Poetry about Stardom / Nick Harle

Nick Harle is a writer and screen actor from Perth, Western Australia. A furiously creative screen performer, Nick’s poetic work mimics his stage presence – dynamic, rich, in parts obtuse – but never dry. His style continues to develop, with the work published here ranging in time from 2014 to last week. Ideas of sacrifice, ritual, majesty and most importantly the cut and thrust world of stardom have always captivated Nick. His fascination and devotion to the sheer alluring power of these themes is juxtaposed with a reoccurring criticism of their superficiality in his work. Nick’s poems are emotional and bloody, and never lie.

The Weather in Vegas

The weather

In Vegas,
Is found in the side walkers.
The lights

Of Vegas act as beacons of hope, for those disenchanted enough,

To drain themselves of love and loss
And merge with the rhythms of the concrete.

If you take the heat,
that creates the sweat,
Take the sweat that shows the pain.
And if you take the pain created;
Really, by the lights

You find the heart of Vegas.

Burned in the rows of bulbs,
In the filaments white-hot.
They blaze the bleached streets cold. Swirling with the broken dreams Of its people.

It builds like a rising tide,
Crashes when

The lights

Pulse and beam.
Through the city:
The people follow these currents like the lights they know.

The people live bright and flicker, strained in that glory.
The weather in Vegas is there.

Quite, alone, underneath it all.

Lucretia

Every choice ever made, Lucretia held at the tip.

From her wrist through her palm,
Her last impact made on her body.
Lucretia remained Lucretia.

She claimed herself back from the hands of men, through her very own.

Blood had fallen and fell freely;
For us, for them.
For the blood of her men
The blood of the bleeding woman herself.

You could hear her still,
The blood, the essence of Lucretia;
Dripping on the streets.
A fallen martyr to a republic of lions
A pack that licked the streets shining clean.

Believing the deification of her devoured body would cleanse the scorched palates of beasts that roam in the paved fields of hostility
and pillage the ripe seeded streets of revolution.

Gold - 23/2/18

Where was it said?
In Hollywood I recall.
In Hollywood love was just like gold

(That is, was exchanged and sold)

Shining in the sun.

Here in my rooms I swim in the sun,

In the warmth of days not yet begun. And call for the words,
Where fingers fail, and distant breath released its hold,

The slipping veil.

I surrender to the waves.
To the rhythms of love.
The water drips, slips past my lips,

Fills my lungs, leaves me gasping; Starry-eyed, in the sun’s mist.

I blossom in the dawning,
In a foolish parade of longing. The last time I saw you,
You were staring straight at the sun. Unaware of the changes,
That your hand had done.

Beat the sun.
The setting has already begun; Longer than before,
A year, or two; a century could fall.
I could still, till this day, breath the light from between the sun.