Jenny Weight started writing and performing poetry at Friendly St in 1995. since then
she did some performance poetry and has now ‘settled down’ into electronic writing.
Her stuff mainly appears on websites. In 2002, she moved to Melbourne and she is now studying and teaching in the field of interactive electronic media.
Jenny’s first poetry collection, Life in the Oort Cloud, may be purchased on-line from the Wakefield Press website.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
There’s nothing there.
All I did was tap, once,
ever so lightly
with the want – honest!
Reality is such a flimsy commodity.
I have painted paper flowers on the air,
filled hours with reproduction love,
master, by default,
of this malleable castle.
And good and bad have gone to bed
to spawn a race of questions
who plot to inherit the earth.
And am I not, perhaps,
a simulation of myself?
Truly a connoisseur of deception –
even the sorcerer is my own invention.
So clever…
Tonight, in a fit of maestro magic
I will poison the servants –
but everything is negotiable
when its antithesis is but
a spell away.
From Friendly Street No. 19
Life in the Oort Cloud
Like insects sucked into the ether,
atomised asteroids
corralled in an orbit to nowhere,
tumbling blind
through the foyers of the astral plain.
Out here in the neuter zone
we avoid the diplomacy of love.
Occasionally someone capitulates
to the realms of the planets
and explodes on the common ecliptic:
from this distance it’s hard to judge
if destruction is delight or despair.
We of the Oort Cloud,
prowling the borders of passion
like disumbilicalled navels;
tossed upon the light years of our craving
to re-fuse
with the sun.
From Life in the Oort Cloud: Friendly Street New Poets Two
Boudicca
Boudicca has slipped her tether,
ripped off her veil,
and her hair falls askew.
The robe she wore
is shred on fence palings;
the glory she sought
giggles fickle farewells.
Shriven and brindled by the rape of her daughters,
Boudicca has galloped away –
sometimes she scratches as shanty doors
but mainly she watches
the blood of sunrises
too numerous to mention.
Disregarding her death,
Boudicca is still at large
and she won’t lie down yet –
some people think she’s crazy
but I know, in her heart,
she’s just like me.
From Life in the Oort Cloud: Friendly Street New Poets Two