Asks

What’s it like to be refurbished
tackled or finger-printed?
It’s not something you can ask
but I’m asking.
What is it like to be watched
waited, frisked?
Whenever I worry about my suit
my transparency, I don’t think of brightness
but calories, phones, ancient trees.
Does it matter who Beyoncé was
or what shalala means?
It’s all dancing lies amongst truths
yours or mine.
Our threats are whatever
and whatever will save us.
We know plexiglass, expecto patronus
or police presence won’t save us.
I interpret the clouds
but they aren’t the rules.
The rules are comments and spam.
Go get the questions!
Where are the questions?
Answers are here, unasked.
My hands are softer than they used to be.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Some words no longer work

I tried changing the batteries on the word SORRY today, rubbed the terminals clean of the caustic build-up from the power source that used to run it, until it ran it dry. My neighbours only know me by shadow or consequence. I said THANK YOU to a shopkeeper yesterday and was ejected from the store. Choosing your words is almost an occupational hazard in this society of scrabbled language. I can’t talk to you because our computers are not compatible and our songlines aren’t in tune. You’re not welcome to knock on my door to see if I’m ok or if I’d like to come over for a drink until you befriend me in the vortex of cyberspace. Our own digital footprints put fear in our systems, syntax error, syntax error, syntax error…a new dictionary of linguistic abuse has arisen from the era of Terror. I’ve forgotten how to have a conversation without editing myself or censoring my desire to communicate. Please contact me on a secure line as my feelings may incriminate me and some of my thoughts may be illegal. Freedom is a word that I’ve bought with a mortgage and am paying heavily for. How will the history of this time be written, when some words no longer work?

A fly in the ointment,
quid pro quo and excuses,
not a time for tongues…

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Shafted

It’s the long hair, untenably straight, and
the swinging eye, like a moon losing orbit.
There has always been trouble brewing –
rising to a knot and then smoothing off
like a yacht setting sail for a trip
around the horn, hardly progressing
against the current; actually against the
direction the world is spinning in.
Such a wearisome traveller – confused
but ever-hopeful, I’ve seen you nod
your grey head, a hollow cheek and down-
line – you are sweet but unwell, pierced
but uncut – we have always gotten along.
There are, after all, no false timelines
– a few breaches perhaps, a few ragged
stories, but they are harmless details
done up and hilarious in their impossibility,
as unpredictable as a shooting star
briefly experienced from the ground
looking up. Your thinness and fighting lungs
are the whip of a narrow cord – it flails
in any breeze but never breaks. We wait
for the grinding down of bone
to chalk, and it always eventuates.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Surplus

A surplus of appendages.
A register of distorted perceptions.

Shoved into the circular opening of the device,
waves of magnetic composition flutter the flesh.
You use your personality to get the honey out.

Metals in the blood reconsider their assumed
fidelity to the body the blood supports, it communicates.
Radically rooting for the opponent.

It feels like divine intervention, but
might just be an inferior kind of fabric.
What do you even want to be?

I think of something as vague as our genitalia,
as if they could be differentiated.
Of the order of velveteen, velour, rayon.

What if I told you, you have to appear
at the government agency, face to face
with the good burghers, their smiling offspring.
I said I was a catalogue, a trace.

There exists an unbroken line of narrative,
a conversation, between fashion and war.
My flight landed hard on the pykrete carrier.

For the first time since the peaceful autumn,
the fall, we are presented with the opportunity
to approach the skin as a fabric.
Woah, I couldn’t handle the goods.

The sovereign is that which decides to suspend its relation.
I think of your sex, of its wealth, our surfaces
as vague arrangements.

Say you work less than twenty hours.
No, say it.

You attempt to purchase the street magazine sold by the homeless,
but fall short by forty cents.
The destitute console you.

Did you shake the book?
Did you reassign the relevant officers?

I voted to send the citizens to contain the police.
I vote to erase the citizen.

Is it possible to use sex as a kind of manipulative solvent?
Leaning intently onto the joints.

I never wanted to be a part of your series:
people you love in embarrassing headwear.
Would you like milk, sugar, milk with sugar, or just milk, or just sugar?

I was doing my being confidence trick.
I evolved two nasal openings, and the rest followed suit.

Gradually, I acquired the capacity to read, then put it on the market.
We began to open by appointment only, like in nature.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Devouring the (Un)Happy Years

Grandfather had stubby tough hands
that fit within green plastic bucket
layered wet manure into cement-square garden beds
forged New South Wales Railroads
and sunny fat plum trees
in his long grey-paling Yagoona yard.
Didn’t talk
while drinking milky tea
fortified by garage copper still
read broadsheet news
at red linoleum tabletop
bunkered in household-kitchen
doled hard-edge
50 cent
to give hairy brown shoulder hug
smelling thick of pipe tobacco.
Horn-rimmed heavy glasses
Bonds tight blue singlet
matching job faded Stubbies,
embodied eastern European desire
to make Australia home
he spoke five languages
while casting State Government lines
taught other immigrants English
practicing their tongues.
Not once conversed with me about labour
hammering metal inside work camp.
After broken dawn sabre charge
across infantry
left light horse shoes fallen
on forest road
flanked
machine-gun torn
Polish grass
of Krojanty field.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Alice at Last

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly … – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland


I un-wake to damage.
Neurotic light-bulb flicks
once off, once on, illuminates
imagined city
skyline.

Inside my bedroom it rains
for days. The head
full of synaptic hauntings
shudders. Old-milk sky,
dimming.

I tell myself there is
a world outside
the world. Stay still
completely
still and gather dust.
Watch the fretful halls.

Walls convulse,
contract & close. The filament
at the bulb’s heart flickers. I
am half
dream-drowned Lethe.

There is a sickness not worth
surfacing. Better
to sink. To listen: soft light, soft
light
& the pressure
of doorways.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Heathward

Peeling back a wet blanket
of bracken more or less dead
on its feet, a small patch,
one warily pulled head at a time;
hoping to see the doused
coastal heath, that still smokes
underneath, reignite.
Hot-pink flowering Heath’s installed,
Prickly’s Beauty and Moses, Yellow
Spiky Bitterpea, Sagg: the names,
lit upon like the moled plants,
won’t disclose the wanted wealth
of paucity, desiccation
to be risked in these days
of declining rainfall. Planting
stones at the feet of baby shrubs
to dissuade rabbitual
excavations. Taking fresh
pademelon scats as a sign
of progress: remnant native grasses
reconvening as the patch dries out.
And this morning an Eastern Spinebill,
deeply addicted to the sweets inside
each dripping bell of Heath, grinned
through the patch like good luck,
peppering the bared ground pink
with rifled flowers.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

finite

my grandfather said it’s good not to have
to think about blinking or breathing
blood gases sugars or supply
to the brain it’s good not to have
to remember to breathe in
after you breathe out
forget and you lose everything
you have no longer
to remember to think

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Not under Lake Eucumbene

for Adrian, Bonny, Fiona and Lindsay


State-owned water floated,
a new sky.
Raised floor plans are bones of fish in mud.
Dead trees signpost hushed streets
lined with rushes.
Concrete steps lead up
to an absence of church.
Ochre struts from a ute chassis, rusted through,
flake off as slabs of poor shale
or ancient timber.
Fifty years of silt and wash on these spoils
brought them to a dusty sheen
under drought –
death’s own shining resuscitator.

And when Adaminaby
first rises, memory is a plot of panic.
When the old town and its foundations and cisterns,
chimneys and well-tops surface through air,
the breathy wind is across them,
it hisses
the topsoil skyward, coarse with rumour.
The sun
thrashes at a boat ramp that slopes to more ground,
with its cracked contracted wounds peeling scales.
Drowned trees are stuck waders.
There’s nothing here
that’s not residue. A boy, once lost in town,
now has a useless map in his grey head.

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The Road to Ireland

I would like to live in the West, at the edge
of the world, on a small holding,
walk my cow each day to the milk shed
and see which hen I am beholden to

for laying an egg. I would change
wheat into loaves, fill my plate from the field,
stack turf like gold bars for the kitchen range,
and conceal my distillery in creels.

Instead, I have stood at the town’s crossroads
and listened to who is ‘Wanted’ across the border,
who is being adulterous on the old bog roads
and who sprayed ‘Ireland is out of order!’

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Neruda’s Sixteen Finches

It’s difficult to see the glass ceiling because it’s made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly. ― Caitlin Moran


Insanity.	Great affection.       Hand in hand. 	If your love is for animalia      then
this is the sign	    a sign that you will be judged  (can it be?) 	It’s only Hector Malot
thinking out loud inside your head.	Not so loud!	Neruda hears humming         a fragile
mind is more creative.		I see her travel with sixteen finches 	and a violin or two 	
no less	with a husband  or two     all fit side by side on a rack.      And her stance   strong
not at all unladylike	(captive) she holds	all the wild beasts	gather ‘round her

(lucky charm) like Orpheus 	sweetened by sixteen notes 	oh brother!       just for a lark 
Neruda seeds an idea	to be unshelled    tasted    spitting husks of insanity     to the finches
fine feathers 	not a sign that the bird can sing          no humming please	nor a fiddle
by name alone		befickled of reputation.		(I’ve overheard it said)      only a man 
or a lesbian 	could stroke those curves    make it sing so	(like a beast)	make the maker
redundant.	And behind his hand, hinted in the dark    you know   how she might as well

smoke enormous cigars          drink stout          play golf     (insane I hear) a rodent humming
rat-catching 	fetching finches           teach them all that as well           sixteen years of age.
Watch how the world would play  (make believe)  if not for Neruda   or the great painters. 
Hang the answer in the Halles   see the birdie in the picture    a goldfinch   go look for the 
sign! Bellini is there    copying a feminine figure onto canvas    curves out of the frame
(read an artist’s eye) 	a violin and a woman             bleed together          a medieval beast

mixed from the same oil.     No need for such humming	gentlemen (we’re English).
Remember that	the beak holds no more (significance) than the feather.	Sshh
The picture is speaking           (a beast) of grace          sixteen bunches of erase-me-nots.
Even the devil’s fiddler had an answer	      insanity of sorts          imitations of a donkey
swatch of horse hair 	this is the sign in defence of she          who would not be silenced 
(insulted)           those finches perched high on a single string (to whom do they belong?)

Yes, the witches will dance	on the grass	underneath the walnut tree (despite)
hubbub of howling            insane humming like tinnitus   a tribe of warriors	in your ear!
Give it time and you will see the sign	    (think back) how the fiddler fitted	    right into
the crowd of sixteen revellers (swooners)            black of dress, of hair, of eye, of bird.
The beast cries out   mad wicked folly    liberates finches and ladies (Victoria is not amused).
One by one          he creates a star in the midst          convenes a meeting of the weird sisters.

Sister	do not consent to be sung           only in the manner they wish (understand)      you
alone can cause your wooden lung to sing it real    listen     (Nicolo’s) little bell     beast
of kind reply	   for this is the sign	   hear your goldfinch   twitter at the tip of the steeple.
Strike the violin sixteen times in staccato	study in Italy (or France)            call home
any place where the Master prizes talent    above all humming   stride forward through time
insanity has a  magnificent portal       (with gilded cornices)        twelve foot mirrors.

I will foster a fine bowing arm   (fine beau on my arm)  keep sixteen finches and a humming
bird     sign of a beast.  My violin of tender years     kissed by the old fiddler    as if an ancient
Cremona at auction.  Delicious insanity! Witch be near me. Mirror me on the path of Neruda.
Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Seven Years, to the Day

His cursive writing. His presence.
This old green logbook to help find lost bushwalkers
Makes him seem right behind that ghost gum.

Blood that took half a decade to purify.
This man, my father who lay in this hut.
In the top bunk, shivering, small, broken.

The bravado had worn off – his boots
Were giving him hell, he wore mine and
I wore thongs. I didn’t stop for boulders.

We walked out back of the dam for a few days.
After his son lay face up beside a grasstree. I wrote:
Sitting here on the ridge, those tiger snakes are still out of reach.

I hoped he might join the dreamers,
Start walking, maybe write some poems
About kangaroos and red-tailed black cockatoos.

But he blamed himself, after blaming everyone else
and we haven’t spoken for seven years.
I return to the hut, to the day, written in the logbook.

I run my finger over his handwriting,
His abbreviation for Mundaring mirroring mine.
He’s not here, he’s not here.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Black-figured Greek urn (lekythos), dreaming

Perhaps the urn was made all those years ago
not to hold oil, which it has never held, not
as the ground for the pictures, which
have chipped off, though a hand remains
unattached to a person, not to be carried
from place to place, though its handles are still
intact, but to dream of the museum,
and the museum attendants, daydreaming
in corners, and the mother, holding
the hand of the little girl in the itchy
red wool, passing the older girl a pencil,
to make a sketch of the urn. Instead, the urn
dreams of a photographer, walking briskly
through the museum not looking
at the objects in the cases, or even at
the other people looking, but at the way
the ceiling lights are reflected in the glass.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Response in Negative

Wrote an extensive treatise
insisting Life is change,

having canvassed the canons,
philosophy, science, so on,

but centring on one life—
I renounce it all.

Should not have changed.
Should have stayed

cleanly bathed in my light-
house gaze, casting, in return,

his own glow. One consummate
arrangement, one time.

Couldn’t. The chrysalis split,
released a whole

other answer despite all.
What I wouldn’t forgo

to reverse, all the way back
to completion’s

precise source, that walk
along the shiny corridor,

pushing the tiny, trans-
lucent crib, asking,

exultantly, Is he mine?
Is he really mine?

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Curator

I am trying to throw things
away. Say, these two cups,
his always green, mine always blue,
in the long dark the two of us,
me stacked inside him, or him
stacked inside me. I fear they’d shatter now
on separation, bright bundle
of cutting shards.

What even is this –
museum of the artefacts
of people who did not love me
enough? See here, this
teal-handled knife, from a caravan set.
How careless she buttered her bread then,
bikini bottoms ruched like a shower cap,
face cast down in the slide frame, still years away
from fool enough
to imagine a child.

But I wake in the night, afraid I
really did throw those cups away.
Lurch to the kitchen.
They are here. The moon is senseless
on the neighbour’s car. I am part
of a chess set and all the other pieces
are misery; I cannot discard them;
they cannot discard me; there is only
gambit and check, gambit and check,
back in the box and start again,
and what if I just threw
everything from a high place then
ran down and set it alight? I’d have
to buy more, and all I seem to have
in my purse is this one pearl button
and this tie-pin, slightly rusted.

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Papier-mâché

This spit-polished veneer has street appeal and is open for inspection. In
these shutter-speed days her family portraits bear the least resemblance to

anything real, paintbox-bright statements, all flourishes and filters – tumbling
and spreading from the news feed’s mouth. And it’s the arrangement that is the

most exhausting – the nipping and tucking, the painstaking placement; all that
sure-footed running with the bulls. What remains of her curls on the editing

room floor, and it’s there that she exhales, stripped down to a wick – hauling
the dead weight of domestic bliss like a cadaver. There, she waits, tracing the

panic room’s button with her finger, as her audience chatters and twitters with
with absent kindness – cutting her a break in digital platitudes; the emptiest of

intimacies. It’s a fragile masking agent, enough to hold the moon at arm’s length
from the sleeping faces of her children; keep the dark sirens, doll-faced and

dead-eyed from making their move – from clambering and twisting their way
out of her, as everything real is stuck, fishbone-cruel in her throat. It’s a complex

deal to strike, and she wonders how it came down to this – all this keeping up
appearances – pasting papier mache strips across this perfect, terrible mess.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Luck

My mother threw pinches of spilt salt
over her left shoulder, would toss water
that had boiled eggs onto the garden;
crossed knives were swiftly uncrossed on the table.
For good luck: her youngest brother’s signet ring,
its horseshoe worn smooth; the rabbit’s foot
that was her mother’s; a shamrock, four-leaved,
pressed inside her unused missal.

By small margins, sometimes, we find our way
or lose it. If charms that kiss the hem
of a frowning god, can help, let’s have them.
Secure all mirrors, slip on the horseshoe ring
then with a pinch of salt, plant seeds where
the egg-water fell. Tend what grows there.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Skywatchers

As we climb the dim-lit verges
of Observatory Hill, once Windmill Hill
bicycle lamps whirl past like fireflies,
orbiting in the dark
city kids kick-boxing or exercising
in green space, lights blinking on the Bridge.
We set up telescopes.

The sky is picketed with stars
a gibbous moon, its bent man bundling sticks,
a far-off plane, moving slowly, glowing
like a rogue planet. The lit-up time ball
that drops each afternoon at 1 pm
towers behind us
no longer calibrating ships’ chronometers
but accurate to the second.

The Emu in the Sky’s defined by nebulae
hundreds of light years away
visible against our Milky Way, body and legs
the trailing dust lanes to Scorpius, head resting
in the Coalsack dark nebula, a map to the Universe.
Once seen, like a Rorschach ink-blot
the night sky will never look the same again.

Far below, Fiona Hall’s
Folly for Mrs Macquarie, a filigree of cages
in Sydney Sculpture Walk, Botanic Gardens
images a self-imposed confinement
barbed wire, an axe, some bones
a domed roof of Norfolk Island pine
too brittle to make excellent ships’ masts.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Bored Orcas

*
This is your habitus speaking. You can look but not touch. The longest time you can look is four to five seconds. Any longer look will be considered ogling. When you shake hands, allow no more than two or three seconds. After that, any touching becomes sexual. The palm leaves a faint residue of oil and salt that can damage even the hardest surface.


*
The end of civilization will be marked by a series of cataclysmic events: the icecaps melting, a rogue wave (really a tsunami), an earthquake, forest fires, a global monetary crisis, tornados (tractor trailers, grand pianos flying through the air).

The past ahead of us, the future far behind. Uranium and plutonium.

Only the Internet will survive. Save? No.


*
A dog ran up to him, started to lick his face…

Everyone should have their own pet, especially one from a shelter. Everyone should have something to stroke, to fondle.


*
Share the road with animals, share the planet with animals… Sure, but they will always remain predatory and rapacious, despite our best attempts to domesticate them. (Google “bored orcas.”) For this reason we now have bigger cages in zoos.

What a disgusting, vile-looking fly!


*
The person you pass on the street may be a fascist, a torturer, a bigot, a child molester, a psychopath, a satanist, an assassin, an alien.

For instance, this elderly woman at the bus stop: “I remember music. I remember clouds. I remember when people actually swam in the ocean.”

You keep on walking, your fists clenched intelligently.


*
The barbarians – yes, always a kind of solution.


*
We don’t want old people, with their wool sweaters and cocoon sunglasses, on our fast-speed boats. Let them stay at home and collect anniversary coins. We have the right to our amusements, our orgasms.

We don’t want fat people to sit next to us on a plane. We don’t want the homeless to sleep our newly repainted park benches. The stench their bodies produce… When I say such things, I’m aware I sound like a bigot.

We blame the fat for being fat, the homeless for being homeless. The homeless know this. They go back to their mansions, remove their rags, take a shower. They deposit their money in the bank. The fat take off their body suits.


*
Stop only for ambulances and caravans.


*
Check your account daily, your pulse hourly. Watch these ads carefully. Do not cross median. Take responsibility for your actions (feelings).

Eventually your computer will know whether it’s you or someone pretending to be you.


*
A kind man with bad breath: “We should put these people in special camps, where they can be taught to appreciate great literature and music, especially classical music. A little Mozart never hurt anybody. Their children should be sent on field trips to Civil War battlefields. They should be taken to galleries and museums and introduced to famous works of art. If you believe in education, you must believe in reeducation.


*
Be careful not to click twice. You will be charged twice.


*
No one likes being rained on, spat on. Payphones, mailboxes, antennas… The map says: You are here.

On the bus, the insane, the homeless, the addicts, and the working poor. On the phone, “This is Charity speaking.”

At the stop, you give all your change to the homeless.


*
Chances of being in a plane crash are infinitesimally small, yet almost every day a plane crashes somewhere in the world. In most aviation accidents, a number of things have to go wrong. Until the final report comes in, we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. Then the flight attendants started chanting: “Brace! Brace!”


*
Please do not listen to this message if you are not the person we are calling. Please call back if this is a wrong number.


*
Spy masters read spy novels, football players play football video games. Firefighters fire petards at a political rally in Seville (2010). In America, politicians hold a golf summit (2011). Put politicians on minimum wage and see how fast things change, says a graffito on the Internet. In the museum, white dots on a white wall. We thought it was a part of the stunt.

TV reporters talk to each other (“Back to you, Anderson”). In the movie, a flight attendant takes over for the pilots who have suddenly fallen sick. First the candidate engaged in a debate with his foreign-policy aide, then the two men switched sides and argued opposite positions. I’ve always liked The Surprise Symphony. Is this real world or exercise?

Confusing fiction with reality, I once punched a guy who had insulted me in a dream. I once dropped a lighter into a sewer and, as I was trying to recover it, I realized that I had watched exactly the same scene in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. “Like the sensation of being followed…” I’ve never seen so much real world stuff happening during an exercise.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

En Passant

So to have become passed-
on, like so many pawn shop

pieces, waiting, in another
world, for the gleaners to re-

use, re-cycle, re-fashion.
But none of these parts

in the real world worth the
wound, alone—altogether

more than their warp, and
weft, their untold pattern.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

telescoping the history after LBJ came to Melbourne

747s
and Pelikan ink, and Letraset
kissing without meaning
because
we were smart
and beads

she wore a blue panty girdle
napalm blossoms in the garden
Rufus Youngblood, the head of the presidential security detail
trotted in a suit beside the Lincoln Continental

angry egg yolks ruin shiny car black duco
our youth priest drove his Peugeot 404 at 100 miles an hour
on the back roads behind the concrete dam wall

stone walls were crumbling
my Irish history
we were listening to Sergeant Peppers

though apart from the novelty
we had no idea
bus drivers were figures of authority

I had to stop and weep
driving over the Great Dividing Range
in the red and grey Mini my father bought me

we ate red meat and gravy, but even then
our mother was making us detour to the stone ground miller in Epping
we thought she was a fool
this was 1966
she was doing rough paintings of Australian trees
under the influence of a German artist friend
in the hot, stony outskirts of a Bendigo suburb
that I cannot get rid of
sadness

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

To the Anglo-Saxon Insult

You ass-out art against artlessness;
brazen bawd, bull-bladdered bushwhacker;
you churlish clown, clapper-clawed crower —
we’re dizzy-eyed at your dog-breath wit.
Ear-tweaker, you stink-eye the elf-skinner
& flap-jaw gill-faced flax-wenches. Fools’ folly
galls: you gully-wump gorge-gut gearheads.
Haughty, hag-faced, hedge-born harpies
can importune — ill-bred impertinents!
Your jar-head jolts fell jack-a-napes
with knock-out punches. You keel-haul knaves,
rout louts soundly, leverage lewd-ass lurkers,
maul all mammering manikins & mewlers,
nix ninnies & nix the nut-brained.
Oh, your onion-breath, ox-eyed grace & the
power of a-pox-upon-it praise!
The querulous quail; they quiver, queasy.
Dear roguish, raw-boned rut-rapscallion,
you are so saucy! Shag-worthy, smutty!
Even the toad-titted, shit-faced, toast you.
Unmuzzled urchins wax unctuous,
while wanton wags go whey-faced at your
yeasty quim jokes. Chain-yanked yes-men
zip their lips, zit-faced. Zounds! All praise you.

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

The future is but the obsolete in reverse

the future is but the obsolete in reverse∼Vladimir Nabokov

hens-teeth
tooth
sooth-seer
futile
soul-fever
suture
terrible-host
horrible visitors
onset
teen
believer
tree
root
soil
obvious
bovril
herbivore
stub-toe
hurt
error
reversible
hubris
revolutionist
refuses
reefer
oo
uu
ee
ii
truth
referee
thief
shoe-ins
throttle
shut-outs
better
before
best
of
three
refresh ↻
Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

The New Music

One minute you’re a child, amazed
by the god-light leaking through clouds,
the next, dressed like an antiquarian
bookseller, you’re creeping the Facebook page
of the one who got away, recently deceased.
When you think of all the times you said,
“Just a sec,” you want them all back.
You’d stow them with your passport
and your father’s gold watch, recognition
for thirty years of service, hand-tooling
replacement parts for obsolete machines.
One day you’re keeping up with the new music,
the next, all your favourite singers are dead.
You’d pour out your pickle jar of moments
like a boy counting his piggybank spoils,
letting them sieve through your fingers,
the cellar-must of sweat and copper.

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