defence presented…
what else would one expect
with those lopsided cranial hemispheres.
We’re mostly lethal to ourselves,
our old & damaged, new & selected.

Friends reinforce the collage of fiction that we are.

Addicted to praise, we grasp for one sure thing.
Like vigilantes we preserve
these flintier figments... burn through cities
to keep us reliable, right.

Certainty is a kind of lunacy.

A peer buys the drink
then you are reassured
effervescence in the beer, you are so here.
Boss gives you honey,
you drown in it. No sin, only synapse.
To eliminate surprise
psychologists promise deep but they are
orchids high in rainforest boughs,
way above relevancy.

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Identity scaffolds are up
but nothing gets built it’s
about the scaffolds. The dorsolateral prefrontal
takes you for a night out
under the town.
Eccles’ World 3 stops talking to World 2.

We’re all on the blood bus

& you can’t trust this
incident we call being. Bundle theory,
each one of us is a crowd.

Create a bright side.

Let all the philosopher/neurologist nit-pickers
lurch about this implacable complexity.
A new connection, a lubricant,
allows the wounded to wobble
towards the end of life with
fantasy padded around their every tumble.
Humans, screaming death-sacks all,
shuffle through their moves.

But but but

optimists putter like two-stroke engines
towards the affirmations outside this argument —
those anagogic mountaineers.
The Empathy Trick
has tiny audiences in tears.
You say “what about our kids!” I go all
softy gooey nest-mess so
pre-programmed & evolutionary.
We defecate predictability.

Doctors snip & a handful are silenced.

Shucking their unisex scold’s bridle
a few ride beyond conviction
to a knowledge deep in meat.
Parmenides’ juggles-full of nothing,
Anselm’s absolute good & perfection in a notion.
The flotilla of words show a certain flexion,
we are clever within our cage.

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Free will, though never free,
can free. The next step
could be a revelation.

Small charges ignite a numinous spurt.

This can become a fountain, look!
The day after rain
we abandon our homes for sandscapes,
white cockatoos croak like consumptives
a frantic pair of currawongs feed a craze of family,
this is no black/white binary no leaf/sky absolute.
Neighbours stand in gawk beneath simpleton sunshine as it
burns this small globe pure.
That awe, if swindle, is worth any cost.
Which is also imaginary anyway so why worry?

Then there is the brainchain.

My thoughts bounce from hers she touches
strangers, this neural brushfire is perpetual
& a world-changer. If each self is a cascade,
an almost random deluge,
what is our community of selves?
There is an inundation of hatching outcomes —
all potentials, all hope.
Despite rats in the eyes,
Damian’s patience has cured Sharon’s hurt
and thereby cured himself.
A sacrament sits within simply listening.
That succession of aware entities that we are/will be
is a gift, a harvest.

Neurotheology — god is in giggles. It is the hymn within \

our Personal Delusional System.
Neuroplasticity — we can sculpt
a future with our laughter, invent tranquillity
or dance with fairies. Irrepressible glory —
I will lay down my life to pretend it matters.

If it’s all just blips

then that makes our sorcery a perpetual surprise.
There is yet more

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sounds like a prayer,
I built my churches about this murmur
(though the conniving cortex would say that).
\

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The Euthanasia Workshop

Mark & I have both seen ghosts.

For two agnostics
a surprisingly comfortable realisation.
But no ghosts today,
I’m sitting with dozens of 60 70 80 somethings
all eager for gossip from the fast-train to dust.

There are hugs from friends, how come

so many repeat attendees?
Are they checking on who’re still around
their pre-purchased poison wrapped in foil
on the fridge door shelf beside the mustard?

While Esther thinks her heart pills will do the job

Barry’s bought the nitrogen kit online with
(of course) a recyclable plastic bag.
Mexico has Day of the Dead veterinary bus tours
while a civil Chinese online supplier
called Smith is 100% genuine.

When I run across a colleague at the tea-table

we both bluster Knowledge is power yeah right.
Seems like demise is the last challenge…
one has climbed mountains
& surfed that stupid-huge wave off Oahu.
We frocked & balding adventurers
won’t be pushed, we’ll jump.

Even modern death has such a hurry

no time for cupcakes & pretty monologues.
There’s much laughter —
especially when we hear Grace’s rehearsed last speech
was short-circuited by the fast reaction —
her last words — This tastes like shit.
No way Nembutal can pass as a cocktail
our final sip has disgust built in but
right to the end life costs,
there’s always an aftertaste.

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By the Wayside

Over the drinks

Alise started discussing “us veterans”
as though we had conquered something real.
There were enough stories that day, our
backs bent, the calcium dust we shed
as we struggle on towards dotage.
There’s a form of war
universally fought against the years.
She had a hit in the 80’s.
Staunch, she faces this foe
that always defeats but that’s
not the point.

Later, look her up on google, 251734 results.

Then think back
her ex-lover Janet
that careless brilliance the photographs, poems
her singing voice raw with gitanes & clarity.
I think about the “fallen”,
those casualties to narrative,
the ones who shone with promise
flared a few years then disappeared.

Because I saw Janet last month, North Wollongong.

Written out, whatever-happened–to’d.
She’d raised 3 kids,
2 of whom weren’t her own. Her 4th education
was in a psych ward she
graduated with a patience for small circles.

A next-door neighbour loves her unconditionally

though Alzheimer’s has robbed most context.
Janet cooks. & laughs.
This is now her audience, her demographic.

There are so many of them —

Remember? Where are they now?
Some had predictable disasters.

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Of course, my own irrelevance crowds at the edges
& is itself irrelevant.
My place is guaranteed in the void.
Incidentally, so is yours.

Janet said I still dabble

as though it were an embarrassing affliction.
We patched in the decades,
cracked a few revelations.
Beachfront café was shared like a joint —
the crackle & smoke obscured
loss, apology.

I didn’t say
she wouldn’t have acknowledged
that nothing stopped that didn’t need to.
There was no point discussing
contradiction & regret.
She was dying, pancreatic cancer.
Notions of fame & achievement
had walk-on roles, comic relief.
Our respective kids are doing great,
though we are anxious about them.

Brilliant careers aren’t worth

the confetti they’re written on.
Worn out is a core part of the contract.
It’s a tiny dire.
I hunger for her dignity.
She’d swap me
for 3 more months.

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