I am Geoffrey Aitken and I have recently been accepted for publication as one of three contributors by Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets into New Poets 19. I love people and I love poetry which I write to read and share at ‘open mic’. I do both regularly here in SA to where I’ve returned after almost 30 years in central Australia where significant disadvantage has shaped my thinking. Initially I was mechanically trained and so I write of the impact of that tortuous, mundane routine of work … suggesting ‘light industry’. I use local issues as prompts, varying only to remind myself that as an eventual teacher of Senior School English, it is the ‘less gifted’ for whom I must try the hardest because it is they who struggle the most, to be heard. I use irony like a prescription medication addict; to kill the pain adorably. I am recently retired and therefore, early older age. Always appreciative of opportunities to share.
it’s all relative (FSP Nova Prize short list 2017, Anthology No 42)
it’s old
before it reaches me
i’m told
the light
the day
the news
the conversation
there’s warmth though
and daylight hours are favourable
still dealing a life force
measured sometimes, in moments
and so
i make the fickleness last
etch notes in my journal
ignore life’s frailty
expand the impermanence
until i have possessed
the full day
calling it mine
as if it were mine to own
lived unremarkably (FSP Poem of the Month August 2018)
imagined precisely
authored biologically
managed medically
carried expectantly
raised exactly
schooled religiously
worshipped naively
dreamed unimaginatively
trained mechanically
loved inattentively
married prematurely
housed uniformly
reproduced expeditiously
urbanized routinely
worked tirelessly
aspired inappropriately
retired remorsefully
travelled reluctantly
aged tragically
died hypothetically
recycled metaphysically
in so many ways