Scoff

by George Anderson

In tattered rags
he taps
at our front door
3 or more times
during winter.

Head slung low
cascading white beard
he asks,
'Can I please have
a small bite to eat.’

Silently,
in the porch
we watch him
scoff a sandwich
or slurp leftover soup.

Then, with a pleasant
but gruff ‘thank you’
he is gone,
a nameless, homeless man
tramping up the street
through the skeleton wind.

Driving on Stilnox

by George Anderson

I awake
my girlfriend on top
aggressively shaking me,
totally pissed off.

‘Where’s my fucking car?’
‘Dunno’.

I have no recollection
absolutely no idea what she is on about
I go back to sleep.

The next night in the garden bar at Ryan’s
I talk to Pommy. He reckons
I came in totally wasted:

‘You looked like a zombie,
an automatum’.

Said I skulled three schooners
one after the other
said fuckall
then split.

I remember going to bed early that night
about 11
downed a small red pill
crossed myself
contemplated the white rabbit.

The car is found a week later
trashed near the bowling club.

In the glove box there is a traffic fine for $220

‘Driving a m/v in a dangerous manner at night.
No headlights. Flat right rear tyre’.

Education

by George Anderson

in my first posting
no one in yr 10 can read
no one gives a shit

a 12 yr old boy sleeps in a drainpipe
overnight

a student stoned falls backwards off his chair
cackling madly,
sprawled frozen on the ground

a teacher is strangled by his tie
by a football player
another’s hair set ablaze

the deputy principal purple faced
as I explain how students leaped
from the library’s second floor window.

The Engagement

by George Anderson

We left late & tossed in the back
a case of VB,
together with an intense desire
to get hammered, to get wasted
during the night, which was not
altogether unreasonable
considering it would compress time,
& help us forget the wild horse of a week
which sped uncontrollably beyond any
notion of reconciliation. This much I

Know. I certainly wanted to come.
I wanted to meet the girl’s parents.
I was looking forward to sailing with Pete
the next day up to Ulladulla. Dragging a
line a metre from the sea floor in search of
Flathead. Suffice to say the beers sank

Fast & I was my expectant self: cheeky.
Quarrelsome. Bent on self destruction.
Never make it to 40 mode. I recall like
a thick fog arguing with the bride’s mother.
She reminded me of a witch. I asked her if
I tied a large stone to her chest if she would
float. The blood curdled in her. She screeched at me.
Her dark eyes splitting from her skull. Her boyfriend
laughing in the kitchen with his arms folded.

The following morning I wake on the lounge. Pete
reckons it was a top night. Asks how I’m feeling.
Fleshes out a story, how about 3 or 4 in the morning
I was crashed out, laughing hysterically on the ground.

Laughing uncontrollably. Laughing at everything and
at nothing. He tried to heave me up. Too heavy.
He said I was content to remain on the ground &
laugh. ‘Tell Stacey her mom is not a witch’, I say.

Is that an apology? Bob asks.

‘No, I don’t believe in witches.
How’d Dave & Stacey fare anyway?’

They’re still sleeping. Stuffed.
They aren’t getting up any time soon.

‘Good. Where’s those fishing lines?’

Crones

by George Anderson

At the Caltex
pump a white
Toyota veers
sharply up a one
way entrance &
pulls beside the #7
petrol pump
blocking my
exit. A fat
greying woman
slams her door.
I’m sick of self obsessed
crones like her & yell out
thrusting out my middle
finger, ‘Read the
fucken sign next
time. This is one
way only!’ She is
disgusted. ‘Who do you
think you are swearing
at me? My husband’s in
the car. He’ll fix you fast’.

I stare in the car. He’s in
the back. He’s not going
anywhere. I’m 6’2’’210.
I’m not as fast anymore
but still hard to take down.
‘I don’t give shit lady,
the point is you’ve driven
up a one way lane & you
are blocking my way. There
are signs everywhere! Now
I’m going inside to pay for
my petrol & when I come back
out you better be fucken gone’.
Her husband, about 40, winds
down the window & apologises,
‘Sorry man, she always does this
to me. Please ignore her. She’s
receiving professional help’.

As the automatic door bolts
open I hear the quick churn of
tires, the crone’s defiant wrinkled
face snarling from the window, her
horn an emblem of her impotent fury.


*George Anderson's blog:
http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/

Hate

by George Anderson

Hate is dark. Guttural.
Largely unfathomable:
A surging, tearing, choking rage.
Seething, mashing

through clenched teeth.
Reeking,
of hot hunched shoulders.
Lurching callous fists.

The hard quick crunch
On soft fearful faces.
Cleaving open wounds-

like flower petals
or mushroom clouds
multiplying upwards
in soft ripening rays.

Aphorisms to Guide Your Life

by George Anderson

My old man expressed
his attitude to me in aphorisms

in little kernels of wisdom
usually after guzzling
between 12 and 24 beers.

‘I wanna tell you something’,
he’d begin,
pointing to the kitchen chair,
‘Sit down’.

It was a kind of ritual.
Firstly, he’d scowl at my
earring and throw in a jab,
‘You didn’t need another
hole in your head’.

I would generally nod
dumbly in agreement
moving the inquisition along,
drinking his beer.

'You think yer tough?'
'No', I’d tell him
for the 100th or so time,
not wanting to provoke
a senseless argument,
‘I’m weak as shit’.

After a few treadless jokes
he’d tell me tersely,
‘You don’t know fuck all’.

I would nod & smile
tell him he was right
& slip into my room
when he was distracted.

Later, in night I’d often
find him sitting in his chair
or sprawled on the floor snoring
sometimes in piss or vomit or shit.

I’d think of another of his aphorisms,
‘When my wife died, I died too’.


*George Anderson's blog:
http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/

When My Mother Died

by George Anderson

In her open
coffin in the
basement of
the chapel on
Sherbrooke
Street in
early winter
she seems
so incredibly
small. vulnerable.
layered with shit
on her face I had
never imagined.

friends & curious
acquaintances
we had not seen
for years, sometimes
decades, suddenly
appear.

mom,

i explain to her
in my adolescent
bafflement &
grief,

'i never got to
know you'…

Two days later
during the service
conducted in church
the minister reads from
psalm 23, my father
behind me whispering
clearly into my ear,
'fucken bullshit!,
fucken bullshit!'


*George Anderson's blog:
http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/

SquamousCell Carcinoma

by George Anderson

1.
It first appears as a spec
like the fleck on the outer
flesh of a suspect
apple.

In the days that follow it breaks the
surface of my left cheek-
its core splitting
open. Morphing. Forming a
black scab. Shedding. Then
cleaving open again:

Metastasizing.

I visit Thirroul Medical Centre
& Dr Walker refers me to a
plastic surgeon. I open his letter of referral. It reads:

‘Thanks for seeing the patient who has a ?BCC on his L pre auricular region for excision’.

2.
Eight stabs of local & my cheek is numb in fifteen minutes.
I am asked to turn on my right side. Dr Salmon goes to work.

There is a quick deep cut of the blade
& an ice cream scooping motion 3-10mm below the scab.
A rough scraping back & forth like the scaling of a fish..
A spraying sound and the smell of burning flesh.
My flesh.

‘What I’m doing, reassures Dr Salmon, is using an electric probe to electro-desiccate any remaining microscopic cancer cells’.

I feel a tightening of flesh as it is stitched up in a series of sutured loops.

All done, he says.

3.
I sit in the foyer waiting for my son to ring
I watch and take notes as patients come & go through the aluminium framed door
my bandage like a wide white sideburn in the window
A dull ache emerging.


*George Anderson's blog:
http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/