apell I’ll 11 shreds

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Marty Hiatt

no pulse
I touch
I do

jagger flash hung upside to switch
an other for internal monologue
will our glasses ever clink
it’s a race with tea
“do you eat when I’m not there?”

what does coal feel like? chewing
in cubicles guilty
doubts bout foot etiquette no mustn’t
metals out my ears semi-precious
choppy cave digs secrete
swiss timepieces

zinc works licks its coat & steams
now with modernization & technology
only 600 sonic the hedgehogs are needed

to image my rent muscles
high beam up the mock
stream & how
does the lord slip his?

stars run down panes to oil
other’s hand pats
swimming beautifully drunk
& isn’t it all?

letters wicked to clouds where like all ankles
they shatter with a saline fizz
bacteria on the sphincter
jittering with
mind
gushes yet cannot turn the wheel

or snow’s tumbling off an overcharged branch
burst plopf scurrying rodent

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

On the 36th Floor

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Pip Smith

we are on par with thunder.
The clouds are switched to reverse,
hoovering steam from the craniums
of CEOs. They’re holding shit together
just beneath the spires of sky-scrapers,
channelling gold-fever, sucking lifts
up shafts with every morning coffee-
run. And then where does it go?
Get scrambled by the flurry of bats
above the bridge? Shoot rocks
down from the solar system? Listen,
I’m not trying to tell you anything
you don’t already know. I saw you
watch that woman try to push back
the bones round her eyes, and we’ve
all been caught in the tiny electrical
storms of kitchenette etiquette wars.
There must be more than two million
people stashed behind those windows:
wired up, plugged in and terrified
of their own numerical inventions.
Zoom out and you’ll see the same red pop up
everywhere, lacing flags to lights to trees
that just won’t let go of their leaves,
strapping the city in place, so nothing
kicks round the universe when the earth
tips at the end of the day. What we might
lose: decimals culled from rounding down,
ideas cut loose from interrupted
conversations, your Disnified
musical future, blasted to bits
and shuddering, dehydrated,
in the air conditioning vent,
about
to lose
its grip.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Newman Street

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Laurie Duggan

orange & white pots
square in the middle of the sill
of the house opposite
its blind always half-drawn over curtains

a mirror image to this house
the rooms must be the same shape

a large woman leans over the fence
appearing impassive

the sun moves across her face

*

across on the corner of the street
a house yard surrounded by a cyclone fence
young couples often stand examining
pieces of wrought iron

*

the TV set doesn’t work properly
it’s lost its vertical hold
actors feet hang from the top of the screen
over their talking heads

*

the corner milk bar is often out of milk
the red phone isn’t always there

1978

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Sixth Bell

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Frances Horne

He washes up upon the shore,
that blue man, waxen in the printer’s trowel
of harbour light. A wedding pumps
on the waterfront, a limo driver smokes
and blows his rings at bats, and he
who looks so often to his watch sees
the washed up golem beyond the rail
and parking bay and barrier and
does and says nothing.

So the sixth bell peels at two AM,
when poems fall away and the tired quay
sighs; the circle train death-rattles
from cut to cut, slipping into Hades’
graffiti bunkers, satanic murals,
black water, black rubble, Tank Stream.

The dead man brushes himself off,
scrapes his way up sandstone walls
and shuffles toward The Lord Nelson.
The bell sounds again, and something
vibrates in wet jeans – the cross is right
way up on an eastern hill. Time falls
back into the space between steps;
the echo of the bell is set to ring.

Stormwater gushes from a cut below
the city’s ribs, as if the CBD sucked
vinegar from a sponge. Metals settle
like a drowned man’s hand across the silt
and scalps of rusted weed roll, quaffing
through a tide of endless wash.

The moon lights Lavender Bay, a light
moons coal-lap bars as coloured rays
dance from off the decks of charters,
or leap from North Sydney towers, taking
brands from neon scaffolds, drowning them
along with lost dogs and the drunks of Darlo.

The dead man touches all the figs from
shadow-bridge to Barangaroo and steps
toward the bar to find the happy-hour spent,
and TVs mounted on each wall ticker-taping
news events to a room of people blue as he.
‘What will it be?’ the barman asks, as once
again his wet pants buzz.

Barangaroo
was the woman who presumably tamed
Bennelong, or was it the other way? Or
was it neither way? All the blue man knows
is in the heated room, is in the amber diamonds
flitting from his glass onto the beams of ships
planed and bolted down to stay the swaying.

Stormwater pours out a clean deluge
which hides in crystal flux the heavy metals
of give-and-take and rips like razor light
into the shoals. A sixth bell tolls.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Sydney Office

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Luke Beesley

Going to and leaving scuffed planets, she drove her nail across a cake
of soap. Waves peeled off Bondi. Cafes continued in fine, hip disinterest.
She scrubbed the table, then, and fell into hot traffic. It was a kind of
legalised man slaughter: the archaic, better rested, individual, circumstantial,
ontological, piecemeal (we were drowning between two life savers, flags
primary colours. Used car sales. To think, the kids swum up through the
passenger-side window. Both had moustaches. Salesmen quick phrases slugs
squeezed out of envelopes soft packs and packages stitched canvas or cotton
from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, waxy blood-coloured signatures stitching
books with dental floss.) Her teeth were smashed! Getting up, she swore
bloody at cars and limped to the corner store and ordered two ice creams …
Sydney staged a fight/stayed one night
sun cream pale arms and the power of injunction, punctuation, apostrophe.
It was an apostrophe! A secular ecstasy on the sand! A round fat cut glistened
on her elbow though this was pantomime, a port of inconsistent sailor jokes.
Blue jokes in overalls and the blue bay in the mouth of a strangled burglar.
(Thieves know the tip-toe and the train line, the blue- grey rock the blue
shadow.) To dress in hot disguise with a clean white house dressed in a blue-
black suit pocket of business cards islands the coast of corn coloured light
over lawn from oblong windows. Houses ocean liners dogs slept all next day
boats putter argyle strides emerge with nine irons zippers up smirks and
milking demonstration in men’s shoes – steak dragging great clouds of
fragrance out back into George like muddy explorers. Elderly, their arms
wrinkled as udders, outraged and chatting politely to high school kids in
grape or pea green uniforms. Sydney – so very young, so very old, newly
discovered planet. How do we get our head around it? The heavy high
watermark of the harbour celebrity residence coordination in Glebe book
binding us here and there a foot facial relapse three days each morning in
a pair of Reeboks laces so long it takes a half hour to trace my way to the
universe and maths of chance time and let’s, oysters.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

NOT THE NAME I CALL

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Nicola Themistes
whereupon the loquacious vestibule & a deciduous scorncloud quaffneck stout athwart the faultlines of a plover’s merriwheel pantheon: the dramaturgy straps in twain, yet once more talk of selzer & effacement // the instance was without precise measure but it was widely conceived of not to be // one’s pewter clockscale & rustica nervosa got putrefactorially imbricated with their facilities, & in general those ruptures were ordained of the primary issuer (which having been so, immediately ceased) but without which the assets would not visibly been assigned // the indirect verbage was not, so to speak, affectless, & neither was it prescribed; however, your tenebrosity while fallucidating certain traits of the heraldic crier pointed up some skiffled flaws of which nebuchadnezzar disflouted or beseemed // this occasionally provoked but seldom misdetermined or quadreventuated a distimbrous administrator // inchoassummately we consumed only the particular fruits to which our prescription had occasioned, but this (at times) was not precisely to the letter // do you recollimber adroitly the epistemorpheme of that fitful juncture? merriweather, smother & disobstructivation during post-production & the lace of verisimiltude ravelling out & out in an oxygenated slipstream, a stealthy smokecloud of seconds burning, flummoxingly, to be removed in minor places // yet once more, paean
acknowledged of smooth lydian airs,the applause abrupt beyond bas-relief & qwertechnological advances of such an epoch not perlustrative in the tense of more traditional logarithms // the event as I think I mentioned earlier was its effacement, & the renewed distance that issued up, as though in hindsight, before the agent was sentenced // not to say the object was dimmed amidst the gloamish mobfiscation, rather its integrity dispersed amidst the unctuous lucidity of our phases // by that time, at least, I’d a grout to my purse, if not against my name (neither alms nor legality to my name, alas, but confidence in its inviolability nonetheless) (well, I’ve not yet cast the whole scope of squalor aside, but it does disintroviscerate one, certainly) & suncorp reflexed with a chilled dish of a thriftwhore binbargain, rather sardus swift swansinging along the ivytrod whaleculler & absalom demenstruficated // but from that point the mode got a bit degeneric, rather consecuted by a strain of polar flux // all the eternal springs of my infernal experience engendered their own sure & certain & specified brand of relentless disinsensibility but that aside, I’d like to repose with the joint of my aperture, viz., the selzer // a queer abstinence of context & consonance hath driven me divagately athrust in meter thirstily from the effervascillating pongle of my carbonnet clime: the plump corpus swigging out of the portadux, quelching toesful of loam, & making
a poor art of overlordery besides, was inadvertently implicated in the tale of a birthmark yet untorn // with respect to the caste system, in your divulgate account of the pataplause appearing to antedeterminate something fatal (qua empiricism? qua dislocution haranguing counterlogic? qua resounding millimeters of subaqueous hegemony?) a certain phase in the contrapuntal plotpoint alluded (unblemishingly innospent in its affexecution) to the exergue inscribed upon the margins of my ventricle: viz, the ardent trombone measures of bowel-destroying lambency are not uninherently postheretical, but on the other hand there remain five digits, most of which are integral (but the contingent basis of that might accord more suitably with heteronormative additional factors belonging to zeros) // seize the furnace! // chillblains from the potash & the vox of an obtuse angle opining of a radical dramatic sequence of transgressive desires! // weep no more, skelton crookscythe, helter & heathens unwashed ashore, weep no more // the clouds no longer read your face with scorn // parallax immeasurable in the disturgid patamorphosis of this sequence! // for the degree of fermentation is what makes this dream
so sweet
 
 
Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

net

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Derek Motion

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NO Omar J. S Jess Murray Abdullah Noman Nathan Smith
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POETS IN THE MAKING ecitsuj Julie Sheekey POETRY BY KDW
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Lucy O’Keefe Tom Patton Adrian Robinson Christine Ratnasingham
Stephen Davis Igor Marinovsky Claire Rose Bloom Faleauto Carolyn
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Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Worldless

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Pam Brown

where’s my donkey : thursday evening

catch the train,
seagulls circling
Central Station

catch a bus
pick up a paint chart,

at the gallery –
Korea and Kinglake
photography exhibitions

(different)

a very thin man
in Oxford Street
in red leather pants

talk on Eastside Radio
read two poems

at the bus stop
long haired boys –
regenerate fashion,
retro,
fashions
arrive & go by
really quickly –
I had to live through
the entire decades!

(peeved)

catch a bus,
redhead woman driver
playing jazz piano cd
loudly, in the bus
(suits the traffic)

catch the train,
seagulls gone to Pyrmont,
night workers
eating chocolates & chips

(hunger)

walk to the seafood shop
buy the dory, grilled

walk home

*

I am the donkey : saturday afternoon

step onto the crossing,
lift palm to car,
thanks driver.
quicken pace, cross smartly,
think
‘why do I do that
why do I want to live
am I depressed?’

Scottish sentimentality –
car alarm with violin

(answer)

*

I pass the donkey : tuesday morning

walk to the bus stop
(forgot my watch & silver ring)
open umbrella,
light rain shower

catch the sad bus
through the streets
around
sad blocks of flats

paint swatches
(I must remember)

what colour the door?
the brick fence, what colour?

coffee at Zoo,
hair colour in the arcade
(regrowth)

buy underwear,
blue, mauve,
& stripey

buy preserving jar
(lemons)

buy
honey, celtic sea salt
& iodised sea salt

carrot & celery juice,
the juice maker
takes ages
to juice the vegetables

almost miss the bus

quickly buy the newspaper,
here’s the bus

winding back
past Centennial Park

there’s the donkey,
no, it’s a horse

(mistaken)

here are the streets
around
the sad flats
& here’s
the Cauliflower Hotel

listen to Patti Smith ‘Twelve’
(Changing of the Guards!)
on an ipod
on the bus

on the move
but in the clouds

(worldless)

thought stuck,
pinned down

stupid under
a roaring sky

*

there is no donkey : friday night

hazard lights
in the bus lane

police
remove the number plate,
the driver
brays drunkenly
(caught)

going home
to make a poem
(this one)
to give my problems
to you, reader

(contagion)

everything fails
when all else fails,
when all else
skyrockets

some of what I think
is a piece of crap
some of what I know
is worse

some things I say
shouldn’t be said

my heart,
meaning
my feelings towards you,
reader,
meaning
my straight ahead empathy,
though
is
in the right place

nearly home,
the streets seem dark

enter the house,
hug you,
my synthetic coat
squeaks

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Act #12

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Ali Alizadeh

Vintage in verisimilitude. Private
Sale – Vacant Position – Business 1 Zone. Scent

of sandalwood, inconsequential
bells, organic

food and runes. Fortitude
begs futurism. Health

store
– Home ware – Souvenirs. Unrequited

regret: fetish value
fades
from my wallet, untold impotence

of possession. Schism molds scansion. Yeah
I saw the bookshop

round the corner spells

work only if life’s banality
becomes the node

of bewitchment. I know

I wanted to blow 20 dollars
I didn’t have. Who the hell

wouldn’t.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

syd

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Stu Hatton

overw
eight s
tubble
d dow
n too m
any on
e-ways
glitter
harbo
red a r
ing tra
fficking
dags in
noted p
ark be
at head
offices i
n shape
of head
aches +
we arg
ue hom
e throu
gh a bir
d-show
openin
g or wh
arf chri
stening
champ
agne co
uture r
ecepto
rs insta
nt by in
stant r
estylin
g stimu
li while
hopefu
ls in a g
rungy y
acht su
ck lips

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Office w/views

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Christopher Brown

it was the key
to everything
if you had one

copier queues
questions that
puzzle us like

where to smoke
as Wordsworth
has it the river’s

London’s only
living presence
but I shouldn’t

be reading this
now & scrupled
her dark circles

if a hand of euchre
at lunch seems an
antiquated notion

so do i
go on
through

light snow flurries
folded wings of collation
tonight like others

work late & no less
than dedicate this To
Our Unknowing Publisher,

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

circle of eagles

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Sam Langer

1. important to feel comfortable can I borrow a
chair skin grafts collage? with nothing extraneous.
extra news: the brow paper snake’s eating a space egg
plot hatches & thickens ghost w/diarrhoea has its
head in my eye cleft socket. vacancy cut outs
cut out
dance round it stag beetle bat drawing on book
valley with machine guns. 2 heads better than I esp
when they are 1. vacancy jags holiday lion down
horses face melts traces a dough head. porcupine –
grey – in my head.

2. blue uncanny’s trotter emitting fence of dots → weaker
pastel head w/ breast imprint touching elderly black
smoke thicker fur of dots draped over b. miscloven
math pork chop sprays blue seahorse gauze 3 towers severed
hound by water & chlorophyll dropping into cormorant
w/ swollen breast wolf // cormorant from legs
under sheets one tenting other pointing oily
lightning of gloom & pasted on grocery bag
another corm. ejects → margin at westerly ballerina
leaping shadow of grey muscle

3. black cutout shows broken mickey elephant man.
blunt worm/black feathers & arrows eating slum flattered w/
red fossils & leaf skeletons
beige shape of difficult vague situation.
pool makes u-grey ice cubes
bowels of head, black thing dips its trunk, blocks
another lying leg. perfect almost.
nice creep, 2 heads, smoking, thinking, amid Caesar
ghosts. he? is lazy & has a furry friend, black
than he is.
—————————————–
warming middle patched forward temper
missed precise purchase fold crumpled apricot
coconut amber follow flow canberra paper
serious erupted capable precious forceful grouped
purposeful
handled fitting responsive necrophiliac corrupt
cool short loose appearance trippy total laine
nacreous crooning deep shallow formless formful
farm charm chalk stalks trips creeps tepidity
focus squiggled lid trumpet tempest torment
topiary tropical tactical touching tumid garbled
gaping gusty hogad draped demystifying
depressed dusty/dusky borrowed
painting

bronze shadows heaped.
after the final no.

Written at Amber Wallis’s painting show, Circle of Eagles, at Utopian Slumps, 2009.
 Typed by Corey Wakeling, with thanks. Last 2 lines taken from Wallace Stevens/head.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Transpacific

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Michael Farrell

The view of the watery gardens suggested a truly
Verbal rosette. We see the world as a black and
White golf course. Constellations, like buttons on
Apollinaire. How much longer can we afford it?
We fall – in performance – in rose coloured costumes
shooooooooooooooorT Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaants
Leave your backpack and duty free gin with the
Luggage of the others. Now it’s too late to choose
Between a life of Christ: or of Buddha. I could hear the
Metal tearing but couldn’t see anything in the bathroom
CarrrrrrrrrrrrrrroT Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie
was the last thing I regretted about my
BOYHOOD
Gosh is not an Australian WORD
Let it wash into the sea SAID
The Australian GOD
So many WORD
-s TRACED
from SYD
-ney. WORD
-s that APPEARED
slightly rusty. (It was actually BLOOD

T-Plane; white magic. We use a different number system
And believe that this has improved the area’s economy. It
Was a century. It produced a lot of songs. We learnt to draw
On the back of an owl without falling. Now we’re slowly edging
Towards Babel in reverse. With a lot less languages of course
k-T-Pp-t-k k-T-Pp-t-k
We walk more
Depend on phrases that we learn to cut from bark
The idea of the tower disappears

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

At the Darling Harbour Convention Centre

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Adrian Wiggins

At the conference lunch
the industry chatterboxes turn
a gavotte, then prop and scythe
about the buffet loading
up pot roast, pumpkin salad,
rendang. Says the keynote
speaker bignoting counterflow
down the queue: “Hey I’m on
the Be More Biodynamic
close-out,
next up.”
Tops.
Our gaze drains
to the Harbour, a heaving sluice
of yachts and city views — it retains
all our best attempts at describing
its irruption then chucks them back,
like we don’t know what we’ve got,
which is a Paddy’s Market tchotchke
or a box of chocolates, “spent coins
of abiding love,” you say. Good one,
thanks hon.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Vis[i]tors

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Christopher Brown

i.

the office & library
cooling system hum
outside the weather

feet on pedal or dash
we refuel loyal listeners
tolerating radio’s sight gags
took the bridge coming in

ii.

so that here –
Port Botany sky
curators race for cover

our late 80s archive
an amateurish mix of creams and whites –
is the view you paid for (sixteen replays
are inconclusive)

iii.

this morning by the stairs a famous face what’shisname

give way to the
portrait of an unknown

a red flag sirens
the beach is open
even when it’s closed
scene to breathe life into

iv.

: almost on cue

a breeze reports
first in the crumbly architecture
stippling windward

tracking the flown inflatable
as far as

White Cliffs

v.

when the kids get tired
the big kids get wired
when the kids get wired…

he has a boat out front
the adulation of the gulls
french for welcomes/
farewells

vi.

short of a stop

time/location met
peremptory bus doors

with these wheels
perambulate sandhills

retired elevator
card in the lock

vii.

timed cued to cross

& short flight home
to spurred ledges

not sure where
walking ends &
traipsing begins

i folly the signs

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Reflections

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Stuart Barnes 
On May 31, 2011, as headliner of Sydney’s VIVID LIVE, The Cure played
one of two ‘Reflections’ Shows – its first three LPs (Three Imaginary Boys,
Seventeen Seconds, Faith) in their entirety, as well as a fourteen track encore;
‘The Lovecats’ closed both performances – at the Opera House’s Concert Hall.

even sunstruck the ribs rise
from Bennelong Point like Arthur C.
Clarke’s black slab

I storm the frets, stopping
only to whirl when your aperture’s
cocked at my spine

this hair’s a tornado
of sand ridiculous, you needle,
a blond gothic

no licks of laughter
(Father, Son, Ghost shedding Prozac)
my Scorpio sting: fuck off, Madame Acronym

§

the ticket snakes
on knotted
wood shoved between twin beds

once
we had no need
for such arpeggiated space

dulled, you insult
in my headphones: ‘Other
Voices’, ‘A Reflection’, ‘Grinding Halt’

Fender grey,
a sea gull pummels crossbows
on the pane

§

three four five
raven finished
casts embark Dry Ice

I’m more cleft
than that acoustic-electric
presented by my Daddy

in stunting aisles minors gravedigger-
dance and mew
the lovecatsss …

a crèche of stars
weeps plasma at the mutilated
placard of the Harbour

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Sorry’s Essence

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Mark Mahemoff

This poem is constructed using words and phrases directly from Kevin Rudd’s ‘Sorry’ speech
as reprinted in The Sydney Morning Herald (online version) on February 13, 2008.

I move today we honour, we reflect
on mistreatment of the oldest history, indigenous people
who were stolen, blemished in our nation
the time has now come to turn Australia’s history
by righting the future
we apologise for profound grief and suffering and loss
and pain and indignity and degradation and sheer brutality and hurt
of mothers and fathers and brothers
and sisters and families and communities
breaking up inflicted on a proud people and the spirit
healing, heart, embraces
never, never again
solutions, respect, resolve, responsibility
origins are truly equal
remove a great stain
do so early
an elegant, eloquent and wonderful woman
has travelled a long way to be with us
she remembers the love and the warmth
and the kinship of those days long ago
she remembers she insisted on dancing
rather than just sitting and watching
she remembers the coming of the welfare men
tears flowing, clinging
complex questions
it was as crude as that
Tennant Creek and Goulburn Island
and Croker Island and Darwin and Torres Strait
She was 16
a broken woman fretting
ripped away from her
it’s a good thing that you are surrounded by love
Sorry
And remarkably, extraordinarily, she had forgiven him
there is something terribly primal about these
a deep assault
stony, stubborn and deafening
leave it languishing
human decency, universal human decency
deliberate, calculated, explicit, and notorious
Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation
all native characteristics are eradicated
they are profoundly disturbing, well motivated, justified.
an apology well within the adult memory span
a point in remote antiquity
it is well within the adult memory span of many of us
therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well
the darkest chapters
with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public
we are also wrestling with our own soul
cold, confronting, uncomfortable
there will always be a shadow hanging over us
I am sorry
I am sorry
I am sorry
without qualification
Yuendumu, Yabara, Pitjantjatjara
there is nothing I can say today
I cannot undo that
grief is a very personal thing
imagine the crippling effect
it is little more than a clanging gong
a thinly veiled contempt
the gap will set concrete
the truth is a business
halve the appalling gap
back the obscenity
beyond our infantile bickering
Dreamtime

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

(untitled)

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Sam Moginie

a plane flew overhead
ten kinds of friends
you never said that
you said I just want

to show how I love
shouldn’t lie it’s nice
try not to raise your voice
military

like I can talk
everybody wants
a walk and a cold beer
to hang their head on

whereto for poly hearts?
open lines and hill starts
an enough advice
to please everybody

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Out of Politeness

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Aden Rolfe

Out of politeness you probably wouldn’t say,
especially when spring has started false
and hailstones
small as ball bearings
ring the roof
keeping you trapped at the library
a cancelled anatomy book under your arm
– or perhaps it’s a newspaper
and instead you’re under the eaves
looking out at sheet rain
wondering how a street sustains so many cafes and not a single electronics shop.
It’s a cable you need, not a coffee,
but it’s a small consolation.

If asked, I probably wouldn’t say,
instead imagining myself lost in a forest
surrounded by the heady aroma
of peaches, perhaps
enjoying this wintry lapse into drizzle
alcoved under a willow
fingers deep in dark soil.
I probably wouldn’t,
I don’t think so anyway.

I wouldn’t say nothing, though
if asked
if pressed between pages
if, while hours and minutes trickled by
if I
if –
I probably wouldn’t say no
no, I’d think of rally driving and Zen meditation.

When time’s fragments gather together in the same room
like boxes on a calendar grid,
a room say, like the one at the end of the hall
with sash windows and the Edwardian daybed,
when they gather there

I wouldn’t want to say either, either
or as well,
I wouldn’t want to say anything, no,
not nothing, not no, not probably not,
lips stitched against the apologia
of a coming wind
needling
addressing no one
but giving everything away.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Western Triv

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Ann Vickery

(courtesy of the White Cockatoo)

Petersham: the formerly fashionable
but now rather heavy overcoat
on the portugese tart. Tickertape ribbons
and other dictionary entries.
Lip-reading Theory of the Leisure Classes,
little Ern stumbles through the public primary
before graduating to Summer Hill Intermediate.
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray,
to say nothing of our serious frolic.
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real
behind the shelter sheds. I tell you
these things are real. Even
baroque Mediterranean garden furniture.
Greek quails under the flight path,
cooing softly: the girl from i perama.
Rooming houses line summer dust,
a month of pianos for Kate and Pete.
We wanted underground lighting
or even just subtext
to distinguish the last three decades
of a fallen Enlightenment.
Romance relishes the house-referential,
listening night after night
to Janet Jackson’s Alright pump
through over-priced rental walls.
Hightailing cowboys drawl
back to school, it’s fort for
or la di da, Lacan with a cute snub
neurosis warring over the inner, waning West.
Someone has to pay
or there would be no affect. Pasta dura
rather than Dürer. Crusty paraphrases
stagnant on the unclaimed meat-tray.
We purvey a crystal ball obscura,
a street stripped back, oxford-pinked.
1999 ‘found’ postcard: Hi Mum!
Didn’t inhale Paramatta Road, parked
on anarchy’s shop-floor, Birkenstocked
our way through claypot chicken,
& bought into the $5 Rashai
Frequent Diner’s Club cartel.
It’s true, global ecologies
kept us searching for the gastro-commune,
but to no avail. xxxx, E.M.
Cockroach hopscotch
lags on the line-faltering footpaths.
December gossips between
of, whenever, and somewhat expectantly,
another tin-roofed rapport.
Next year, Lieutenant-Governor
Francis Grose will check out the real estate here,
wave to Joel in the flat above,
and set up a row of convict sweat crops.
Before you know it, it’ll even be home to
The Australian, or at the least its tidy originator.
All good & legal, so they say. Identity
flashes in. At our duplex, national pride
still gags for just one more go
at the Olympics. But why pine for the ultimate
when you can already see Ultimo?

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Sadly

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Joel Scott

Ability is not the end cause and justly–
not even the original thing can foreclose the horselock
I don’t want to tell you I want to say you
come here to the main city where all the intense emotions
sleeping in the outback incommunicado.
I can’t keep not looking at you (I never was)
I can’t keep up anything I never started.
I left the house and made it close. I decided against
excision. A scalpel slices my leg all those years ago (1).
Where is Sydney even ever when you need it? Not t(here)
I don’t think. There is a prefix of verbal destruction that
can be applied to any word. Watch the summer monstrous.
Watch my flower while I walk. Where is the sun in relation.
Where is the unrelated. Every orbit is too close over there.
Watch your head when you kowtow please. Who needs a car
when a car can be broken? This is a place about poem. Arms space.
Race race. All of the dayglo foodstuffs are too strong. Open
out a lily and gild all my flowering embarrassments.
Back when the bible was still the newspaper things were heavy
you could swim all the way, dude, no shit. You’re wearing me down
and weaning me off. Take only the best. Always be trigger-happy.
Give me enough pages and I will write for you every self-help book.
All the houses are seriously full. All the houses are full, srsly. All the
homegrown foodstuffs are selfmade geniuses. Automatic Dialect.
All the people are good and bad and evensided. Howevermore.
Insofaras. In the near snowlight. The cutest herbivores.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

written in sydney

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Sam Langer

1.
Looking for the unobstructed view
a man with glasses and a chair-like stick
untainted by settled heavier blueness
a child reaches out to a chess-man
I retell myself as coffee comes onto me
nothing in the world matters more than each other
but I kick against you & hold like two dots
an airbrush’s idea of human hair
independent sail you have no tact
knitting your own fingers in black
crocodile won’t apologise cat-eyed nor change
cardboard harassing paper in the street
three middle-blue squares pay the cheque
half the air is birds
 
 
 
2.
Crossed out wait for me
I’m a dinosaur at the end of your arm
the crinkled brick subtracted us
Blotches and of a piece
near the trolley bars return key
Ford canvassing a star
you shoot a pipe from your arm
to which I held neither piece
gamble on this tracking away
into a bitter railway identity me
if it blinked like a key
it is a star

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Juvenilia

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Louis Armand

Standing in line with haircut to join the
Air Corps circa 1989 – & failing that,
a George St boarding house
(firetrap w/ kindling for stairs),
shoesole counter-dinner, chips, tomato sauce.
Squadron Leader says lost cause,
gulping schooners & ducksoup
saxophone mindwash – psychiatrist not
liking the green cut of yr silhouette?
Great art’s all very well, son,
but it’s details that count.
Old guy on telephone sobbing with drink –
Berlin on the radio, Cold War fizzle,
rocky horror midnight cinema freaks.
Y’d cut yr balls off, wldn’t you,
for the good of the nation?
The man with the bitter pill behind
the fishmarkets, four a.m. –
swallow this & see if you can’t stomach it.
Where’s home? What’s leaving for?
Flying bomber-formation
through Chinatown, kicking up dust,
butts, used cocksucks – the future
sure looks bright from here.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Opera

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Stuart Cooke

After each useless, ephemeral voyage I return
to the house
and its quay; I circle the edge before skittling
off to the suburbs.

Come to me, I cry, fat plastic and screaming sail,
shining, golden city
cramped and seeping music! Tonight
my heart’s emptier than a harbour.

I gulp down your murky cocktails
of diesel and suit.
I drink, drown and return
sharp as a note, sharp

as a particular location in space
– one
of one million locations – one
of one trillion locations in space.

I watch the melody collapse
– looming, stretched, blasting –
it flattens me and I’m spat
out the other side

into pure noise, pure scrunching and there’s Sydney,
the wet black face,
the burning beer intoxicated with its own
bubbling tarmac.

Ragged music blows in from the desert,
from the sea;
ragged sheet music catches
on a barb. Sydney’s

a barb on a rusted wire;
it pierces currents, leaks tetanus;
it’s the time of day towards which
we tumble inexorably,

away from which we surge, searching.

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged