Obsolescent Music

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Anna Rugis

a piano
built in America
for use in saloon bars
with a high iron frame and a tone
to be heard over a room full of sloshed singers
yet how sweet it could sound
when damped by blankets
and played at 3am by an inspired songwriter

the ivories are chipped like a woodsman’s teeth
and scorched now
by a hundred years of nicotined fingers
but still it’s a sterling object
built to last though inherited
by an evolve or die world where
what man makes man breaks
where he drinks to accelerando
and belts out ballads
with the timbre of falling trees

then there’s the coconut
with its unidentified growth factor
and floating in its glowing white ocean
expectant beings
ready to scale the meat form ensembles
evolve instruments on which to beat out
the rhythms of their tiny as yet
unbreakable hearts

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(untitled)

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Mandy Beaumont

Taking down her panties
in the bar’s one toilet

she lifts her head
 to the sky
and starts 
asking for God
to take 
her away from all this.

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Conspiracy Theory

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Peycho Kanev

You walk your dog in the park. One black
car passes. Then another one, and then
another, but just the half of it. Strong smell of

gasoline. Perhaps this is why a red van
stops next to you, two guys rush out of
it wearing masks – one with the face of Saddam

and the other one like Balzac – and push
you inside. And all goes by the numbers:
duct tape over your mouth, sack smelling of poetry

on your head. They drive in an unknown direction.
You hear all, but you can’t see. The road is long and
only the ship’s horns hint for the inevitable future.

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Longevity

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Lisa Jacobson

There are ghosts of me here,
and a trace of the old circle
in the grass my father mowed
so we girls could ride our horses
in the park. We reach the metal
gate that leads up to the paddock
and beyond, the house where I
lived when young.

‘I often pause my walking
here to take a rest,’ you say.
‘This road, this house.’
I called out once, at this very gate
to a God I wasn’t sure was there.
And thirty years later here you are:
the odd longevity of prayer.

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Duchy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Dennis Garvey

anenome of anenome in ford datura talking about dransfield as travelling ghost, saying pitcherthislotta urbanmythnamedroppin circa72 sydney (man!) finishplayinbackamoon
coogee (man!) jokthere ghostsmokinardath (man!) incorner (man!) zeitgeistdoorsmore
open byjimtheman (man!) mostofus writeread poetry (man!) soireeinvitein darlinghurst (man!) friendofrienpad (man!) backafrench’stavern diamondogbox bowieparachute in (man!) ceilindimlit candleincensedark side o’moon morphin (man!) genegeniehostdressplayinsitar readindransfiel (man!) stop pass on lhs read stop pass on lhs someone readpassinreadpassinreadpassinreadsinbillowingsmoke Halt! Who goes there? Ghos … (man!)
Dransfiel!! Walkininsittingdownan JACKPOT (man!) i read …my own stuff (man!) reachininjacketpocket anslidinonhisbook tofootend
dransfielsays ‘taste’ (man!)
‘can’t call ‘em drug poems’ (man!) – ‘mere modernist tosh’ (man!) – And I pass history on left hand side where life on mars starts over

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Jackpot Economy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Margaret Owen Ruckert

a joker Wednesday      dripping
with the good fortune of global warming
      best July rain in sixty years
residents huddle in the basement
      café of their local RSL
picture window onto the carpark
red-welcoming carpet      warm
      as the voice of a favourite machine
they sit around tables sized for intimacy
weaving between chairs and other patrons
      balancing trays of unrationed water
      serviette supplies      a fistful of sugars
eat away a private afternoon      in public
      with a half-serve of roast (the ladies)
and a slice of lemon meringue pie
the new chef cut into 8 instead of 12
      it’s offered with a badge of proud cream
and a sorry for the battleship portion—
slicing through the deck of marshmallow
      the pastry hull with its generous lemon-
custard cargo      sweet/sour as the weather
      a smile trumps the wrinkles
      sun shines its brief blessing
      no need for a flutter today

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Dealing with Early Spring

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Luke Fischer

           Hamburg, 2012

 
A beggar cups his hands and pleads for change
while the sun gilds his palms and fingers
like a bowl possessed by Charlemagne,
standing now in a museum’s vitrine. This gold
is superfluous to him but I check my wallet
and offer a medley of coins.

All the ice has melted; the locks
in the Elbe are overwhelmed
and I wonder what to do
with so much water that can’t
be channeled or held.

In the park the arms of beeches are empty⎯
candelabra lacking candles⎯and glowing
as though being smelted anew. A clear
plastic ball hovers a moment before
it falls, while the boy who launched it,
anticipating, already raises his arms.
I keep my hands tight in my pockets
like a boat clinging to its anchor.

While reading in a café
I lift my eyes from the book;
behind the polished window
the dawn-yellow of buttercups
is almost an affront.
Are they really wholly
oblivious to history?

On the way home, crossing over the bridge,
I decide to give up and toss the page:
it briefly ignites⎯incandescent⎯
before the letters run,
sink into the stream.

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Why Are there So Many Poems about Goldfish?

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Fiona Hile

It’s not as if they speak to us of some tequila
moonscape lost to sense, though the telepathy
of our own hand-coded secrets might. Python
Technology integrates our systems more
effectively, overruns us like mice. To bolt
a metal bar to a sandstone wall and fear the
sheets tied end-to-end will cornuscate a sheer

drop defibrillates louche timefields within the shrill
carapace of our deep down landlords. Inevitably we
besot them and find no end to love but not to truth.
Arguing for the personal address you suggest
your face in a fish tank bobbing like an apple
I can’t just get my teeth around. Swimming
happily in your broad sea of alcohol,

words that sound similar but are spelt differently
stalk you like Dentistry. You want to turn them
on creates a sequel for fibroid differentiation,
the whippet of rotting floorboards and bilge
cocktails Mates like James Bond in that film
about diving underwater / leaving your first love
to drown in a rough cut fundraising trailer

while all the domesticated carp you can eat still-
chair you like fields of electro-con workers, their
long blond hair and super-ramified orange overalls
Spread Eagled Energy Green spelling I KNOW
WHAT YOU LIKE, daisies and hydrangeas and all
sorts of flowery things like that.

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In Lieu of Feeling

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Claire Potter
In the dim hours, you’ll ask for a poem about chips, a request you think will unnerve me, but this morning, after a twilight of revolt and insomnia I realise, after reading the latest figures, that a disarmed heart is luckier than a fused one.

Instead of dallying about feelings, let’s direct the mind’s eye to the mauled trajectory of a love-letter sent twice: sent first into the hands of a stranger, and then into bladed basin of an unhinged roulette. Small difference where things ripen––it’s no more than ink on the page that only in part sketches the leaf, fills its pores, mirrors the paisley lines of apron-covered hands.

A shaving bowl on the porch stays as blue as the midnight passionflower which opens its dark centre against the shadows, disappears into further darkness, and loses everything.

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Every Punter Wins a Prize

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Michael Sharkey

See how the Fates their gifts allot,
For A is happy; B is not.
—The Mikado

At Maud Cahill’s bookshop I produce a list
of books I’d sooner sell than keep on seeing
on my shelves. It’s time that dust returned to dust.

I know the story, otherwise: they’ll stand
together, till the final purge of all, when heirs
will toss out Kees and Bishop, Pope and Sappho

in the same box with this sad lot who have hung out
on the sidewalks of the mind to beg for cash.
Perhaps their trash is others’ treasure. Maybe

there are people who, determined to have
one of every book that has been printed,
dream of making life-sized pyramids of paper:

who can say? Clive James composed a psalm
of joy to see his enemy’s book remaindered.
I’ve more charity, took pity on the homeless,

brought them in until they nudged aside my friends.
I tell Maud, strike out the ones you never wish
to see. She goes, predictably, to those

I first set down; Ronald, Lynda, Steven, Di,
you others: be advised, the Great Recycler
is at hand. Not for you the antiquarian

dealer, nor suburban op-shop bin. There are more
ways to cure depression – mine, or any future reader’s:
you shall be made one with nature, part

of that infinitude of atoms whence you came.
Your fractured dactyls will go flapping to the earth
to keep down weeds rank as yourself; you boys

who entered like a military band performing Sousa
will go out like that last horse’s tail that leaves
with its last flourish nothing but the scent behind.

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This Wealth of When

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Ben Walter

suddenly, noticing a lost sixty
            hidden in the blue carvings,

furrows gaping like fish, frugal
            fountain dipping to baptise

white faces, roses to itemise and
            radishes to task, there,

then he is sewn; fingers pool in
            drops on the desk.

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Housie

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Kristin Hannaford

Before the first call of the day
numbers grow bright,
illuminate globes tinkering in and out of darkness,
Christmas lights or an imperfect grin,
a momentary promise
amidst gold-rimmed plates of pikelets and Arnotts.
A blue rinse array of perms and cardigans,
punters fanned by dull slow rotors,
low and familiar murmurs of weather,
gardening, and Tony Barber.

Nell, my Nan, spreads her many cards –
she has all the mystery of a Tarot reader.
A circle of black and white beads at her neck.
Outside the wooden hall the greyhounds
are training, chasing a hare around the track.
Our tables span like ribs across the floor,
Nell reaches to straighten my cards.

‘Eyes down’ and a palpable hush falls –
a last teaspoon tinkle raises eyebrows.
Orderly rows of pens and daubers
rise and fall as number squares
are blotted like missing teeth,
            both the fives, 55
            me and you, that’s 2
            it’s sweet 16 – key of the door
            and stop work, 65
someone calls ‘Yes’ and it’s a line.

A cardiganned enforcer
gives the nod to the line caller,
            and we forget to breathe –
            the lights, the numbers,
my Nan’s lost to the strange incantation
two fat ladies
I’m watching the globes,
and finally it’s ‘Housie’.

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The Railway Platform Weight and Fortune Telling Machine

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Binu Karunakaran

looks like a casino sun
flowering in the night, full
of calibrated science,flashing
coloured lights and a Newton’s
disc that refuses to stop
spinning until the last pollen
of weight left by that moth
of a man before me is blown
away by the wind from the train
that passes. After a throated
clang it spat out a cut cookie-
coloured card on which is
written your lucky number
and a hooking line about fate
in proportion to your weight
in the world.

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Wombats

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Robert Adamson

Driving through Kangaroo Valley
I glimpsed a low slung animal
in my headlights; pulled over
and recognized a wombat — fog
lifted its gauze, a clump of ferns
moved apart. Another animal
trundled out, then a third
came into view, larger this time
with darker colouring.
All three moved into a rough circle.
I turned the headlights off,
squinted through the glow
of parking lights — too dim to see —
I grabbed a torch and rolled
the window down; frogs pumped
in the undergrowth, nightjars
passed along their liquid calls —
in the middle of the road the wombats
were doing a double shuffle.

 
 
Return to Three Poems and Webb Lecture by the Inaugural CAL Chair of Poetry

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Impact

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Andy Jackson

for Matthew Hall, after reading ‘High Pink on Chrome’ by J. H. Prynne

 
Light glancing off polished steel.
                        Steam, petrol, adrenaline in the air.
            Surfaces – skin, metal, language –

                                    all the muscle implied by them.
This wreckage of disciplines –
                        impossible to tell which vehicle

            is which, and if this is a problem
                                    of language or vision. The perspective
from within a dim, unplaced room.

                        The “accident” glimpsed through bent
            horizontal blinds – lines of poetry
                                    from 1975, still warm. Tucked into

deep folds of grammar – knives.
                        You could have but didn’t call
            the poet ‘seminal’, the word too much

                                    rooted in the historical, sexual to be
of more use than the impact itself.
                        Reading a photocopy, I’m jolted

            by the motion of the last train
                        home, someone shouting into
a mobile, another – one bare foot –

                        burping through three litres of cola,
            the rest of us facing each other like in-
                                    determinate alternatives, swaying

and blinking into the night. The edge
                        of the palm of your hand that keeps
            appearing in the margins is

                                    to me the key to the long poem.

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Her Joy (In two lines)

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Derek Rawson

Moving his cursor across the screen, the doctor circles a small patch of light and dark.
“You see those two lines?” he asks, and we nod. “Well, Madame, let me say that you’re in luck!”

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Double Happiness

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Vernyce Dannells

A cataract of water clinging to the tail of the penny
magnifies its ringing summons, promises not mere
luck, but double happiness
I must have it, bending over in spite of that voice —
that one of my beau, scolding me with
“Leave it for some less fortunate kid.”

Doesn’t see the one hovering just under my
slightly enhanced self-made sistah’s skin,
bawdy, incredulous celebration of better days.
It’s love when he calls me his little grubber
And, truth? Hovers over a deal as lingeringly as me.

But I just can’t leave double happiness
or just plain luck to someone less appreciative
though I might know that a penny shared is
exponentially luckier to its finder. I’m satisfied
with double happiness.

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Plato at the Pictures

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Toby Davidson

For the briefest of moments,
a glimmering sketch,

I incline my right cheekbone
one degree, untransfixed

by the knowledge of him,
the frame of his arm,

his crumpled penumbra,
a whisker perhaps.

As much in character
as anything else, I ask

my new buddy, the vague
auditorium, the rippling,

piercing green exit
signs: So what’s the Idea

of a Schwarzenegger,
ploughmen’s arts not of earth?

Dialogue strays, indisposed for a punchline.
Woah, honeyed Silver. We rise before the titles.

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Doll Making

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Mark Grinyer

          after Vonnegut

 
She sits before the TV screen
and needles russet comedy from cloth.
While the re-run witch
talks through her laugh
and zap,
unravels time and space,
she fades into the ad biz of the age.

A million bony fingers
stuff gray fluff
into her carapace of cloth,
but the fabric of her mind
is much too rough;
the slightest cut
unravels it from thought.

While our interstices bleed
ice-nine into the cradle of
her life; while the digits
of our thought embroider time
and curliques of space
onto the skinship of her mirth;
and while we laugh,
say “so it goes” until we drop;

The grinning lips of comedy uncurl,
until just beyond the blackest,
vacant snuffles of pure sloth,
before we rise, before
the up-turn of a smile,
she stops,
and crowns that yarny head
with a cherry colored fools-cap
and a laugh.

Such actions speak much louder here
than words; the ends of empty stitchery,
they lift us from this fantasy,
and short commercial blurbs
to leave us with her memory,
unraveling epiphanies of trash–
and that is when,
sewn carefully to cloth,
her scarlet velvet heart
leaps out to us.

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When Nothing Else Will Do

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Alana Kelsall

The first haul was in a village north of the A17
I scooped up all six small jars
and thought they’d be good for another six months
or more but it seemed to rain every other day
and our landlord with her bouncing pony tail
opened all the windows to the Arctic and beyond
each time she came to show new tenants through
we unscrewed cap after cap and watched the rain
a drought was declared in the midland counties
we moved to a city criss-crossed with canals
a cathedral at the highest point
clouds hunched overhead
and it rained every other day
I found shelves of the rival Marmite in different sizes
and a Sainsbury low salt viscous variety
that you said was another kind of bitumen
and no, I don’t know why it tastes so good
or why it rained every other day
April was the wettest month on record in the UK
the drought was lifted last week in a few counties only
and you reverted to your childhood favourite
the biting sweetness of Dundee marmalade

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The Twilight Zone

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Maria Takolander

Maple Street, Smalltown, Ohio. Sunday afternoon, a regular sitting room, an urgent news broadcast. Doom. And then nothing.
     Electricity lingers briefly, like a soul, until there is only the grey bulge of the screen and its putrid reflection. A man and woman on the sofa crawling with roses shift towards each other. Their fingers entwine and grapple.
     Outside the blades of grass reach unseen towards the noonday sun. An abandoned lawnmower is silent as a stick insect. There is the sound of an ignition clicking. The milky wails of a child. Then suddenly, on the side walk, running. The aeroplanes, purified by the Midwestern sky, have arrived in a shining haze of noise, with nobody on them. They fill the world like a scientific vision.
     There is knocking, humble and wooden, at the door. The man and woman stand and retreat, hiding in the aircrafts’ screaming. The man fumbles for a flash light in the bureau by the stairs. Takes his wife’s hand. They descend to the cellar, deaf to the protests of the timber steps and the patent leather of the man’s shoes, black and vitreous.
     Underground, ghosted by the torchlight, sweat melts like wax from their skin. Then the man drops the flashlight. The darkness is inscrutable. They hear the batteries extrude onto the concrete floor and roll, almost like marbles.
     Until something, or somebody, stops them.

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The Pope’s Arms Are Dripping with Gold

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Ellen Kombiyil

after viewing the Barberini Tapestries

 
The pope’s arms are dripping with gold.
Handed down palm to kindred palm, unseen
behind a veneer (a garland of souls
worn thin) of smoke-tinted color. I mean,
what else could it obscure? Lovely rosé,
after a few drinks of bubbly the world
appears brighter or at least more holy,
even the gold the pope’s wearing, the hoard
of pirate’s booty that’s hidden then found
in light bearing the same strange light of storms:
streaming in shafts, hallelujahing down,
the heavy air precipitating sound.
Then silence (pause), which brightens even more
the gold dripping down the pope’s arms.

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Missing in Action Prime

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Barrie Walsh

Just because it didn’t go off doesn’t dispel
What’s primed “digit immortality” will tell
2012’s May Day OZ Lotto #950 draw
2+6+25+29+34+36+37=169 is 132 see-saw
3 & 8 supplementary to missing in action
Fibonacci series 5th-month Day protestation
What’s going down goes around, until …

No Hand’s an algorithmic computer program
Of random number systems, i.e. lottery scam
And word ordering stratagems of poetry contest
So as Boobquake’s “Cordite #39 Jackpot” conquest
2012/4=96th Prime: inverse 69th-position predestinate
But another No Hand is placed to manipulate
Of $US640-million Mega Millions world record …

Plans meet flash in pan web trends; how do you wield
2010 CSIRO identifies 5 “megatrends” shaping the world
8 “megashocks” of impact; where natural world has preset
Digital counterpart defining rich & poor; Are we there yet?
Social media added propaganda, but what’s new & controlling
If high frequency traders are inside, algorithmic programming
May 8 OZ Lotto Game #951 is Jackpot $70 million …

Without 5/8 lottery draw No Hand’s at best only half the poet
So reversed Game 950 to 059 with 1st & 2nd digit transpose it
To be 30zero31 test-dummy 4-Corners of the Metaphysical Tomb
Product first two primes plus one is prime, etc. prescribes doom
59×509=30031=2x3x5x7x11x13+1; no 5th-Prime to 7/31/211/2311
Unless 30zero31 is TOBACCO code instead of smoking heaven
El Dorado sequel to Raleigh’s 1585 Roanoke settlement at 770 W …

Heard it thru the grapevine, but can’t remember crossing the river
Positive & negative: if IR “wire” predefines the route, who’s married what
In getting to the altar on time & schedule has hidden agenda to deliver …

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Fabian Avenarius (Arthur Craven)

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Sarah Sarai

I can be anything. Leave me in the dark. – Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges

I was christened Contessa Sarita Mujer de la Dia de Muertos.
Crones called me often,
my nurse called me Sibyl,
the workers, spoiled and worth it.

The world was my lover, the oyster my best friend.
Women called me wanton,
my husband, cock, tease, rapture,
my wife in the bleak of the night, “So beautiful.”

On my bed of many feathers, wings, many wings
dreaming five fields of chrysanthemums.
Rose-red. Cumulous. Sunrise. Amantillado.
And Flesh, a sixth field of Flesh.

“So beautiful, so very beautiful.”

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