Beetle
As a kid I took a beetle apart
bit by bit
just to see what made it tick
trying to find the heart of its mystery.
I dismantled it methodically
like a mechanic a car –
wings, feelers, head …
but then forgot
how to stick it back together.
And it never did stop moving
right down to the last
single
twitching
leg.
By then the mystery had fled.
Selfing
I am most myself
when least myself
when I give myself
when I lend myself
when I lose myself
re-lease myself
to find myself flung
by some centrifugal love
into the orbit of another
out of the blinding I
the soul-toothing Me and My
to be woven, like straw
into the consciousness
of an othering land of
empathy, understanding …
all those nice pretty words
but not just sounds
plucked from the tongue,
gathered from the lips as
windfall to fill a basket
with decorative sweets dead
and ornate as a wedding cake
words to be usefully juiced
and fed to another’s heart and head.
Almost selfish, this altruism
for the gift the giver it gives.
Though at its best blind
to this paradox of slippery bliss –
to forget to exist
is to most exist, most live.
Bionote
Tug Dumbly is an Australian poet and satirist who has performed his poems, songs and monologues on radio and in schools, venues and festivals, both in Australia and abroad. He has released two spoken word CDs, once won the Spirit of Woodford storytelling award, at Woodford Folk Festival, twice won the Banjo Paterson Prize for comic verse, and three times won the Nimbin World Performance Poetry Cup, most recently in 2017. He was runner up in the 2015 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, and recently completed a project writing 12 Christmas-themed poems, based on historical documents, for Housing NSW, which were displayed in installations around Sydney’s Rocks area in the 2017 Christmas season.
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