i read:
do not read these words

too late

i read:
wet paint do not touch

too late

I read:
open your heart open your mind stop reading

just in time


MChallis © 2014

for my darling jan*

I woke at 2.30am and left you sighing gently as you slept,
checked the trap but found only droppings on the floor
I set the trap again and hoped the rats would leave –
I would prefer not to **** anything.
The dog mawed and moaned at its fleas
rubbing against the rail on the back verandah,
it settled when I whished it back inside to sit
(my mouth made that wist noise, the one you know the dog will hear but won’t wake the sleeping).

I lay on the red couch in the study and read Ray Carver.
A return to Carver simplifying me. If not by sleep I was
comforted by his weave of innocence and knowledge.
Ray started writing poetry in the year I was born (1957),
I don’t know why I mention this, perhaps I feel him like a kindred
spirit and am warmed by even the slightest connection.

Between the living and the dead are the sleeping. However being at rest
is no excuse for ignorance. Ray is at rest - some 18 years.
His poems like me are alive and breathing.

The magpies begin their morning carol as I return to bed at dawn.
Your breath and skin have waited for me.
When we wake, I tell you,
I am grateful our poem continues.



MChallis © 2010/2014

The smooth force of ****** skin
carresses and moulds me in stone.
I stretch to the contour
groin the hollow
nurtured and naked
for sacrifice.

Grave friend, grey faced
steady eyed friend
shallow edge
great heart
melt with heaviness the torsion
in each of these limbs.

I surrender time to the mother of you,
dry tenderer, assauger of guilt, you
who holds up day, and lets down night,
who bundles and sprawls me
like a rough shouldered parent.

I search for the place of no light in you,
close my eyes to your dreaming
seek out eons you’ve sloughed off
and deeper, how your weight pulls the gravity out of me,

I surrender
and can fall no more into the rocking
rocking lap of you;
mother how can I fold into you
how can I surrender
how can I add my breath to the sigh of you?





MChallis © 2005/2014

Listen son
It’s al ‘right to feel
It’s OK to cry
It’s even acceptable to not be perfect
In everything you try

Failure can be positive
If bent another way
A kind of subtle back-burn before
The fire of success comes your way

Its not the end of everything, but the
Beginning of something new
It’s probably the way you see it
Is the shape that comes to view

A mountain so enormous
Never seeming to be climbed
Until you’ve done some treading
Most likely one foot at a time

Some day you get right up there
You’re laughing with the clouds
And at some stage you lose your grip again
Falling all the way back down

So you pick yourself right up
Spit gravel from your mouth
And head to other climates
I’m recommending south

On the way you meet a few kind souls
Perhaps a little wiser than yourself
Some who might begin to question
The state of your mental health

But don’t despair; it’s all good stuff
The journey, the quest, the sport,
Some days you’ll go a long way
On others you’ll pull up short

Just keep going that’s the main thing,
I’m buggered if I know where, cause’
Eventually south goes north
And every other where

Keep treading, keep smiling,
Don’t forget to breathe
It’s important to enjoy yourself
And keep something up your sleeve

It isn’t easy, this I know,
When some old ****** gives advice
You think he’s a little crazy and
He don’t talk so very nice

You’re probably right, he might be mad,
But the thing about this is,
It’s better to keep asking questions
Than be sitting in a tizz

Complain or question or kick or scratch
The ticket is the train you catch
The one for somewhere, the one that goes
Not sitting at the station and picking at your nose

Get on board
Live a life
Have some fun and
Cause a bit o’ strife, now

I’m sorry I can’t say more than this
But I reckon you know why; it’s
Coz you’ve got a good long life to lead
And I’m about to die.



MChallis @ 1999/2014

In this room at four a.m. where the universe sometimes meets, I cram some thinking time into the stillness that does not occur at any other part of the day. A wall clock scratchily taps its one-tone metronome in a time signature discomforting to noisy thinkers.

My quiet contemplation is possessed with a version of unkindness, arising out of unsteady dreams. In the most recent frame; invading forces stay out of sight to threaten as the unknown enemy. We burn candles for those who plead the safety of our dwelling. But suspicion becomes our ally and neighbours are offered no solace.

I notice a small moth as it circles a candle avidly craving the feast of light. I think of those who have struggled with a near-death experience. I’m told the dying enter a beautiful light when called to begin passage from this world to the next. Does the small moth feel the same sense of awe as it prepares to feed the candle?

The lifeless screens of television and computer, (sometimes channeling the universe into this quiet room) hold their square black mouths agape, but offer nothing more than mute obedience. The only living pixel in this room is worshipped by the fervent wing of a moth: and is unaware of being a metaphor.

I hear at distance, the first bus for the morning passing by, it is mostly empty of the silent ones it will carry later in the day. I wonder how many of today’s travellers will have been awake at this time, pondering fate and future in the shelter of an urban meditation.

The early hours of the morning, I’m told, are when most passengers depart for the next world as they sip or gasp a last breath.

Slipping by and above me, some adventurous souls are carried by a hot-air balloon: the rushing light and sound of the gas-flame is a jet of life which heats and sustains the commercial moon as it drifts by in close orbit. The balloon then changes metaphor and mimics sunrise.

Perhaps moth and balloon and empty screens are pre-cursors for all that is to come today: all that is furtive, all that is futile, all that pretends omniscience, all that is agape, all that is sufficient for those of us who assume we will live on and on and on. And for those of us who repeat each day secure, content and satisfied: completely taken by all the fuss and noise of living for successfulness.


MChallis 2005/2014

His fixed black eyes,
turned, like a mother's to her sorrows
eight metres down in a hole
dug for concrete.

His workmates call hoarsely from the rim
but only see and hear
his nothingness

- “he was just here a second ago"

His neck is a broken spirit,
fingernails are torn away
he'd flayed against the earth
falling indefinitely for one and half seconds.

The young concreter,
carefuly finishing his glide work
at the edge of the slab
had stepped back to admire
the reflected perfection of the sky.

His mother receives the news before the slab
is no longer a mirror,
she pictures him falling and
thinks of the last time he called,

- “I only spoke to him yesterday"


MChallis © 2005/2014

On the 4th of September some time ago now
I returned to an empty house,
a wall of anger ran through me and around me

It took a week for that wall to crumble,
standing at the cash register at work
anguish surging up from a deep well way down low.

For hours I sobbed and howled
in the office out back of the store
Evelyn the manager came and went
and when she could - just sat and listened.

3 days later my mother and father arrived
for 2 weeks they stayed
their child, the grown man needed care

mother cleaned all the shelves and cupboards
cleaned all the clothes and ironed all the shirts
father tried to find the answers
and in the end - just sat and listened.

After they went home, the house slowly lost their comfort,
shelves and cupboards returned to slight disorder and
one by one ironed shirts were worn, never again to feel the same.

Hanging in its place I left one shirt untouched,
now and again I would open the wardrobe
to feel my mother in the sleeve.

A decade later we are speaking on the phone
about the children
all of them young men now and mostly independent

you talk about wanting to see them more often
and it being hard to arrange, you tell me about your new man
and how things are working out.

In a moment of candour you speak of the past
confessing
it should probably never have happened.


Who would have thought that in the end
it would be me, who just sat and listened.



MChallis @ 2014