Mick Devine
Winner of The Mundaring Poetry Prize 2020.
I'm currently hawking the 50 minute, illustrated "MIck Devine Verses the Universe" around Perth. It includes some of these...
Widow’s weeds
“I’m tired old girl
Let’s walk to the end of our shadows
Take off our clothes
And go to The House of Dust.
We’ll hang that wreath up on the parlour wall
Then fall like snow into each other’s arms
And afterwards we’ll sleep.”
“Oh husband, you must go ahead
I am not ready for a wooden bed
Besides, it’s a long old walk and you’re a long time dead
But I’ll see you in a year or two
And I promise we will roll together
Where the moonlight streams
Through the broken beams
And the barred and curtained windows
Of The House of Dust.”
The waiters
On candelabraed, white-draped tables
In a snow-bound restaurant
(A barn of a place on the other side of town)
In a country that was never mapped
The fingers of discarded thoughts tap and tap
As they wait and wait for waiters
To bring news of dates who won’t show up.
Still young, dressed to the nines
These memories have lost the minds from which they sprang.
They check their watches.
It’s a long night for the exs of the late-demented:
Pearl-necklaced, evening-gowned, fancy-scented,
They sit around and curse the geriatric poets
On whose young lips they’d played.
Some are songs that never saw the light of day.
Strutting like a peacock in a young chanteuse’s dream
They’d been forgotten come the morning;
Coiffeured, bibbed and tuckered, itching for a dance
They now have bugger all to do.
The love notes scrawled on walls at school
The daydreams of the typing pool
A shop assistant’s reverie
A bottled message lost at sea
The wasted days of boxers, head-the-balls and drunks
The mislaid hours of glued-up punks
These memories have lost the minds from which they sprang.
Ragged-arsed or swathed in sable
They tap their fingers on the candelabraed, white-draped tables
Trapped in a snow-bound barn.
In another country, on a summer’s day
Granny tap-dances her walking stick along the pavement.
She stops, surveys the clouds
It looks like snow
She should go home, but no,
She ducks into McDonalds
Orders tea
“Oh, and while I think of it, young man,
A peacock sandwich please."
Dirty old man
She was so much younger than he
And here they were, alone,
She all flesh and blood,
He all skin and bone.
All bristles, knees and hips
Skin as tight as vicar’s lips,
A slight smell of cheese,
They’d warned her there’d be nights like these.
She stood there with a duty to perform.
She stood there in her nurse’s uniform.
The old man was quite dead.
She drew the curtains round his bed.
Began to wipe the grime away,
As mothers will do every day,
She washed his dirty knees,
They’d warned her there’d be nights like these.
She scrubbed behind his ears
And stroked his head.
She combed his hair
And tucked him up in bed.
She thought about a goodnight kiss,
But no, not on nights like this.
If dead men dream then this was his:
He took that goodnight kiss
And dreamt of the wife he’d won,
Who’d touched him as the nurse had done.
He dreamt of days of bliss
Of when he never dreamt that there’d be nights like this.
“Good morning, lovely weather,” he said
Leaning over the counter and
Unfilling a bucket of goodwill over my head
“I’d like a girlfriend,” I replied
“A friendly, pretty one
And preferably one not delivered from a bucket.”
“Picky, picky, aren’t we? Unbucketed girls don’t come cheap.”
He showed me his stock
I showed him the cash
I pointed to the one with the tiara and sash
Which was a mistake because she turned out to be Miss Worlds Apart
As, when I looked more closely, did all the others
Strange to see them together like that.
Then to make matters worse
The man in the shop turned out to be Mister Parallel Universe:
As soon as he had my money he disappeared.
And she didn’t even come with a free bucket.
It couldn’t last
She kept herself at a distance
Then blamed me for shouting
We never went out together
We slept in separate beds
Took separate holidays
I bought us a tandem
She bought a unicycle
I bought two tickets for the Superbowl
She bought a barge pole
“This isn’t what I was promised at the shop,” I said
But I could produce no bucket as proof of purchase.
She must have slipped out her bedroom window one night
I found a ladder propped there in the morning
A ladder, two lines that never meet.
It had to be him and sure enough
Up from the garden drifted the smell of what could only have been buckets.
And no letter of explanation from Miss Worlds Apart.
Hats
From birth, our heads get bigger bit by bit
So that, in later life, our dunce's hats will fit.
Likewise our parts to fill our knickers,
I grew just one long toe to fill each winkle-picker,
But you’ve not changed since I first knew you,
And yet I’ve not outgrew you.
Post mortem
He is not dead,
My precious lad,
The sun shone out of every hole he had.
He beats within me now and keeps me warm.
I carried him in the beginning
I’ll carry him to the end.
My precious, precious lad is home.
We’ll always have Southend
Apart from the blue rinse
You look just like your photograph
And we take a morning walk along the beach.
Seagulls, winter sunshine,
A cup of tea at the end of the pier.
I take your hand and say, “I’m glad I’m here.”
You visit the fortune teller.
“No hurry, take your time love.”
Then a mid-day stroll through the cemetery,
Your mum, your dad, aunties, uncles, pops and nanas.
I say, ‘hello’ but none of them has any manners!
We laugh.
I suggest a visit to The Kursaal,
You tell me that it shut the year your last husband died so...
“We’ll go and have a cup of tea with my friend Pat instead.”
We stay for some time.
In the late afternoon drizzle, another walk on the shoreline,
You speak at length about your swollen knees.
I find a message in a broken bottle that says ‘two pints’
But doesn’t say ‘please’.
You ask me why it should.
Is that a cold sore on your lip?
You’re having trouble with your hip.
At the public convenience you nip to powder your nose
Or perhaps to have a shave.
We’re none of us getting any younger.
“No hurry, take your time my love,” I say
And you do.
An evening meal, a restaurant on the promenade,
You order a bottle of wine then ask if I’d like one too.
I notice the squint.
A message from Pat: she will be joining us.
You yawn and a spray of tiny serpents
Wriggle and hiss at the back of your throat.
A worm sticks its head out of one of your nostrils
And disappears up the other.
You take a call from your daughter,
Then another from your son,
You go on
And don’t notice that I’ve gone
Until, through the window of The Fisherman’s Feast,
You wave to Pat
And see my hat hurrying to catch the last train out of Southend East.
My dad was a liar
I know where the time goes,
As go it must,
It goes like the wind,
Which explains all the dust.
I do know where the time goes,
I heard it talking to the trees
When I was three
So I asked my dad,
“What did it say?”
And he laughed and said,
“I’m here to stay.”
Then he found a twig
And scratched that lie into the ground with it.
Which suited me down to it.
We avoided cremation.
It would have seemed that time itself had set dad’s bum on fire
As though belatedly berating him
For making his non-carking remark
In the park
Thus consigning him and his joke
To a message in a bottle of bloke.
Now I’m back in the park
And hoping time has been kind enough
To preserve the evidence.
Hmm, I thought as much;
It’s blown all the leaves into a heap
Like secrets the trees couldn’t be trusted to keep.
It’s broken the twigs’ fingers
For their part in the scam
And I’m afraid to say
That all the rain today
Has turned the dust, like dad, to clay.
Which has itself been washed to the same place time goes
Which is either, rather beautifully… away.
Or, less so…down the drain.
Depending on how nice your dad was.
Wolf wanted. Must be discrete.
One Winter’s evening
Hurrying home from work,
The North wind whistled at her
And she a married woman!
She slowed
She glanced about
She slowed some more
She stopped.
She turned down her collar
And took the scarf from her neck
She closed her eyes
And allowed the wind to blow its wicked way with her
Bold as you like the hussy homeward rushes
But walking through the door
She cannot hide her blushes.
Unlucky in love
My dog Lucky passed away today
Over a cliff
I’d seen him put his head out of a car window before
But this was different
He did not bare his teeth
His lips did not ripple
And I did not laugh at his flapping ears
He howled all the way down
I blame her, the bitch
Lucky was a mutt
And not much more than a puppy when he met her
She was a purebred Red Setter
And a good deal older
With a pedigree like that
She should have known better
She wanted his body
But Lucky wouldn’t let her
He’d sniff her bottom
And she’d present
But Lucky wasn’t keen to
Because I’d had him seen to
He bought her a stick for Christmas
Money wasted
She refused to chase it
She went off with a Beagle she met in a bar
He’d made a packet testing cigars
He bought her a fur coat and a fancy car
She demanded a diamond studded collar
And he said he would sort her one
She wanted a dog and he bought her one
The rich are different
Which left Lucky holding the Christmas stick
And he would sleep with it
And his back legs would go
And not very gently
As if he were chasing a Bentley
He stopped eating and his whining broke my heart
So, this morning, whilst we were out for a walk
I took that stick and made it disappear
But throwing it away was a bad idea.
Homosexuality in the 1950s
Henri the stage contortionist
Would twist his body into exotic shapes
Before suddenly straightening
An act which brought the sort of thunderous applause
That might have been denied him
Had he performed it in reverse
Which is what he sometimes did in rehearsals.
Dirty minds
In a dark alley
Behind The Rex
Mary Carey executed her ex
Dumped the cheating sod by the side of the street
Revenge was sweet
She cut off his head
Collecting his thoughts in a black plastic bag.
Took it home and showed her Mother
Who took Mary to the attic
And showed her the others
“You did all this?” gasped Mary Carey
“No, some of them are Nana’s
And Great-Grandma’s too
There’s allsorts here
Dirty, dirty buggers every one
Christian, Jew and Hindu.
Men, they’re all the same.”
Which would be nice if you were talking world peace.
Mary Carey had a daughter
And, in an attempt to break the family tradition,
Gave her away to the nuns at the Mission.
When the daughter turned sixteen she was sent to Rome.
Where, in St Peter's Square
She bedded
Deaded then
Beheaded every man who took a delight in her
Leaving behind a trail of bloodied mitres
And a pile of bin liners that should have been tied tighter.
“Can’t stop
Myself.”
And off she popped in search of other buggers.
But the plastic bags in St Peter’s Square are suppurating
And, in other lands far away from the Catholics,
The collected thoughts of de-bodied Protestant
Muslim, Hindu, Rastafarian and Jewish men
Are flatulating through the puckered bumholes
Of other untidily tied bin liners and floating away.
Most smell of roses
Some of Forget-Me-Nots
Some of Valentine’s bouquets
Some of old ashtrays.
And one or two of rotten apples
Which is a shame
These waft across the polished toecaps of young girls
And leave a nasty stain
Dirty minds, you see
They’re all the same.
Small Title
An open book
“I can see you want to,” says Miss Polkinghorne.
And I do. I smile as I hold open the pages of my Early Reader.
Which is when it happens: ‘Janet can run and John can too,’
But I myself am pinned to the desk by the photographer’s flash.
And I see the sign:
-Last black hole for 20 billion light years-
Wow!
I throw the book into my spaceship’s airlock,
Press eject, watch my childhood disappear over the event horizon.
And engage hyperdrive.
I’m five-years-old.
Goodbye Janet, goodbye John,
See me, see me, see me run,
I wonder how a five-year-old can read and fly a spaceship.
One day we will know,
In the meantime, on and on and off we go.
At eighteen, it has become obvious to me that time is not linear:
From my bubble-topped intergalacticar I can see both past and future.
They lay before me like an unfurled map of everything,
Which is how I‘m able to read the previously mentioned sign.
I have, on several occasions, been waved down on the intergalactic highway
By someone I believe to be Miss Polkinghorne.
I hadn’t stopped, “I could see you wanted to,” she would have said,
Then she’d have asked me where I was going
And I wouldn’t have known.
At twenty-five, I arrive.
It’s a world without end and all the stars are mine.
At thirty-six, or thereabouts, I discover the Instantaneous Transfer of Matter:
Cataphlatrix Six appears suddenly in the co-pilot’s seat and wonderful she is.
However, our love-making organs don’t conjoin as well or as often as I would like
And there are other issues, (steering wheel matters).
Soon our happiness is in tatters and she begins to not-so-instantaneously fade away.
“Given you can see into the future, this must come as no surprise,” she gurgles
And is gone
Before I can tell her of the parallel universe I was counting on,
The one in which we were to live happily-ever-after as dad and mum
To a little Janet and a little John
But on and on I run.
Happy birthday to me, I’m one hundred-and-three.
The leak in the airlock blows out the candle.
By the time I turn a thousand, the gift of foresight has lost its appeal,
Every day the same surprise, and I switch off the engine.
Then I see the previously advertised black hole and realise how far I’ve come.
I pop on through.
There’s nothing here but perfect peace
And my old Janet and John book.
Which must have wormholed its way through time and space.
Look. Look. They both can run.
Good luck Janet,
Good luck John,
On and on and on and on.
Perhaps at my old school they’ve still not solved
The mystery of the boy who disappeared.
And yet I was an open book, so I’d be surprised,
Surely someone saw the faraway look in my eyes.
Waltzing Matilda
There’s frost on the pavement, the front door is open
A light from the kitchen, there’s singing within
The linoleum nips at her feet as she skips it
Matilda is waltzing the evening away.
“Tra- la-lee, tra-la-lee-dum, da da da da dee dum,
Tra- la-lee, tra-la lee-dum, da da da da dee,
Tra- la-lee, tra-la lee-dum, da da da da de dum,
Mind your business, it simply is none of your own.”
Her partner’s a mop with a shock of white hair
He is twirling her nifty to left and to right
“My, my, such a thin boy, but hard as our young days.”
Twice more round the kitchen then into the night.
To swing round the streetlamps in wynciette nightie
Splashing the moon as they puddle along
“Let us dance down the road like there’s nobody watching
Let’s step like we used to when you were alive.”
Oh, Waltzing Matilda, my Waltzing Matilda
Let go of my hand and stop shouting my name
Go inside now Matilda, sweet Waltzing Matilda
Go inside or they’ll call out the coppers again.
“Tra- la-lee, tra-la-lee-dum, da da da da dee dum,
Tra- la-lee, tra-la lee-dum, da da da da dee,
Tra- la-lee, tra-la lee-dum, da da da da de dum,
Mind your business, it simply is none of your own.”
Now the clock’s out of time and her feet they are aching
Her back it is breaking, it’s taking too long
To your bed now Matilda, your midnight fandango
Is over and over and over again.
Imaginary friends
This morning in the park
The toes of baby giants have sprouted through the grass.
They’re mushrooms, of course,
But it’s a cheery thought.
I’ll pass it on.
Not to Gwendolyn:
She waves a hand, then, head down, hurries past
In pursuit of late husband Edwin, always the quicker walker.
Edwin whose mind turned to sand and trickled, egg-timer-wise,
To his boots.
He left behind the trail she follows every day.
Edwin, who, towards the end, asked Gwendolyn to hold his ankles
While he stood on his head.
A lovely bloke,
He liked a joke and would have laughed at my mushroom thing.
No point in telling Percy Pointer,
Ordering his mobile phone about again.
I’m sure there’s no-one on the other end.
Perhaps he thinks the same of me.
He might be right.
Too early for John and his dog
He’ll still be at church talking to God.
John that is, the dog’s agnostic.
Ah, this little schoolgirl I’ve seen before.
No mum today, just her dolly and a packed lunch,
Mother’s Pride no doubt,
Beautifully turned out,
A brand new shadow every day.
This morning she’s trying to stamp on its head.
‘Ha! Only hurting yourself!’ I would have suggested,
If I’d wanted to get arrested.
This jogger has wires trailing from his ears
He sings “Doo-be-doo”,
I wonder if the one wire goes straight through
But he is past before I can ask
And I’m beginning to lose heart.
Then suddenly, out of thin air, she’s there,
My ex... Invisible Jennifer.
(I don’t see her anymore).
What brings her here?
“Why,” she says, “this gorgeous morning!
The greenery,
The scenery
And have you seen the toes of the baby giants?
They’re mushrooms of course but I thought...”
I think you’ll find that that was me, I try to say
But can’t get a word in edgeways.
Oh well, it wasn’t all that funny after all.
Let’s bugger off before she drives us up the wall
Jenny
One imaginary friend too many.
“And who are you my dear?” I hear her shout.
“Are you with misery guts?”
I think she’s talking to you.
