Had I but the right cutlery, I could cut it
but in this age of convenience and terror I
am not to be trusted. I’ve a piece of plastic
I must sharpen with my mind, that presently
tears, no wipes, the hang-dog expression
from the face of our single serve of lasagne.
This is not the end or rather the end as I’d
imagined it, this monochromatic restaurant
with its listless salads and half arsed pasta
bakes, its muzak and families dull as tines
on my fork. Craft taxi and dock, no this is
not the end, it is ends – and interminably so.
This poem wants to do so much, the cutlery
apposite: I am trying to lift love, I am trying.
Terry Jaensch is an Australian poet/actor and monologist. His first book, Buoy, was published in 2001 (FIP) and shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. He has worked as Writer-in-Community, Poetry Editor (Cordite) Artist-in-Residence, Dramaturge, Artistic Director of the 2005 Emerging Writers’ Festival, poetry teacher and in a variety of arts/community and local government programming positions. In 2004 he wrote and recorded 15 monologues based on his childhood in a Ballarat orphanage for ‘Life Matters’ ABC Radio – since reworked and performed for theatre as ‘Orphan’s Own Project’. He was awarded an Asialink residency in Singapore where he worked collaboratively with poet Cyril Wong. The resulting work, Excess Baggage & Claim (transitlounge publishing), was launched in 2007. He has won awards including the Melbourne Poet’s Union International Poetry Prize, the Victorian Writers’ Centre Poetry Slam and was on the winning team of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Slam. His work has been anthologized, most recently in Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann) and published in journals nationally and in the US, Germany, Japan, Singapore and India. His poems have been translated into Bengali and interpreted through classical Indian dance. He has a background in acting, having studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio and Stella Adler conservatory in New York.
