Thursday, December 31, 2015

BANGKOK SUN

Red splashed sun sparks harshly
In that last hour,
As if days were doomed
To dusk forever;
But it’s just a gesture
Of a jester,
Fooling us,
Jocular, and clever.
Then, by morning,
It’s there again so bold
That my eyes can’t scan it
As daylight stirs,
Smudged across
Those murky smears of smog,
Staining, streaking the horizon
With its blurs.
Then, for much of the day,
It hides and seeks,
Playing a game with shadows
And pale light,
It spurns and burns away
The bashful clouds
That must be gone
Before tropical night
Falls to quench
The cranky sky of sunset,
And yet heat lingers
So we can’t forget.


JETTY POEMS



Wednesday, December 30, 2015

JETTY POEMS - OUT NOW

David Morisset's newest collection of verse is out now at Amazon, CreateSpace, and Kindle. It features poetry written mostly during the second half of 2015. The poems cover a wide range of themes including childhood memories, love, ageing, mental health, capital punishment, justice, politics, terrorism, and the natural beauty of Australia's east coast, where David lives and writes.

The Amazon listing can be found here.

The CreateSpace listing can be found here.

The Kindle listing can be found here.


Saturday, December 12, 2015

SUBURBAN BANGKOK

Hours ago the heat
Surged past plain hot,
Bouncing off the concrete
Into my face,
Scorching, scalding
My paler tone of white,
Coming from skies
Smog-smeared,
But not erased.
And the traffic moves
Like a lame tortoise,
Lurching on by lunges
To empty space,
Cars avoiding scooters -
The gap so slight
No human eye can see
The tiny place.
There is no remote refuge
On main streets
Amongst food vendors
And the well-stocked stalls
Standing in the shadows
Of Tesco’s fare
In air-conditioned aisles
Behind the walls.
There's barbecued fish
On an east-west lane
Where two-tiered houses
Form sunset’s frame.


Friday, December 11, 2015

ONE DAY IN AMSTERDAM

Our political leaders are either liars or simpletons who have no memories.

There is no doubt in my mind that I am the world’s least successful terrorist – even though, in truth, I was only a suspected terrorist.  So every now and then I wonder who stands out as the most successful terrorist(s) of my lifetime.  There are two nominations I cannot split.  One was an American president.  The other was a group of students who overthrew the same US president and installed a new regime halfway across the world.
It was late in September 1977 when I set out on my supposed mission for an eclectic coalition comprising West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and, much more likely given my Celtic facial features, the Provos, the infamous Provisional Irish Republican Army.
I had spent more than a year living and working at the Australian Embassy in Tehran and I was badly in need of a holiday and a break from my daily dose of an addictive mixture of culture shock and outright fascination with a foreign land.  So I headed to Europe with my then wife and our one year old daughter.
Our first stop was Amsterdam.  I can still see the emerald green fields of the Netherlands as our KLM flight made its approach into Schipol.  We left the airport in a bus destined for the centre of the old city.  During the journey we consulted our borrowed copy of Frommer’s ‘Europe on Ten Dollars a Day’ seeking a budget hotel.  We were, quite simply, broke.
Why were we broke do I hear you say?  Malcolm Fraser had taken power in Australia and, under his leadership as Prime Minister, government expenditure was slashed by a newly minted razor gang or, as it was known more formally, the expenditure review committee.  That committee is still a standard feature of federal administration in Canberra.  The then Department of Foreign Affairs faced some of the most savage expenditure cutbacks and staffing reductions.  I recall that my promotion to Foreign Affairs Officer Class 1 had taken place as scheduled at the end of my training year in 1975.  However, it had yet to be confirmed because of the uncertainties resulting from Mr Fraser’s stinginess.  A few months after I returned to Tehran it would be duly gazetted and I would receive a large amount of backpay.   But, as I looked for a hotel in Amsterdam, I was still on trainee’s pay and I had to watch every cent.
As it happened I had quite a bit of contact with Mr Fraser during the 1990s in the private sector.  He was a difficult man and he had an extreme sense of entitlement that featured a reluctance to ever put his hand in his own pocket.  It was his expectation that someone else would always pay all his bills despite his position of considerable wealth and his enjoyment of huge taxpayer-funded allowances.  Even prosperous companies have rules relating to personal expenses but they seemed to be irrelevant in Mr Fraser’s mind.  In addition, his treatment of staff was appalling even by the loose standards of those times.  I have often wondered whether the celebrated ‘lost trousers’ incident was in fact an act of revenge by an aide.
But I have wandered from the subject, even though Mr Fraser’s attempts to demoralise and render almost useless major organs of Australian government might one day be considered a kind of non-violent terrorism.  And, of course, his venality, in my opinion, makes him another type of unpunished offender of fundamental morality.  It amazes me that he is so universally idolised now that he has passed away.
The place we chose to stay in Amsterdam was a quaint establishment beside an abrupt curve in a tiny canal.  From there we could walk everywhere, including up the several flights of stairs to our room with its linoleum floors and views of an alleyway.  There was no elevator, no central heating, and the communal bathroom was several metres down a narrow corridor.  We were charged about US$5 per night.
But the rustic accommodation did not matter.  I loved Amsterdam at first sight and I still love it now, albeit from a distance.  In my opinion Dutch beer is one of Europe’s genuine miracles and I get a little teary when I recall my first cruise on the canals running into the River Amstel as dusk fell and the lights in the streets and inside the gabled buildings turned the place into a wonderland.
When we walked into the hotel foyer we were not exactly welcomed by a middle-aged man who spoke a mixture of Dutch and English as if he could not distinguish any boundaries between the two languages.  He took one look at us and swallowed hard as if he had seen his own death stroll into the room.  Then he accepted our money in advance for three nights and asked for our passports.  The diplomatic passports we handed over somehow made him more nervous about his new lodgers.  He promised to return them within 24 hours.
When we finally got our passports back two days’ later, our host apologised profusely for the delay.  He explained that the city was gripped with fear of terrorism, adding that a young couple with a baby was standard travelling cover and diplomatic passports often turned out to be fakes.  From that moment he was a perfect host, he and his wife cooing over our baby daughter at every opportunity.  He observed that the cheap stroller we had bought in one of Amsterdam’s well-stocked shops was ‘prima’.  I knew that my career as a suspected terrorist had failed dismally when I heard that most versatile of Dutch words, ‘prima’.
The American President who wins, jointly, my award for success in the field of terrorism is Jimmy Carter.  His betrayal of the last Shah of Iran was an act of such ignorance and short-sightedness that I still find it hard to believe.  Mr Carter undermined a friendly government by naively chanting his human rights mantra and insisting that his untested principles must be applied in circumstances that he would never understand.  The Shah was disempowered not by his own countrymen but by his closest international ally.  His fall was followed by years of misery for Iran and demonstrably irreparable damage to American interests.  There are no reliable estimates of the associated death toll.
My other winners are the students of Shia Islam who occupied the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took most of the American staff members hostage.  Apart from the impact of their cruelty and fanaticism inside Iran, perhaps their greatest achievement was rendering Mr Carter unelectable when he sought a second term.  After 444 days of captivity the US Embassy personnel were released on 20 January 1981 – the very day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as the USA’s fortieth president.
I pray the current generation of terrorists might be surprisingly unsuccessful, whatever their grotesque methods and selfish objectives.


Sunday, November 29, 2015

'UNSEEN POETRY' FOR THE HOLIDAYS



David Morisset's 'Unseen Poetry' collection is available at Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Smashwords and other book sellers.   The poems explore the natural beauty of Australia's east coast, mental health issues, love and politics.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

SONG OF BATACLAN

All I want is a chance
At a better life,
I need refuge from evil men
Who oppress me and my wife.
All I want is my child's equal share
Of the riches you worked for,
That your fathers died for,
An equal portion, no more.
All I want is more for me
And more than you gave
When you took me in,
For it is more and more I crave.
All I want is to live in the ways
I left behind in my homeland,
But all of you racists
Claim this is your own land.
All I want is the death
Of you who oppose my god,
And I want what I once fled;
Why does that seem so odd?


Explanatory note:  This blog post is a poem.  It is not a news report and it is not a statement of opinion.  Rather it is an expression of bewilderment that seeks to highlight everyone’s vulnerability to manipulation by forces and events beyond our comprehension.  And, by the way, in my opinion, the agents of terror in our world are not all Muslims.