The Book of Mys takes
is an ancient compendium, so far without end, inexhaustible, constantly writing itself in small, dense script, each word a tiny pressure on the windpipe of the world, each page familiar yet revelatory, a mirror maze in which endless reflections of ourselves peer back, bemused, or guilty perhaps, or indifferent, or even oblivious to its histories and betrayals, to its taints of déjà vu and repetition, recorded in the bland fashion of a ledger, without concern for morals, or truths or lies, and without being a cautionary tale, an instruction manual, or A Guide for the Perplexed, nor requiring any judgment (each mys take being its own indictment), or any justification for its existence, existing simply to exist, before vanishing, as everything will vanish, when we stumble, disbelieving still, over its precipice.
**
Sound Bites
1.
Monogamy is passé: it takes too long to stay
when we can simply feast on lust's buffet
like bees hovering from flower to flower in search of nectar.
Our lives are all showground, bells and whistles, cheap thrills
hile we ride a surging tide of limited attention spans,
surf on waves of half-baked plans, drink cocktails,
meekly give transience the upper hand, as if there's nothing more
than each saturated moment,
and where are our hearts in all this faux bliss?
We drench our senses, allow them to colonise our thoughts,
eat up our days, while we covet and cavort,
while we engage in endless sport.
What do all these swiveling heads, these searching eyes
apprise within the forest of our lies, so much said
that isn't meant, the quivering leaves of discontent,
our ever-restless firmament?
Our traumas run deep, the wounds we have buried
ourselves beneath, from which we flee, each waking day asleep.
2.
There's a gravitational pull to speed, to need,
to manic movement so opposed to stillness, reflection,
we run until we stop or drop, until the running's done,
until we're all wrung out, our weary souls and bones,
the stream of texts on phones, truncated, abbreviated,
a stream of child-like consciousness, nonsense, and inconsequence.
This is the world we have all made, are making daily,
a world of endless monologues, silence disappearing with frogs,
with twittering tweets, staccato beats, the way we turn and turn
from that to this, and turn again,
and yet we know, when we pause to think, to drink from longing's cup,
there's something else we crave to touch, we hunger for,
we need so much, a mystery at our core
that does not yield to the rat-race of our days, our avid gaze,
but averts itself instead, diverts us, leads us
where we are so readily led:
witness the lost and the searching, the stargazers amongst us,
the ones leaning against their own momentum,
trying not to be borne away by the whirl and spin,
witness their hair flying in the wind,
the deep wells of their sorrow, questions unanswered today,
unanswered tomorrow but asked,
witness the unread poets, all their precious gleaming falling softly
in hidden rooms of a castle glowing like Rumpelstiltskin's gold,
awaiting the open door, spilling out for the world to see
if ever it should turn to look.
**
More or Less
Less is more
say administrators, bureaucrats, politicians,
say bean counters and poetry editors
in lessons delivered
from distant pulpits
..............................by soft hands
so...............I should keep this
..........................................short
lest I give you less
or lest I give you more
and you get less.
Less is more what exactly
I wonder
calling upon philanthropists, benefactors, mentors,
and all those
skinny starving children
there seem to be more and more of
........(but let's not get morbid):
what do you say to this proposition?
They're all too preoccupied to answer
with their more giving,
more starving, more clinging on
to lesser lives
..................... (as the case may be),
though I can imagine one child,
not too far gone for mischief
answering more beans, please,
whilst I, observing,
confess that the more I see
the more it seems
that if less is more
it is only more less.
-----------------------------------------------------
David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light, and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David's poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. David's poetry has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has won the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize and has been twice shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize and commended for the Reuben Rose Poetry Prize. David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series "Poets' Corner". He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.
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