Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 9. May 4 1981

•P•O•E•M•S•

•P•O•E•M•S•

Tired Words

Be careful not to overdo this fashionable paranoia
of little houses in suburbia,
little people, insulated lives.

Your arrogance,
barely masked in that non-conformist stand,
has shaky foundations.
It will be swept - along with your ideals,
shouts of jubilance and sneers of youth - into the greater turmoil of everyday life.
And you, you will be left grasping, confused, defeated.
Scrabbling in the chaos of your hypocrisy,
you will see the winking lights of the warm little houses and reach out.
To sink, sink gratefully into security you'd shunned.
To give yourself over to the reassurance of ordered life;
the ordering of life being life.
We all get tired sometime, girl,
So quiet your protestations,
Save face
The years will prove you inadequate.
Acceptance is far closer to your truth.

T.F.C.

Carpark; 11.30

Crammed in a cortina
Staring out at rain slashing
night-puddles slinking through the carpark.
Pubs closed, no parties.

A physical understanding
between bodies violating other's space;
The retention of one's own for one's own
being superfluous to the moment.
Just listening to others breathing,
Exchanging an awareness of other lives - an awareness heightened by the rain's primeval, rhythmic drumming on the hood.
Rain, always rain,
Bloating their senses, drawing them back,
Back to the common core.

Swirling together
in this half-grasped knowledge of the essence,
their beings slowly merged.
All that each had ever thought and done
Folded over
And slid into the collective consciousness
which hovered, like the smoke, lining the roof of the car.
And still, the rain's insistence
The smell of close, pulsing bodies.
The car spinning in the glistening night's void.
No longer units of integrity;
They had offered up their individuality,
Rain-mesmerised,
To a greater Ego.
Thus, blurred in nothingness, they became everything.
A revolving total
In a stoned Friday night, cortina-encapsulated, communion.

T.F.C.