Darren Stein's Storage Space

All that remains

2011-03-06T21:29:00.000+11:00

I look at the remains of the Abraham’s lives –
Two octogenarians now carted off to the home,
he, to the hospital section, near to certain death;
she, to pine away, alone among strangers, waiting
for the ever diminishing weekend visits from her
children and other family members.

No one has bothered with a garage sale – what
was of value, the family has taken – the rest, lies
strewn across the pavement outside their
building for backpackers and crows to pick through
the remains; a warped book shelf; an old mattress;
pretty, stained coasters from some holiday they
must have taken in the sixties – the detritus of a
marriage, an independent little world, now piled
onto a heap at the side of the road for the garbage
men to drag away and dump along with the rest
of life’s refuse.

A Conspiratorial Society of Creators

2011-02-24T23:30:00.001+11:00

I post my poem or artwork on the web
and wait for some other self-styled artist,
some kindred spirit to endorse it with a
thumbs-up, or a monosyllabic “cool” as
a seal of approval – to provide external
legitimacy to my hours of scribbling or
brush strokes.

I trawl through words and images from
thousands of other hopeless cases –
all talented, brilliant, yet commercially
barren and unrecognised by those
outside our conspiratorial society of
creators.

At least we have found each other.
Fragile egos which like wobbly
bubbles, bob back-and-forth in
quiet anticipation before our laptops,
waiting for someone to approve our
efforts and help us live to type or
paint another day.

Short Story: The Rabbi and the Vampire

2011-02-15T03:10:00.001+11:00

The Rabbi and the Vampire

On Lost Youth

2011-01-09T22:04:00.000+11:00

I never considered my body to serve any purpose
other than the locomotion of my mind. It’s
strength and attractiveness largely irrelevant for
one whose pride is the intellect and imagination.
But now this vessel scratches for my attention.
My belly has exploded over my belt and aches
and pains prevent a range of movement I had
long forgotten that I ever had.
More times than not I’m out of breath, and the
fantasy of a fit young man, fast and defensible
is all but gone.
Now I look at each set of stairs with trepidation
and steel my will for a walk up to the corner
store.

2010-01-12T00:25:00.001+11:00

How to treat your poets

2009-12-10T22:30:00.001+11:00

You can judge a nation by the way it treats its
poets.
Does it silence or imprison them?
Does it grant them freedom or commercialize
their words?
Ancient Israel hailed its poets as prophets and
anointed a poet king, as a result its verses have
echoed down throughout the ages and forms the
bedrock of our very prayer.
From Muslims to Hindus; from the Upanishads
to the Quran, their words are poetry, their
instrument a message from the divine.
So treat your poets graciously, nurture and
encourage them, for it is through their words
you will be judged and your memory will live
forever.

Epidemics

2009-10-30T13:14:00.001+11:00

Cows are mad and pigs have flu
So it seems do birdies too.
Horses have an equine virus,
That stops the nags from racing
for us,
Wild rabbits have Calici germs,
Fish: mercury in their interns,
So its no surprise that when I
buy it,
I might stick to a vegan diet.

The TV Elves

2009-10-28T09:49:00.000+11:00

Swine Flu

2009-09-23T11:09:00.002+10:00

Pork chop
Hates slop
Revenge takes
Outbreaks

Prognosis

2009-09-23T11:09:00.001+10:00

Docs give
Bad news
Will live

No Baggage Allowed

2009-09-01T09:33:00.001+10:00

Success is a narrow gap
that you can try to slip
through, but have to
leave a part of you
behind - a hand
or a heart.

NO BAGGAGE ALLOWED

Or you can sit and watch
the gap close ever more
as you get older, glad
that you can keep all
your bits, but sad
that you will
never know
how it was
on the
other
side.

Knowing is a torture in itself

2009-09-01T09:32:00.001+10:00

Genius is often small recompense for a broken heart,
Often knowing is a torture in itself,
For feeling the world intensely
You are scourged at every cruelty wrought by man.

Broken Orbit

2009-08-28T11:18:00.001+10:00

All of my relationships came through you.
You were my connector; the friends we had,
the company we enjoyed,all revolved around
your gravitational centre, and once it was
gone, I was left spinning out of control,
growing ever distant from the rotating
planets happy in their other orbits.

On Post-Modernist Theory

2009-08-18T10:37:00.001+10:00

On reading a book of Post-Modernist Theory,
I ask myself, where else might I use the words
epistemes or similitude, and what would be the
reaction of the man down at the News Agent
if I said that he was merely a responder?

Would my subjective reality preclude me from
interpreting him correctly as he asked me for
two dollars in change, and could such a request
be neither defined nor definitive; that there was
in fact no reality only interpretation, and his
request was merely an artefact of a dominant
and illusionary discourse?

As he deconstructed my paradigm, he might ask
me, ‘whatever happened to plain speech and plain
Meaning? ’in response to which I would give him
my book and warn him not to try to flush the
glossy pages as they tended to clog the toilet.

Poetry at the point of sleep

2009-08-16T11:13:00.001+10:00

It came to me at the point of sleep –
a flash of brilliance in poetry,
And I lay wrestling with my slippery
consciousness;
Should I wrench myself awake and
force myself to write it down or risk
I’ll still remember it tomorrow,
hoping that tonight’s illumination
will be as clear then?
Sleep won out, and my poem
unsatisfied like a fickle lover
abandoned me, leaving me alone
with nothing more than this.

The incompatibility of math and poetry

2009-08-10T20:01:00.001+10:00

It’s been many years since we rode that bus
to university together –
You, to your maths degree and me to my
course on English Literature.
You used to say that Maths was the universal
language and tease me about the worthlessness
of the arts and poetry.
I said that even maths is not immune to the
adaptability of poetry and cheekily wrote you
an Ode to the solution of a math problem at
2 AM in the morning.
You laughed as I dedicated it to you, and
gave it to your math teacher mother who
used it as a cover sheet on one of her exams.
It has been many years now and perchance
I came across your name on Face Book;
‘I published your poem!’ I wrote to you,
but you did not respond, so perhaps you
were right after-all, maths is incompatible
with poetry.

The redundant salesman

2009-07-17T08:47:00.000+10:00

Nobody wants what I am –
a redundant salesman of the truth;
a poet with no market for his wares.

Mercy for Sisyphus

2009-07-16T13:05:00.001+10:00

Moving home is the sixth circle of hell.
Zeus cursed Sisyphus to forever roll a
rock up hill, but I think he was merciful
for if he truly wished to punish him
he would have forced him to move home
from one location to another, forever
packing and unpacking in each
temporary domicile.

There is a magic which holds one’s
home together; Like the mystery of
floating atoms, things settle in their
cracks and crevices; Items of low
mass and volume somehow explode
in size when one moves them to a
new location –
a Big Bang on a minor scale.

And one discovers that no matter
how large the succeeding space
there is never enough room, and
one has to cull and dispose of
one’s belongings before
beginning the cycle again.

Dead Books

2009-07-06T14:49:00.000+10:00

My grandmother has a shelf full of dead books;
Not that they are moth bitten or bare broken bindings,
but that they were written in an age which no longer
worth finding and speaks to a paradigm we have
thankfully forgotten –
the pretty housewife with her repressed ambition;
the hardboiled detective and his misogynism;
the heroic soldier with his homosexual undertone;
Unlike our race’s evolving attitudes they remain the
same - antique wall carvings to world long forgotten –
a curiosity perhaps like the words inscribed on a
strangers tombstone which do not speak for the
living and no longer have a life of their own.

To be or not to be (Part 2)

2009-06-20T10:32:00.001+10:00

I am lost in my own perception of self;
The ever-shifting maze in which what
I presume to know is never so,
And what I believe the one day,
I soon discover is not so on another.
I reach for that which I intend to grasp
only to find that I have in fact taken one
which I’d forsaken, and not the one which
I had wished at all.
My memory is in free fall.
I do not recall appointments, nor remember
small details such as pin codes, or the phone
numbers of friends abodes.
I do not trust myself with basic information
and have lost my confidence, my sense of
who and what and where, and so resolve a
course of resignation, and try as best I can
to pretend I do not care.
I write bad poetry instead and wait for the
day that I might turn up dead; my problems
solved, the mystery resolved.

New Cartoon Blog or Clog

2009-06-17T14:46:00.003+10:00

I invite you all to view my new Cartoon Blog, "The Hidden Paw" about the secret history of the Teddy Bear menace. Feel free to comment.

The Utopian Herald - Careers Section

2009-06-16T13:44:00.000+10:00

Poet Wanted:-

Well-established firm for the Poetical
seeks capable poet for developmental
verse and prose.
Must be well versed in the Satirical
from Juvenal to Nezhukumetathil,
as well as pastoral, villanelle, ghazel
and Lowell’s Confessional
style and form.
Critical reviews of previous fictional
work will be optimal.
Some international travel possible.
Generous conditions and salary parcel
for the candidate who is suitable.

Pain is my muse

2009-05-10T14:59:00.001+10:00

I escape reality, not through fantasy,
but in its creation, which grows out
of a disappointment with my own
existence; thus, pain is my muse.

We only return for funerals

2009-05-10T14:53:00.000+10:00

Having come across the sea
to escape our former lives
we only return for funerals -
having vacillated during the
days of the living,
terrified of what awaits us
on return, of becoming that
thing we once were,
finding excuses to delay our
reunification, until we are
finally faced with that final
obligation –
the cowards farewell to the
dead.
Absence does not make the
heart grow fonder;
It eases the pain and salves a
guilty conscience, after years
of neglecting the living.

The Porcine Conspiracy

2009-05-08T21:34:00.000+10:00

An eternal victim is the pig,
to the planet’s end he’s hunted
By butcher, troll and big, bad wolf
whom he has not affronted.
He’s fed on refuse, housed in mud,
his name applied to insult –
His only friend the kosher Jew
or vegetarian occult.
But porky has now hatched a plot
to avenge this lack of grandeur
He’ll unleash upon his bitter foes
the H1N1 influenza.

Poking fun at global catastrophe

2009-04-28T23:09:00.002+10:00

This latest design is available in a range of clothing and apparel from my Provocation-Fashion website.

HSC Marking in the Cattle Pavilion

2009-04-24T22:43:00.000+10:00

Two-hundred teachers- HSC marking
like the students who wrote them
in row after row in a disused cattle
pavilion at the Easter showground.
Ziggurat stacks in cardboard in-trays,
all armed with coffee which they
take intravenously-
but in reality, it is only the flies
that keeps them awake.

The Final Note

2009-04-17T13:25:00.001+10:00

I am so stressed by endless labour that I do not
even have the time to write my own suicide note.
The cacophony of demands:-
do this -
do that!
Don’t forget too...
Be sure too...
Please confirm?
And though, at home, amidst waves of chores,
little children nag me to peel their apple or
accompany them to the bathroom, it is,
at the end of the day, only for them that
I don’t yell, stop!
and make the time to sound that final note.

The Deluge

2009-04-17T13:21:00.001+10:00

My darling little girl and boy
have brought me almost endless joy;
I testify to God above
there are no limits to my love.
Our problem is a spacial one,
when little kiddies want some fun-
To play and fight and shout and chat
confined within our twin-room flat.
No sooner have I cleared away
the cluttered remains of the day,
the hydra then springs back again
multiplied by the force of ten.
I’ll pick a toy up off the floor
and place it neatly in a drawer-
in seconds I find at my feet
are several new toys I need sweep.
Like King Canute’s delusional pride,
I’m in constant battle with the tide
and find myself in great distress
as I slowly drown in waves of mess.

An April Fool's Funeral

2009-04-13T00:25:00.001+10:00

They buried the son I never knew they had,
on April Fool’s day in the rain –
A suicide, a long-time coming, and apparently
of no surprise to those who know him best.

As the slush and mud hid the outlines of
more recently filled graves, the retinue
scrambled over Roz Feitelson - just lately
dead from cancer – to avoid missing out
on any of the current action.

His mother, pallid, her groans echoing to
the heavy clompfff of falling sod that beat
the coffin that hid her baby boy.

And we looked on, conflicted by our
sympathy and morbid fascination that
tried to fathom the unknown lifetime of
cause and effect,
and ultimate responsibility.

Cartoon Clocks

2009-04-13T00:06:00.000+10:00

As I am dragged from my slumber
by a determined four-year-old,
I stumble through the family room
to turn on the television while I
manufacture something marginally
wholesome for him to eat.

Whilst pouring chocolate milk and
buttering toast, the morning cartoons
Inform me of the time –
If it’s Backyardigans, it’s between
six and six-thirty; Dora the Exlorer,
six-thirty to seven; If it’s Diego, than
it’s time I had a shower, and by the
time its Sesame Street we’re already
late for school.

I often live in ten-minute to half-hour
Increments –
“Not just yet, dad, I want to finish
watching this show!”
It’s the price I pay for this technicolour
babysitter, that schools the mind of my
innocent child
and his lazy father.

First Review

2009-03-28T19:55:00.002+11:00

The first official review of Storage Space has been written by John Lehman at Book Review.com. I think that it is fair and balanced and am very happy with the overall sentiment. Here it is:

It’s unusual for the first poem in a collection to be the title of the book. Usually the poet saves that for three-quarters of the way through as a kind of vindication for what has been included, but in this case it is perfect. “We all need a little space store the things we treasure…” the poet says, whether they are valuable or we just “lack the heart to throw (them) away.” The pieces I love best are those that reveal the relationships, memories hopes and dreams that make up the poet’s life. Does that make them profound, or even relevant to the reader? Not necessarily. Stein says on the back of the book, “Poetry is irrelevant; it has no effect on the world around us, and were it to disappear, hardly anyone would notice. This does not, however, mean that poetry is untrue, for what we have learnt is that the truth itself is often, also irrelevant.”
Two poems I particularly recommend are “Toy Cars and Immortality” in which the poet watches his son play with toy cars as his father watched him do the same; and “The Curse of the Ordinary”: “When should we realize that our poems—our novels— / will never be published or that our paintings will / never be displayed— / our self-assured genius unread, unseen, / and unappreciated. / When will we stop sending entries into contests, / or letters to publishers? When do we come to / terms with the fact that we are just a teacher, / just a husband, just a father; and that is all that / we will ever be.”

These, and others of similar quality, are in the first half of the book. Those in the second tend to generalize and be more reaching, and I believe they are less successful. As Darren Stein says himself “In Passing I Said to Rikki” “the truth is made of simpler stuff.” So when I read poems like “Lost” or “Mists” I want specifics. I want to experience the feeling of being lost, or close my eyes and see the face that haunts the writer, not understand the poems’ themes. I don’t like poems that end in “Why?” such as “Here and Now—Now and Then” or shaped poetry like “An African Picture Postcard” (though that may be a matter of individual taste). And some poems have both wonderful lines and those that clunk: “We carry with us rooms of ghosts— (from “A Fear of Ghosts and Distance,” what a fantastic title) is followed half way down the same poem by “Will we always hide behind this mask of words…” (which seems to me terribly clichéd).

Often when I read a book of poetry I dog-leg pages I want to come back to. For one reason or another I have dog-legged more than half this book. Don’t worry Darren, your poems will be read and re-read. You are not ordinary.

Teaching Criminals

2009-03-27T21:06:00.001+11:00

After teaching high school for several years I have decided to teach prisoners in the state correctional system. After all, they're more respectful, their parents don't interfere, and if they misbehave you can have them beaten with a truncheon.

Darren's Designs on Red Bubble

2009-03-21T17:46:00.001+11:00

To see a friend charged

2009-03-21T17:12:00.000+11:00

To see a friend charged with a sexual crime is a shock
to one’s intelligence. Your ego feels that you would
recognise evil when you saw it, or could glimpse behind
the mask of secrecy to spot the beast that prowls beneath
the smiling, friendly surface full of trust and goodwill.

At first you make excuses-
Perhaps they got it wrong?
Perhaps it was a little incident that was swallowed up
amidst the enormity of a larger one?
Perhaps it was simply a case of stumbling into the wrong
set of circumstances at the wrong time?
But, then the reality sets in and you abandon your denial.
You wrestle with the ambivalence of your emotions, the
responsibility you have towards your friendship, and
consider your reactions to such matters on other occasions-
condemnations,
harsh judgements.

Can you look beyond the crime and remain a pal?
Can you ignore the morbid curiosity that tempts you to
discover every detail, or should you preserve a friendship
against the tide of conscience and public opinion, despite
the rising gall that make you choke upon the facts.
Hannah Arendt wrote about ‘the banality of evil’-
How it wears an ordinary face. There is no black hat or
dark cape. No red-lit corneas that stare out from the
shadows;
It’s just your mate doing things that he shouldn’t, and
you pity him for being caught, although you would
happily have seen another hang.

David Collins - The Umbilical Brother

2009-03-10T15:22:00.004+11:00

This is my latest artwork. It's a portrait of my brother-in-law, David Collins, from the comedy team, "The Umbilical Brothers". I photographed him drawing a third-eye on his forehead at my son's birthday party and I just loved the image.

Death by Poetry

2009-03-09T15:46:00.000+11:00

Many poets have written about their death by poetry.
How the love of their art has slowly brought about
their demise: -
starving poets,
ill poets -
too poor to buy the necessary food and medicine to
survive.
And then there is a spiritual death; The pining away
of the soul while we vainly try to reach the world
like some biblical prophet whose words of caution
tragically fall upon deaf ears.
Like modern day Jeremiahs, the world has no
interest in our truth, and even those we thought as
friends and colleagues shrug-off our scratchings
with indifference, and leave us burdened and

alone.

Storage Space

2009-03-08T21:49:00.000+11:00

Storage Space is the title poem of my new book.

The lowest perch

2009-03-07T18:24:00.000+11:00

I have been relegated to the lowest pigeon hole;
The plastic walls of my little mailbox buckling
under the weight of those above it.
I now have to kneel to retrieve my messages
and I finally understand my place in the pecking
order - the bird on the lowest perch is always
crapped on from the higher branches.

The Substitute Sports Teacher

2009-03-05T18:02:00.000+11:00

‘Here,’ he said, handing me the balls. ‘You can take the Year Sixes for volleyball. Just break them into four teams of five and let them play for forty-five minutes.’
‘Right,’ I grinned, ‘sounds simple enough,’ and it was in theory, although no one had explained that to the Year Sixes. For the boys the ball became a soccer, rugby and every other type of ball except a volleyball. For the girls, screams and squeals as they criss-crossed sides while the two genders gleefully interfered in each others’ games.
‘Ok,’ I said, ‘let’s try basketball. Boys on that side of the court, girls over here.’
And it worked for five minutes, till those two little girls wanted a drink, and this little one bent her finger back, and that little boy fell and scratched his knee and needed two of his mates to help him to the school nurse.
‘When does the lesson end, Mister Stein?’ asked a smiling face.
‘Not soon enough, mate,’ I replied. ‘In fact, there’s only five minutes left of the lesson. Why don’t you go all go freshen up and get something to drink before you have to head off to your next class.’

If art truly imitates life?

2009-03-03T20:59:00.001+11:00

What we need in movies is more toilet scenes to help put things into perspective.
Hollywood claims its gratuitous use of sex scenes represents a normal element of human relationships – a case of art imitates life – not meaningless titillation. And so, if the average human being goes to the loo at least four to eight times a day, perhaps a hundred times more than even the most athletic of us will be lucky enough to have “relations” - than let’s see more pooping and peeing on the silver screen.
I would like to watch Wil Smith running to the dunny before mowing down the latest alien menace. I would like to see plumbing facilities on the USS Enterprise or Millennium Falcon, and see Captain Kirk queuing up to use the head, while some Plutonian life-form complains that the shape does not suit it’s anatomical design and function. And more importantly, Angelina Jolie should have to take a whiz before taking off her top.
So cut the sex and bring on the ablutions, and lets have some real truth in our artistic revolution.

The Poetry Olympics

2009-03-03T20:57:00.001+11:00

I think that poetry should become an Olympic sport-
Spoken word or Slam, where poets compete on simile,
metaphor and other forms of verbal report.
There is nothing unsportsworthy about this, however
complex,
For after all, the Olympic repertoire now even includes
the riding of BMX.
And as with Synchronized Swimming, such an initiative
would definitely attract more money to organised rhyme,
And large corporations would be lining up to sponsor
all sorts of poets in next to no time.
You could “Have your Frosties with Robert Frost,” or
“Learn to park with Dorothy Parker,”
“Choose your booze with Ted Hughes,” or
“Take a bath with Sylvia Plath.”
We would stand at readings wearing logoed T-shirts or
pimp certain brands of beer in bars,
We’d be photographed for the back cover of Time,
wearing Rolex watches or driving fast cars.
All it takes is imagination and the hard work of a
determined poetic team,
For as Herzl once said, “If you will it, it is no dream”.