Month: December 2025

I Might Be Mistaken – 31st December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment
Photograph © Tianhu Yuan, Another Self, 2019

I might be mistaken
but you were the very first

(at least as I remember),

the one who would awaken

the child, underrehearsed,

as a repeat customer.


The twelve turns swung around 

me for the third time;

the damage by my own accord.

With my eyes kept to the ground,

these dirty hands of mine 

would be a blemish on her otherwise 

pristine record.


Since then, the decline 

in the quality of dates was evident

on either side of the tracks.
A shiny attractor at one time

soon became as inelegant
as another zombie lurking 

in the depths of my phone contacts.


That ghoul revived;
dead friends with benefits
and decorated with unseasonal flowers;
the shiny patch on her nose survived

and the black dress she still tightly fits

gleamed in the light 

of the setting sun’s golden hours.


All neat lines, sharp angles, 

and overlapping layers;
sliding like the glass elevators
inside the chromium tangles;
her face halted her betrayers;

tinged red like the clouds

and their orchestrators.

A moment of sudden uncertainty,
pursuing fame and profit,
wasn’t completely meaningless either;
the lowest rung is always so dirty.

And unable to stop it,

in the arranged dating marketplace,
at the hands of my deceiver.

Existing together somewhere 

beyond the family, outside the home,
the lawn turned from green to black, 

then orange under the light’s care,
cycling back through time’s blown;

the abrasions of the rainy season 

had marked the surface of the stack;


Brand new, or a decaying shell 

on the point of collapse,
the red pylons of the distant Yangpu Bridge
mapped out all the city’s positions well;

like two sticks of incense, perhaps,

glowing at each tip
and releasing all their smoky courage.


Illuminating everything that could see them 

and everything that could not,
she could have been an actor, 

or a time traveller (from way back) then;
sparks were cast down, sparkling hot

glittering waves that tumbled forth

and entrapped her.



Amber street lights, black roads, mauve tights,
like a game restarting in something of a trance;
like two fish trapped in a weir;
stuck in the reddish neon nights,
she disappeared down one hole, by chance,

and from another she’d reappear.


The reflections gleamed ,

neither the air nor the water 

had changed with the years;
the two incense sticks seemed 

crimson, solemn, and brought her

indifferent to the blazing headlights
of a thousand volunteers.

The surface of the river was calm, 

and the sky was broad;
it felt like I had left my room behind 

and was standing with her arm-in-arm,

a simple reward,
together in the midnight street
I might be mistaken
and I may be so inclined.

This poem is an exercise of my own invention. I took a short story (Goodbye, Bridge of the East by Wang Zhanhei) that I wanted to read but hadn’t yet, and ran it through DeepSeek to extract whatever lines it found of a poetic nature, of which there were thirty-three. Without reading the story, I reworked all the lines, in order, into the poem you see here now.

I’m not sure how successful it is and I’m off to read the story now, wondering how similar it might be to what I came up with.

I’ll try this again but perhaps be a bit more selective with the extracted phrases, as this poem is way longer than anything I would normally write.

The following is a letter from December 31st, 2024, delivered today from the past

Dear FutureMe,

It’s December 31st 2024. Just another day as far as I feel. I’ve not invested much into important dates. So long as I remember Hayden’s birthday, Amy’s birthday and our wedding anniversary, that’s pretty much all I need for dates.

Of course, circumstances also dictate I must go to Thai immigration every 90 days and renew my visa every year. Boring but important duties.

Tomorrow I have to collect a stool sample and then on Jan 2nd, I go and do a health check at the hospital. In general, I’ve been feeling the best and healthiest that I have since I was a teenager (physically, at least). My problems all seem to be ‘old man’ related and I am a little bit concerned about my prostate, hence the need for a health check.

I’ve managed to keep posting a poem every day on my blog and feel that my writing has improved a little. I’ve also managed to keep an online diary every day that will get posted to the blog at some point. This is mostly interesting to me, to look back and reflect on how I’ve changed.

At this stage, I anticipate continuing with this writing as it keeps me grounded and also tests my abilities.

I’m still enjoying school and teaching – maybe too much! I guess I’m comfortable with everything and sometimes that reminds me that I may be taking things for granted.

It is also a little exhausting and doesn’t leave me with much energy and enthusiasm for other things. I am quite easily satisfied with my life but also have to remember that Amy is here and we could be doing things together. These days I let her take the lead as she is more aware of things happening around that we could go to together. I don’t really know about new restaurants or interesting events to check out. I’m just not looking around in those circles. I know that I’m a little wrapped up in myself and, as mentioned above, don’t want to take things for granted.

Tonight we will go to Mum and Dad’s for a NYE dinner, though I hope that we don’t end up staying until midnight. Amy’s brother has moved back from Bangkok now and Amy and I are both preparing our minds for the family dramas that this might bring.

I think that I will write another letter here after I get my health check results. Let’s see where life takes me.

The Lingering – 30th December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 2 Comments

The lingering human felt oddly.
Oddly human, felt joy,
a lingering joy.

A place of sense,
a point of joy. Sharp instead.
A sense of place. Instead.

Oddly full, to sit and point,
felt sharp…
lingering… human.

Oddly human joy,
to sit with sense.

A lingering point: the human point,
sharp with sense,
the human sense, full and lingering.

Shared with The Sunday Whirl #737
word list: lingering felt sharp human point oddly full sense instead joy sit place

Sunset On Al Dera – 29th December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment
photo: Ibrahem Nabeel/Google Maps

I walked down the old, sandy wooden steps
to the beach
I had been here decades before
everything looked different
but the smell was the same
a salt that cleared the nose
and spits in your face
time
and time again

I remembered the flashing lights
reflected on the water
all the good cheer
the dream that this day will never end
up before the sun
patiently impatient
the horizons are soon to reveal the truth

…but
this Christmas
I wanna die
I’ve seen Satan and Jesus
in a crimson-bloodied sky
angel wings pummeling the city to dust

Shared with an AllPoetry.com contest by Bad Jonny, who gave us the italicised lines as starters. I decided to use both and link them.

Thirty Kilometres Per Second – 28th December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Self-hate is trending, depression the prize,


Addiction and angst in a modern disguise.



The world we make believe in, soon forgotten,


This beautiful cage, become foul and rotten.



The beast, denied, grows restless in its cell,

Feasts upon the host it was designed to quell.



Things are moving faster and faster

Towards an absolute disaster.

The title here is a reference to the speed at which Earth is moving through space.

This Earth Keeps the Memory of Gadigal Footsteps Through Fire, Silence, Survival, and Unbroken Song Across Two Centuries of Dispossession and Resistance – 27th December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 14 Comments

Warrane’s children watched the tall ships come; now towers rise where the songlines hum, unbroken
This scarred earth breathes beneath the city’s beat: a heart they couldn’t silence, slow, deep and true
This earth remembers every footfall: songs of Gadigal sorrow and steel unspoken
Lasting months or more, a communal, visible crying, the place always bound by grief

Two centuries of silence could not bury their song; they still sing their harbour home
Images and names, kept memories – unseen, unsaid – the spirit safely travels through
All these years of bleeding, the harbour knows; the rocks remember the cry of every stone
Unresolved collective and intergenerational mourning, still seeking relief

Grief continues because the causes have never been fully acknowledged or repaired
Death manifests through mass dispossession, disease, violence, and murder malevolent
All the sorries are never finished, the deeper losses are continuously shared
Peoples excluded from decision-making about their culture, heritage and land

Deep historical culture, reduced to plaques, acknowledgements, and museum displays
Bulldozed by infrastructure and development; damaged or erased without consent
The least I owe is attention, some respect; The least I owe is to not look away
Protection laws weaker than commercial interests; consultation, a token hand

What my ancestors named discovery, the land remembers as interruption still
I inherit the language of arrival without having paid the cost of entry
I stand here in admiration, aware that the ground knows more than I ever will
Just two centuries is but a heartbeat to a people who measure time undeclared
Grief, which demands absolution, is only another way of asking to be spared

This poem has broken my brain! This challenging form was created by Catherin J Pascal Dunk with insane rules, that my insane brain chose to follow and even expand on slightly.

For a longette:
The theme is social commentary (usually critical of the status quo and reaching towards a better/longer future)
The title of a longette is long; 40 syllables
The poem consists of 21 long lines—of 20 syllables each
A longette has an ACAB rhyme scheme, with a final rhyming couplet:
ACAB/acab/a’c’a’b’/A-C-A-B-/A’C’A’B’B’
The poem can be separated into 4 stanzas of 4 lines each, with a final stanza of 5 lines, or set without stanza breaks, at the poet’s discretion.
Use of emojis is encouraged. The same emoji may be repeated throughout the poem, but if you want to use more than one emoji or symbol, you must conform to a 1312 scheme
Emojis and other symbols are not counted as syllables.
Collaboration is encouraged.

I couldn’t comprehend using emojis in a poem, though Catherin’s sample poem uses them well. And on re-reading the rules, I see that I actually used 21-syllable lines instead of 20! Perhaps I can claim to be the creator of this form now! Either way, I don’t think that I will be attempting it again soon!

I initially struggled to find a topic but as I discovered that Catherin is based near Sydney, a place I became very familiar with for 20 years, my mind kept coming back to Gadigal country. The Gadigal people being part of the Aboriginal owners of the land on which Sydney is built. The only problem? I knew next to nothing about the topic beyond the fact that my ancestors have completely fucked them over time and time again.

So I turned to AI for help. Here is the process I went through:

Prompt (Deepseek): I want to write a poem about the struggle of the Aboriginal people in Gadigal over time and need a 40-syllable title for it. What can you come up with?

I was hoping that a title would help trigger further ideas, which it did.
I haven’t had much luck with syllable counts with Deepseek but it did come up with a set of phrases that I noted down before switching to Chat-GPT5 from here on out. I soon discovered that Chat-GPT could identify syllables per word correctly but then couldn’t add up the simple math totals correctly. Don’t trust AI with your maths!

Prompt: Can you give me information on how the Gadigal people mourn and also how they still struggle to be recognised?

Prompt: Can you suggest language that avoids appropriation while remaining powerful?

Prompt: What about some ideas around ‘white guilt’ for the deeds of our ancestors and how to think about that in the context of the Aboriginal people?

Prompt: I need to find some more poetic lines that deal with this perspective and issue – they need to be fairly long sentences. Ideas?

Prompt: Tell me more about this: “Many Gadigal people speak of ‘sorry that never finished’ “?

This poem is my selection of phrases taken from the various outputs of these prompts and then manipulated (by myself, not AI) to meet the form requirements. When I had finished, I asked AI to give me feedback on rhythm and flow and did a little more tweaking. At this point, though, I had been working on this poem for more than 5 hours and I know that I could improve it more with another 5 hours but….that’s enough. 5 hours is often 4 hours and 59 minutes longer than it takes me to write some poems!

I learned a lot through doing this exercise but tomorrow I’ll be aiming for something a little simpler!

An Absurd Tail – 26th December 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 18 Comments

I woke up this morning with a tail
This new appendage has become proof
My centre of gravity shifted
But what can I do with this new truth?

Is this a dream or a cosmic glitch?
My animal instinct manifest?
Checking behind at each errant twitch
It’s such a struggle when getting dressed

Reverting to something once forbidden
The wagging always gives me away
Unable to keep my feelings hidden
A real animal? Well! Who’s to say?

Shared with W3 #191 – improbable

The Spirit Of A Second Thought – 24th December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

the unsent letter

a warrior armed with raw feeling
striking without thought
where a diplomat may be kneeling
no battles need to be fought

bearing a truth

those absolutes need crossing out
refined with a quiet ‘perhaps’
because all truth contains an element of doubt
with their wordy traps

better left to time

let the hand hover and pause
momentum is difficult to halt
the desire to retract one’s claws
gets framed as being one’s fault

Shared with Poetic Bloomings #573 – spirit

Landline – 23rd December 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 1 Comment

“Do not touch me…”

“Seriously,” I said.
I’m not just the next generation:
I’m a real survivor.

Hard as old bread.

Quicker than grandma’s slippers
thrown with boomerang precision. 

At the age of five, I could already “read”
my mother’s mood to avoid collision;


At seven, I had a set of keys
and instructions: 

“You can find food in the fridge.”
And, from there, were all deductions.



At nine, I was my own chef,
discovering my own taste.

I knew what I liked, what I was
and exactly the future I faced.



Spending days outside, without a phone, 

with just a well-planned route: 

the hill, the river, returning home at night, 

perhaps minus one mud-stuck boot.

Real maps made of these small battles

that I survived. 

Scratches treated with saliva
and leaves, medicines contrived.


If it hurt, we just laughed
and sought distraction from the pain,
because further adventures beckoned
so there was no reason to complain.

Eating bread with sugar on top,
drinking from the garden hose;

microbiomes that yoghurt would dream of.
Allergies? What are those?



I know fifteen tricks to remove stains 

from grass, fat, blood or ink, 

because we only had one set of clothes
and wore them til they’d stink.



Transistor radios, black and white TV,

gramophones, vinyl and cassettes,

carrying CDs and a Discman,
singing songs no one forgets.



Tightening tapes with a pencil
means little to an MP3

soon with a driver’s license,
there was a wider world to see.

Travelling the country in a rusty old car, 

without hotels, air conditioning or GPS,

just with a tatty, discoloured car atlas

and an old beer mat with a barely legible address

Always arriving safely, 

maybe late, but with a smile. 

The last generation to live without the internet,
and revolution was all about style.

I had no backup batteries, 

or worries of a dead phone. 

The landline hung on the hallway wall,
unanswered if there was no one home.

Believing that any missed calls meant:
“I’m fine, I’ll call you back.”
I read books while I was waiting
or fixed myself a sneaky snack.

I fixed everything with tape or a clip;
I rarely bought anything new.

With only one TV channel to watch
There was always something else to do.



Made of “emotional asbestos,”
flowing easily from the back of the duck.
With the reflexes of an urban ninja
They were the times of making my own luck.

Carrying a menthol candy
older than your child in my pocket. 

I survived without sunscreen and a helmet
Or seatbelts in my rocket.

Schooling without computers,
youth without multiple screens.
Encyclopaedias had all the answers
once you’d deciphered what it means.

I had to trust my instincts
and say what I thought aloud.

Now I have more memories
than you have photos in the cloud.

So “Don’t touch me,” I say again
Though I’m not sure you could anyway.

Here’s my number, call my landline
and make sure you’ve got something to say.

An epic poem for me! This one is inspired and paraphrases an article that I, frustratingly, neglected to note the origin. I’m annoyed with myself about that!
I’d also like to add that I don’t particularly agree with much of the thought within this piece. Of course, everyone reminisces about their past, their childhoods, etc, but that doesn’t make it better than now – just different. I’ve never subscribed to the ‘things were better in my day’ philosophy.
Congratulations if you read this poem to the end! I know that I might not have!