Pages Cafe ’05
I’ve discovered that AustLit have a full bibliographic listing of my publications, including this chapbook published in 2006 to say thanks to the poets who performed at my Poets Corner events between 2005 and 2008.
http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C820752?mainTabTemplate=workTableOfContents&embId=Z1857424&from=40&count=20&sortWorksBy=byPageAsc
Each poem is now registered and available to read, including a poem by Jack Thompson’s (the actor) father from an out of print book which I later gave Jack, re-published with his kind permission:
The Sunbather “I shield my face. My eyes are closed. I spin“ John Thompson , 1935 poetry (p. 41)
AustLit requires certain hurdles to jump if you want to read the poems, so I’ve copied one of my poems from the book “Pages ’05”:
Suits and Ties
Your corporate wardrobe titillates.
Challenges me to abandon –
invites you to swim with me –
in a sea wet with desire.
Throw off your hard shell,
your calm, controlled exterior
and reveal the let-go you.
The knot of your tie,
like seaweed trapping
the unaware swimmer,
restricting your neck –
choking. Stopping words
that reveal your heart.
Speech splinters jab at me
– stabbing me with purpose
pricking my memory of
a shipwrecked love
laid low in my sub-marine.
I want you to loosen your tie
with purpose, invite intimacy,
soul revelations as you
breast-stroke in deep water –
prove the want – the known need
to be swamped by passion.
The three-piece suit necessary
clothing – layers hiding…
Providing warmth, weighing
where sun shafts can’t penetrate
or offer paths of lighted guidance.
Relinquish your quintessence!
Allow this sensual drowning
– while arms cleave in swells
of touch, taste and heat –
liquid languishing laid naked
to my reciprocal need.
Dismiss the discipline
of habitual analysis?
Take off those polished shoes –
shake off the weight and surrender
to feelings incomprehensible
to the clever business brain.
Allow unknown, unrehearsed,
unrestrained actions –
releases of reason, to win.
I watch you purposely dive
our murky, bottomless depths.
Hands locked together, arms
pointed straight above your head
protecting – patiently proving
your commitment, your leap
with one compulsive breath
into our eventual eternity.
Frances Macaulay Forde © 2003
(First appeared in “Hidden Capacity ~ a poet’s journey” published in Ireland, 2003.)
@FrancesMForde #FrancesMacForde #Father’sDay #PoetsCorner #BOOK:Pages’05 #StateLibraryWA #AustLit #POEM:Suits&Ties #Poetry #ExploringPossibilities #BOOK:HiddenCapacity #CorporatePoem #LovePoems #ACTOR:JackThompson
“Portrait Study – Old Man”
Tara chose this GIF because she always wanted to be Sherilyn Fenn. 
Perth Words... exploring possibilities. 