THE WASTE

There's something deep in mankind's memory

Of life in the earliest phase of time

That makes the sound of raindrops on the roof

Lull us to the sweetest sleep paradigm.

At times I wake broken

By words never spoken,

Gestures that were token,

And wish I'd not woken.

I sleep through deepest dreams

Of escape, or so it seems,

For I'm captive to schemes

Of torment at extremes.

More than ever before

I walk lost on this shore,

Only certain of 'your',

Never 'my' any more.

Somewhere I lost the plot,

Perhaps I just forgot,

Crazed by the question 'what?',

Robbed of all, but not a lot.

What is it that mythology recalls?

Why are there monsters in folklores?

Were the firstborn of humanity

Food for freaks or dinosaurs?

But now we are devoured,

In glorious postmodernity,

By the lies our minds devise

In our blindness to eternity.

THE FLEECE

“Once he reached for something golden, hanging from a tree,  and his hand came down empty.”  (Carole King, ‘Tapestry’)

This is the way it ends for the broken kind,

Missing in a maze of trimmed hedge cul-de-sacs,

A victim of a simplified minefield that is my mincemeat mind,

With the colours of my culture multiplied and maximised -

White on white but never quite optimised -

Every melanoma scar scaped like scabs on my scared skin,

But pristine compared to the wounds of the suicide within.

The Africans called me a Cambridge wash-up;

But I was a product of red-brick schools and fibro slums;

The Asians said I looked like an old footballer,

A rugby type, thick-necked from too many scrums,

Yet striving to be amongst the thinkers,

While the locals saw me as one who belonged with the drinkers -

Soon to become a rejected son of Australia.

And so I steered the years of quest and failure,

'Til my hand came down empty, though I’d climbed the trees

To reach for the branch where the fleece fizzled in the breeze.

Now I'm just an ageing face in the audience,

Eyes bloodshot red and yellow with jaundice,

Straining to see beyond my reading spectacles, 

Each lens reflecting the specious spectacular,

Restricted to thoughts riddled with speculation,

A wasted brain that somehow became

A mere receptacle for others' brilliant exceptionals.

THE NEW SETTLEMENT

David Morisset's new novel is now available at Amazon, Kindle, Smashwords and iBooks.

'The New Settlement' is a dystopian fantasy set in a fictional Middle Eastern theocracy during the last years of the twenty-first century. Seven decades have gone by since a nuclear war turned parts of Shemesh's homeland into radioactive netherworlds. The narrative highlights humanity's defencelessness against religious extremism, corrupt governments, and the murderous overreach of state-sponsored brutality. Amid the toxic shambles there is a longing for the better days of a possibly imaginary past usually referred to as the times of kings and queens.

The book (including the Kindle version) can be purchased at Amazon here and at Smashwords here.  For the iBooks version please use the iBooks app to search for books by David Morisset.

ELECTRIC SHADOWS

I've never been scared

By shade at sunset

But shadows

Other than my silhouette

Can haunt me

Almost to the point of death

With their tailgater's grin

And heavy breath

And the black dog

They insist on walking

As I seek peace

Away from fools talking

To lenses panning

Like madmen stalking

A sad victim

Of chance and circumstance

Not yet invisible in time's expanse

Against blank backgrounds
All set well aglow

With a few faces nodding and gawking

Telling me lies

That I already know.

CHORUS

It's dark

And all the innocents slumber

In quiet places

Stacked with plastic toys

Yet guilty hearts pulse

In the night's blackness

Perhaps that's why I hear

The ambient noise

As this world beats out

Rhythms sent from hell

So loudly

That the sea is rendered dumb

Even as waves

Devour retreating shores -

My weak sleep ceased

When I heard demons hum.