Deb Curreen Author

Look at the Liars, with their pants on fire. Serves you right, you human blight.   Taint on the horizon, sty in the eye; wrecking the day, with your pork pie lie.   Go reap bad karma! Get hit by a stone! Live your life with honesty, leave good people alone.   Look at the Liars with their pants on fire, shame about the hole in my bucket, or else I might have saved you – liar, liar.

I'm on another night out, in the local cafe, with my bestie, sipping wine, nibbling nibbles, missing a mate, lamenting her absence, scorning her loss, wondering what went wrong, with her. But She did post something that was private, about us, set to public "When it comes to friends, it's not all wine and roses, carrot cakes  and drunken choruses on a floating boat in the harbour," my Bestie said. "Sometimes pots get thrown, flowers die and the wine gives you a bloody headache." "The boat makes you seasick and there are sharks in the harbour," I offer, as I am pouring her more sparkling wine. Rose, the pink stuff, meant for holidays and chatty talk with "the girls". Not for funerals, and certainly not for a friend who posted something private, set to public "Babes can  be bitches," a stranger from another table chimed in. We looked askance at this someone new. She drank red. Serious about life then, or worked too hard, trying to...

Old friends is a place, in your heart, like battered suitcases, carried from town to town, to home and back. Full of pictures, laughter, sad times and wine with crackers, the tears from hard days and nights.   We carry old friends, never leaving them behind or in a dumpster, tied up in plastic sacks, driven away from and never looking back. We save that for enemies. Old friends come with us, wrapped carefully like precious bone china, stored in the cupboards of our heart and clearly labelled, Fragile.   One day we find them again, and we bring them out to wine and dine with again. We remember, oh we remember and it’s still too funny but not sad, well a bit. We are grateful that we lived, to watch another sun set, over another meal together. Sitting on the suitcases of our lives, unwrapping the precious and the fragile, comforted by the familiar, sharing the dust of lives thoroughly lived.

I swim in the waters of friendship,  letting their kindness wash o ver me, drinking the praise, eating the mem o ries, exquisite m o rse l s that I keep in a trinket b o x beside my bed-  la Familia What a bun fight at every Christmas, missed birthdays and never a call when I need y o u,  la Familia But still that bl o o d it sticks I find puddles in my kitchen, dr o ps in the trinket b o x, tang l ed in my hair, smeared  o n the wa l l s  o f my s o u l then s ometimes, the twain meet  Gentle  rivers meet the   o ceans on a quiet day, fresh water swirling into briny waves...la Familia...salt and light H20 meets plasma, night kisses day and sometimes the two become one. But not for long, la Familia with swords drawn, duels at dawn, bloody mess and mothers cry wet tears  as the clouds pull the ocean away from the river, memories wash out to sea and friends don't look back. Blood is no longer thicker than the waters that have become as bit...

I’ve been watching the news again on the terror-vision, the window of doom into my sitting room and I wonder if anywhere is sacred anymore.                                                 Do the sea lions know they are no longer protected?  that some fullah too fat to fish anymore is removing the protection from their lives, while children begin to starve on the playgrounds.                                                                                                  Who really cares? Shrugs a heartless coalition, as a couple of politicians turn their coats over on potholes, they’re never going to fix… and ...

  In 2019, I lost one of my best friends in the Christchurch mosque shooting. This is what the world is like now without her.  RIP Pikelet 💚💔 The light in my heart that was you There is a light in my heart, that searches for you, in a dark place of loss where the earth no longer holds colour, only shadows of a thousand yesterdays while faint laughter carries across eternity teasing my   memories.   The light in my heart listens, for that song rolling out on the radio, notes and lyrics pulling me back to those days of dancing, leaping, shouting, our spontaneity making the kitchen a dance floor of sweat, laughter, alcohol, heartbeats, more.   The light in my heart holds, my last email to you, the final poem I wrote, a shirt that you made for me, black and gold, too small now, and a handful of photos of you, always smiling, always dressed up, colourful and gay, happy beside me.   The light in my heart remembers, ...

 As I stand in the place of our meeting, in a paddock of winnowing golden grasses, summer winds stroke my arms, while tall and silent mountains smile down upon me, the whispering voices speak to my heart and as I it all comes back,  i feel everything.   I kneel beside a riverbed of yesterdays,  waiting at night for the ghosts to embrace me. Yet still I wonder.... How can I say good-bye to you? Every you and every day, all the moments held in crystal nights, a love that never left me, but has waited here until today. I am back in the town where we met, on the streets that melt with the summer sunshine of January and a new years day, with hallowed homes and winding driveways, where my feet tussle with the dust and memories of forty years  waiting for the return, Of you, and me. All that is mine, I have carried with me until now, and I can't quite stand, the stillness of all that ever was and can never be again, pulsing in the air that I can barely breathe, se...