Scenic Overlook

1.

Nardone


2.

Nardone


3.

Nardone

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Spare a Thought

I thought it was raining. I said on the phone oh god
it’s my face and an involuntary avalanche of motion
called him and he picked up. But it fell into place.

I was shaky at the beginning. At that moment I got a text
and couldn’t cooperatively countenance my ex, understand?
I felt that he was going too deeply into dark knowledge.

I drove the route of the night thought, yes. You are right
about all things. When I make my way to the bus stop as usual
you are a doctor and I should feel and act. I swore

I would repeat that mistake. At that moment I got a text
inviting me explicitly to step behind bars. It’s last drinks
for wouldn’t you know. I spare a thought, don’t go.

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Katun River

I.
This story wants to be told in bed. Its breathless subject
stays awake but it is darker than us both and we are frightened.
You wear your toughness like comedy.
Women love the caveats, to- fix-you sadness.

Collecting clusters of stars, they draw succor from a void.
White noise: hum loudly and you won’t hear a thing
as horror rips you and leaves rivers.
Tremendous tides coil in. My mind will not let me see: look past us.

Stare down explanations, shut out feeling. The story must happen the hard way,
without hurting anyone living.
Love is not safety: the desert keeps whispers under.
I am lifted into the arms of love and held there but know love
makes a plank bridge over the Katun river.

II.
Women love a project.
To display their stunning reel of beauty: but you know her beauty fades
because it was never hers. She staggers with this burden. Oh beauty,
what are you doing, stupid?
Piss on it to learn it.
Revoke it or trust its total waits in Heaven.

It is a mistake to teach children that the world is simple.

III.
Tomorrow I shut down.
Don’t stop me. Be sad. Breathe in.
What if we do nothing.
Feelings are not facts. I need facts. Feelings are facts.
We cannot stay here at the tipping point.
We cannot stay here at the tipping point
Undressing in stop motion.

IV.
Rushing sounds like blood inside my mind’s gates.
Everything is happening at once now that
you chose

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pipiwai

kua mate tetahi atu he totara kei mua e kata te ra
[another totara has died before the day laughs]


as morning pokes its sullen fingers
t h r o u g h
sentinel clouds,

we trace liminal
the scurfy scrub
whimpering to itself
like a wounded dog.

the karanga is a piano
trilling umpteen notes;
pullulating the penumbra
in acid flashback;

a cascade staircase
that climbs all over us,
before our ears can think.

inside the scabrous palings
we phalanx ourselves
through the footsore legion
who bestow us forward
like magi.

all heads defrocked & doleful,
as karakia births the dawn.


[karanga – Māori – call onto marae/ karakia – Māori – prayer.]

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Provo

Wherefore my glorious
Template unseen
Sent before discount etymolygies
Rid there of custom
Commentary not confounded
Chloroform refers with alertness
Behold my perjury hands
Command essential domestic activity
Scattered by the price of liberty
Judgment seat such legacy fends
Faults of man reign days bask
Inundated with the concrete spasm
Resolutely twanged
Grab him by their handle
Fury cluck interpretation thereof
With what gift I admit
The time is arrived our ear
Is appointed if they say earth move
Earth makes move mountains
Rise up and fall
Upon that city it is written

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Historical Winter

The composition of any given aura is a painterly
mix. So I’ll choose the shadow colours grey and
pixelate. However the cold comes this year I will
wear that same grey chorus and my own corona
—should I imagine—will be as rich with matter
as a furnace. Help, I’m seriously thinning. Not
in body but metaphysics. Seriously pale in the
main street and in bed—surfing a thin line—
in the blanket—heat—and thinner in the water.
At the gallery I slipped one out. All over I’ve taken.
This ability to fetish is downplayed—black behind
that sheer—and where a caption could emphasise
percentage grey in style. Trolleys,
automotive parts, the history of photography
and film, now in union throats and disclaimers plus
that famous sliced eye. This fetish travels—and has
to do with how we move—skeletal, adrenal
and related systems. The days are seriously slow
stereo—why not adding in a socket—for the old gas tube.

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Camellias

A canvas stretches beneath the colours of camellias
and rain. A child has left. The heads are petals

tucked crimson around gold—the stamens, pollen-
thick. A parent lives. Dropped from the stem

they fall intact. A spouse is sutured and well.
Each is a basket held, by those grey brackets

that hid the bud. My plans are undone. Detached
the heads rest on concrete not far from a scatter

of gumnuts and my exhalation of regret. I have
wearied of care
. A wattlebird will make its home.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Getting Old

You make a sound as if to say—Land Ahoy
A cabin boy claiming first sight
A ship nearing the oh so distant shore
Magpie rattle in the shushing pines
Then the trill of laughing warblers
Thin bones with all the trimmings
Getting about with a stick tap taps
Another day getting short
You make a small noise like clearing
a throat or a twig cracking underfoot
Here comes the night frame
You know why children do not want
to grow up
You adjust your spectacles
You adjust your backside on the hard
wooden seat as the seagull settles
on the wooden rail enchanting or
infuriating You make a
sound to unwelcome the
gull It looks at you with perfect
eyesight and youthful pleasure
A splendid red beak and legs
Eyes oh so round
and perfectly drawn
Ignores your gruff exhalation
And you are yet to tinker with imperfection
And to leave a laden heart

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

a trainspotter-journalist’s demise

To dedicate oneself to writing contra the daytime empire equates to working five jobs, to be rewarded only with endless grime upon your thinking, & no pay.
          Any coin that falls is not likely to be legal tender, & leads you not to the source but to a sorry luncheon in a ditch. And alongside that pollen-stinking path by the disused railway are those silos jammed with pulped weekend liftouts. While walking, you are hesitant to greet the folksy, beanie-wearing ex-husband (he may well be the one wearing a wire). You refuse his offer of raw water, noting that the flooded train carriages form linked aquariums.
          Meanwhile, in some cordoned elsewhere, an unseated mind fades a shade of greenish white. Hush money crosses the tinted room, & futures markets smart as the meeting at the bureau is drowned out by the sighs of the birds outside. The dead are contented.
          You always wanted to become a translator, or a diplomat (& what is translation, if not an act of diplomacy?) Your dreams saw you grafting markers upon the century’s over-painted array. Yours was the drab game-board of unspoken geometries, yours the sword to carve the wax atlas.
          ‘Success’ may take many forms, but this, in the end, is not one of them. The thought strikes you: may as well’ve put it all on a dartboard! What kind of ugly mosaic led you here, after all?
          Grading into obscurity, the sun shrivels against some grim awakening that seems notionally yours.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Bricks of Myrtle

My body tears apart
Upon its peripheral side
I get to thinking

About the ghosts that knock politely
Whilst I fix my demented cereal
Brush my stockpile hair
Stare at the vicious bricks

All I can see on the red faces
Is how wondrous you always look
With your hair tied back neatly
How much I love you and
That sweet manufactured smile

And how my Hyde hands
Committed sweet suicide
Before my bloodshot eyes
Could even move in
REM

Blast love
I never feel this cold and alone
In the afternoon

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

ICE SHELF (02- Flying in cloud theory)

Holdaway

Any altitude not found in the set
Of altitudes of the world. A gap in the mountain as cloud
As mirage in the cold desert glittering
Pages of travel magazines. Peacetime sweep. To input correct
Errors into a twelve-&-a-half-thousand foot
Computer system of air, called data collapse. That logged
Some twenty-thousand Novembers before I
Crash directly into the paper
-white path. There was no training given for
Disintegration. Just networking. Fuselage meet skin
& white slopes of Mt Erebus & wrecking
Slopes of economic/statistical power laws. We get
A prototype for snow. Tender
Predecessor of hyperexcited
Tissue on impact. This recycling this lifecycle. No.
Just the right amount of widespread order
To keep disorder, balanced at critical;—enough
Little hourglass tumbles every so
Often to stave off the really big downward tails. So flight left
With tickets for empty seats. Business as usual. Aluminium burning
Warship on the side of a volcano in the Antarctic. The only game
In town.

It was usual for no survivors to be seen
Camping in wing wreckage—quick to assemble wind
& guywire piles of snowy sand.
The orchestrated remains are meticulous
In their record keeping;—tissue immaculately detailed no matter
What dusty vapour or drenching fire isolated it.
In the language of thermodynamics Information survives
Like cockcroaches crawl through nuclear war like static is always
Seething . . . Fuselage of human grease turns
The little water of this dry ice earth black. Meat stew
Of polar clothing, and gulls help at identifying corpses
When radar lets them down
—lowers macabre iron cargo nets to remove the human element.
Unfazed. A crash site whipped up in no time (in parentheses)
Always already prepared earlier . . . suitable for the uncertain.
The pedestal more famous than
The person—the ice as good
As ignoring all search-&-rescue efforts.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

culture afloat

this torch requires an evaluation
flash of soft politician gums
hatless creampuff wearing sunglasses to the inquiry
pecuniary metric conversions
of a scout hall footage

choose 4 nights on the celebrity solstice
where a tasteful program of classic dramas
will play out as the vessel
grazes Balkan harbours
lining of the ocean
with swipe-tag aesthetics

meringue nests with the director
deposited on the helipad
ticket stubs on mimeograph paper
are post-consumer foods, junk boutiques
(commerce making do)
the dialogue continues
after the credits roll

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Coalesce

I am already dead. Already, I am dead.
I am gone. Already, I am gone.
You are reading this when I am gone.

Dis. Integrate.

Already I am earth ash leaf caterpillar,
the tomato between your teeth.

Already I am ink on the page the bottom
of your boot tepid water from a sun
soaked tap, wood.

Dis. Integrate.

Already I am dust mote that cannot fit
inside itself, small parts flung out and
around and under, blood shiver, glass shard,
prism throwing light at the yellow kitchen walls.

Already I am dug down with a sign skewered
above me in the soft dirt my children dug out
earlier: this is the grave where I lay, where I
lie, where I am folded inside a pillow case.
I am my own terrier tucked in, dead from
the green syringe the vet brought to our house
at eleven am. My arm shaved.
Anaesthetic put in. I am the dream of dirt
and bone. I am put down. I am put under.
I am touching root systems, gravel, earthworm.

I am carried by me and my three year old
who cradles my head while I take
the weight of my body.
My eyes refuse to close.
My tongue keeps pushing out
between the loose points of my teeth.

Dis. Integrate.

I am gone. Already, I am gone.

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Talking English

The Gulf’s ancient tongues are hobbled
by inherited trauma, gene-crackers

sadistically scabrous and burgeoning
in the remembered fluency of wire-tipped

stockwhips and all those manhandled
civilisers of a splendid frontier’s orders.

And though munanga were not to prosper
in these mirages of pasture and surface water,

where crocs and distance preyed in circles,
a momentum remained to infest

and disturb, to see barbed-wire fencing
and scorched stations spread like gravel

where barefooted dancers once sung
a bounty pressed intimately in ochre

and law. And so sacred trees were cut
dead, bones gathered in caves and girls

stolen as pilot were hobble chained
as sex slaves in a waste land dragged

to heel by Martini-Henry carbines
that at this critical moment were talking

English.

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Poem for Bats

there hangs the poet
ripe before his time
slighted in the moment
adored when, fanged, he dies

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Inheritance

i


There’s a complex certainty in coming home.
It keeps on, something like faith – shakes the red dirt
shoulders of the Maranoa and prickles up a spine

of Ooline trees to the west. I have not travelled nine
hours here bearing sorry words, because this poem
has long been carved into the palms of my hands.

This is not the place for absolution. Not here, where
clay plains repeat with the smell of ashes and burning.
This is a wasteland for sepia-drenched stiffs, and crows

tossing gunfire emptiness with bullet-point eyes. I’d
rather drive through this molasses-thick heat, away from
ancestral fossils. Out here, Mandandanji feet know the earth

and I am only a stranger – a tightly clenched prodigal
alone with the pull of regret behind my rib cage.
Out of the car, I fall hard into my own body.


ii


There’s a fanfare building in the mess of my chest,
at first – the dull insignificance of white noise, a bedrock
for more obvious sounds. Ghost movements about the old

homestead’s bones as daylight’s axe splits the dawn.
A tin mug, filled rough from the bore – a timpani
to ring out a father’s cut-throat kind of loving. Cattlemen

have such little cause for conversation and I never knew
how this land could colour your blood, ink your
shadow. How it could spark like live wires across the

fence post props of this old town; mouth dropped down
at one side – beaten to chalk dust by heat. Still, a strange
beauty glows in small town geography. And even here

by Oolandilla Creek (where nothing is particularly beautiful)
something bigger burns through me – leaves white light and
saltbush scars, my fingers moving along the same lines as yours.


iii


At the back of the cemetery, I sit by you, wearing cobblers’ pegs
and eating plums from the Amby store – wondering if your
constant absence was just your version of a blessing. But it’s easier

to understand all this out here, when the land continues
before you’ve even noticed it begin; the quiet flow of the
Maranoa River pushing on, emptying slowly into the Balonne.

At the artesian spa in town, a trio of boys hold a fourth
under water, til he thrashes like a hessian-bagged red-belly.
There’s not a soul in Cambridge Street after midday, as a

B-double truck rumbles over the bridge. From a clutch of
belah trees, a black-striped wallaby appears, turns to outback
coral then dust. I think of your headstone, weathered to ghost

text and about the blinding nature of recall and bloodlines;
about how the walls of this dam always seem to hold, even when
the avalanche comes – and there is nothing else left but bones.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Deserts and Promises

My people make
deserts and promises.

I can live quite beautifully in words
assembled and disassembled so easily,
as if we conquered the world with riddles.

I once lived on an island
with no word for thank-you,

this is the art of small places.

When the colonialists came
they took the teak and sandalwood and cinnamon,
and left a please and a thank-you
where once the forest stood.

My father left his island, cold,
where the people speak like songs,
and talk in stories,
and whisper that the name of their city is a lie.

I was raised in a forest without trees,
a forest that existed only in the memory of birds
they would come winter mornings
and suck dew from the grass.

My mother’s people, from the high country
lived in a place once called after a river,
but now bears the name of a long-dead colonel
in a battle that only the cannon survive.

This town
is called by a word
we don’t understand,
a symbol
carved from a language
expelled from the landscape.

The name may mean ‘red earth’
or ‘bend in the river’,
or ‘where the wide waters meet’.

It could be a crooked curse
or a lullaby,
a passport
or a prayer.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Discourse on Blue: Three Colours

1) Tyres at blue speed a TV channel off-tune we see is jammed on Blue. The foil wrapper rattles the wind, is a disappearing. It flies in blue schema. It’s sound makes us watch, this scene is sound.

2) Her daughter watches the past recede as colour of cars in the rear window; the girl will not see it catch up or the future soundless. We will: film over the eye, the ear, of the past swimming back into a woman who

3) stopped for death. Daughter. Husband, Patrice. This eye-on-death close-up, her eye, our eye, hospital air and breath of feather, fabric, close as art-house. In dearth and in this world, wealth. Effects are alone aesthetic. The grammar of that sentence.

4) We. Our. If viewing seems singular, it’s learnt in plural. This film coheres as soundtrack, coheres as filmtrack, as tracks it more than usually coheres. We are underwater with her. Our senses fish.

5) Her track is the orchestra agush, at life at death. It. The pills she tries to swallow gag back on her hand. The Julie they met in her mouth, ugh, the self who won’t, the self the colour blue. Krzysztof! tablets so huge? They’re white, at least, for the non a colour’s inscribed on.

6) But the great music must be finished! (is music ever finished?). Form is. Not pills but Patrice’s melodramatic concerto for Europe. In his mouth, in hers? Or the flautist’s ragged busking on the pavement, lungs filling and breathing, who pipes to haunt (us) and almost live (us). Pan is loveless.

7) Love? Tightened blue in her knuckles rub bloody against the wall of stone (my back skin shifts like shingles) after she disabuses Oliver (who loves her) by making love to him, and resists the music. The crystal light-hanging (she tore from the ceiling) shimmering, that fills her hand like a glassy daughter grasped up from a river. Her grief so ruthless it weakens everyone she meets. Renouncing, them, the unfinished. Blue is the colour of scrutiny. Julie is learning: to see in the dark and feel nothing.

8) This music or grief inner as herscape, her free indirect speech, our narratology enters her like her black coffee seeps into a sugar-cube. Visual motif. We wait. We hear the flute’s high notes the sunlit busker, a melancholy nest of Preisner each film of Kieslowski.

9) Grief as pre-speech: wailing, silent, Lacanian. And post-speech, wordless. Can the imaginary be full of chords? (Must it be so serious?)

10) The frames erase story so the eye is filled by currents of blue. Not I. Don’t live with me, life, I am death. In the absence the blue the wish to swim underneath, descend, past and through, the line on the bottom of the pool the weed the frippery of light-hurting-voice of go on, kick up, break the surface, the film.

11) An orchestra erupts through surface! Her, blue, narrative … I shake and am wet but she doesn’t and isn’t and Kieslowski knows it. Music finds us and draws from where it wasn’t to where it isn’t. The remnant, trace, the film floods.

12) We are her fear of mice, a mother and its hairless young in her room: life finds her in the dark and enters her. Life is tiny and grotesque! A mouse of self-reliance! Julie wants to be without fear. (But fears mice – who will kill the mice for her?) Mice?

13) Juliet (Julie) Binoche so poised and beautiful, at a remove in her pale face, classically sculptured (her face her music) as … marble? what else to compare her to (permanence… I pause on her cheekbones, her downcast eyes, the stillness of her mouth.) The vulnerable flesh of religion. In side-frame a man rushes past, mere, plain.

14) Olivier spreads out the printer’s-quality paper (the sound of it, beautiful as Binoche) the staves close up, seeped-into by ink (coffee into sugar-cube) that only Julie can compose in her composer’s self (as Patrice, amanuensis ..?) but Olivier knows she is dead, Olivier knows she will rise. (We too.)

15) She says, show me what you’ve got (the ghost of her says). If she listens the film must run its course, its of-course. So the past catches up like cars flashing on the front of her daughter’s death.

16) No! Patrice had a lover. The lover is pregnant. Don’t think of mice! So late in the blues Julie is cheated. To lie in white sheets of music. She knows. She in her blue lack composes.

17) Composes. In her own pen her pen is, is music, lived-in like goodness. Is not all music? Too good to be true, this, his gongs and angels, she loves … something. (She knows how he loved.) There in the scrolls. ‘If I have not love… ‘ Don’t end it.

18) Love, her estate, her wealth, her blue. Her film effortless and rich, her art as class, as landed, city, aesthetic, her exception to history, her ink this gorgeous paper scratched into with love, the instruments endless.

19) If hers it is, Patrice’s it isn’t. To end or begin? She forfeits. Her denial her silly kind of love. If not hers now, when? Style more self, less love.

20) But if hers shall be his? A soprano pierces.

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(untitled)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Berg

A fin of ice arising out of sky, frigid sea A single
turret above belies the monolith beneath The berg
advances at the speed of a pilgrim travelling
on foot

Calved from huger sheets and carved, desolate its
drapery, its skirts submerged

The berg at a palmer’s pace dissects the waters

And you: First anatomise the cryosphere Breathe
out ever-condensing vowels Capture its face then
explode the berg bring the wreckage to light

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

In Flight Entertainment

‘no more blues’, that’s not a promise
there’s no traction or policy in the blues

all those bars are too long a cycle
to make for twittering views

no more plaints or graces
no thanks, ‘watch and listen carefully’

enhanced performance, premium economy
‘a loss of consciousness’, ‘oxygen will flow’, ‘settle back’

it’s a field day under the smoky hills

what does my tray table say about me
the colour of my life jacket, indeed, my life

‘woke up this morning’, that line’s been used
an immense dark blue sea nothing like the Pacific

it’s a long way down, it’s a long way home
even the clouds are small

perhaps something scary or precious
will break loose as the screens fall

what if there were no more blues
everything white and cloudy, ’nothing to see here’

does Europe seem safe
there are checks again in the Schengen zone

‘strong margins’, more landings on Lesbos
ancient songs for peace, love, weddings, thanks

‘persons of interest’, abductions
the last Commodore rolls out of the factory

what do you do with your hands
time is pressing, ‘enjoy the service’

‘the cost of complexity’, alive in the aisles
‘full of self belief’, ‘materials handling’

showers in Cape Town, sunny and dry in Lima

your own youtube channel must be full of likes as well as gripes
as the news disappears into itself, by jings it’s hard

but not so hard as no more blues

and there’s New South Wales or whatever it was
or will become, cultivated white squares and a haze

‘being a personal trainer’, ‘a true Aussie lifestyle’
from Port Macquarie to Wagga Wagga

which state would you settle in

‘the Australian dream ticks all the boxes’
welcome to the Gold Coast, five minutes from the beach

no more blues, it’s all white from now on
‘a loss of consciousness’, ‘settle back’ –

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Chronotope Highway

The forgotten allure of conversations inside cars, like fast and furious, but cooler. Your brown dog in his many pantone shades is left behind in Cooranbong where we kill the get directions voice, her indefatigable English accent permanently miffed at being called to account for anywhere. At the petrol stations I feel sleepy like River Pheonix, though when we hit town you crave background noise. You’ve got the pinball hips, as the multiballs rain down, though ordering fish this far inland is a risk. Soon we’re holed up in our executive apartment by the mighty Murrumbidgee, two women enter…Even mum’s sure she’s met this one before, like in that Seinfeld episode when Elaine decides to stay with her ‘bizarro’ friends. Out on the balcony, with a rubber tire ashtray, ugg boots and Suntory the cockatoos are ecstatic. Or we’re having a Sunday roast chicken expertly stuffed up the jacksie. Until the drive home spools on like archival footage, passed the cli-fi of the wind farms and a burger in Gunning.

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snake-well : a suite of wheatlands poems

i.

ash loam and foot flesh
farm-bones and skin maps
pink, grey, graveground,
form-grasses and wavetaints
wellbaked and seed black


ii.

starlows the cropframe
saltcanvas of generation, plateau
waist the size of place


iii.

tigerhand by jokebite, and
fivethink of bootstub
hand-me-down, snow hot
tamarisk, sack-a-flour,
jackgun trapchasm foreign sun
our unsettlement

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

The Future Un-imagine

On the run from the W.A. police, her faking German accent
could be someone else: embassies [snapshot] in their circular
drives, late night music. Claus plays haus in Canberra,
surrendering to the domestic obscene. She home hones
in mu-mu when home so foolish, stretches her long legs
to admire shell pink toenails. Claus is punk hausfrau who only
just makes code. Still the morning deflate.
Before this rapid joy in sunglasses, remote mutes happen
in a box. Did you say instant? On the opposite side
of the lounge they have closed the borders to Europe.
Claus works the images, kills the sound. Prone and sensitive
before afternoon soap, that cool ex-wife, next-wife plot
creates such cosmetic intersect. All goes quiet, actors tho’ and
monstrous nobodies. Sound down politesse: each listening
elsewhere. Why we feel torrent almost tolerant. Outside
the wind freshens to mass moist air above the continent.
Though as a rule clouds avoid this place. Elsewhere
is mayhem in what should be Spring. Where’s the hope,
where’s the promise? It’s a disaster end to end, and everyone’s
muscling up, muscling in.
What really interests jostles her. Pause
and stretch: jigs, cutouts cutaways and reveals to that soft
unused skin. Could they be implants? Now she is sell, the soft
sell. How did it go so wrong? Inside the cage, life hardly moves
:toy truck, broken glass, rotten goop that is so sub-urban
:she’s been here long enough waiting at the zoo with the other
animals. Claus remembers the different pleasures of kissing a man
with three days growth and of a woman.
This is big. She feels irresponsible. Forget the future, un-imagine
a past, there is only here Ground Zero where she rents the view.
What did Little Gidding say about ends and beginnings?
The landline rings. Overhead a helicopter hovers, and out on
the street the police negotiator leans over the roof of his car.

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