Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three Nov-Dec 2026.
Cocktail Shaker, poems by Damen O’Brien.
Cocktail Shaker
Two smugglers were rescued after spending weeks
clinging to the cocaine they were smuggling.
Shambles water and the vessel bubbling downwards
but you’re buoyant as a tumbler full of ice and gin
or the crush in a mojito, you’ve got more float than
a hot lung full of smoke, a head packed with grass.
If only an entrepreneurial by-line could fend of sharks:
‘let cocaine float your boat’, no, ‘cocaine saves your life’,
or, ‘cocaine is a life preserver’. Good thing the coke
is hurricane-wrapped for the difficult passage, each
package bundled in its own little jacket, which
the crew wasn’t given, not being precious cargo.
Newly-made floatation devices. Powder-keg rafts.
Delicious dilemmas. After a week clinging grimly
to uncut contraband, death waits for both choices:
to seek help and die choking from an assassin’s fingers
while money changes hands outside their cell, or brave
the black current, the fins and teeth of junkies circling,
looking for another fix and the drug cartels waiting
on some Columbian beach, not notorious for patience.
Terrible ironies: consumable product in all directions
but nothing edible. Those who live by the sword
often die by it and it would have been a temptation
to go out with one big overwhelming bang but the last
wasted blast is actually the Navy ship’s horn bisecting
the meniscus of the horizon and the choice is taken.
Handcuffs for each sailor, warm soup from the galley
and happy snaps for the officers beside the haul of
soggy bales of cocaine and weepy bailed up smugglers.
Ballast for brigands. Gas for gangsters. You don’t
always know you were floating until you begin to sink.
The Night Watch
I am the node around which the whole world turns,
in pointe carrousel, or moon revolves and yearns,
or that drop of old blood, the sun, slowly churns.
I am still, so that the hurried world may move,
by my hand the croupier sweeps the felt and shoves
the chips into their house, the ball rolls in its groove.
Turn me back, the trees retreat, their claws sheath,
twig back to seed, ink draining out of grief,
the man sloughs from the boy, doubt withers into belief.
Wind me forward and you’ll tumble into the grave, on weak
and wandering legs, flames bristle in your love, you speak
in sepia and ghosts, of dissolves, diminishments and leaks.
I’ve seen your passions enacted like a third-rate play,
your infidelities, thoughtless camelots and mandelays,
your open hands, your fists, your parting of the ways.
I’ve cut so fine that no one finds a scar, between
my blades the seconds fall like chaff and in
every one, the universe is kernelled entire, unseen.
I’ve seen the apple rot, under my swept hand sped,
the second where the apple ripened, bubbled red,
I’ve squeezed the beating out of every bed.
I watched a girl sit beside her window in the dark, she
stayed still for so long, I questioned my machinery.
I could not ask what she was thinking. I could only see.
Mostly, I have seen the world degrade,
the callus and the cataract, the curtains on the window fade,
paint laid coat on coat, the old blunt new blade.
Once anger got up and slammed a final door,
the world out there was not the world I saw.
In me, the actors take up the positions they held before,
I push them round the room like paper dolls, they pivot, turn,
do it all again. I can only watch, I cannot learn.
The girl waits for a man that won’t return.
C Ash
A small part of the fug that is cooking our planet is burning money.
Treasuries and Mints allocate replacements for bank notes lost to fire.
A small amount of tender has always burned as tinder that we all
breathe in a peck of richness, we are coated in the works of Mammon.
Fired up annually, furnaces ash the old consideration now obsolete.
With an orange flame once, now polymer shrinks but once viridian ink
burned like the spirits of gold possessed it. Votive offerings are still
launched at acquisitive Gods, who know the real thing when they taste it
and won’t settle for inflationary notes or empty Bit Coin: indigestible,
un-exchangeable and incomprehensible rows of zeros. Pesos burn
each year in the jungle economies and banana republics faster than
they’re printed, a great expanding cough of money which for its rich art,
its counterfeiters’ dismay was once coveted. Mulah melts, dough burns
as easily as books do in the occasional spasm of deliberate forgetting
mankind is prone to. Charring in mattresses and hidden deposits.
Under the sack of armies, cities crisp in the bonfires of lucre and
so many Gods are suddenly satisfied, they are glutted on the worth
of things which are now become transitory. When the greedy raiders
come to strip the wealth from our fields and set their torches in our
thatches, the money hidden under our floorboards will run and flutter
like a stop-motion cartoon of a bank robbery, like the confetti of a king.
We will find that there is nothing special hidden in the paper, no ward
or spell. When the leaves of that thorny tree burn, we cannot hope,
as they spark and flare into new gold, to buy anything but warmth.
Sound Asleep
I bent a crowbar trying to open sleep –
typing on the inside of my eyelids for hours –
my neighbour’s cars snuffling up the street –
the muffled slam of doors, stifled talk –
nightbirds calling to each other like lost boys –
cat, perhaps or possum, scratching at a bin.
I listened to the pulse pump in my ears,
sensed the textured darkness like a bat –
insomniac industry of the Port’s low groan –
a train’s dull horn calling out the hours
to every drowsy station that it passed –
this settling house, creaking in its blankets –
planes far above, dragging furniture around –
scratching their long groove across the sky –
my neighbour coughing quietly in his bed –
mournful whimper of a dog, loud silence –
embarrassed keys jingling at morning’s door –
the sun’s crass marimba ringing up the day.
© Damen O’Brien
Damen is a multi-award-winning Australian poet. His poems have been published in eight countries, nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and highly commended in the Forward Prize. In 2026, Damen won the Poetry D’Amour Prize, the AAALS Creative Writing Competition and the fourW Poetry Prize. His poems can be found in Dust, Griffith Review, ANTAE Journal of Creative Writing and other journals. Damen is currently working on his third book.