SELECTED POETRY
Poetry has been a constant companion throughout Bill's life. A way of observing the world, exploring its contradictions, and giving shape to moments that often pass unnoticed.
The poems shared here offer a small glimpse into the themes that run throughout his work: love, humanity, nature, memory, politics, humour and the quiet complexities of being human. Each has been carefully selected to introduce a different facet of his writing.
If a poem encourages you to pause, reflect, smile, or simply see something familiar from a different perspective, then it has done what poetry has always done best.
THERE IS NO TIME
There is you.
There is you and us
In our fickled design
how we choose to live,
And give, to each,
moment,
Who we pray to,
on solemn knees
In a verse or a song
That sparkle like
red oak leaves
In our everyday.
We are followers, each.
on social media.
on politics.
Inside stadiums.
on a communal beach.
outside of our earned beliefs.
There is no destiny clock
ticking away our skittish lives.
We all would be free
If we weren’t busy with
our invention of time, of ourselves,
our schedules,
and futile deadlines.
There is you and us,
for other poems to rhyme.
There is you and us
in our fickled design.
Moving faster, mostly,
in between , captured
by skeleton seconds,
past corroding,
confusing,
black and white
highway ghosts signs
listened for instruction
on war.
on feelings.
on shedding skin,
from the divine, inside
unseen,
the breath in your mind,
as it accepted defeat
by following the child inside,
covered in blood scrapes
and righteous deceit
the crimminal country,
playing on the mass graves
of parachocial presumptions
ceremonial assumptions
of when and
who’s to starve
and who’s to eat
in the cold
in the heat.
There is no time.
LOVE
THE GIFT OF TEARS
I fell in love when she gave me, the gift of tears.
I read her a poem, the poet unknown,
the words offered flowers and spears.
Her eyes closed, her mouth composed
not allowing the images to leave.
I heard her sigh to this lullaby,
like an angel in God’s blissful sheath.
The gift of tears is a higher form of love,
without pain or grief or stones.
It’s when words transcend,
beyond a thought and pen,
when your heart has found its home.
HUMANITY
HOW DID IT ALL GET SO STRANGE
Blowing hard ugly breaths against the wind, it is all too obvious when society is spending more money, more time to break the disadvantaged.
Encouraging neighbors to resent each other, to kill each other, to create war.
Where are the headlines for understanding, empathy, and decency.
Everything is to win a vote or support a fallen ideology that has no place in heaven or earth or in between.
It’s just another dysfunctional concept created for our entertainment.
Lust for the unjust!
You can see the angry skinny insect bicyclists shouting holier than thou invectives at Toyota, Ford and tired commuters.
I assumed riding a bicycle was healthy Mark Twain lazy summers, peddling harmony, easy days - now it jams into the worst of us, as the superiority of ideas take control.
Humankind is reduced to green, red, blue politics.
Colorcoded to ensure we are prevented to think one or two kindly thoughts.
The colour speaks loudly for each of us promoting anger, intolerance, and tribal division.
Endorsed by the support of popular culture hack writers and counterfit tv nerds.
It’s all there for us to consume, and spit at our neighbours, to satisfy our desire to claim God as our own; or a variation that attracts religious bureaucrats and Indigenous natives, throwing their bets on a cosmic roulette wheel, that spins forever, never stopping the dissatisfaction we’re feeling that has nothing to do with being alive.
The constant lack of romance, of tenderness that is hidden in urban decay including the universities embracing ignorance.
Turn it off and drop out.
Facebook, X, Instagram!
Turn off television, and radio!
Take a long 20 year walk to regain your sense of individualism, and some pure thinking, and then burn the vicious crap you are taught to memorize and reproduce, otherwise find yourself divorced three times or in a hospital bed cut open like a surprise tuna on a Portuguese fishing boat, marinated to give you a better afterlife - one that was promised from employer, to whore, to church, to home.
We are in search for answers that take more than just a meditative sitting.
Mary of Nazareth held her dying son. I didn’t hear the media posse, covering each bloody piercing, or cat calls of bitter women telling us a mother shouldn’t hold her dying son in public. It’s rude and Mary should receive a citation - fine bitter women know best about such matters, under the absurd guise of towering morality and enlightenment. 100,000 podcasters placing their home into our restless mind, created a contemporary itch living under our skin like crawling fleas.
Building monumental pronunciations with provocative words upon provocative words.
Just enough sugar peppermint popstick lick beneath the gritty surface.
We watch the fashionable canines parading the inner city streets with bored mothers and their halloween children.
I dare you to change your thinking just for one day, the century of bigotry dogma permeates our neighborhoods, our shops, our good human conditions, and the things that will make us love openly.
Like a flower romancing the sun while stuck in the muddy morass of its existence.
Carry your bottled water to the pretensions of your daily visits.
How did it get so strange?
NATURE
TEACHINGS
The forest is a life coach,
nature is formless, like water
on your brow, it seldom boasts.
Seeds expand, to quote
a wise Greek ghost.
you feel poorer alone,
like a tossed old coat.
the pilgrim's feet, blackened,
like burnt toast.
Walking on the weathered floor
on nature's compost.
In the invisible air,
a billion breaths mingle
and gather in prayer.
In clouds. In birds,
In spiritless deserted outposts.
Tomorrow is scrolled.
In ancient notes.
In music, on paper,
In celebratory hosts.
HUMOUR
TONGUE IN CHEEK
When I kiss her, I touch the skin of her heart
on my unnecessary lips.
These days my aim is blurred, I fall apart,
when her chin gets my Valentine's spit.
It wasn't age or a drunken moment that navigated my open mouth.
Was it her beauty or unconscious futility that enabled my tongue to go south?
Love is as awkward as putting slippers on the devil - an irrational fear of damnation and pain.
Like a pressed cheese and tomato sandwich rising from hell, in heat, and dripping hot rain.
MEMORY
BROKEN INDIGENOUS TREATIES
There wasn’t enough glue
on that paper,
to make it stick.
Not enough light in the fire,
to watch it flicker.
Not enough land for a compass,
or a tracker to offer trust.
Not enough blood,
in the landlord’s conscience.
Only the locked casualness of duty,
from orders of title, and lineage.
It is passed down the table,
like soft butter passed,
to hungry guests,
in small waiting conversation.
AGEING
AN AGEING WALLFLOWER
An ageing flower never fades,
give them sugar and loving praise.
They will open the gates of genuflection.
On sacred space, the garden of reflection.
The body pleasure with its curves and canyons,
are the most beautiful to traverse as a lover or companion.
The soul is deep like a galaxies twinkle,
or an actor in a good script that is feverishly wrinkled.
Age is an invention of multiplication and deceit,
like a mirrors young eyes - oft in conceit.
The gaze of experience will deliciously arouse,
a thousand moist bedrooms in one chocolate creamy house.
The coming of age is the coming of time!
While youth sit, and wait to prepare their design.
Seduce the night, the day, and fallen leaves.
our breath in this moment is an involuntary breeze.
POLITICS
IN ISRAELS WAY
There is a place for prayer.
A room for solitude,
not from a one-eyed soldier stare,
or in a gift box with gratitude.
It's heavy in your heart when suffering is overplayed.
inside the death camps of charred children,
in Israel’s way.
Blame the Palestinians.
Blame the Jews.
Blame the Americans for framing the news.
Air strikes, executed by modern men.
Landing in hospitals, mosques, and your friends.
Hamas - half-man serpents, guised as true.
Are unseen, everywhere, in the music fields,
In the killing of me and you.
Children die. The old remember.
No quiet place to pray. To be free. To surrender.
The helmet media speaks in rehearsed riddles and position,
Shaping humanity like a didactic composers composition.
A resolution! Cease the bombing of children and ruined neighbours.
Elegant nations review a multitude of words with concern and labor.
One country, an idea. One race after the war. This land is sliced deep, from the Zulfiqar sword.
Erase a culture like hard chalk broken on the blackest of boards.
There is no peace when nations are divided. When murder is abled.
It’s the execution of humanity when choice words are left off the table.
The leaders of well-fed nations, with their abundance on display,
have time to live, to smile, to be human as their children play each day.
The indigenous. The dark. The mothers of Gods dispossessed. The stolen generation. The planned holocaust for the prized Nazi war chest.
Blame it on God.
Blame it on fear.
Blame it on your country, when it's many times severe.
It's the children’s cries we hear, the sunbirds dying sons and daughters.
Tiny shattered limbs draped in the factories of bleach and slaughter.
Lives are destroyed in raids at home and the common jovial cafes.
It’s hard to raise a family or to count your blessings, these days,
In the face of extinction.
In Israel’s way.
COMPASSION
THE WIDOWS OF VARANASI
Torn from a wind so bloody, so cold,
banished like the infirm or the too soon old.
To vanish is bitter, a taste of salt,
on crusted mouths. A ritual of fault.
Bowing heads pushed down from burning rain,
Feet moving north to south, ringed and ashamed.
Drums are pounding to the gutter on broken streets
the widows of Varanasi wrapped loosely in ghostly sheets.
Scurring rats have family and friend.
Why not them? Why not the women, then?
Why not these women formed of crushing concrete?
Praying and singing for something warm to eat.
A pink serving of high tea desert,
with splendid ladies in scottish wool skirts.
A grandchild to spoil, play and please.
Instead, the horror of abandonment with baby Jesus on their knees.
Where are the trustees for the widows of Varanasi?
Men with their brothers layed lustfully, carelessly
under temporary comfort sheets.
A small meal of tomatoes and cheese?
Drums are pounding. The air is gender thick.
The filthy Ganges bathes the poor, the weak and sick.
A symphony of corpses on every hustling block
A composition of scriptures direct from God’s double talk.
Are they different to the sacred cows
roaming crowded tourists streets?
An ashram for the Beatles to make it pop complete.
A persian carpet spread like butter for their peppered feet?
Who sees these widows of Varanasi?
Swaying near piss spray from the holiest of rivers,
to make their lousy peace.
Lifting palms to the camera action givers,
begging in prayer to be released.
They sing as one entity-dying nuns, atoms and particles of dust.
A million eyes scattered into the rippled divine that combust.
A penumbre of demigods dancing behind the shroud.
The drums are circling, pounding like blistering clouds.
The ribbed shell of a dog whispering for a soul or a treat.