… thought is not a sentence at all, but, after several explosions, a fallout in words … Hélène Cixous
… Strolling under a constellation
some moments strike like lightning
spasmodic astral body, gambler’s luck
“toute pensée emit un coup de dés”
ink swirling residual patterns down a sink.
In February 2016, after a High Court ruling against a challenge to the legality of Australia’s practices of arranging for the detention of asylum seekers in offshore facilities, a grass roots campaign mobilised around the slogan #LetThemStay. 267 people, including many children of whom 37 were babies, had been brought to the mainland for medical and related reasons; they were now threatened with return to detention in Nauru. Photographs of the infants appeared on the front page of daily papers in the Fairfax group. A Brisbane hospital, several churches and some State Governments were among those who responded with offers of sanctuary. To date many of the 267, including all the babies, have not been returned to Nauru, but are in community detention in Australia. (Information drawn from Get Up Campaign and a variety of daily news articles.)
At 31 March 2016, there were 468 people (363 men, 55 women, 50 children) in detention in Nauru, and 905 men in detention on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. 1679 people including 17 children were in various levels of detention facility in Australia or Australian Territories, from Christmas Island to Villawood, from Perth to Melbourne. 655 people (184 men, 154 women, 317 children) were in community detention in Australia.
Sanctuary 267
Note: The names listed are not those of asylum seekers per se, but reflect the diversity of persons, any one of us, who might have been in this situation.
Sanctuary 267
Adam.
Aditi.
Ahmed.
Ai.
Aicha.
Alejandro.
Alexandra.
Ali.
Alice.
Aline.
Alonso.
Althea.
Amahle.
Amar.
Amelia.
Amina.
Aminata.
Anna.
Angelo.
Antonio.
Anya.
Ariel.
Asmita.
Augustine.
Ava.
Avery.
Awa.
Aya.
Aziz.
Bakary.
Bandar.
Bandile.
Barbara.
Beatrice.
Benjamin.
Berat.
Bintou.
Bokamoso.
Bolormaa.
Bruno.
Camilla.
Carlos.
Carmen.
Carolina.
Celine.
Charlotte.
Chih-ming.
Chloe.
Clarence.
Con.
Dalal.
Daniel.
David.
Dejan.
Diego.
Dimitar.
Diya.
Djeneba.
Doha.
Dylan.
Eisha.
Eitan.
Elena.
Elise.
Elizabeth.
Elnur.
Emil.
Emilia.
Emily.
Emma.
Eric.
Esther.
Ethan.
Fahd.
Farah.
Fatiha.
Fatima.
Fatoumata.
Feng.
Fozia.
Frances.
Francesca.
Frank.
Gabriel.
Gamalat.
Gamila.
George.
Giovanna.
Goran.
Guo.
Gustavs.
Habib.
Habiba.
Hai.
Hana.
Hannah.
Hao.
Harper.
Hassan.
Hasti.
Hatice.
Hawa.
Ha-yoon.
Hessa.
Hina.
Hinano.
Hiro.
Hoda.
Hussein.
Hydar.
Ibrahim.
Iminathi.
Indira.
Ion.
Irene.
Isabella.
Isidora.
Islande.
Jack.
Jacob.
James.
Jana.
Jandamurra.
Javier.
Jay.
Jayden.
Jean.
Jennifer.
Jeremiah.
Jesse.
Jessica.
Jie.
Ji-woo.
John.
Joon-seo.
Joo-won.
José.
Joshua.
Julie.
Jun.
Justin.
Kadiatou.
Karabou.
Karim.
Karima.
Kavya.
Khadija.
Khaled.
Khayone.
Kheira.
Kirra.
Klea.
Krishna.
Kungawo.
Kyla.
Leá.
Lejla.
Leon.
Lesedi.
Lethabo.
Liam.
Lili.
Linda.
Logan.
Louise.
Lowitja.
Lucía.
Luis.
Mahmoud.
Malak.
Manua.
Mary.
Maryam.
Marwa.
Mateo.
Max.
Maya.
Mehdi.
Meriem.
Mia.
Molly.
Mona.
Muhammed.
Mustafa.
Myra.
Nada.
Natalia.
Nesreen.
Nicola.
Nishi.
Noah.
Noreen.
Nur.
Odval.
Olive.
Omar.
Omri.
Onni.
Oumou.
Paul.
Peng.
Peter.
Poema.
Prasert.
Ralfs.
Ramón.
Renz.
Reza.
Richard.
Rin.
Ruby.
Ryan.
Sakineh.
Salma.
Sarah.
Sekou.
Selim.
Sinayabonga.
Si-woo.
Sophia.
Souta.
Stefan.
Sunita.
Susan.
Tali.
Tao.
Tareq.
Tehei.
Teiva.
Thomas.
Ting.
Tobias.
Umar.
Valentina.
Valeria.
Vedad.
Vincent.
Victoria.
Virginia.
Wei.
William.
Wiremu.
Xian.
Ximena.
Yael.
Yan.
Yassin.
Ya-ting.
Ye-joon.
Yi.
Ying.
Yong.
Yoon-seo.
Yusuf.
Yuuma.
Zara.
Zeynab.
Zhen.
Zoe.
Zofia.
Zoran.
7. a Brisbane hospital
8. a bowerbird chick in a poet’s home
9. fresh water
10. the beginning of an open text
11. a chorus of human voices
12. each in counterpoint
13. the scent of familiar herbs
14. clean sheets
15. the sound of rain on the roof at night
16. room
17. space for another
18. an unstitched coastline
19. she sews a child’s hem with dry hands
20. adequate employment
21. a sufficiency of bees
22. to commit to memory unfamiliar names
23. of birds
24. and flora
25. to be alert to the redback in the garden
26. the poet laureate of detention
27. her bags of rice
28. a sudden calm
29. a tenancy of appointment
30. a child’s construction kit
31. a wedding cake topper snug in a pocket
32. a woman and a man
33. two women
34. two men
35. a child pours water on a child’s hands
36. an open gate
37. a closed gate
38. a cool house
39. a warm house
40. context
41. her hand samples the sun
42. air shifts in a sheoak
43. if community
44. a possum evades a cat
45. the milky way
46. two stars point to a cross
47. she looks up
48. an infant nuzzles
49. an insufficiency of fear
50. a sufficiency of awe
51. water spills over stones
52. a monolith in the desert
53. the first splash of rain on dry earth
54. a gaze that dips
55. respect
56. quilled language
57. the evidence of hope
58. a free thought
59. a breath
60. and then another
61. and then
62. suddenly a hush of stars
63. when the axle tightens
64. a well sprung cart
65. a linen-filled chest
66. the rocking the rocking the rocking
67. green eyes imprinted in memory
68. every day a breath shared
69. from your birth to his death
70. a street beyond the front fence
71. as if home
72. as if home
73. unbending the barbs of a polis
74. the unpicked knot
75. of tension
76. of injury
77. a story unravelling as you speak
78. a tapestry of tact
79. to touch
80. without rancour
81. to touch
82. the nine tails only a museum piece
83. only only only
84. a life worth the trespass
85. an adieu worthy of a future
86. to approach the asymptote of your want
87. a stability of climate
88. if only
89. if only
90. she writes her name on a leaf
91. she shuffles the forms
92. a bureaucracy of good intention
93. the strength of a gesture that is mostly true
94. every impetus toward
95. hospitality
96. to be the word’s guest
97. if a poem could construct a dwelling
98. stone and wood and a candle in a niche
99. its flicker and fade
100. the solidity of a thing
101. an arm, an embrace, a threshold kept
102. she wades through stubble
103. in an open-necked shirt
104. the dust is stirred by her tread
105. only the wind’s language
106. and no need for translation
107. a resistant symbol or a vacant sign
108. no vacancy
109. a handwritten letter
110. one hundred thousand signatures
111. a genuflection, a genuflection, a genuflection
112. the weaving of scraps returned to the limb
113. of the tree swaying and claws that hold
114. your name in the mouth of a neighbour
115. his alien kindness
116. her shared world
117. the comfort of culture
118. its unsettling conservation
119. its disturbing transformation
120. its resilient transience
121. and yours
122. to name a child for an ancestor
123. your empathy for a woman moving house
124. freedom to exercise kindness
125. the pronunciation of a name
126. good will
127. the interval between drops on a roof
128. her face softening
129. a head bowed, eyes closed in prayer
130. your prayer mat on the floor of your home
131. the hours rung
132. a solidarity of nannas
133. knitting
134. a quilt of lobbyists
135. clothed for the season
136. frith
137. a compassionate peril
138. dangerous mercies
139. the limits of the open
140. a ruling
141. against an unruly state
142. a separation of nations
143. opportunity
144. parliamentary remorse
145. she delivers kelp to his door
146. a garden compost heap
147. a wilderness of exotic species tended
148. a white fantasy
149. renounced
150. historically a crime admitted
151. a punishment postponed
152. a tug of war between church and state
153. a space of civility
154. temporarily
155. an idea in becoming
156. towards law
157. a way station in the rule
158. of monarchs and monks
159. reckoning contrition
160. each time she sings
161. a leaf falls
162. a latch unhinges
163. salutation without appointment
164. the depth of skin
165. her hair is held in a bird’s beak
166. the wind takes the grey thread
167. the vacancy
168. a suggestion of singularity
169. the allowance of an embrace
170. she imagines she kneels
171. weeping
172. beside a hospital bed
173. and on the tiled floor
174. the sun spills
175. indifferent in its own way
176. to the raw and the salve
177. a failure of imagination — to say this
178. if a hand opens
179. if a hand
180. if a hand and a hand
181. to have enough to give
182. the peal of prayer
183. the peal of prayer
184. the peal of prayer
185. to fashion a peace
186. if you lean against a chimney
187. if a house is constructed around a hearth
188. if the fibres of the carpet soften to your steps
189. the wear of things used well
190. a banksia of irregular becoming
191. what it is to be
192. this life of generosity
193. she walks home in autumn rain
194. she dries her shoes in late morning sun
195. the next day
196. a future to welcome
197. a future to submit to
198. a future to shape
199. allowing for the impossible
200. to hear frogs in the wetlands
201. to see five pelicans cross the sky
202. she is chasing the cat from the garden
203. on behalf of possums and birds
204. to persevere
205. to dare to speak
206. to imagine a child
207. an untamed growing toward
208. ripening
209. the wisdom of infancy
210. to accept solace
211. hostage
212. the kindness
213. that knows the needful invisibility
214. and the crucial being seen
215. the space bar and the tab
216. that mimic
217. a room of your own
218. she practices a spare sympathy
219. a warm drink and time to speak
220. even the clichés of welcome
221. written with paint on a sheet
222. holes cut out for the wind
223. a march
224. a chant
225. a banner
226. things that fail you
227. if you were able to visit her
228. what would she offer you?
229. this question of capacity
230. this question of capacity
231. this question of capacity
232. if the body
233. is a temple
234. sanctum
235. sanctus
236. sacrosanct
237. dignity
238. a quality of a roman elite
239. to live for an empire
240. or its minion
241. to be free of this
242. aphesis
243. quietly in the suburbs
244. thirty-seven infants in their cots
245. ninety-one children at play
246. a word for preservation
247. of other species
248. and our own
249. that gives to silence nothing
250. that gives to speech nothing
251. that gives to justice nothing
252. in excess of hope
253. the privilege of more
254. than making do
255. she is safe enough to be disappointed
256. a star and a crescent
257. a cross and a book
258. an emu flying
259. a story of bunyips
260. and deep water
261. a reviving flood
262. necessity
263. her births are accompanied
264. her bones are buried in good time
265. what cannot be imagined
266. other and more than
267. the thing you came for
after Mica Still
if these walls could talk
they would say I like pink
& fleshly themes hares with x-rated heads
lobes suspended in amniotic fluid
ears flat back in fear and thrill
a passing prefect or someone on yard duty
might see an outline of us in silhouette
cherry – flipping, a tongue perhaps
meanderings in sharp relief
i give no turquoise clues outside
the toilet cubicle
conducting the occasional tryst
working with my hands
all ways
just you and me entering sacred ghettoes
high on fluoro dreams in your lunchbox
canned ham through cling – film
a vegemite sandwich
wolf lovers kneel at my altar
I howl in pig latin to the sky
Nd— experiments are conducted at the e+e− storage ring VEPP-2M in the energy range 2E=0.5-
1.4 GeV by physicists at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics Novosibirsk 1982 to 1987
her kids born during that time Norway's Norsk Data peaks then too with the NORD-5 32-bit
minicomputer which beats the VAX by six years so what! Nancy-drew-Naughty-dog-New-
democracy-Nuclear-dawn none of it matters when she becomes mother to angel daughter &
son she does not yet feel his lanthanide pull is blind to his laser light walks past him at
concerts takes the same bus miss! miss! they are still "he" & "she" not "us" 25 years until
God forces things & then Dear Reader the astonishing begins a nanosnap in a late southern
spring a beam more powered than the American Dream o incandescent fate! "new twin"
it is a mighty magnet that connects us we smash into each other like this it marks
us for life a confluence of colours a duality of light an excitement of newfangled
cells but love so pure is dangerous & rare & one must take care intense! intense!
the kiss so bright the heat so huge it melts you whole before you can say "permanent
Home" or "popular inversion" or "inertial confinement fusion" one must take care
protect from within be able to say refugees welcome! rescue the reef! respect
your elders! rape is wrong! be able to say I-am-sorry-I-love-you-come-back-come-
back for the truth my darling is told like this in the grim dark future is only cold
the soothsayers have spoken St John Nostradamus George Orwell Jim Jones it will
come as we laugh or make love or eat an Andromeda colliding a World War Three
electrons finally forcing themselves free you & me learning the latest buzz speak
'tribulation' 'revelation' 'Armageddon' 'hell' with Gog & Magog both clanging
their bells & asteroids & strangelets raining on world & Daleks descend & rapture
upends & the fifth sun blackens & NASA announces "total existence failure of—
A nonexistent element. The theory of phlogiston was devised as an explanation as to why some things burned. Materials which had lots of phlogiston were supposed to burn well, releasing the element during combustion. Disproved with the discovery of oxygen.
We need to know why we blaze, when
nothing happens as
life escapes from an aviary of scabs.
We breathe in our canopies. Watch the basket of
wants – our morning beggary,
the mansuetude of respite.
When nobody knows you,
as though pain needs an audience.
Punch the sky, kick the dirt.
Then piss out your small complaints, maybe
beat the wife & kiddies maybe
run down that odd person outside the shopping strip.
Anyone could understand, it’s
an element & they each have
their own course, their need.
Our trees are just dinner,
other life an inconvenience. We eat incandescence
as frantic hands simultaneously paint windows in their fear.
The animal intelligence avoids our sunlight.
Earth serves flammability poorly.
We know so little, in certain conflagration.
There are no apologies in legends
& futures can’t by definition
live in those written towns.
That September 11 … exploded there in my country.
Yes. It exploded La Moneda in Santiago which was devoured by flames.
But. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of tortured bodies,
crushed hands, eyes staring at the gates of death,
bodies tied to pieces of rails of evil and thrown into the deep sea.
That 11 … if Dante had not written the Divine Comedy
& Raul Zurita had not written the Anti-Paradise
still it would happen as happened it.
That September 11 … Neruda shouted: Come and see the blood in the streets
he died, his funeral was prohibited by a military Junta.
That 11 … It had not been in a chapter of Marquez’s book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
That 11 … 1973 Kissinger and Nixon collapsed our history forever.
Blustery springtime month of March.
Supertanker Number 1. Commercial Vessel Torrey Canyon. Titanic proud with bulk unmatched. Liberian in its livery.
The Captain, bonus-parched and scared of crew, shortcuts through to Northern Wales.
Metallic belly-hull of Torrey Canyon grinds eleven days on Pollard Rocks in 7 Sisters Reef betwixt Lands End and lonesome Scilly Isles.
Torrey Canyon, plump with slopping cargoed oil, is a full gorged tick throbbing megatons of goop. Megatons. Of crude.
A viscous slick anoints the oozing gash. 20 miles of stink and dreck outreaching. From the upwelled unctuous rocks and over to the offshore trench: a thickness slow and black as recent dread. Furthermore … an extensive, tanged corridor glugs 70 miles northeast&west along the Cornish coast.
(Old men now convince themselves they walked upon the lolling pelt. Lifeboat to lifeboat and back to shore. So glutinous, the gunk, they claim, in cold salt Channel water. ‘No mere thin smeared meniscus, this’).
Too, shoreline Normandy prepares to get some sludge, while Paris lambasts Downing Street, which lisps in diplomatic snoot, ‘It’s the Liberian lowlife, Jacques; nothing’s down to us’. The French say, ‘What? You have no men with force?’ Then Harold Wilson cracks the shits. He summons Royal Naval Buccaneers hangared up in Lossiemouth. (Garrison town smashed by bluff Norwegian Seas assailing northern Scots.) Wilson’s roused to shout, ‘Just fix this fucking UP.’
The Chief of Buccaneers thinks out loud, ‘Let’s bomb the craft and set the oil alight … with napalm mercy-dashed by hot-lined Yanks from ‘Nam.’ (It’s 1967, recollect.) The Yanks respond, ‘This one’s gratis, all on us, so long as you just let us stay and play.’ The Chief of Buccs quips, ‘Acchhh, I love a peacetime bust!’
And together this is what they do. 70,000 pounds of shrieker bombs break up and sink the Torrey Canyon while the sloppy leas of obstinate crude get doused with ‘palm-and-petrol muck. 52,000 gallons disgorged from gyring B52s. (They see good portent in the numbers.) Yanks drop a firebomb in this soup and bank their plane in howling climb. The towering column of particulated flame lights up the dozy town of Tintagel. 100 miles away. And 500,000 sea-birds cook quick to crisps in ferocious noise while galumphing through the grime.
Up in the plane, they squint and spy the ascendant whoosh of discontinued souls. Notice next the gleaming ozone breach – – first time seen – – the Arctic Circle leaking at a scabby dent.
0. a television soap opera and someone getting mugged
you know the tropes already: a guy in leather and a bandana and a too clean t-shirt and a bit too pretty and a knife on the screen of your tv set above the dvd player if you still have one next to the flowers next to the mantelpiece the graduation photos and the babies the coffee table with the local paper whereas
1. when I was a teenager I was asleep
and someone fired a gun next to my head
2. You’re having sex (that person you’re really into from the coffee shop) in the forest under a waterfall like an advert for tropical holidays and then a door opens in the waterfall a wooden door and there’s a doorframe and letterbox and a doorbell and a man is there ringing the doorbell and then you wake up and the doorbell is ringing in real life the world is full of men from Porlock
dreams are fussy about tying outer reality in with the narrative and they don’t care so much for logic they’re literalists but they’re anti-Vulcans
3. I opened my eyes and there was no-one there and when I went downstairs where the others were round the kitchen table they claimed to not have heard anything let alone a gunshot so it must have been a “nightmare” but there was no narrative, no dream at all
4. so it was less a nightmare more a gunshot in the night which nobody else heard well you put it down to just one of those things and when it happens again — and again — over the course of the years you put it down to one of those again and again things until you read about Exploding Head Syndrome aka loud noises in your mind when you are falling asleep or just waking up which must be what’s going on with me except it happens when I’m deep asleep and not dreaming
5. on a message board I read about a guy who heard a single bell a mournful condemnatory bell at moments of peak stress but for him it’s when he’s awake
6. I get tinnitus sometimes I’m a water sign I’ve had uber-vivid dreams but not lucid ones I’ve had premonition dreams too I get a bit itchy when people describe themselves as sceptics but it’s just code for being on one team, not being stuck genuinely in the middle, which is Fortean I guess, I guess I’m a Fortean. The problem with Exploding Head Syndrome is nobody really knows what causes it so I’m just throwing out things which might be relevant to a researcher one day and they’ll find this on a Google search and something I say might solve the puzzle once and for all the only bone I’ve broken so far was in my toe when I accidentally ran into a door when you accidentally run into a door people tend to talk to you in a gentle voice and they write to your psychiatrist or they did in my case
7. I was mugged for real three hours ago in real life shit I was so scared — that’s what a vivid dream is like filed away in your consciousness as actuality rather than safely stored as just a dream which on waking becomes distanced like watching a television soap opera and someone getting mugged
Reconstituted from selected chunks of John Ashbery’s Flow Chart
“… the top
of the volcano has been successfully glued back on, and who is to say we
aren’t invited?” — Flow Chart, p. 167
1.
The incubus awoke from a long, refreshing sleep.
I suppose it does congeal slowly. And the river
threaded its way as best it could, neither conscious
nor uncaring, awash with sentiments in which
the Almighty once saw Himself,
and wept.
Quick—the medication.
And while the fire-mind tries out its images on us
at some charm school in hell, and we can’t avoid
our reflection in these, come speak with me behind
the screen. I’ve been at this stand for years,
a thread of breath: that’s all
almost magical now, almost beyond belief. Just so,
some argue, nothing further remains to be done except
the higher echelons where the view is distant.
Not that I think for a moment …
2.
Here a man carries bags, I ask you. Ask, rather, why the clock
slows down. Smell it yourself he said my gosh. A dream from nowhere
mumbling the litany, unaware that the parallel daintiness
of the lives of the rich mentioned in the Bible
worked, like fish in an ocean
whose bottom is dotted. Now both of us were attracted.
Tomorrow beckoned, and today would soon be then.
Hours,
years later, we were divided up among several participants,
and all that mythology of broken tracks, who make up
the electorate? Each day the ball was in its court. “You’re a grown
man now, but must sit in a tub, on a comfortable income and a few
puddles of camel-stale, jotting down seemingly unrelated
random characteristics.” Leave me here,
if that’s going to help. Always on the rim of some fleshpot,
if he is willing to exchange me for a hostage.
3.
In the real world
one is always setting out from, having in the meantime forgotten
this battle of stupid titans, things keep arriving from the florist’s.
“And I in greater depths than he,” I suppose, know enough
not to insist, to keep sifting a mountain of detritus
like a shuttle. Something else, it says here,
will break fruitfully into oblivion. Another time I was just sitting,
universally misconstrued
in one’s lap, like a sandwich.
The ads didn’t tell you this. You see it is part of your plan,
to realise that sex has very little to do with any of it,
what’s coming, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to like it.
I am prepared now for the drone that submerges
and always turns out to be rather nice.
We must be patient if we are to live that far, deposited
over there, not out of sight.
4.
I wanted to cry back at her: “Yes!
I feel their aura, Mother,
it shall fall into our hands and seem what
disingenuous? Maybe
only a small, other way of living
as one. And when a shining thing approaches,
symmetry is death. Try sleeping on it. And then
we’d have a nice lumbering, tumbrel-like
progress across edifices.
Any day now you must
start something in the sky. And we’re supposed to get on
with the logic these lines always left space for,
the grotty little amusement park one is
horrified at the prospect
of being immured in: mud and cosmetics.
Different forms of address. This stable or retiring room
or whatever you want to call it. You can feel it when the lake is up:
he’s ready to talk business. Yet one’s ego, for a time at least,
must be drugged or convinced with seabirds’ feathers,
and a smart-looking interior. Meanwhile I have
received your postcard. It likes me the way I am,
baling others of us together like straw, for the speed
of light is far away, and whatever is not glue
may be pressed into service as such.”
A kettle boiled happily.
Every single one of the rest had been violated.
We pressed ourselves against hide,
we pressed ourselves onto a yak wool throw.
I saw my ice capsule
float in the drained blue way above
and there was nothing for it.
Outside gravel chippings being swept
along a gouged track,
tar for subsumption
moiled in boilers
curtained in tar,
overflowed,
outside overflowed, hardening at the fringes
yellow sky seeped into, canopied
and hardened.
All or nothing, that was the sum,
steps faltered even though
isolated stars signal to be tacked up –
though underpinned by webs of
projections, as you were,
fall back, that’s your lot, surely is.
O split stopper always were my fallback,
all or nothing,
O split blind trunk fall back,
only to be cancelled or electromagnetic
pulse corrugating time dismantles sunders
pulse. Noli me tangere.
Just remove that mark
in a twinkling/ in a flash/
fields of power will be unconscionable
shrivelled tremor.
Every syllable has been marked
one and by one/
seeded with a confident up-yours
despotic idiom spills over.
Fall back to blockage.
Beyond the tufted field meteorites shower.
On the field rabbit shit.
Inside our tent air thickens now we huddle.
Our escape capsules long departed.
Geospatial analysts have their fix on us.
tide memory trains
down
the beach the sea chops
& eats itself
rocks doze
in purple sets of allthepossible
opens
the path back home’s washed over
the arabesques cooling
into space
on another turn it’s smooth as linen
a bed for the pelican a tomb
for each dream skewered
on the palms
their reptilian thrash
until the waves
go pelagic, growls
spliced with lanterns
from blackestdeep will they
find those naked feet
seduce their nerves the future
rests on the hairs of my neck
frizzing like dune
tuft
inept balloon
mountainous
earth what speaks is what moves
form
& cry
shy from a sloshing
the literature in flakes
& it emerges
frothed
gill of whose
1. BBQ: Zero separation, bed being the body.
2. Title, to Come: Music, alive, a fruit of fingers.
3. Each and Every Morning, Electronic Cleansing: Click. Click. Click. No emails coming.
4. Eight for Six, Reduction: No agitation. Peace and quiet, please.
5. Mulberry Fields Now: People mountain. People sea. Haze, too.
6. They are Here to Clean It Up Again: Man plays sex during brain surgery.
7. A Ship is Singing in the Air: Publish him when dead, for free.
8. 6-word Stories Ought to Have Titles: Thinking someone else’s thoughts: mind surfing.
9. Happiness: To be unemployed, to be Australian.
10. That Chink Poet, Possibly: In 200 years, but not now.
11. Excerpt from a Foreword to a New Book in His Ancestral Land: Australia now home;
China: a non-home.
12. Missing You: Old rain. New arrival. A heartthrob.
13. History: Terribly wrong, something went terribly right.
14. A Cosmetic Future: Sky, injected with botox. Looking better.
15. Development a Hard Reason: Everything’s bigger in a haze, China-made.
16. A Secret Shared is: Freedom: a bullet force-bought to kill.
17. Always Excuses: US-made mistakes: innocents killed en masse.
18. A PhD Proposal: History of anger: Herstory of d/anger.
19. White and Fleshy: T. Te. Tea. Tear. Teary. T/ear/y.
20. Postmodern Ways: Love you so: credit cards please!
21. Futures: Heaven: a vast balance sheet. Missing.
22. Posthumously Published: Cigarette-butts, joined with a writer butt.
23. Post-disappearance Theory: An MH370 love, still to surface.
24. Mind to Map: Theories of deconstruction, and of destruction.
25. The Limit: Beyond sky. Beyond yuniverse. Beyond beyond.
26. According to a 90-year Old: Recipe 4 longevity: Eat less than thought.
27. Rain is a Birdless Affair: Dream in company; vacated by Dreamer.
28. Time to Depart to a Parallel Planet: Poetry is nothing but rubbish, transformed.
29. Once Were Lotus Feet: Shanghigh-heels. Shanghai eels. Hanging separately. De-sexed.
30. Art as Death: Boundary-crossed, living the death, as animals.
31. ‘His aim was dark to her.’
32. ‘We speak English in this country!’
33. Not lonely wolf; lonely orchid, thought-wise.
34. Serial monogamist; serial lovist; serial thinker.
35. Victorian middle-class, Australian middle-class. Little difference.
36. ‘The only retreat was her bedroom.’
37. People do and the skies watch.
38. Warning to men: she withdraws love.
39. The sky-mirror: reflecting a human haze.
40. Men-editors in China: Sex for publication.
41. National Teachers Day for national indifference.
42. Officials? No. A poet hates it.
43. Love: how much does it weigh?
44. In the eyes of Japan: Nanjing.
45. China of fake blondes: like West.
46. A restaurant toilet, of shat food.
47. Get to the truth. Say little.
48. Books translate into 书, that’s 输.
49. Like West, like China, vice versa.
50. Magazines of bullet holes. Word bullets.
(FOR FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE — UPON THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN)
[PLAY ME]
[audio:https://cordite.org.au/audio/the-doomsday-song-bok.mp3|titles= The Doomsday Song] (0:55)
after ‘Das Lied des Zwerges’ (The song of the dwarf), Rainer Maria Rilke
Crooked blood, stunted hands, cripple,
out of place – uncanny how small
thoughts can be, while I’m incomparable,
only a dwarf because the so-called average
person is taller. You ought
to just walk on by, but don’t. Ever thought
how inflated you must look from this
height? When I walk or shop, I’m inspiring,
it seems. Fantastic to see you getting
out, you say, imagining waking
up in my body, the courage
you’d need not to kill yourself, stat.
How do you do live with that?
That’s me wondering back,
distractedly eating (wow!) a sandwich.
In my home, I’ve made it so I come
face to face with the cupboards and oven, belonging
as we all want it. I sleep in my bed (some-
times alone). At work, my cubicle’s longer
and wider than yours. True,
this isn’t much of a song –
but then it never was meant for you.
desire
rose
by
memory
contracted
with
a
sweet
thou
the
content
in
this
grave
called
so
those
poor
pictures
flow
our
bones
desperate
with
charms
and
past
death
rich
thriving
and
a
heaven
told
some
take
birth
accordingly
and
mirth
of
suit
consider
days
to
soul
serve
returning
light
patience
that
man’s
yoke
is
without
wait
thou
the
radiant
and
the
curtains
that
let
silence
wash
the
glares
of
influence
after Dorianne Laux
This shard of Pangea’s shattered plate.
Long nights by the inkling of day.
Our front door’s rusted bell.
Tonic with the spike of gin.
Promises, innocence, childhood faith.
That mirror, my bright luck
splintered to slivers.
The pure road by the slashed white line.
Our world, threads unravelling
from its moth-holed weave.
My ribs and bicycle in the same second.
My laugh for weeks after.
Time into months, then minutes.
This sunset by winter clouds.
Your trust, dropped from my hands
like a china cup.
Nature rides three horses at once
Thinking, self-pleasing, and running
We take on faith
Call them relics
Long-shot miniature ship at sea
Getting under way
Its own spooky distance
Replicated
Close-up shot
Deck of ship at dawn
Medium shot
Madison Avenue at night
Full-shot Empire State Building at dawn
People today have so much to fear
Silent inflammation
Acts like waves
How this weird thing can be true
Exterior sky and city at dawn
Medium-shot 1st airplane
Medium-shot 2nd airplane
Faith like any other
Next day science
Believer and heathen
Sentences till dawn
Put your hand on their hand
Explain the movement
A kind of lust forces us back
:the sky, the city, all a misunderstanding. See how pale it is
a different place each time, familiar yes but rearranged
as fear.
The ride under our bodies kicks along. You are
no longer: disfigured in all the figuring and transfiguring.
Mile upon mile of the wrong beer,
the wrong wine. It is all so heady!
The handsome young arrive
to rescue us and spruik God and the value of Business School.
Is it any wonder our filtering organs choose this moment
to opt out with painkillers and ice-packs.
Face and eyes drift into bottles, arrange themselves on a shelf
to observe this latest attempt to represent the dark-star
of Empire in texta pen.
like a star
who snuffs out
its own path
like a tsar
who wears a
many-beaméd trinket on his chest
like a target for a
Taser or a laser
-guided stent
quasaring throb that knocks
the breast
of the
ocean-going
vessel
fist-sized wren or
cardiac event
vein choked
with the plush that coats
the stag’s rack
stoked gland or glitch
pumping out error
in the constellation Lyra
the second-most glamorous star
the second to be daguerreotyped
and assassinated
stepping out of its car
galactic halflife
neural
leap
no wider than a
a single
bacterium
weak heir
‘s hairline
who chokes up at the opera
eyes glued to his lorgnette ting ting in the
operating theater where the gods all
cluster at the trompe l’oeil
dome and suppose an
even more monstrous eye
looks back
who can swallow the view whole a pupil
who can take the whole thing down
on his knees in the backroom on his back in the sacristy
and
vomit it back up
on the bar on the altar
on the street
outside the viper room
who
chokes on the skein
unwinding from his
bolt like a colt’s mane
extravagance, consciousness,
prize sheep that can bleat
through its cut throat
pleat
that can spread
like blood on the waves and
fetch a price that makes the wind rise
and hurl fleets at the future
nerves pinch at the side and
hold the garment up in rictus
grin and say alive
whatever’s too much is the
price
like a dog returns to its vomit
to appraise it once again
and cart it off
for a price
and the neck
of that doggy star
can bend
Ruoy Ycnellecxe, Si ti Laitram Wal?
Ro na elbattegrofnu nossel?
Ruoy Ycnellecxe, Erehw si Nuhc Ood-Nawh? Ruoy Ycnellecxe, Era uoy evila?
Si Nuhc evila?
Laturb Noitan! Era uoy evila?
ㄱ—ㅏ—ㄱ— ㅎ—ㅏ—ㄱ—ㅖ—ㅇ—ㅓ—ㅁ—ㄹ—ㅕ—ㅇ— ㅇ—ㅣ
—ㅂ—ㄴ—ㅣ—ㄲ—ㅏ?
The photo is from 518기자클럽. This site contains photos taken by several South Korean journalists during
the 18 May Gwangju Uprising in 1980.
The Gwangju Uprising also known as the May 18 Democratic Uprising took place in
Gwangju, South Korea, May 18 – 27, 1980. Students and civilians rose against the
martial law and military coup of 1980. With the tacit consent of the U.S., the
South Korean martial law troops brutally assaulted and opened fire at civilians
of Gwangju. According to the UNESCO’s archives on May 18, during the uprising,
165 died, 76 went missing, 3383 were injured, and 1476 were arrested. And another
102 died due to injuries after the uprising. The May 18 Democratic Uprising played
a crucial role in building a populist movement against the dictatorship through the 1980s.
It continues to inspire resistance against political, social, and economic injustice.
