Fraser Sutherland - Two Poems

Letter To Jim Jones

Some reduction is achievable

in documentary impedimenta:

your voice, rant, rave.

Not that words often do good.

Nor did your words.

To write about you makes us captive

like those who followed you.

You returned them to earth,

to jungle putrefaction.

They lay with you in the hacked space

you called a town and persuaded us

that all should rot and let us smell you.

Living With Mother

And this is how it may be:

I, replacing my father, sit at the window,

besieged by my mother's anxieties

about a ceiling falling, an incontinent cat,

and I will be blamed,

blamed if it happens, blamed

for the fear of its happening.

I will retreat to the cruelty of silence,

my face averted to the window

or take a walk, talking to myself,

or drink and drink and drink,

one moment stuporous, the other

recriminative. My mother,

anxious with her murderous headache,

lives on and on,

and I, my father's shell, await my end.

 Fraser Sutherland is a poet and lexicographer. He's published 17 books, nine of them poetry, most recently, The Philosophy of As If.