Tear Stained Memories

Staring at a photo, hanging crooked From an aging rusting nail on his wall Drags back a tear-stained memory… From a time, he’s yet to heal Drawn by the rhythms of the river, He’s a wanderer, a minstrel A brown water vagabond Music flowing from his hands He hears the sounds of children Singing in the street And… the songs they are singing Take him back to who knows when… Erasing memories of the party years And friends he’s near forgot Before all the backstage passes, He’d worked little country halls, and pubs All the songs he’s sung and played, Lay crumbling in the dust All the, now forgotten faces Of a thousand screaming girls Who… beyond bright and glowing footlights, In the loudness of those shadows He’d grabbed and greedy kissed Their bright nail polished fingers Scouring bloodlines on his back And remembers their soft and naked breasts On his blonde mat of tangled curls Now going grey upon his chest Alone, sometimes he finds a grateful silence, When the memory of his music softly sleeps And from deep within that inky blackness Into his mind she creeps And again, her memory haunts him When through twilight shadows, of life’s din He sees himself there before her, kneeling The memory never thins. Trembles overcome him and sinking to his knees Again, he feels his heart begin its drumming Three-four time in his chest He stumbles, a poet in searching desperation, For practiced words he needs to tell her, Such sweet words, now dying, unspoken on his tongue He feels her graceful fingers reaching, Searching for his calloused hand In his pocket he still fumbles his frantic searching For an ancient family heirloom That fits the third finger on a lover’s soft left hand Forged from a tiny golden nugget Decades ago, his great grandfather found The old man with love and caring had shaped into a ring He set it with tiny diamond, he traded for his cart. Love’s little token for his only ever sweetheart Until the day she died, she’d worn it A treasured testament to love And in a lonely outback gravesite Their names are etched on roughhewn stone She sleeps there beside him, so they’ll never be alone. Within all that mournful sadness As they eased her casket down His father passed her jewel to him, That self-same tiny, heirloom, His great grandmother’s ring Now, all these lonely decades later It swings from a chain around his neck And he can still feel his fingers shaking At the memory from that time When he offered her his hand, Something she declined He’s still searching in the agonising, twilight For an answer any answer, To ease his tortured mind Where is that love so tender From that girl from the river, A love he knows he’ll never find Though her memory ever haunts him, He knows deep within his troubled heart she’s gone He prays to wake another day where on the other side To again kneel before her And hear the sound of angels singing Ave maria.

My FSH Journey

 

Born in the middle of last century my life was one big adventure rolling endlessly from morning into night. A bag of skin and sinew, always a bit slower, a little weaker and believing my peers considered me less intelligent, made me determined to succeed.

There would be no question as to my career path, I wanted to join the family motor business and become a racing driver. Well, a boy could dream. My heroes were men like, Lex Davidson, Jack Brabham, or NASA astronauts.

Never questioning my strength, I found it hard to understand why everyone around me could run further, swim faster and whose hand/eye coordination seemed like it was God given. In essence I considered myself a dork and, if I wanted to get to the Grand Prix circuits in Europe had better be a bloody good mechanic.

Back then, I never understood about the effect girls would play in my post-pubescence. One kiss from a blonde bombshell at a netball game on a steamy, starlit, summer’s night knocked my boyhood ambitions for six.

The girl, now long gone, woke me to a different set of priorities and for the next thirty-five years I won and lost at business, never having enough time to question my health, or why my stamina failed me when others worked on.

My business world was crumbling during the recession we had to have and, I felt as if I had been building sandcastles before an incoming tide. I couldn’t make anything last. However, determination and perspiration are strong allies and our family business held ground until a buyer could be found.

Moving to Melbourne, I worked in a number of sales positions, which took me across Australia and overseas. In my sixties and considered a fossil by HR folk, I took a job as a parts picker at AGCO, a company selling Massey Ferguson tractors. Considering myself unfit, I didn’t take a lot of notice of the aches and pains, but my right shoulder began drooping even more and occasional numbness travelling to my fingers worried me.

So began a never-ending roster of specialists who, while they thought they could relieve my pain, never offered confidence enough to let them operate. A referral to rheumatologist Dr. Wendy Stevens led to a biopsy and an overnight stay for wine and bickies in St Vincent’s. Luckily, before going to surgery, she thought a second opinion might offer a more accurate diagnosis.

Introducing herself as Dr. Katrina Reardon bustled in. ‘Now look straight ahead and purse your lips,’ she said. ‘Hmm, now whistle?’

Doing my best to imitate a botoxed catfish, a breathless wheeze escaping my pucker.

‘As I thought,’ she said, while casting a knowing eye over my Mr. Men like physique, ‘you can’t pucker your lips.’

‘I’ve had no complaints to date,’ I replied.

My smartarsed comment withered, dying the death it deserved, Katrina asked me to remove my shirt and as I responded to her diagnosis commands, she checked my drooping right shoulder and soft froglike midriff.

Dr. Reardon had been with me only a matter of minutes before offering her suspected diagnosis, FSHD. Recommending the biopsy be sent for genetic testing to confirm her verdict, Katrina explained how my life could change over the next few years and my need to give up working as a furniture delivery man.

 

At home my wife Ruth and I began sorting out the ramifications of this change to our lives. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Might write a book,’ I said

‘But you don’t read,’ she laughed.

She was right. I didn’t read novels, but being in sales I could tell stories, I just needed to make a yarn last.

Fast forward two years and we were sitting among writers from across Australia at the 2103 National Literary Awards where my debut novel KUNDELA received a Commended.

Since that night Voss, The Price of Innocence and Gillespie’s Gold have also been published. With a growing list of novels, biographies and self-help stories gathering dust on my hard drive while I search for a publisher, I continue to write and learn my craft.

Who would have thought this no longer skinny kid from Orroroo in South Australia, could find his books in many libraries around the country? Not me.

Terry

Just a boy from Burraboi

 

Just a boy from Burraboi

 

Not a lot of money for luxuries

Yet ample time to spend,

Lost in routine, a farmer’s daily grind

Praying the drought would end,

Dreaming an outback boy’s day away

Escaping the loneliness of Burraboi

Running from the Wakool line

 

Orroroo Sunset

I reworked a poem I wrote on Tim Frolling's Facebook page after he posted a photo of a sunset, please leave a comment as
I would be very interested to know what you think.

You posted the picture of a sunset

And it took me straight back home

Clouds red and hanging lazy over Morchard’s rolling Hills

To a place where time was always friendly

And innocence made us free

When life had more questions

To who or what we wanted to be

When we didn’t care about our answers

For in that blood red sunset

We had faith its mystery would unfold

Running close to new days of our future

Were not of big concern to me

Then depending on the season

For less than just one hour

Our backs on warm and fresh cut lawn

Gazing skyward in the purple of the twilight

We would wait for twinkling stars

Sneaking skyward over Black Rock Peak

Fat and golden our full moon would spread its glow

Laying still scanning that wide familiar cosmos

For the joy that jolted through you

When you witnessed Sputnik make its rounds

Back when yellow of the street lights struggled

To feebly penetrate the dark

Our eyes adjusted, and ears sharpened to the silence

As the Milky way lit up our night

In all those wonderous minutes of our innocence

We couldn’t feel it slowly slipping by

Times hands have washed the muscles from my frame

Even though the wrinkles on my face

Declare the time I’ve won

Inside I feel just as I did in nineteen sixty-one

So, Tim, thank you for the photo

And taking me back home

For showing me the shadows of those wonderous hills

Where as a boy with bicycle and rabbit traps

Around them I would roam

With cousins Doug and Geoff and John,

Our mates Placey, Paul and, Spider too

Oh, as lads we had a time, I tell you

A time when freedom knew us well

As in that short bright flash of youth

We lived as kings, in good old Orroroo

Comment

Sally

Rollin down an old dirt road

Dust hanging onto the back of the truck

Radio beating out an old country song

An angel singing beside me, bringing me luck

Slappin her hands in time on the dash of my car

Singin on pitch,  knows every word

Seems to me, there’s not a song Sally hasn’t heard

 

Give her an old church hall or a public bar

She's got a head full of dreams and songs to play

Doing her dues and making it pay

Someday soon she’ll be on her way

A crowded bar, or empty barn

All she needs is a place for her to sing

So, turn up that amp, girl -- and make it ring

 

Six new strings on an old guitar

Scuffed Williams boots and tight blue jeans

Tapping feet and swaying hips

Eyes of fire, hold a wild girl’s dreams

Killer smile on forbidden lips

Stuff another greenback in her old tip-jar

Help like yours will take her far

 

I remember Sally slappin her hands

On the dash of my car

A head full of dreams and songs to play

Thinking someday soon she’ll be on her way

Doing her dues and making it pay

No longer playing old church halls or a public bars

It’s Opera house and Stadiums

No longer dreamin of fortune and fame

My little girl’s a superstar

Now this old world knows her name

A Conception Conspiracy

 Way back in September 1948

Time was pressing it couldn’t wait

And our mothers, the sisters three

Hatched a plan, or so it seems to me

Something my cousins and me

Called the conception conspiracy

 

If such a plan had been discussed

The birthday dates preferred were June

And with many factors to consider,

Husbands to coerce would be a cinch

A kiss, a cuddle, a loving pinch

A little human to create

 

Doubled over and throwing up

Each sister thought with banging head

She should have bought a pup instead

Encouraged by Grandma saying something great

Like, “It’s your first, I had ten.”

No sympathy from our Nan, she’d say,

“Now, out of bed and start again.”

 

And as June 1949 came around

Through the moaning and contraction slug

Auntie Aileen gave birth to Doug

I was next with Edna pushing hard

My father banished to the yard.

Last was Beth bringing cousin Geoff to life

 

But there we were cousins three

Doug and Geoff and little me

June’s babies born eighteen days apart

A bond soon formed and as we grew

Through our scrapes our fights and fun

Some battles lost some battles won

 

Now sitting here soon seventy-two

I think about our shared history

Our mothers, fathers and siblings too

Of Nannie Symes, those sisters three

and I am convinced, there had to be

A planned conception conspiracy

DAVE THE SLAVE

Dave, everyone thought him slow

And, because at school his grades were low

Teachers gave him extra work

But when it came to jobs outside of school

Dave bent his back and sweated hard

Doing the crap no one wanted to

Became a target for the high school jerk

But Dave was a thinker, strong and kind

Taking all those rotten jobs, he never had a care.

At fifteen Dave left school, failed without a pass

But Dave had a plan to outdo his peers

All those jobs others just would not do

For a price he’d clean a drain, or pick-up shit

Some old red paint, and flattened tin, he made a sign

That read:

‘Dirty, smelly jobs, not for you?’

Give Dave a call and I’ll make them mine’

And below number painted in bright red,

Free to call of course, is what it said.

At first the townsfolk thought him a joke

Called him Dave the Slave

When his name they used

But that was always part of young Dave’s plan

Cleaning gutters, raking leaves,

There wasn’t a thing he wouldn't do.

Gave the pubs a miss when his day was done

No-one he had to sit and yarn

With this drop-out kid from a busted home, on the edge of town

After counting his cash by lantern light

Dave stashed it down tight in an old milk can

And while the town was having fun

It was Dave the Slave who counted his cash

HIs twenty first, no birthday bash

For Dave’d be cleaning the toilets at the local hall

No invitations ever came his way

For weddings, church outings, birthday parties, or such

So, unseen but watching Dave cleaned it all

A life’s ambition had been to save

And now a master stroke he played

That horrid name, no longer was a joke

Our man Dave now changed his brand.

And Dave the Slave, he franchised out

His company’s growth it didn’t stop.

He bought pavilions, generators and polished floors

Now rented out to those who'd teased

He took their cash and walked away

He bought a block on the side of town

Built a strip of shops and factories too

Fast Food joints along the highway faced

And soon the shopping strip was full

A Hardware chain called and asked him

To build

A warehouse large for them to fill

Dave’s wealth and influence continued to grow

No more the small town laughing stock

Dave bought the farm one of his bullies lost to the bank

Only contempt he had for Dave

With little left that the family owned strapped to their truck

In desperation, the bully’s wife gave Dave a call

So with fading light and choking tears

Between them both they worked out a plan

She'd keep the house where she’d raised their kids

Her husband still would work his family land

New machinery from Dave now filled the sheds

The bully, his attitude had changed

And the sense of privilege that he once knew

Had disappeared like morning rain

They struggled hard his wife and him

Until they saved enough to buy

That same land his forebears had worked for years

His lesson learned; his pompous nature gone

A better man now like a chrysalis emerged

No longer propping up the bar when there was seeding to be done

The farm a show piece for all to see

He’d tell his admiring friends when they came to stay

None of this is because of me

It was Dave the Slave, who set me free.