Best Poems Written by Keith D Trestrail

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Death Called at My Door

Death called at my front door
last night but no one was home.
I might’ve invited him in but before 
ask for whom the doorbell tolls
lest it was me he was looking for

Was time up on my alarm clock
or was my living end a false alarm? 
Last night I forgot to fasten the lock
but duh, he has a skeleton key
and I now call on the jabberwock 

We met once and it was grim
yet he took someone else that day.
But I was sure my chances were slim
for there hung a dead silence 
as he looked at me and I at him

Death called by again today
but I was in the karzi without a care.
Didn’t stay long the old prick but hey
when you gotta go you gotta go
and I know he’ll be back one day

Should he return tomorrow
I’ll ask “so what took you so long?
I’ve been expecting you, you know”.
For years I've seen the spectre
and have walked in your shadow

I won’t bargain with a**holes
or fear the dead or man in black.
He is Death and come for my soul
and I become my seal of fate 
for he is the destroyer of worlds

O’ who do you think you are
that life and time is yours to take.
On my shelf I keep my soul in a jar
so take it all for I am still here
and lucky to have come this far

I’m sure our paths will cross
if he wants to meet up bad enough.
I won’t beg for more time or my loss
so Reaper raise up your scythe
cos I couldn’t give a fu*kin’ toss


    Written: November 2021


Note: Jabberwock or jabberwocky
         is a reference only my mate
         would understand. RIP C.B.

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2025


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Where is the Feminist Movement

Today is International Women’s Day.

A day to celebrate women’s rights but those rights and freedoms are under attack and the wounds appear to be self-inflicted. So my question is where has the feminist movement gone? Their silence has left real feminists and past heroes of the cause turning in their graves. In America, and in all western democracies, woke liberal marxist ideology and anti-intellectualism is like a cancer on women. 

In the U.S. in the federal election half the women who voted did so for a woman and a party who are trying to erase your gender. In an act of what I can only describe as smug hypocrisy some Democrat congresswomen showed up at the joint address to Congress this week wearing pink in solidarity for women but refused to support restrictions on biological men playing in women’s sports. It gets worse. They support gender neutral language so if they get their way today will be called International Person Who Menstruates Day.

They want to strip you of your identity and dignity by calling mothers “birthing persons” or a “birth giver” or “egg producer”. They want to call mothers who breastfeed “chestfeeders” who produce “chest milk” as they believe that men too can have babies. They want you and your daughters and sisters and mothers to share bathrooms and women spaces with biological men. That’s what the modern left think of women’s rights. If it wasn’t so dangerous it would be hilarious. 

But it’s not just you ladies in their sights. They want fathers like me to be deemed “second biological parent” but I guess as long as they keep calling for abortions on demand that’s all that matters, right? That seems to be what’s most important to a lot of you. So the next time some Trump deranged lunatic tells you they’re voting for the Kamalas of this world to protect the rights of women call the men in white coats to come and take them away. You’ll be doing a public service.

Trump is the only one that I can see anywhere protecting the rights of women.

So spare me your woke liberal scatology on this great day. Women in America owe Donald J Trump a huge debt of gratitude for ridding us all of this crap but many of you I know are so full of hate and ignorance you’d rather betray your own gender and ignore the reality. There’s a term for that, it’s called mental illness! 

Have a wonderful day, girls.

You deserve it!


Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2025

Details | Keith D Trestrail Poem

Polemic

This town, this Silk Road had no toll to pay
  yet from the east caravans again fill its
pharaonic marble and glass temples. Monolith

malls rise its clefts, eco-wilderness morph
  into multiplex cinemas; into mini golf 
and carparks - the 20th century gold fields.

A new rush of debit credit borrow sorrow
  where the mortgage belt go to covet,
to con themselves - live beyond their means.

Here the sweatshops of Asia are legitimised
  and cruel exploitation of trafficked slave,
child, immigrant, and asylum seeker for sale -

here the long suffering of others is repackaged,
  bulk sold, discounted - an expedient lie
perpetrated on human aspiration! Seven billion

sins for a spoil and a ransom in higher income
  streams of consciousness while our mills,
our plants, our factories are rusting graveyards.

Showrooms fill with pizza ovens; microwaves;
  big screen TVs; IKEA; nouveau riche kitsch…
supermarkets of genetically modified superfoods

nuked in cryogel flavour enhancers; sweeteners;
  emulsifiers; acids; stabilisers; MSG; palm oil
and sodium nitrate for the hooked toxin addicts

of convenience - a fill that knows no limits.
  And saints of haute couture bow down
before the anorexic altar of the Fatted Calf…

to the guilt offerings of culture spin. Already
  the subliminal wave is a raging tsunami,
and we a ship of fools on the rising tide blown

on a contrary wind. I fear my quiet desperation -
  the cold ironies of fate; spiritual paralysis;
I fear for the blitzkrieg’s raw collateral damage…

the billboards; vandals of corporate graffiti;
  drive-thrus of Americana; that uglified 
futuristic aesthetic of mirrored urban jungles;

high towers of critical mass; naked ideology.
  I fear for the luddite in a world of cyborgs;
of usury where the end justifies the means;

alas the black dawn into planned obsolescence 
  where ravenous jackals and wolves feed
on the cannibalised carcass of idle idealism!

And whores of dystopia; pimps; moneylenders;
  oracles of the grand evangelical sell who
divide and conquer! Lepers walking its streets;

necromancers and fools; mad Scientologists 
  at my gate; the cults and hubris of men
in their fiefdoms; dividing God from Godless.

What now of my chimera? What of my anti-hero 
  anachronisms? Sadly one day I must leave
but today I write my rant. This town, this privation,

this pastoral lay has become to my ear an echo
  dumb of sound - to my tangential thoughts
a place and past of no return…a time that was!


              Written: September 1994

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2022

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Red Waltz

                         Red
                       is the
                        wine
                      on your
                         lips,
                      the fire 
                          in
                    your eyes,
                  the lifeblood 
           that warms your touch,
                 the dress that
                   clings your
                        flesh,
                     and glow
                    of burning 
                      coals in
                          the 
                      flame of
                          us!


                Written: July 2015

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2024

Details | Keith D Trestrail Poem

Letter to Sam Hunt

Dear Sam, hello it’s me, don’t fret
old friend whom I have never met.
I wrote a letter time forgot,
you may ask why, I ask why not?
A sad meditation of late
on our nation’s new police state -
its central thesis at its core
is blame the bastards and shame the whore!
It lay unopen and unread
cos my carrier pigeon fled.
A kiwi odyssey I seek
to find the man from Bottle Creek
on the Kaipara water’s edge
by windin’ estuaries and the sedge.

I’m just a pilgrim like you, Sam,
a vagabond - that’s all I am.
No signposts, GPS or apps -
just the moon and stars as my maps.
I’m a poet without a stage,
a biographer of my age
but we’re as far as I can see
surrounded by dumbfu*kery!
All was well with the world until
the old and comorbid got ill -
Gain of Dysfunction WuFlu hit
and everyone lost their sh*t
over a coronavirus - 
a hoax existential crisis.

And in this pandemic caper 
a mad grab for toilet paper,
madder still, I was told don’t ask
and wear a useless a-nal mask.
The rulin’ class in Wellington
lock down and answer to no one -
a canker on the bloom of youth
so fu*k their Ministry of Truth!
Ardern and her apparatchiks,
those faceless functionary pricks
who con us all surprise, surprise
spewin’ their propaganda lies.
And on people none the wiser
prey the narco men from Pfizer 

pushin’ their untested vaccine
while I get pissed in quarantine.
I wonder if James K Baxter
would have been an anti-vaxxer?
The gutless leaders who spread fear
threaten me but I don’t care.
I don’t need a jab to survive
from the queen bee in her Beehive -
well, she can jab it up her ar-se 
for this yellow plague too will pass.
In the Land of the Long Dark Cloud 
where our spirit was once unbowed
we were a pioneer people
but “baa baa” I fear we’re sheeple.

Sam, yours is a quicksilver tongue,
a voice in higher realms among,
somewhere between and born to be
the man and the mythology.
But me, I’m just a misanthrope
doin’ my best to live and cope -
I drink to outlaws and poets
who live and die by their wits,
to gypsies and minstrels who scorn
at all the crazy panic por-n!
Nothin’ anymore makes any sense
and no justice or consequence -
not for commie cu*ts in Beijing
or buttlicks who kiss Fauci’s ring,

not those sinophile U.N. flogs
or the rabid Big Pharma dogs.
It all seems to me way too sus,
a bad joke and the joke’s on us -
I’m tired of the insanity
and rage against its vanity
but I’ll have a tonic and gin
till the cold fog of death rolls in.
I’m no seer or philosopher,
just a man who’s been right so far -
a soldier in the culture war
up for a sh*tfight that’s for sure.
Let ‘em come for me if they will…
I’m ready to die on this hill.


    Written: March 2021 


Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2025


Details | Keith D Trestrail Poem

God of Time

  In flux and flow
time is a river that calls
  and I a ripple 
upon its rapids and falls.
  By God begun
I will follow its end until
  my river is run
and the waters are still
  in the circle sun.

  Time and space 
and gravitational waves 
  wash over me
beside its portal graves.
  But I am carbon
in temporal and atomic
  flesh and skin
and swirling biocosmic 
  dust in the wind.

  God of arc and line
lies beneath the water’s
      circles of time,
but God’s time is spatial
  frozen and glacial
  and linear is mine.

  He is the spirit 
and light in the mire,
  He is the flood
and earth, wind and fire.
  He is the spark
and my eternal flame,
  He is the Omni,
  God of infinity 
and knows me by name.

  God of arc and line
lies beneath the water’s
      circles of time,
but God’s time is spatial 
  frozen and glacial
  and linear is mine.



Written: February 2025


Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2025

Details | Keith D Trestrail Poem

Death Blows a Fiery Horn

In a chariot of fire in the sun
  blew a pale horse and pale rider’s last breath,
and on your grave sings a haunting raven
  in the shadows of the valley of death.

Between trembling leaf and pohutukawa
  the undertaker’s men stood grave and bier,
and brave stoic life filled the living hour
  forevermore a day, a week, a year.

These time echoes rise up from its bones,
  and that lone raven's song on pit row
pipes through the rushes beyond the tombstones
  where time cut short above stood still below.
Yet I fear death itself I shall not mourn
  when its flame bearer blows its fiery horn.

But far more does sound a haunting in me
  as if your faint voice my ear passing through -
and I trapped betwixt next world and earthly
  sit this day communing with God and you.

Today I upon this ploughed earth sullen gaze
  and hearken in the blooms the winds of death!
Its cold foul blow that bodes ill all my days 
  dares to breathe on me its cankered breath.

These time whispers rise up from its bones,
  and that lone raven's song on pit row
pipes through the rushes beyond the tombstones
  where time cut short above stood still below.
Yet I fear death itself I shall not mourn
  when its flame bearer blows its fiery horn.


                 Written: July 1995

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2024

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She’s a Liar and a Fraud

Ms Flip-Flop, busted for plagiarism in her co-authored book in 2008 stealing texts almost verbatim from Wikipedia and other sources.

But the media still run cover for her.

Also plagiarised was a story she told of a childhood memory about when she was a child during the civil rights movement. Only problem is that she stole it from an interview that Martin Luther King gave in 1965.

But the media still run cover for her.

She hasn’t done a press conference in 87 days since she became the nominee because her handlers are terrified of her word salads. Like Joe, she can only speak from a prepared script.

But the media still run cover for her.

The media don’t fact check her because she’s one of them - a gigglin’ woke Trump deranged puppet of the radical left.

That’s why media run cover for her.

60 Minutes got caught editing her answers to make her seem intelligible to voters and are refusing to release the transcript of the interview. That’s election interference.

And so the media will do everything they can to get her elected.

You really think Putin and Xi and all the other dictators and despots of this world are scared of Kamala? You think Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas are shaking in their boots at the prospect of a Kamala presidency?

It’s Trump they fear!

You’ve been gaslit for long enough…vote wisely and vote often (just kidding, we don’t want a repeat of 2020).

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2024

Details | Keith D Trestrail Poem

An Easter Tale

Who killed Christ the Lord?
It was not me said Herod, I did not spill his blood.
I tried to kill him once it’s true
but he was a baby then and was not slew

Who killed Christ the Lord?
Nay, not I said Caiaphas, it was not one of us.
Verily I say it was not by my hand
but by some higher greater command

Who killed Christ the Lord?
I did not do it said Judas, I did not kill the Lord Jesus.
Yes, I betrayed him with a kiss
and in shame condemned myself for this 

Who killed Christ the Lord?
Not me said faithful Peter, I am my brother’s keeper.
Upon his head they put a price
and I, like a coward, denied him thrice

Who killed Christ the Lord?
Not us said the pharisees but ruled he be seized.
For his faith, his power and glory
alas they came for him at Gethsemane 

Who killed Christ the Lord?
Not us said the baying mob, his life we did not rob.
‘Twas the Governor of Judea whose
decree was death to the King of the Jews

Who killed Christ the Lord?
Do not blame me said Pilate, the law he did defile it.
But it was I whose cold fateful breath
ordered he be scourged and put to death

Who killed Christ the Lord?
That great sacrifice of the Passion of the Christ!
Who for our sins in God’s holy plan
suffered the Son of God and Son of Man


              Written: April 2025

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2025

Details | Keith D Trestrail Poem

Mama Always Said Run, Joe, Run!

Run, Joe, Run! And the people represent,
mama always said you'd be President.
  Somethin' else mama said was
  stupid is as stupid does
and I think we all know what mama meant!

Run, Joe, Run! And let the people decide
but mama always knew your brain was fried.
  I think America knows
  that your Presidency blows
and there’s never been a greater divide!

Run, Joe, Run! But to us all first explain
your own family's sudden wealth and gain.
  For left in a repair shop
  on your crackhead son's laptop
are shady deals with China and Ukraine!

Run, Joe, Run! You had big pockets to fill
and Hunter filled 'em for you and for Jill.
  But, Joe, it's not a good look
  to be a fool and a crook
gettin' caught with your hands in the till!

Run, Joe, Run! But sadly it must be said
if you were any stiffer you'd be dead.
  It would be better for you
  if you had any damn clue
to let someone (anyone) run instead!

Run, Joe, Run! Until that's all she wrote,
mama always said we all need to vote.
  America's Ship of State
  needs a captain strong and great
but your sinkin’ ship is an old shrimp boat!

Run, Joe, Run! But Kamala is a curse
and her cacklin' word salads just get worse.
  Joe fogs up in the west wing
  and she’s a you know…the thing
but she ain't ya mama and ain't ya nurse!

Run, Joe, Run! But stop all the fear and hate,
mama always said it's never too late.
  O’ but we are all agreed
  that America don't need
a mindfu*ked Manchurian candidate!


            Written: June 2024

Copyright © Keith D Trestrail | Year Posted 2024

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