There Are Girls That Wander Some Places Sometimes

(with the same rhythm under the same sky 2)


I don’t put the things I like in order.
I’ve come far counting the numbers I know.
Even if it’s not a mistake if you hate me
it might be a crime to forget you.
I’m just going to say it
To speak is the faint desire to show something.
In which book did I copy down this quote by Jacques Roubaud?
Not understanding French, acting vainly is
an evening of adaptation resisting resistance.
A night of cruising antagonising an antagonism.
I can go without speaking for some time.
I don’t have depth. I have width.
I’m a good size to shiver wildly while wandering the forest.
Big world not pig herd.
Star power not wallflower.
Losing the way and getting scared
people call me over and I wander.
The living room light that I looked through the window at was bright and
dancing singers on a T.V filled the whole wall.
You are only in front of the dancers you watch and
I am only beside you watching the dancers.
The ears of only-in-the-front you.
Your habit of pulling your bob hair behind your ears.
What country is this song from?
Even if the ears of only-beside-you me
are there, the song is not for my listening.
Over there you
in the past, not ever following the dancing with a dance
you who disappeared out of me
over there you
lift your heels up a little
and because you press your face to the glass
I scratch.
A big nail stolen from the hardware store said
why don’t you bring the hammer down and smash.
Fucking coward bitch.
Bitches like you are the worst.
Even though I know it
is breaking courageous?
Is the broken thing a relationship?
Black beans or sweet dreams?
The stars in your sky are beautiful and sparkly.
My obvious ornamentation is like diary entries written for others to read.
When I write on the window that nonexistent stars are stars that exist
above my head is one fallen star and that star
is the lit cigarette now ready to be smoked.
Let’s see how far you burn before you get burned.
I tried to let it be
but I couldn’t peel the scab completely off the top of my head and
the dandruff speck grabbed from one hair strand’s end
is fakeness not sadness so
again today to the forest I go and yap.
I wander.

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Those old sad ballads always meant too much

Wallowing was scripted in
melodic minor scales
Rising strings to a chorus of
climax always made us weep.

A kiss must end in marriage
some devotion and a little love
Resulting in children (sons of course)
[never mind the gei dao]1
If it ends any other way
Miss Saigon has to die.

Confucius in your fortune cookie
Confusion in my brain.

Thank the gods our daughters now sing
many different songs

They know that Erato was the result
of mummy’s one-night stand
the heart that bruises
the breathless aches
a primal reaction to biological loss
when another limited-edition ovum
falls
into
sewerage

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Future Addiction 5

You have to wake up to wake up from a dream. But some people still sleep even when they wake up from dreams and some people dream even when they wake up from sleep. Hey, wake up! Having wild dreams, waving their arms… when we wake them up, they’re like people scanning around, hyperventilating.

Adults told me to dream when I was little. That’s why I am still growing up in a dream.
Where am I? Am I asleep? How much more do I have to grow up? Why isn’t anyone waking me?
Trying to run away from my wild dreams, I used up all my breath.
I waved my arms, wandering around inside sleep.

I was nowhere to be found in the night.
Find me.

Beyond a window like the inside of water

the moon divides my body in half and opens me like a map. It quietly looks inside me. Because the only thing I can hand over to myself from the inside to the outside of the dream is my body, I wonder if I can predict my life’s future by plucking the days that hang inside the map like flower petals.

Nope. My ancestors weren’t executioners.
They were labourers.

Life is that night when you carry a sharp pickaxe and cover your face with the black coal that you dug from your overgrown heart.

Under a yellow lamp, the spoon’s clack clacking carries steaming rice and overripe kimchi into the body’s cave, but every dream life shatters together with the morning
and
the season of striking arrives and within the lusciously leafed valley, a snowplow’s red blinking lights.

Like how
you light up this cheek to erase the other cheek

it’s time we confess. I am a person who lives in a dead person’s house and uses a dead person’s stuff like a person who was using my stuff in my house while I was sleeping. I am a person living through the body of a dead person in a dead person’s life.
However

this is a nightmare, and a nightmare has to be in a dream

so how can I be here
if I’ve never been to sleep?

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Future Addiction 1

Nineteen-year-old-me
wanted to see my future
so I lived another thirty years.

So this is my future. I’ve seen it all.
I want to go back and explain.
In this never-ending time-travel that moves hour by hour
I want to stop right now
and go back
and show the nineteen-year-old-me

and would he say that he would want to live the thirty years standing in front of him, or
give it up?

Like a cemetery ravaged by a grave robber, an alley where all the house lights are dark continues, and the streetlamps hang like the pale-red skirt of a woman who hung herself. That night falling with bare feet, hugging it and crying, that’s what it’s like to be nineteen-year-old-me.

Beginning on that long, long night when I thought about

how instead of English vocabulary, names filled his workbook pages black and he carelessly knocked down his bike and stared at the river-water crashing like tire spokes, thinking water doesn’t flow, it jumps endlessly from high to low.

I only lived but a day, but in that thought thirty years had passed and
you haven’t changed at all.
A friend who died when he was twenty-one appears in my dream.
He’s living out the three years that we knew each other.
And then I wake up and he’s dead again.

The attic I lived in when I was nineteen, if you turn the broken hand on the clock
outside the window is the darkness that falls like the hand that fell from the clock.
Remembering being nineteen is not becoming nineteen
but reliving all the time lived it took to get to be nineteen.
Like the hand of a clock wedged into the darkness

close your eyes. Those who know this story are dead already, so in order to listen to this story you have to die.
On that long, long night
close your ears. In order to tell this story, I have to die and become a person that can never know this story.
On that long, long night
where are you? What are you looking for?

I’m looking for the death of a person who wasn’t born. On a long, long night
a story we all know.
Arriving through sleep and unbearable darkness, as if a dead person’s birthday is passing

one day a memory from thirty years in the future reached the nineteen-year-old-me for reasons unknown.
I lived thirty years, but for you
only a day has passed.

Like the black spring tightly wound inside a clock, the attic
spinning every day the same night spinning.

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Humoresque

Because her two hands got tied when she put her two hands together, the woman doesn’t pray. Hands, these two hands, how can one hand stroke the other? Arms folded stuck or stuck in a different crack, when you say that the beak that opens naturally is only natural, super-close lovers have to carry at least four 3,500 won 250-milliliter bottles of hydrogen peroxide for rinsing. Even before the woman tries to say ‘babe’ and pours a bottle, the man pulls out his dick. ‘FUCKING WEASEL DICKED SHIT,’ she screams and whenever she goes to a grill to eat she steals the stainless steel tongs for grilling the meat and thinks, these tongs look exactly like the A in Adultery in The Scarlet Letter. The last line of her book report she wrote for homework for her winter break when she was 16, the angle that is made naturally by the two tightrope walker’s legs the second they drop from the rope. When you say the shame you need to survive is the shame you have to bear, the woman receives the reason to spread the foldable steel ladder on the side of the rooftop. When she steps up the steel ladder, the sky is starless. When she descends, the stars gather inside the water that gathered inside the stone bowl. Those stars, 11 or 12 or 13, she tries but can’t pull them out with the tongs, and the only thing left is her face unseen because it’s been smooshed. ‘Don’t cry. It’s going to get erased. Is sadness just talk? People say it’s a waste.’ When is she going to quit being a target for the gun she points at herself? Actually, maybe nothing happened. Who is the hero of cops and robbers? Is it the one who is cuffed or the one doing the cuffing? The script hasn’t been written. Because the skin of her two sweaty hands was scrubbed when she put her two hands together, the woman still doesn’t pray.

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Tok pissin’


if it blinds me
… i’ll learn brail
if it paralyses me
i’ll learn to run
if it’s terminal
… cremate me
… do not resuscitate
increase the opioids so I die high
closer to the gods

No one has the words
so I keep on talkin’
nothing spills out
but the clock keeps tockin’
nasal tubes ‘n masked
Tik-Tok’s a mockin’


…we are strangers in this
strange ward, a cosmic
lounge for fear,
sans flight and fight responses,
no supernatural saviours here…
Xenus out in Roswell,
Nanook’s in the north,
quendas1 swimming in the lake
nirvana and your corpse,
God is …

Stop!
….
Please stop!

Breathe ….
Count to
three …
Breathe ….
Breeeeeeeathe!!!!!

It’s just a little sting,
(Just a little diggin’)
Crochet needle in my vein
…jab stab stick in.

O2 tank removed
the doors now sealed
In my neck there is a thing
PICC line bling.

Let the infusion now begin!!!!!!

And when it does there’s nothin’ left,
Just tokin’ talk ‘n pissin’.


Note: The title is a play on the term tok pisin, which means ‘pidgin English’ in pigin English.

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The Fall of the West

Despite cutbacks, delays, interruptions
the poison in my stomach
didn’t succeed. Had to walk from the station

of course, no more buses after 11pm. Feet
sincerely sore, the night suitably spooky, at least rain
didn’t add to my despair. Public transport

doesn’t get any better, often gets worse
and despite gruesome dehydration, moral decay and death
dangling the carrot of survival, I thought

of grander things: could Napoleon at all have won
in 1812? Russia, Russia, it’s always Russia. Can protestors
in Iran win? Fat chance. Then

the violent urge to puke again, indigestion
proper is properly vile. It must’ve been that $15 dark
ale — fifteen dollars, for fuck’s sake — that festers

down there. Eerily electrified sign
sports at the driveway to an industrial park
a man (whose face reminds me of a suicidal colleague

at work) shirtless, abs, biceps, idiotic, desperate. Advertisement
for a gym? Another business that’ll go bust? Another
reminder of what connects my malaise with Napoleon’s defeat

with the Iranians’ preordained failure: murderous overpriced
beer here, implacable Islamist ghouls there, where
did the vision of something that used to be called the West

fuck off to? It’s too dark save for more macabrely lit posters
that can’t be bothered with pausing me, houses for sale
at hysterically high prices. I mean if this is

all that remains of the great civilisation
and this Iranian-born French-obsessed drunk
stands tonight as its sole witness, then

it must’ve already ended, surely, the empire
has fallen. Nothing to celebrate, no time to commiserate
because I’m too hungry, too tired for either joy or tears.

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White Pages

When footprints that arrived without permission from far away
cover the given pages

how are the pages going to get their whites back?

The brick heights growing from footprints
and the mouth silences amplifying from footprints,

even in the colonisation season
that thickens the pages

things grow.

Like fungi sporing into the cracks of time, when we

open our mouths thickly, in the end
like jungles

we become dense and barbaric.

Wind blows here from a place of unknown origin and
pages flip and flip and flip.

Without anchor or road
you and I met when we lost our way.

The undeveloped light
finally reaches us.

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Speakers of Duckspeak

I’m going to leave this place
and make noise with a bigger mouth.
No thoughts
no concepts
quack, quack, quack, quack.
When I go to the place where Duckspeak1 is spoken
I’m going to say I’m on vacation and
when I open my big suitcase
somebody else’s kid will pop out,
a kid I didn’t pack and
lollipops that the kid brought
will also pop out and
the red round lollies
will shut our mouths and
our cheeks will bulge together and
quack, quack, quack, quack.
To a place where we become happy after chatting
each person brings a single suitcase
black, heavy, and desolate
with nothing allowed in.

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Weereewaa

respectfully yuma weereewaa
filled from the rain
lost under the sun

restricted flow
shallow
but with a deep history

evidence suspended in the silt
pollen and ash
worked stone

eagles circle, watching
lake’s large mouth, calls
it’s tongue licks at the foreshore

Birik sits, looking up from below
careful, he waits
for those who take what is not for the taking

sorrow trees recline in the water-soaked reeds
weathered arms outstretched beckoning to come sit
to heal a scarred soul or

damaged heart

I sit cradled by the woody arms
they whisper the message of peace, forgiveness, and love

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I Go Meet a Friend

I go meet a friend.
Because bugs move from this tree to that tree I go meet a friend.
Because the tree moves before the bug moves I go meet a friend.

When trees move they also don’t move.

Walking along the trees.
Walking along the light shining on the trees.
The light that turns on and off, on and off, blinks first in the head.

Because bugs move from this light to that light I go meet a friend.
If I walk from this light to that light do all the lights stop?
Distant, one light flickers.

I go meet a friend.
Bugs move from this friend to that friend the light goes dark in the head.
To sleep darkness descends.

In the tree that stopped walking is a hole.
The hole swells.
I went to meet a friend and I’m not coming back.

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The Non-Vegetarian

(after Han Kang)

It makes perfect sense, really
to make the most of this body
before the rot sets in. Maybe

a premature sky burial, and who better
than the ghost in this deadbeat machine
to preside as chef de cuisine. I propose

starting with the shoulders, so achy
after so many years of drudgery. Recipe
for pork shoulder steak should do, us humans

so comparable to pigs. Braise or roast? I don’t
have a Dutch oven, so it’ll be smoke. Indeed
years of smoking may have prepared my meat, alas

I could only afford the cheapest tobacco these past
few years. Poverty and overwork are truly
key ingredients for this auto-feast. For Entrée

I’ll crack my skull against the wall — in the absence
of a reciprocating saw, something else I could never
afford. I shall do the right thing, soak the brains

to purge them of blood. Dessert? I’ll stab and tear
into my upper stomach to extract a liver
which is no doubt fatty, courtesy of decades

of alcohol abuse, courtesy of even more decades
of life in an unliveable world. I’ll make foie
gras donuts and will serve all three courses

with goblets of thinned blood and piss. I’ll propose
a pre-dinner prayer to the god of capital and democracy
before my disembowelled corpse grins and digs in.

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The 3rd Poem

(for Sin Yong-Mok)

Cross-cultural implies there are cultures
to cross. There are bodies and languages

sure, but cultures? What is so innately different
between kimchi and vegemite

these things one eats, then one forgets about
as they’re transformed into a dark universal paste

in one’s stomach? Identity was always
an object of false consciousness, comrade

propped up by the true parasites to prevent
us from uniting (to lose our shackles) and so

there’s nothing innately different between
Squid Game and Mad Max: moving images

that depict the horror of the contemporary either
in Seoul or in the Aussie outback. If

there’s something to cross it’s what we assume
separates us, not what separates us. Let’s

assume better. Let’s assume we can unite (act as
if) we can defeat the horrors, or outdo them

by becoming a dark universal entity
beyond culture and identity. Then there’ll be

truths other than the facts of languages
and bodies, vegemite and kimchi, cultures and crosses.

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The Exiled

Because we have a tongue that splits into multiples
we can’t obey.

In this small world
the lights became too many
because you abuse yourselves.

I’m swept away by rakes of speech
and return infinitely
like the coral ends washed up by waves.

Clueless and beautiful children vanished.

Even if you say
let there be light
bodies that need more darkness are born.

In the time of breeding illiteracy

in the prayers of the countless horns
spurting from my tongue
there is no God
or country.

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Oak Trees and Gum Trees

modest conversations with
interruptions
static
broken sentences
and silence

I ask her to read to me
100 poems
by 100 poets
she does
while tying crystals to my ankles

I sink

like a ghostly shipwreck
settled on the ocean floor

slowly running out of breath
she lies with me
amongst the shells, Bream jaw bones and coral

similar but
different
oak trees and ghost gums
northeast and southeast

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Paper boats

at dusk
we launch paper boats
with the free-flowing words
inscribed in charcoal
last of the daylight
allows us to watch
them set sail into the night
we wait for the water to swallow them
solace knowing our words would dissolve
lay in the silt
fossilised for future voices to read and ponder

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The Place Where the Houses Stop

I didn’t do anything today. As if I didn’t have hands
I couldn’t get hold of anything.
Just spreading out and moving around documents
I couldn’t look into them. By themselves the papers fell
and made paper pushing sounds.
Firefighters failed to put out the forest fire.
The suspected arsonist couldn’t be apprehended.

I didn’t hear it at first. When I heard it, I didn’t know it.
It was the sound of a sheep crying. Faint, but
clearly a sheep crying.
Who set the sheep outside?
In the far-off bushes at the place where the houses stop
the sound of a sheep crying. The sheep couldn’t emerge from the bushes.
And yet the crying sound broke through the bushes.

Not able to go far, the crying sound fell around the bushes.
There was nothing in the housing area outside of houses. No one could open their windows.
No one could touch the burnt air.
The firefighters put the fire out.
An announcement was made. The fire is under control.
Everyone was told to lie face down so the fire wouldn’t come back to life.
Everyone was told to be careful.

Couldn’t sleep today. As if there’s no night
I couldn’t see the night. Yesterday’s brainwaves came through today and tangled.
I laid face down and listened to the sheep cry.
Spinning around in my ears
the crying sound fell back to the floor.
Who set the bushes outside?
In the housing area there was nothing outside of houses.

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Carp

—as if its live weight is there
beside my hand
but with a Korean meaning I cannot fathom

(each creature battered, vulnerable, caught,
carries un-read meanings marked across
a manuscript of sinew, scar and muscle)

I read on into your poem as I might look at a river
new to me swirl and go—
its branching nature and sandy stretches
its islands older
than the eternal water birds posing on them
barges too that plow it for centuries
and along its banks: the river’s creatures plugged in

Your poem braced upon its phrases
arches across the continuous river of itself

Two shapes competing in grace
one given to Heraclitus
the other to the atomic permanence of presence

Talk to me about divided rudeness

The river wants an arching earnestness
while the bridge longs for the river’s playfulness

Then you say context—
is where meaning lies

The river’s flow a flow of imagery
and the bridge a place to be

I imagine
I can understand everything you say
as long as I can go without that rudder of logic
and hold my vertigo in check

Poems cannot show what comes before the poem

Carp, surprising carp
—priest, invader, monster, finny angel,
it might not matter
your dark mouth agape
that you’ve been thrown back into the poem
still unknown

Rivers beyond
their fragile springs, bright falls and secret forest pools
reveal a blind and headlong reaching into lowlands
as they pour themselves deep and deeper into seas as deep as time

Carp, I read and wonder
at the mechanism of the river

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Light

Today I cleaned two long drops
of venetian blinds.
It was like rewriting a poem
by discovering on each line
dust, grease, coffee splashes,
brittleness burned into every word.

I felt like one of your shop assistants
with no line of movement
but this work.

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Say It Say It Say It What Do You Mean

I woke up in the middle of the night to a phone call. Unknown number. The moment I woke up I got a call. Unknown number. I’m a person that can’t sleep. I put a stone next to the stone pile during the day. The stone has no eyes. That’s why I’ve always been a person that can’t wake up. The voice on the phone was nagging. Say it, Say it, Say it, What do you mean.

The sound of fighting coming from upstairs. I couldn’t tell where the fighting was. Could be a bathroom, could be a bedroom, could be a living room. When I heard a man laughing like he was crazy, I thought it sounded like it wasn’t fighting. I couldn’t tell what was being looked at while the laughing was happening. While the laughing was happening, I couldn’t tell if a wall clock, an audio speaker or the darkness was being looked at. A woman was screaming and interrogating. No, No, No, That’s not it

I was the person answering the phone. In the morning and at night I was the person answering the phone. Stones flew around me. I couldn’t find the stone pile. The unknown number became a known number that became unknown again. Say it, Say it, Say it, the unknown person was berating. No, No, No, the fighting person responded combatively. I was the person who couldn’t sleep, the person always answering the phone. I fell asleep listening to the sound of fighting.

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Translating

Saying, for instance, The last time I spoke to you
might not be the last time I speak to you

Following the path of a writer’s words
sewn into the earth with a green thread
and remembering nothing of what they said

Watching a bridegroom leap from a cliff
then nothing until a distant splash
that brings out everyone’s applause

Or a singer between songs
wanting to be told
what he should say to his newborn son
about this sick planet’s sickness

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Fire

Fire

Fire cleanses
Burns
Fire destroys
Rids everything
Just everything
It can’t be controlled
Can only be feared

A mind of its own
No oxygen
Hard to breath
Combustible material to consume
Mesmerises, hypnotises
Seduces, destroys
It will eat you up
Leaving nothing but ashes



Fire II

Fire cleanses
Heals
It opens seeds
Awakens
From a long sleep
Dormancy
To activate
Creating new life



Fire II

Before time
Humans were given fire

There are rules
on who can use it
When to use and how

Small fire, good fire
Elders say

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National Sorry Day

This is not a day for red appleologies.
This is not a day for yellow appleologies.
This is not a day for green appleologies.

It’s a day for sincere apologies,
a day when a country says it’s sorry to First Nations people,
a day to pet countless screams, moans, cries, and silence.

May 26, 2023, afternoon. I met Samantha on Zoom and she said

Today is National Sorry Day.1
A day to remember the children of the stolen generation.

Among the children who were dragged away crying
were brave girls who ran away from white institutions.
In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Molly, Gracie, and Daisy
walked 1,600 kilometres to return home.
The rabbit fence erected by white people
who failed to prevent the breeding of wild rabbits
became a signpost that guided them to their hometown.
However, after her marriage, Molly was again transferred to a government settlement
and attempted to escape with one of her daughters.
The daughter left behind in the settlement was Doris Pilkington Garimara,
who wrote the novel.

Samantha, from Moa Island in the Torres Strait,
said she was writing a book called Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia.
She said she was writing the language of a disappearing tribe with annotations.
I asked about the small flag on the screen.
As I guessed, it was the Torres Strait flag.
She said that green symbolised the earth, blue symbolised the sea,
and the black line between them symbolised people.
The male dancer’s white headdress
and the star representing the five island clusters also appears.
However, the tribal dances, festivals, and myths have disappeared,
and now the flag is only flown in the corner of her bookshelf in the city.
The longed-for island lies far away, only in dreams and poetry.

Today is National Sorry Day.
A day to confess and pay respect to the memory of the stolen generation.
A day when the white nation apologises
to the land, sea, and sky of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
and to their descendants.

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Coral Spawn

Have you ever seen the coral spawn?
Swum at night through the cloud?
Engaging embracing this moment
Yet trying to not take anything with you

I wonder what you felt?
Was it exciting to see this rare event?
Was it a hindrance to your work?
Or somewhere in between?

Was there an indicator?
Did you know?
Were the flowers blooming?
Birds mating?
What season was it?

Was someone with you?
Did you share this moment?
An unforgettable experience
Remembered over the years.

Polyps bursting forth
Did you stay awhile to watch?
Erupting rainbow polyps
Exploding, shooting, flying
Painting the ocean canvas

Tiny life emerging
Floating on ocean currents
To new destinations
To take seed, settle and grow

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