| Country | Number of Deaths | Cause |
| Indonesia | 94081 | living |
| India | 14962 | living |
| Sri Lanka | 29755 | living |
| Thailand | 5046 | living |
| Burma | 56 | living |
| Malaysia | 72 | living |
| Maldives | 82 | living |
| Bangladesh | 2 | living |
| France | 250 | touristing |
| Sweden | 60 | touristing |
| Germany | 34 | touristing |
| UK | 34 | touristing |
| The Philippines | 25 | living |
| Norway | 21 | touristing |
| Italy | 14 | touristing |
| USA | 12 | touristing |
| Japan | 7 | touristing |
| China | 12 | touristing |
Source: www.sina.com.cn
Date sourced: 04/01/2005
you have that white chocolate
guilt, where it
isn't chocolate at all –
but something you've mixed
together from other things
things stolen
kigos from the Edo period
Bruce Lee's arms at 32 fps
crazy dumsaint and
Barthes' kleenex box
– that mercenary ethic
your head like a mixing bowl
and eyes for beaters
until at last
when you
bake
it looks nothing like you
– just ingredients, cold
crowd on the plate.
1.
walk with me along the pathway of analog lovers.
visitors will bring food and gifts
gathered from palaeochannels visible
in the twilight at fifteen-day intervals.
once a mega-lake, the autumn slowly made
inroads into an atypical hesitation waltz
you have investigated for a project
the maintenance engineer thought long overdue.
many of these forms and rhythms
see now
a return of enthusiasm
similar in appearance to a brown pelican
as luminous as several thousands of stars.
do you belong here. turn toward the asteroid belt
directing its colour-coded bodies away from further
cycles of cell division, alone everywhere.
the telescopic view during this time
provides thinning crescents with hope.
when the camera breaks down, smile and reshape.
in case we drift apart, wear your compass
on a checkered sleeve, bicycle helmet, white pillow,
from day to night.
2.
discovered by removing a subset of commercial vessels,
the remains of a viking longhouse
eject cometary material into the twilight.
emptiness yawns: what has gone missing
cannot be deemed to exist
until the ship makes port, kneels and finds citations.
new experiments cloud the request form.
intricately constant,
your gaze sets shortly after the sun.
you calculate departures from the probable,
steering between limerent styles. i follow,
one blind step to each beat.
The cattle grid jolted him back; it was where the green
Tree snake coiled itself like a stowed garden hose around
The railway iron & they refused to cross, the gap of fear
Too great. An Apostlebird greeted his return, its grey fantail
Spread in an elegant bow, its harsh voice he inherited; purely
Environmental. Lousy Jacks his mother called them, as their
Disciples slapped mud huts onto the trunks of black wattle.
He grew in a bedroom the colour of prickly pear & it became
His favourite colour; frog his schoolyard nickname. He learnt
To read news headlines peeling away the frayed linoleum;
Pink with red flowers in his parent's bedroom, as if wrack
Could be countered by austere repetition. The cottage was
Decaying, even the mud wasps had abandoned their homes.
He gave a nest to his daughter; the fine creation full of holes.
one in two men like jelly. the hand comes to claim its
prize visavis gough & the new york poets. i freeze in my
bag. the stamp isnt one youd want or even read. cramps flower
unbeknownst. prose though apparently maupassants triumph was also his
downfall. money in
snow. setting off for the presbytery like a winky. i think it
surreal but you a suitcase. his grace stank. the tone like an
unripe pear or pineapple. leather kept you from the grave for years
but today youre here & on your knees for a change. men
are sexier than before or am i just getting out more? forced
seclusion in the north. snow in money. she ran an extension cord
from his vexation to someone with more energy. hallelujah doesnt come with
raisins. have you been to the outback lately? it looks like sydney.
the tea cooled & the coffee awesomed. we were back to back
& the space invaders werent games or gamers but coming to take
our place our cake. its a kind of fish icecream. big in
nonfood circles. googoogoo. marinetti looked to a tableclothless future
something the nazis
couldnt do. it can happen when literacys at that level. the bar
had oscar wildes name on it. the computers lyric plaint brought a
tear. i get out of my bag. its light i can hear
the unbearable rumbling of the sun. worse than santa being dragged
over
needles in his sleep but reindeer willing that wont happen again.
i met andrew xs editor but i didnt meet andrew x. by
the time we got the hypertext working wed run out of blue.
the novel on the cover of the bonnard painting. thats a clock
you dont see every day. hypochondriac phlox. the lettuce freshened in the
structured vermouth. the bullet in my heart voided lostness loneliness. like a
drysdale. like a bark. the years go past in a righteous haze.
the copilots haircut delayed takeoff but the monitors obliged. happy drugbust
baby.
two more harpsichordists quarantined. it may be in quantity that we have
our hope. a squeaky sock gathers the moss. wikipedia nightmare. borrow your
own thermometer. are linebreaks sister to windbreaks? the crowd urged
caution. albeit
briefly. vegetarian aphids dont bode well for roses. & tell me how
im going to breathe with no head? the cereal typed the paper
while he talked shit to the milk. dial f for froot loop.
off ice he wasnt on the same wavelength. theres a bigger niche
than astronauts for poems like these! too disgusted to play chess. the
spacebaa was woaking but a typed a. a storm brewed. there was
little atmosphere in the room. her philosophy wasnt a negation of all
i held dear. his demands included a reading of wordsworth over the
police megaphone. a basketball flattened with disuse. are jane austen &
dr
who in cahoots? i keep meeting guys from the twelfth century. how
do i know theyre genuine? how do they know about bank accounts?
My foot on the wood
and the heat surging through it
seems a bourgeois grandeur
here in the public sauna.
A long way from the hot
bitumen of home.
I am no exile, though
I doubt I belong here
in this, or most poems.
But to be a conduit of beauty,
to be somewhere
between dirt and bird,
song surging through you –
that is a pretty wish.
Even a silent song
playing in one's veins, some-
thing approaching the throb within
Beethoven, would be okay.
The sharpening of a sense
with the perishing of another.
The salt rising to the surface
of the body reminds it
of the short distance
it has crawled from the ocean,
ancient secrets embedded
in the flesh. The body
has endured a short lesson
in how to be here.
But it changed our shapes.
It changed our song.
We did a few drawings.
The money spider crosses a hand.
You shut the door and open up
the secret drawer, so hefty
and loud your knees pop. We're
beginning our descent into barbarism:
sorry, it's conclusive
since the windows filled with milk
and the floor with blood and honey.
Only two to go then one more, then
we begin our evolutionary strategy in earnest.
Look up and smile; the coffee drinks the cup
and fathers eat their leftovers unbidden.
We like these airy breakfasts, anti-gravity service
puts me in the circus-mood
mentioned in the guide. White clowns in the air out
on parole. We must wear our ornamental
blinkers for landing.
Skirts turn Mondrian. Complimentary?
Yes, it's all free–so long as you can say
“pop it in Mum's bag,” she prising
lead shingles off a roof. Our dentist
works as a baggage-monkey now, inciting every
passenger to their teeth. But smile,
this is a road someone lives on–and that's
why we're here on this national holiday:
to celebrate how ducks move and the big
noise they make! enjoining us to attend more closely
to pirate, treasure, flag and farm
equipment plowing us untimely under
the clues, the slopes.
Every day Abba Paul plaited a new basket,
for which there were no markets in the desert,
so he burned them in a bonfire at the end of the year,
and again began his termless labors.
High roller Sisyphus was also an incurable workaholic.
One day Sisyphus met Paul, who was weaving
yet another basket. He asked if he could put his boulder
in Paul's basket. Paul replied that his baskets were not
big enough for boulders. 'Then what are they good for?'
Sisyphus wondered. 'For nothing,' Paul responded.
'They are good for nothing.'
'That's what I work for too!'Sisyphus quipped.
'Then go ahead and put your nothing in my basket,' Paul offered.
'But what should I do with my boulder?'
Sisyphus pressed. 'Why not burn it?' Paul suggested.
'Do boulders burn?' Sisyphus wondered.
'They do when they're in my basket,' Paul replied.
'But you said that my boulder won't fit in your baskets,'
Sisyphus recalled. 'That was before I burned them,'
the monk replied.
'oh no! it hurts!'
Richard Hell
there'll be no billy ocean
until we meet inside the radio
on albany highway
a bee once stung me on the nipple there
it was classically trained
in techniques of surprise / and exited
past a future lover thru the passenger side window
to fizz out on the cut grass
in bee-eye view
of the bicentennial memorial
lake
half a line of wang wei translated
in its mind
this thing extreme
well, this
was something new
and that night or soon
inside the shell of a car
again a soft-focus filter between us
and the drone
of the recently deceased
that might have been engine or radio hum
but when the song came on
memory clicked in
and i forgot where i was
From my father I got
Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Joplin.
I found them shrunk with the cold,
dusted on his writing desk
underneath old newspapers,
bills, blunt pencils, inkless pens,
accounts of unrealised genius
and corpses of cockroaches.
He hid them – stained with coffee,
Western voices
stamped on samizdat cassettes
with Russian lettering and fake covers.
He was too shy to let me know
that once he could make love
to the sounds
of the same music
I do.
Who would think there were times
when my father
wore dancing jeans
underneath the mirrored balls
of Siberian nightclubs,
where tattooed DJs
had to swear loyalty
to the international struggle
of the working class
if they wanted
to keep
their jobs.
My father
with his trimmed beard
and trimmed wings
and sadness
that will suffice for all of us.
When you were my age
You had to write
Whatever they ordered you
If you wanted
to keep
your job.
in the yoga class, breathing Ardha Padmasana,
my rusted shoulders don't florally grace
half lotus
green thumbs agree Dan's brittle lemon tree can't resist
superannuants bracing the Wall Street crisis
and stiff winds
crossed legs unlatch reluctant joints I bend with classmates
downward facing dogs posed hard in fiscal
inertia
sunlight strikes the red hedge, bounces with the late breeze
fresh green backs bailing out American
mortgage debt
Zhai radios from the vastness of space, 'I am proud,
Chairman Hu, people of China, mission
accomplished.'
the smell of new mown grass wafts, the village school bell rings,
a rooster crows far from my rhythmic breaths,
mind scudding
this ordinary life: cobra uncoiling is Kylie;
she meditates on mildew powdering
garden beans
(Inspired by 'A monument to war', sculpture by Kathe Kollwitz, Berlin)
i.
He'd hated her old handbag
and how she carried it.
He'd idle behind,
watching her shoulders
move solidly through public streets
carrying the bag
he'd given her in childhood.
He then learnt to walk in front,
cursing slowness
and memory
and the impossibility of being man and son,
so he chose man
and avoided her gaze,
but at night stayed awake
in ease of darkness
to hear her private singing from the bathroom:
her smooth notes skimming water
to steal under closed doors
then find him, open-eyed and loving.
ii.
One thousand degree fires turned solid bronze to liquid
which, bubbling and thick with resistance,
was emptied into Kollwitz's mould
then clasped shut,
left still,
for airless weeks.
Bronze settled, quietened and cooled
to this:
a grown man
enfolded in his mother's full embrace
his head angled backwards,
smooth neck reflecting the sky,
long legs spilling effortlessly
to the angry earth.
This Berryman's a moralistic thing:
its jacket has been lit, man rolled back to ma
and shot with liverspots like extra moons
or doctored film of UFOs –
blinked, I think, by a student in the bath
who, before Returns, checked the title page with '??°a marche?
Oui' (knowing a book so used would not reply);
and who, for all his troubles, failed
to notice a label still stuck fast across the blurb
and faded to its price code, W. O. E.
Every landscape painting is a left eye's worth
of a stereoscopic image. There's no comparison.
Sight has its own methodology. Hearing too.
If a picture could talk we could not understand it.
This, though black & white TV returned me better
than colour to where 'a hand can approximate
any shape'. Where the blessed say 'Oh yes'
about their pain. Let's have every image in sharp
focus evenly across the canvas 'just for now'.
Stanley Spenser, an old favourite. An old fart.
'Art' is what remains after a trip to Raspberry
Creek. It can be 'bolted to the asphalt' &
deserted by a whole team of people with tools
who walk away, leaving an eerie absence.
Recursive absence too. As in ekphrasis. Or a
'poem' upon a book of poetry. It can be a sign
saying: Go this way. As in a weathercock.
Or clock stopped 20:07. 'I step to the cliff edge-'
Or it can be something else entirely.
someone's shout become
an accent on elocution lip-reading
at the bar – 'is repetition still itself?'
gazing at the décor a glass too tall
for its short straw if faces trickle in
a peck on the cheek in duplicate
and all slide and the anodized
salvers shine like some pleasant hangover
from last century – way an ultra-violet
lit songlist catalogues nostalgia as a genre
self-portrait in the third person – smile
while the sunken lounge swallows me
then up and go with the flow gyrating down
light to guide us down our only sprung dance-floor
you left i was lost guitar in his minefield
of effect pedals this way to
those rare tickets illicit lure of the cubicle
unspoken like here they know your order: two news
a regular fantasy inched closer to a view to
fissure in a cymbal rim or tympanum the law
packed lips of gum their feel it a figure of speech
and a fait accompli historically the encore
applaud a first shadow each to follow
late and later forgot time and danced on
into the death throes of a last, a final heroic outro.
what wakes me some outside
blast of glass waste banking up
like a valle d'aosta autostrada
in deepest nebbia. terminal shift
audio setting unavailable for
comment, the year turns a page –
cities edged maple lemon nearly
all green thought flattery by this
the fade of the swimsuit season, a
bridge where a subject seated
might fork out (through the nose?)
for his own caricature
here on the water successive
symmetries reliant on reflection
as if ideas settle to focus slow within
shade a certain shade of blue
below us a deckchair, constellation
of tin cans aglow in the shallow
we arrived your 'forests'
of statuary dogs and lions ghosts
where fire relocates the royals
and some time later metro it back
to the hotel-of-the-same-name
hundred channels none that matters
sort re-shuffle the postcards
voice like a field of unreturned
calls to remind me if when? this all
falls together we'll be (seriously) overdue.
after Stephen Haley's Forest (2008)
In a forest of blue trees it's easy to feel lost.
Yet calling which way now Hansel
would be purely rhetorical; if a path leads
out of these trees it begins & ends with ourselves.
Ask instead-in this age of reality–
why shouldn't office chairs adorn a forest floor?
Confused now with appearances
fall back on familiars:
trees shaped like trees, the idea of water
spilling over glistening stones,
stars suspended beneath the ceiling
by nothing more than our faith in art.
Here, to seek concrete answers
is to target a singular truth in the arc of night.
Beyond the forest's glass cage a computer
hums its music of making & the god
of images-who never wholly sleeps-projects
anew the waiting world: a forest is beautiful,
the blue light announces, a forest
could be this, or this, or this.
When he reads me, I'm reading him,
each line along his brow,
the spaces between breaths.
He's a mystery.
Those eyes that shift from left to right
hide as much as they reveal.
Someone imagined him,
gave him grammar of demeanour,
used his pale skin as metaphor.
His form I'd say, is more or less
traditional, though marred by adjectival
spots he won't get rid of.
I give him marks at least
for genuine attention.
Low-shelved,
I wish I'd written him.
We write beneath the noise of men
in our choice of cell.
Wrath and keyboards
perpetuity
and fashions of cruelty.
Lies are by nature brittle
(I hope this thing)
written on your lips.
white paint is medicine.
Welfare on wheels
huskies turn on the air-conditioning.
Team Sky is winning 3-0.
Chasms of pepper
every vehicle is a princess.
I hear the nurses calling
this new aristocrat
in his cotton rags stuck
in the roaring library of fire.
Could anyone be bothered pressing these
in clay? Or scratching them in polished stone?
Words once were more than writing, were their own
accomplishment – you didn't read at ease,
you read at work, you dragged them from a field.
Then words were stooked, hand-tied, and lined in rows.
You harvested whatever you could carry.
But now, each day's another dictionary,
a library of untranslated prose.
We weigh the chaff and think we're talking yield.
I don't believe there's anything to say
that someone reading this in 3010
might think was truly worth the waste of clay
except, “I was alive like you. Back then.”
I didn't mean to be an artwork,
going about my business on the platz.
Coffee slurped smoke in-out
shirt tail wedged down one last time.
Okay, okay, white shirt into back trousers,
But he could've chosen one of the other drones.
Who knows what stirs behind the small splinters
and wood grain? It's just easier to thank yourselves,
that you didn't end up like me. All your fears
in one tidy package vanquished with a smirk
and sideways step to the next exhibit.
And I'm easy to store.
If I dropped on your foot,
you'd know. If I fell, I'd crack. Like
to see a picture do that. Maybe
the critics would mourn. But what I really
want is for someone to touch the indurate bulge
that is my hair and pretend to put it in place.
Sometimes, not enough,
I'd really look at you
and say: Let me clean your glasses.
You'd take them off.
Blink. Hand them over.
Pull out a folded handkerchief
from your trouser pocket
and give that up, too.
It's always the edges that get blurry.
I'd work on those the longest, teasing out
flecks of leaf and breakfast smudges and wattle pollen
until the glass was clear. Like making them new
again. You'd put them on – just as slowly
as you took them off – look around
at your familiar world and say:
There's no doubt about you.
i thought
you could
tell me
the colour of god's hair or something
