dannyboy

Stan visits no more


Uncle Stan, thickset, solid, as if shaped
like the convict stone fences that slide
up and down the hills of Victoria, pushed
through the mud, a limp courtesy of the man,
bow legged, his hand clutched the Gladstone
bag and fairies always in his green eyes
dancing to the clink of two large beer bottles.

The road was mud or dust in those days
before The Oz wizard paved everything
in Australia into a shiny 60’s suburbia;
deep pot holes and shrinking frog pools
sprouted all over, ruts showed where a boy
dragged a eucalypt stick, the companion
through many school return trips home.

Dad would be standing on the porch,
in the heat, angry as beetroot uprooted
before the need, mum washed her hands
in a tea towel stolen from a Coles
Comeuppance store, floral dress, sore feet,
her eyes distant as the whisper she loosed
and none of us heard yet all understood.

Stan brewed trouble in that magic bag
of his. Auntie Bid - his maybe time wife -
never paid him no more bed-heed, went of
with her bevy of loud girl friends that I
would later meet in pubs when I was eighteen,
leaving Stan to potter through the family, a smile,
a wicked idea of what it was to be grown.

My brothers ran to meet him, stood happy
beneath that ruffling of their hair hand
as rough as the tar roads that only later
would cover our tracks. I stood beside
my mother, hand against her hip, at that age
her womb still held more pull than the bag’s,
and Uncle Stan’s, manly amber contents

and I knew with Stan’s arrival, dad’s words
would rise and rise, and he and Pop
who slept in our lounge room, kept pills
I liked to rattle hidden in old drawers,
would argue over the splinter of their lives
into another ugly night, dad’s singlet as stained
as the heavens, his voice a childhood terror,

and then that midnight flicking on of the light
his tears, my blinking eyes and Stan
in the faraway distance wailing, a crippled Tomcat.
Dad died fighting the drip, incoherently mumbling
about a desperate duty to fulfil while his girls
gathered and the men, we now were, drank
themselves to a stillness that bordered on violence;

but Stan slipped quietly into the cold night, a life
bruised as easily as a yellow petal; not much to tell,
about his severance, a stumble, the fall to the left,
a surprised clutch – no one even bothered to notice
the two broken glass bottles, or smell the spilt fluid
as it seeped down the back stairs, nor cared too much
about the Gladstone bag open; a grimaced mouth.

Damian_Rucci

Amazing. I think this might be one of the best poems I have ever read. I don't really see anyway you can improve it, but that might be because I suck at critiquing poetry. But I loved it !

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Check out my blog: D.F. Rucci's Writing
Fourth Lyrical Album coming out July 4th! Check out:
"Cannabis" "Farther and Farther Away"
"Never Beating Heart" "Killing Me"
"Trapped (Lia's Wings)" "Birds"

SadLuckDame

How cool and full of character, charm. Quite intriguing and well done in my opinion.

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Well, it was a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won, if it hadn't been for that nasty Knight, that came wriggling down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let's pretend -- -" And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favorite phrase "Let's pretend."
written by Lewis Carroll

dannyboy

thank you both