Observations in the year 2016

The truth has more enemies than allies.
Adults have their ways, children have their whys.
People are made smaller by their grudges.

A straight banana is an impostor.
No pebble looks like its parents.
Bubbles never overstay.

The busy life, the lazy life, both are quicksand.
At any age you may become what doesn’t become you.
Your heart may fail as a lie detector.

Melbourne-based poet Peter Bakowski fell in love with the map of the world at the age of six. In 1983, he wrote his first poem while staying at a friend’s farmhouse in Waco, Texas, in response to receiving a “Dear John” letter from a Melbourne girl. As a result of that fateful letter, Peter ended up travelling for seven years, caught a freight train across Montana, lived in a cave on a Mexican island and ate gazelle cooked in stale blood with road builders in the Central African Republic. Peter has been writer-in-residence in Rome, Paris, Macau, Suzhou (China), Battery Point (Tasmania), Greenmount (Western Australia) and at the Broken Hill Writers Festival. His poems continue to appear in literary magazines worldwide and have been translated into Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Polish. In February 2015, Éditions Bruno Doucey of Paris, published a bilingual edition of his Selected Poems, entitled Le cœur à trois heures du matin. Peter’s aim as a poet is to write as clearly as possible and no matter how many books he writes in his lifetime, they’ll all be about what it’s like to be a human being.