for Toby Fitch

Scrape hard for the ruins, duke,
I am at Heide thinking of birth
and you, you are at the NSW
thinking of Bacon and me.
Think hamburgers of slag metal
and contortion scrapped.
Agreed, cloister as bedroom,
as squat indefinition.
This is not the last we speak of Isao,
blistering light, the long-necked
poppies, calmatives, moral
cuckoldry, comeuppance-ville.
The orifices of the work were vistas
in the rambles, he vaunts, tied
weightless to the tallest tangerine,
buds not fruit like hung by nativity,
not kumquat, the genii to first
love affair’s drive in Lesmurdie,
homestead instead, pageant of weeping,
vacant workshop.
Hard-done-by severance nearby
still night, for you and me, we say, yes,
hard to come by such quality silence.
Flung spigot to the well flue,
well-deep cited to my surprise
is hardly treading.
And the waters of Yarra reflux,
which could’ve been aspic, after all.
You want money? What will Cashies
give for Edward Gordon Craig’s
screens? To stave off the present
drafted, instead – since summer’s
lovely hue cheapens the north-facing –
a gelding correspondence. They circle
Moonee Ponds racecourse bullet-shy,
cowboy and charlatan-dogged.

The Bacon I hope sealed that moratorium
where salvia booms, tendentious
cowed mass any place if drugged for the win,
hence the 10,000 falls easily. Winsome
salvia gave this Clifton Hill ramble
something to look forward to, when I give up
my taxi, that is, as lasso it makes a great
burden. Whence brew
no blues rushing, and at speed ugly, no doubt,
but the flesh accumulated, like that
Marinetti turn – if only he’d bartered
better with the spirit world – miraculous,
for flesh to tear all fleshly.

Enter attack of the beast, a consolation
as much as influential, since if favour for the machine
by Tiffany’s on Collins reproduces M. H.
shredding his unpurposive trachea,
I should like to ask M. H., who knows
Schopenhauer, how M.H. remains the denomination
common in a fruit fly transition?
Petitionary memo, yes, I decide otherwise, leaving it
to a reader to enjoy the more interesting task,
regarding denominators, of working out of which
M.H. here is speaking. Two or more.

Cloister as bedroom is best lit, and sharpest view
of the weeping pageant – doppelgangers too in the glare
of triffids. The lasso marks around this neck, the smoke trail.
There is no clean way to shirk devoted correspondents.