a whistle
look up to see that apricot wash
and out on the balcony
of this block named Manhattan,
two currawongs expose white butts
at empty apartments which face
Mt Ainslie in an arc
one lands on the terrace next door
to examine a lime green Buddha
the only other audience
in this amphitheatre of absence
i plunged my fist into your chest and discovered the heart i licked my discovery my knowledge in the cell, in the nighttime, as the moon covers its eye with the shadow, i discover the will in the cell which is the will in me, i began as a shellfish and step by step became a monster of knowledge, tore the mask from the weakened citizen, denaturalised the kidney beans, as they fall from your fallopian tubes, the bells ringing, i dropped the fabric over the surface of the body and ceased to be a citizen, my qualities became obscured by the dark cloth i had no values, i was a machine for the god, he licked me on the face and told me to uncover myself he stripped the leaves from my flesh he licked the vaseline from my sex, my cache-sex, in the darkness, i relieved myself, i was of shame for the other, the western string, the history of a shoelace, i looked toward the other lands and saw them twist their strings, it folded into them, i discovered the silence that precedes them, that sustains them. i became raw in the sunlight, i rosied up to the god, for only through the medium could i perceive his ephemera and feeling it could i discovered the solitude.
displaying my whole surface, everybody could see that exposer and cacher were the same verbs but with alternate intensities of light. i discovered the hand within the glove. i discovered the land. i ran the finger over the rock and left my cells on its grisly skin, i painted myself onto it i discovered art. i pwned it. i discovered the bodies under the coat, a coat made entirely of arms, what god has commissioned this, what tailor has known such a creepy might. i discovered the bones beneath the skin, ran the tips of my own skin-slung bones over their content, i told you you were a symbol, i fit you to a concept, hitched a star to a waxen figure, twisted the forms. i discovered the eagle preying above us revered it. i never feared god because i saw his shaven face. I found the leader in the sunlight, he presented his rugged chest to us, his capped scalp. we ran the sandpaper over his breast. we made of the blood and hair a paste, ,and began to paint the landscape. i discovered the bed under the doona, discovered the tongue in the minority grouping, they were pressing back against the freezer. i slid the bottlebrush down my throat felt its nettles rush, noted my pores prickling to the stamm. in the introduced unherb, i made a finding, introduced myself to the responsible gods, placed myself before the others.
the pink men of knowledge, sweating in the closed rooms, resisted and in resisting, continued to be true. i swallowed the turd and breathed into their air-hole. I raised the plastic sword to your plastic neck and made the thickened plastic blood sulk out. i discovered the plague in the handkerchief. i discovered the stain beneath the mug, the fleck behind the cushion. i covered my skin and the excreta removed itself. i lay the banksia on the battlefield in order of their size, their hue, the length and width of their tendrils, the resistance of their leaves, the flexibility of their stems. i catalogued all of these properties, then shuffled them under the undergrowth. i found the blood in my soup and took it back, even though it was my blood and someone else’s soup. likewise i documented this case and it took on a quality. in the name of equality i saw myself forced to destroy the others. in the name of fraternity i felt myself tempted to kill the sisters. i discovered the complexity of emotion. it was we who discovered the lip under the moustache. we discovered the yoke, bolted it to our necks and showed it to the boss. he said teamwork and we hi-fived. we discovered the subject being subjected. we discovered the leaves of grass. we discovered the peninsula and broke its neck. we began to swim, our surfaces were shining and covered, we were naturalised.
Sometimes in your later
years it is enough
to read the titles only.
shorthand for the contents
you cannot quite recall.
The sleety ironies
of Philip Larkin, say,
a flatness everybody
knows but he defined,
bending to his bike-clips.
Wallace Stevens, Hartford,
was maestro of the lot;
his titles in themselves
an instant, one-line poem:
‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’
‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’,
Good titles are the flag
that flies without a pole.
They say their piece alone
and straighten in the wind.
We called it a Russian summer,
roses on the table, vase
too light in the wind — the blooms’
suitable pinkness, smarting.
She lent me a jacket—
pelty aubergine velour,
with button missing. And hat
of genuine silver fox
—undoubtedly monstrous.
I petted it shyly, tried the jacket,
its gappiness rehearsing
nobility’s bruising
and that sound of axes.
On the table, near the vase,
crystal bowl brought up
its bellyfull of cherries.
Black at the mouth, with cream,
we embarked (with sighing
by far our most
credible affectation).
Sucking Lapsang through teeth,
we pierced the glossy skin,
and swivelling the pits
set wet magenta running
along lines of wrists
to splish in drops to the floor
— seven sets of bloody fingernails
thumbing stains into paper.
The thud of some future,
and isn’t it funny? Everybody leaves.
It ends in luggage, and an old man fretting
for his master’s coat.
In the stickiness of the plastic rush
Jeff calls to Steve as the wife tapers
away to Target, Steve looking like an
apple in the stickiness of the plastic
rush rises to curb the wizard, Steve
is related to Mel Gibson by default,
he claims to be the third-cousin of
Mel’s ex-wife, Jeff nods like a rehab
patient whenever Steve begins like
rain around the ears. Unique as a
Saab comes Neil through the door,
he has a severe light & retires into
the magazine gloss, he likes Kanye
West’ philosophy & the sound that
metal makes in the sun. Nathan is
bristling up & ready for trimming,
he nods like a dashboard figurine
Nathan indulges in weather talk &
the minor colours of sunsets, he is
in the chair describing blue to Jeff,
Eddie is waiting for a text with one
foot hooked upon his knee reading
his selfies, Eddie has a fear of ceiling
fans & low quality Broadband areas,
with an inevitable film over his eyes
Eddie rises & Steve mingles outside
with a temporary gleam, Jeff stands
below the radio just for a moment
not to hear.
aries
desperadoes will welcome a dalliance with a short dark
macchiato someone from your fatigued,
not to mention jittery, past reappears
promote personal relationships by returning
glances & loans you know it’s about more
than a borrowed book & feigned interest
in his pet axolotl bonsai little annabella
taurus
after rain, seek guidance from worms
inhale their fragrance pluck perfumed
sample cards from david jones’ garden.
your partner/lover/boss suffers from an eclipse
of the senses have you used the word gifting?
or said, i gifted them? a significant
someone may have taken offense at the abuse
of a noun repeat, perfume is the perfect present
gemini
on the equinox your suspicions will be confirmed
at noon avoid obsessing about things you can’t change
like shade diagrams recharge your batteries
solar resources surge into a surfeit
by the summer equinox meanwhile what you save
on sunscreen spend on champagne–coloured lingerie
cancer
these short days beware of discounted plunder
& maxed plastic smart crabs head for sunny noosa
to avoid the sales checking windshield wipers,
tyre pressure, oil & water–
or getting someone else to do it for you–
will bring unexpected & consummate mileage
leo
beware of bosses & bossiness—
playing the chemistry scales
is its own accompaniment.
weigh up human factors
lay in garlic & sprigs of rosemary
the lion may lie down with the lamb
virgo
your heart says try circumnavigation
your head says tarry with ways to land
a new job one that pays a new psychic
season rolls around like a randy ginger cat
cool you purrs off the cat, researches positions
at academies of the paranormal
libra
the azaleas and hyundais come and go
no time for a toy boy or a gigilo
young venus creeps into old mars’ pocket
accept nothing less than the real deal
this may be the time to purchase a car
scorpio
easy going november lizard with blue tongue seeks
victa mower for transporting relationship
begin flossing now embrace neptune
possible alignment of salty kisses by christmas
sagittarius
droopy executive socks stunting your love career?
a celestial gridlock provides an opportunity
to hitch your hosiery wagon to romance
drop in at the new south wales art gallery
conversation socks for inarticulate lovers
capricorn
everyone is needy but you needn’t spend another
christmas lounging at home with twinkie
or travelling with your long term companion,
the pacific highway pick up your mobile
punch in the number of that one-armed
bootmaker fall hell for leather under one another
pisces
stuck in a relationship with pre-folded corners?
not sure if you want to be tempted at tempe or
access remote ordering & payment services?
not sure if you are ready for nymph / elf shaped pasta
or if you should stick with comfy rustproof aluminium?
achieve a look you’ll love you have an irresistible offer
don’t indulge in flat-pack ambivalence
italicised words in ‘Pisces’ from Ikea website, 15.11.14
When they have taken away
the childish laughter and dog-eared books,
peeled off the last much embrace,
given the girl
her lipsticks, hair rinses and pills
When they have poured back the drinks
as long as empty deserts,
returned the spurs to the one-night stands,
taken off the overcoat,
and riddled her bed with song
They’ll find
a mirror smothered in lips
a vacant room with stale cigar ash,
an unpaid bill for a Turkish masseur,
a woman’s glove by a handsome typewritter
They’ll see
charleston dresses of the mind
with their fringes running like blood,
a list of men’s names
from childhood to eternity,
they’ll dig the very fluff from the floorboards,
examine the stains on the manuscripts
Which drug did she take?
Which pain did she prefer?
What does the lady offer
behind the words, behind the words?
The criteria will be:
so long as she’s dead we may
sabotage and rape
Now in the night I wake to it:
plucking of a cello string,
low hoot of wind in a deep cave,
song of wrongness sounding,
sounding.
The hand is unmarred to look at,
paragon of itself, sweet in sleep
as a small bald mouse
curled in the nest of its mother.
Nothing hurts it. But oh,
it hurts.
Someone is crying for help
in a locked house; I cannot get in.
In the hallway mirror I see
the slumped back, fattish neck, arm
dangled like a butchered fowl.
What fool left me here
in charge of this body?
All the world put away in its box
but us: the body and I. What to do but sit
and wait, in the mesh-curtained streetlight,
by the grey quiet
of the television, the shapes
of the dirty glasses.
Sit! Are we not a good dog? The hand
inert in our lap: look what we’ve fetched. Surely
the master comes back for us
by morning.
George Jeffreys woke up in a sand lagoon
on a Wollongong beach on his back. He had
just relaxed enough to close his eyes, when
a group of holidaymakers grew concerned
above him, debating if he’d died. George
reached warily for a towel and crawled
up onto some rocks to watch his sometime
lover Clare, who sat on a grey shelf.
The foaming lace at her small feet was
the colour of her hair and ghostly skin,
the foaming sea lace like the edge of blood
after a knife goes in.
Clare’s small hands were clasped on
her knees in grey depression, rocking slow
inside the rock’s grey depression. She was
preoccupied with a boarding kennel
in Adelaide that had let the animals die –
by howling dozens, dogs and cats –
in a bushfire, apparently refusing
to evacuate early enough or accept
help in evacuation. She had heard that one
proprietor supposedly heroically on site
was really in America on vacation. George
wanted to warn her that such concern
for animals would completely break her heart, but
knew since she’d killed her siblings in
her childhood that, anyway, her heart
was already completely broken. Instead,
he stumbled over towards her, put his arm
bravely around her shoulders. She was
too polite to show her tension, allowed
again the intrusions of affection. He said,
‘It’s the Holy Holiday again. On the same
principle that Sitwell said that torture
could elicit anything from victims, except
that they hadn’t enjoyed their holidays, people
will do anything if they think that they deserve
a vacation.’ She nodded, “Some owners
of the pets are defending the kennel, because
they left their animals there and don’t
want to admit they took a risk with them.
People do think a holiday is sacred, will
sacrifice anything for it, angrily. Are
you enjoying ours?’ ‘I went to sleep for a second,’
he said, ‘but they thought I was dead. Would
you like to go home?’ He felt such pity
from unpossession that he rephrased the question,
‘Would you like me to take you home?’, but
she continued on the grey subject: ‘Every time
some child dies on a school trip, some
of the other parents defend the school, even
sometimes its parents themselves. Any
institution seems more powerful than
human love or loss.’ George said, ‘But it’s just
what you said: the guilt of careless
delegation. And blurring of ego with
any perpetrator. The remaining children
in Cairns declaring loyalty to Mother.’ ‘Is
your ego’, then she asked him,’still that
badly blurred with mine?’ ‘It never was,’
he answered, ‘or you’d never have accepted.
So if we’re still on holiday, would you like
me to ask Sophie and the baby to come here?’
Sophie was Clare’s friend from Paris, who had
been saved by Clare from a fire and a husband.
The baby was a few years old now, but
would always be The Baby, because
of her infinite mutuality. ‘Yes,of course, but
we’ll all just talk about sieges.’ ‘It seems
a good use for a holiday’, said George.
*
Florence on holiday from kindergarten
took everything as seriously as ever, but
had the serious person’s propensity
to shriek with serious joy. George
and her mother Sophie sat on the rocks
– that particularly Wollongong mixture of iron,
sand, anthracite and granite, which Clare
said reminded her of George – while
Florence and Clare ‘wave-danced’, which
meant them holding hands,jumping back
at each roll of a wave, chasing the next
one out while shouting with excited
surprise interspersed with risky
pas de deux worthy of the early
Nureyev and Fonteyn. George watched
and applauded – a function he enjoyed –
thinking the scene had even more beauty
than a lucent Bergman beach, and almost none
of the ominous undercurrents. Sophie
said, ‘So many deaths in Paris and the siege
here, also. I was thinking of you: your quote
from Bevan that the Labour Party has too
much reverence: that you must think the Muslims
have too much reverence, too?’ ‘Reverence,’
agreed George, ‘is a violent emotion. And what
confuses things about Muhammad is that
he was iconoclastic and didn’t want any
portrait of him to be worshipped, but
he also wanted people who disliked him
or his God to be executed.’ Sophie considered,
‘Yes, I suppose if it wasn’t for the latter, one
could say the Charlie Hebdo cartoons would be okay
with him. George affirmed, ‘Yes, because
they aren’t a form of worship.’ Clare was right,
he thought, that Sophie’s face was like
that of Paris Hilton and, he realised
looked therefore like an icon in the Orthodox
Church: the nose slightly curved down, the seemingly
one-dimensional smoothness confident, its depth
suggested by its surface, like a lake. ‘Yes,
like Luther, any prophet might well be afraid
of the power of icons’, said George, ‘as much
as by the power of cartoons, which always seem
too energetic to be sinister.’ Neither Clare
nor the baby looked the slightest bit iconic
as they turned to the rock watchers, faces
as animate as unconditioned kittens. George
knew it had taken Clare three decades
to reach that unconditioning in which
the system one rejects does not dictate
the form of one’s rejection: without this,
that form too often, as she had
told him, was ‘likely to be death.’ All
holidays presuppose too brutal labour, thought
George, and those two faces were too free
consistently to play these mere exceptions,
these holidays for deathly carelessness. Slowly,
and still protesting lack of grace, then he
and Sophie joined them, dancing with the sea.
Like the Memphis Queen she steams
downriver at pleasureboat speed,
the rolled umbrella of her beak
peony pink, wobbleboard gullet
dangling in fleshy bagpipe,
a flush of fresh shrimp
wooshed out of her rubber pullet.
She stalks what she sees,
takes more than she needs,
the vast bayou of her appetite
swamping catfish shuffling
in mud, minnow churn, and the small
sweet cries of sausage dogs
on the shore—there is always more,
third helpings, the plate piled high
roadside diner style as she rides
stately as a motorcade,
dips her head in salute
along the antebellum scrollwork
of the shore, fossicks and prospects
with the rude gush of her influx
and pump, sucking shellfish
into gumbo, all swallow, all hallowed,
then with a swig of ipecac
upchucks the chum to her sons.
They struggle to keep up
as she steers south, singing hymnals
and cursing Union strongholds,
coasting to her holiday home,
a lavender estuary on Key West
where she wallows each year for a stretch.
Chiefly she goes to taunt the caimans,
sliding between them like a sly catamaran,
lobbying for a crackpot annex of Texas,
suspicious of the spoonbills’ migrations,
always at war, muttering to herself,
still nursing her grievances about
the Louisiana Purchase
and the Pledge of Allegiance …
Lingo as a last keen sanctuary for the purpose come to the circle
who saw philosophy and then turned back.
The coral and the woods, and the ankle blisters from biting,
were better, so we went. Then of course you think of his Fremantle
and the aeronautics stories, his confidence,
your pauper’s dreams of sailing, a generally spare
reference to an abstract agriculture.
Better the excitement became devotion in the Darling Ranges,
where you visited together and felt less, because
it was the first time for some and not for you, and not being
the first time for you a kind of conservation-seeming
became the incorporated hamlets of satellite vocations
to serve a Shiva committee ruling. Shiva says that
this many arms moving will not look like many arms moving
but instead like the pulse of a turbine. Ruling:
you are now the listless spinning of an introduced maple leaf.
Disinclined to speak during the visits they made
to parade the diet of the new committee, they kept rebuilding
that red brick church you admired for the squatters on its lawn
who hated it. The public phone nearby especially,
sometimes a family, sometimes a protest,
struck with lingo in parasite engraving making liquor pursed
in. Forgetting sovereign statues clung to by the random,
the certain took in careless sure steps,
and now that you are the clung-to, people assume
that they might qualify the grip, but it must cling onwards
because it is now the snorkel in odium and mercury.
You are now vitreous with the sandstorm, better aqueous
among those stalemated. This is because it can in portions
be the solar and the platelet, and the conspiracies are only fertile
with the metamorphic table of elements, like when
a city dilettante, once a rustic, now ancient but miniature tree,
says that with his acres of mucuous he is more concerned
that the sponge hasn’t been emptied.
You delete all lines that refer to a sponge as a person,
except this one, which is an undestined life boat
carried suddenly to the breach of earth. It never comes back,
thankfully. You have sent the question of a lifeboat forwards
and away to be again the livid humours of the one
who lies by the sponge, forgives but confirms that
the sponge hasn’t been emptied, and then go back towards
the richly tensile and stern corpus of a marinade transference.
It’s better to care that we are stories in transit to become transit
than to believe that the dairy industry has a civic terminus
in a taller food circuit.
Precious grin, intransitive art, we transfer
like a conference as conference furnace farms. It is better
to have seen sharply the goodness of recursion.
We are assassins surprising assassins, perfect with the pace.
Divots left to the weather a new etiquette
to entertain a wait-and-see up to the dotted minute
doing for others… then the marshal’s quip trail off
and voice-prints queer the cameras—no one’s
nuisance (par for the upset) before drying off.
The caddy is good at what he does, worth the wait
on this one. Never calling foul, calm settles offhandedly
as it should, all the more becoming, kicking back, you know.
The groundskeepers mistook the mess for mole holes.
We deserved the visit to rub our noses in it.
Eighteen screws later these carts fall apart
as jiggling sets off waves
beyond anyone’s control makes his day
it seems. The small world, the control room
got it this time, a piece of it anyways, loose ends
I mean … taking it as a hint, road buckling.
There is a way that summer stops
short of nudity. The loose
delight of your task
as necessary as twins
coordinating shirts and comedy
at the exhibition match
scheduled for short notice,
like a low-fi Santa providing
own beard. The trainee
nuances Auslan for
a cyclone called Greg.
Though real, Greg is late
for the election, can hardly help
the damage he will wreak.
for Crab & Martin
… there is much to do.
A little man tells us how to
invest our money, my teeth gain a few
fillings, probably, at the dentist’s—who
knows, maybe no drilling—but, as Xmas closes
in, some shopping, then I wait for Crab to
show, mark the end of the year, an oasis
of drinks—a quiet bar my ideal—
friends, artists together (bohos, hipsters)
Are we these things? Variously. The real
hipster is probably Crab. Though Martin
thought “beatnik” did usefully for us. He’d
distinguish himself from all of us ‘in
the business’—and tainted (went the joke) with
the badges of long hair, weird dress, in-
nocently held opinions, ‘ideas’. Stiff,
coming from Martin, but when he didn’t mean it
dismissively it was affectionate. If
it came down to it he admired those things. It
indicated partly a style he liked—”hipster”
especially. Martin Munz, artist,
had made the move to management. If a
manager could look as artily nutty
as Martin—and as nonchalantly—(if the
management class could be thought to know Marx thoroughly—
Benjamin, Karl Krauss)—Martin might approach the typical:
& the world would be more crazily
uniform—a hip dystopia. Difficult
to imagine. A special case. A world of guys in shades,
women in louche combinations, nifty or
somehow strikingly chosen revival shades
& patterns: a cartoon extreme enough
for Martin to fit in—& fit in better, in most ways,
than me—though here Cath would make it—the stuff
she wears looks cool, I think—and
Crab, too, fills that bill. How hip must
a poet look to get by? and how hip (how hip can
he look) without feeling a caricature?—
Cath looks good in her shantung green shirt, Ray-ban
glasses, slacks—and with, usually, coffee and a book before her.
Her own book launched this week, Crab in attendance—
and tout le monde—where we made this date, one of a
long series of ‘drink-and-dinner’s (and then—
further drinks) that we have, to an irregular
schedule, to keep us together, drinking, talking. There’s
the future before us—the past behind—Error
(aesthetic or ethical) to avoid,
hope, plans, cheers, jokes and stories, music (there are
music things to discuss, or to avoid
discussing—gigs that fall through—bands to put together:
Crab, a working musician). I will sit alone and, to avoid
being too drunk before my friend arrives—though there are
those who would ask Would he notice?—
I’m drinking coffee, & staring vaguely—where a
woman is walking by, or someone is
effortfully, or casually, parking—
and thinking modern, writing this poem, which is
the mask / of my dream / of a gin and tonic, wherein
I envisage how the night might go, recall
my teeth, the day—of dentist, of accounting
by the accountant, Cath’s and my shopping—check the tall
guy approaching—(not as large as Crab)—
and write it down.
The phone call went badly,
again – the old arguments about
how you were never a mother to me,
and why, why couldn’t you just love me
as if such hurts had answers.
The weeping – so blue, so literary.
At fifty, she was still stuck
on the old suppurating wound,
repeating the same accusations.
“The damage,
the damage you’ve done.”
She didn’t want her to think she’d
survived it unscathed. Not ever.
She’d worked so hard to become
something she wasn’t.
Someone must be to blame.
She was so clean,
so impossibly clever –
how could she not be happy?
this unformed artist weighed down
by other people’s baggage.
When the mother said:
“You have to work with it, use it,
create with it”…,
she howled:
“Stop talking over the top of me.”
It was like saying get rid of your self.
Knowing herself that well,
she hardly knew what she was.
you think like me
and find holed out solace in
a quietened
Futurama dvd menu,
sleeping in cartoon static
jokes that are too entrenched in meaning to unpack
doubled over falling over
the night is over –
home to the dancing clouds
next to the jungle stage, your reasons for being here
dressed in furs and drooping pupils
are demanded
your answers are too honest for the cameras
your words too cruel and i can’t not laugh
mateship predicated
on mutual, unironic appreciation
of post-grunge music –
“you must have been
the lamest fucking teenager”
“I once loved a hobo in the park.”
This was my friend’s mum talking, her papery face
suddenly a lantern. I kept prattling
as if she’d said something ordinary, something
not quite so aligned with my own predicament.
A hobo in the park – my inner tape recorder
got it, even if my drunk-mind didn’t.
Her eyes were the same blue as a Sydney summer,
the same eyes that once treasured society’s trash.
The stupidity of wisdom. I told my lover
once: “You’ll end up like one of those guys in the park
you know, the ones who yell at nothing and throw
bottles at people.” We were in my car, driving
across the Harbour Bridge. “I don’t care!” he said,
a fresh burst of spittle coating his week-old t-shirt
like air freshener, the cheap kind that’s labelled ‘Alpine’
in black letters, and smells even worse than shit.
It was 11:30 by the time we made it to his office,
which is either shockingly late or “Just in time
for lunch!” depending on whether your half-filled glass
contains vodka. At some point I suppose
I’ll have to stop finding him hysterical
or I’ll end up with the surname ‘Jones’
and a bedroom with a leafy vista.
I know. But my friend’s mum doesn’t lecture
because she knows the wilfulness of love,
the hurricane that howls in from nowhere,
from stillness to gale force in a breath.
Transient as we all are; voyeurs in a dream.
We met as phantoms in the mountains,
Unable to avoid the transnational arm of sleep
Of whatever city we got raised in.
I had such a beautiful dreamtime, an electric field,
My only weapon against it was to escape
Like Fantômas to the mountains where I met
Failed companies still operating under rotations of
Wild & loaded faces. A party danced nightly
In whatever settlement arose next.
Driving hard down the rue we strafed & founded
The ghost of Baghdad, a bag-heavy breeze
Of phantoms to maintain, & that we mooned,
Howling up a storm so that landslide myths would soon
Descend on the Coalition of opulence.
But that city’d been razed already
By the ELK, the Electric Light Korporation
Illuminating bones with a muzak unknown to me:
A silent fountain able to maintain
Despite the holey cluster the church had become—
Towering opinions having bleakly caved in.
Now everyone wants to sit in the rose
Of Venus: hermits are smitten by her ravines, suburban
Drunkards burn like moths in her brambled gin;
Needy men gyrate then faint on end
But no waterfall can compete on Stag’s night as dear old
Diana swallows the mature-aged sex industry
In whatever gun city she gets a raise next.
It’s a slippery slope, a Humming Flower production,
A piquant high of opals, as though the sea level’s
Risen to a newfound mountain peak.
Sometimes the ocean darkens, full of deadly schrapnel,
Orphic oysters berthing with news of forever
On our razored city shoreline—
It’s a furphy the Centaurs defecate on
From the height of the Collapse & into the Gulf,
Another mountain to climb for the Falling Man.
Roland keyboards on “beast mode” amplify the shock,
Sounding like teeth-plaque, like a bum-rush out or in
To whatever position will arouse me nix:
Fire drills ring out!—but I keep sleeping through it: I’m a wake
On an invisible pulley above a valley of tears, hanging out
With Fantômas of the mountainous Allegories
& we’re watching the latest TV wheeling & dealing
Over Libya from a romantic holiday chalet,
Our waterless eyes like onyx as
Craters explode & palm trees curdle over the edge of
This railing, designed for & streamed to those who dream
To meet like phantoms in the mountains
Of whatever city they got raised in.
Note: this poem is an inversion of Villes II by Rimbaud
‘I never much liked the pictures, starlit, gauzy,
a crank hand dealing largesse it didn’t have
scrunched skies and foreground sentimental dogs
like my great-aunt’s china doorstops …’
Disconcerted at exchange, he returns to his vignette,
and last week’s salve backs into its humdrum test-tube
in a safety-catch pouch.
I couldn’t say goodbye to the door,
the facility’s ashed portico and encased plants
under a spool of birds
so print out my friends next to the Colosseum Knitwear,
a doff to its inspector blinds vertical like a corpse.
Sunflowers walk the brûlée gardens to tarp verandah’s ersatz shade.
At the corner they gasp over raw creation, baby on its petal, intoxicated car.
Afraid to own mistakes, fortunes say.
The iron gates’ trade stamp Ballarat 1903, in sun-spined indent.
Aloof birds lantern a tree’s torpor or jubilance
that drain like an extinguished star’s revenant.
A drink of instead of, parasol of intransigence,
that’s longing, then nix.
Her stabbing stilettos sweet
kisses in the sea-struck mind—
Love the hate the love-me,
love-me-nots hurt, so deep runs
the magic and sweet brutality
impossible to resist
the phone call to misery is
the fairy tale you live in, a story
unfolding by a cold river.
Insane now, so you feel this.
The meltdown. A toy slaps the mind.
Then the peace ray
beams down bliss and light
and miracles.
two women in the room
thinking different things
at the same time
she takes the pen from her friends’ grasp
installs a brush well what do I do with that?
all of Minneapolis outside the door
will have to wait
windows are permitted
opening onto the quality of water
how soil changes the taste of carrots
potatoes from the centre of the country
handwriting like a thumb print
several ways to talk about
striped horizons and the aspect
of an aspen tree
carving out a language
in a room made of paper and canvas
“Just between us, she could have been great”
– George Balanchine
I was a little boy with his eye
in the keyhole, training: Vaganova, Karsavina, Gerdt
pas de trois pink ribbon battement
each one a different measure of sound
unraveling movement of a new world logic.
The body is an instrument I use
what they are—like to go under
the skirt slight sniff of perfume:
we do not train the pussy
cat—she teaches us gestures
in time and we test and taste;
a pinch of salt, a bit of sugar
culinary complements:
Q: Wonderful borscht
how do you do it?
A: I feed from the acid in her thigh
a clean line moving
forward somehow
elegant plié a swung hip
split
second compressed
into one tiny capsule: little lover, adventuress
long-limbed colt, firebird—a variety of bodies
cut free. The real world is not here. It is
a conduit of force, weightlessly musing
on his shoulder; chest high, back straight
feet arched. We do not see what we do not
see: obsessive tendus five-minute
Coca-Cola developé musical tuning in the pit
but a raised curtain: Mr. B
trapped in the wings of my own demonic furor
let loose upon the harshest critics: at first
‘ah, it’s wonderful’ and then
‘oh, I don’t …
And then it is over. And no more.
He sat in the cabin in the woods where he had fled to, because his mind was uneasy in the city. He enjoyed staring at the stars at night and the pang of hunger, which was new to him. He had dreams of Jenna swimming in the air. Executing a luscious breaststroke towards him, while he tried to hunt for his own game out there in the wilderness beyond the porch light at night. When he would wake the next morning, drinking tea (the only thing that was essentially plentiful) he would try to discern some form of meaning to his dreams. He then pieced together from the ornaments in his cabin a mental roadmap. That brought about his dreams. There was a lady doing breaststroke in an red, one-piece swimming costume in a lake, in a painting on the wall, on the back of his bathroom door. He would stare at her while relieving himself and wondered what it was like to float on the Dead Sea. The hunting game-part took him by surprise though. He was the hunted, not the hunter. He was the escapee not the persecutor. He was the rabbit who bolted at the sound of creeping footsteps and Jenna’s were only the softest of treads.
