Drill

In Los Angeles, 1974, the fire alarm
would go off in the 7th Grade. Our teacher
told us to hit the floor, hide under
the desks. I didn't understand because
I didn't speak English. Me, who'd recently
arrived from Cuba, via Miami, via Spain.
David, my Mexican friend, would look at
me from his own little space under his desk,
and he'd translate what the teacher told us,
to cover our heads, stay still, he said:
'terremoto,' earthquake, and the first
time I did think I felt a rumbling below
the ground, below my hands. I thought:
This is it, I'm going to die under a fallen roof,
in the rubble, my parents will have
to come identify my remains
. I thought
I saw the floor move underneath my cold,
sweaty hands. I left wet prints on
the linoleum floor, cracks etched red
lines on my knees. My neck ached,
my temples throbbed. Dizzy, I felt
my elbows go weak. David kept
asking: 'Estás bien? Estás bien?' Suddenly
I dreamt of a roof top in Havana, this flash-
back of a clear blue sky, a squadron of jet
fighters screaming across, over us, their sonic
boom an echo… Los Yanquis Imperialistas,
I thought, invading Havana. They
are bombing the city. Lost, I heard
someone call my name, our teacher
Mrs. Brown, bent at the knees, looking
down at me. 'Mr. Suarez?' she was saying.
'You can get up now, it is only a drill,
only a drill.' The class breaks out in laughter.
My hands and knees ached, my face pulsed
red with pain and embarrassment. How would
I ever get used to all of this? Here, in English.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Cuys: A Tale of Magic-Realism

A man from the Andes moved to a New York
suburb and decided to raise guinea pigs,
built a cuyero house, similar to a thatched
kitchen in hut back home, his intention
was to have cuy meat available for special
occasions, summer barbecues, also because
the animals' noises, purrs and clicks, pleased
him, helped him stave off homesickness.
On warm days the man let the animals graze
in the garden; one afternoon he forgot
to feed them and the pigs wandered into the streets,
not able to find their way home,
and when the temperature dropped, they all died
of hypothermia. The man, unable to contain
his sadness, drank himself silly, lost in his second-
hand clothes, he moped about, aimless,
poor, his longing for home like the furry balls
that wandered into Manhattan's flower district
where a woman carrying groceries saw one,
a creature she swore looked like a giant rat.
She screamed and let go of her groceries,
a huge rat who stopped her to ask for directions.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Shakepeare Didn’t Play Guitar

With the death of Elvis
I could no longer believe.
Since listening to Flaming Star
on a winter Saturday, 1973
I had been a sucker for his elegies.
Suspicious Minds took me out of the paddocks
and into a bedroom with an older brother,
where my education in music began with Slade,
the Jackson Five, Skyhooks, our sisters
into the Osmonds, Sherbet, David Cassidy.
Pubescent and wanting more
than Playboy and gunslinger Westerns
I forked over calf money for 16
Teen Beat, Circus and Cream.
Shakespeare Didn't Play Guitar,
he didn't rate.
Like the acne on my face
I opened up to body shirts,
played under-17 football at thirteen.
My brother read Ram, Juke, NME
became obsessed withbands the radio station didn't play.
He stashed magazines under his bed
for future reference, testing me
on the original members of The Yardbirds, Black Sabbath,
until it became clear
the magazines were holding up his bed.
In the clean-out we found a dead rat,
a smell we hadn't noticed
staring up at posters of The Stones and Foghat.
Each night our room was a succession of guitar solos –
Jimmy Page, Ted Nugent, Lobby Lloyd always
within grabbing distance of the record player.
Despite Mum thumping on our door for tea
The Sex Pistols helped me to see.
a different side to milking 180 cows twice a day.
My brother cut his hair, dying it blonde
around the ears so as not to offend
our neighbour, the footy coach.
With a Boys Next Door quiff
he was still a relieving ruckman
in the forward pocket.
As a centre-half forward I was more ambitious
but I hadn't read anything
outside Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving,
a mournful antidote
to Richard Allen's skinhead epics
which I read in conjunction with English music,
and formed an early distaste for Royalty.
Outside footy and Mass
we didn't go anywhere there was
to go. With some neighbours
we started our own blue-light disco,
decorating the local hall with footy streamers.
Word got around
but the dance floor was watched by my father.
I pashed on in the back corners
to Ami Stewart and Thelma Houston,
coloured lights strobing the Honour Rolls,
my brother ran his first car into a drain.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Stop Over

Who the fuck are they kidding
in the transit lounge at the international airport of Fiji?
The place looks new enough – I mean the shops:
plenty of duty-free: perfume, drinks,
walkman batteries… appropriate snaps
of archetypal heavens with heavenly bodies…
Apart from viva Fiji on the shirts
and a carpet with a few too many marks,
I might as well be home. So here's the thing:
A smiling Fiji guy in a grass skirt
and matching grassy cuffs, stands in the light
of Proud's Airport Duty-Free World-Class Shopping,
as if to say – well, I'm not quite sure,
something like: this is an authentic
Fiji world-class duty-free shopping store

Our friend reminds us of our exotic past –
a simple, musical place of fish and grass,
that before we came, was all the same;
this guy in the shop points to a time
of distilled cultural essence – a shuttered flash
when everything was fine. But I'm not cross:
I'm sure he's got a pretty easy job.
Some folks work at a desk, he wears a skirt…
now he's talking to his buddy in slacks and a shirt
while leaning on a wall. The answer, I guess,
To who are they fucking kidding, is us

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Suite

I.

I think even though it's a hard
task we should stanch it now,
the way the hard
pillars of slight settle hard
& fast in your “ha ha” posture.
We know you're hard-
ly a stickler to the “hard
and fast” rules of the match,
(match =
a duel, as it were), that hard
warfare of inducing a smile.
– Smile!

we've snagged your smile.
Your gaze is hard
as you resolve to smile,
as if you'd killed a smile.
Even though you find it polite now
to smile
when asked to smile,
the ragged posture
of a forced smile
is more a fuse than a match,
more a grapnel than kitchen match;

it is, in fact, a perfect match
with wilt and rot. A smile
unrequited is a damp match
at the worst possible time. Is a match2
maker visiting my wife. It hard-
ly goes away, the fear of match-
ing argyle socks in the wash – not mine. Match
stick, please. Gas cannister, too. Now
hand me her photo – Now
I need to snap out of it
. Match
& mix, sort through the causes of poor posture
that plague me. One must posture

like a debutante when learning posture –
this book-on-the-head method is now
overlooked by fancy magazines. 'Posture
is a matter of vitamins,' they say; 'Posture
is a matter of X, not Y. So is a gleamy smile.'
I was never taught. Thus the posture
of a pasture very much resembles my posture –
creepy, hewn from mud and lichen, hard
and uneven in winter light. Hard-
er travel lies ahead, Ethan, posture
and feet to be tried now
by a duty greater than the planets know.
 
 

II.

– after Man'yoshu
 

Lying unloosened, bare,
crouched beside thin clothes,
nothing but rift between bare
vale and black rushes bare-
ly fingering the diamond moon,
diamond-shimmer dusting the bare
slope of – is that a dune, the bare
heap? Black garden;
then the black garden.
Pearls are bare,
grey gravities, the un-light.
In my garden of tiny lights

she gave her soft sigh, light-
ing the grove like a scream. Bare
trees, black streams, all light
remnants of the once fire. Light –
laughter fluttered like clothes.
A pall that suggested light
is just saddened lightning; light
is air aflame, every gate is a moon;
Night's a hole cut by a thief, light
stealthed away to his hideout, some garden
gone fallow. A garden

of bone. Garden-
ing at dusk, light
burnishes dusk. Garden-
ing through laughter, garden-
ing through Sunday: it happens. Bare-
ly, but God allows it. Allows detsu gardens,
gardens
where we may doff ashen clothes.
What are clothes?
Drapery to hide us from night. Garden,
o garden of black night. Moon,
o moon, you serve moon-

light like ice. Moon-
light like sad clothes
burning, smoke draping the moon.
The soul, when stung by moon-
light,
dissolves; drifts moon-
ward – or so I dream. Beneath the moon –
one of many that hang like bats, bar-
ing themselves to this little audience – bare
lovers can't stand to part. The moon
has no such trouble, exchanging light
for light, each night, like clothes.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Busker’s Partner

Pick me up and lay me in your lap.
Rest Botticelli hips on your legs
one hand on my stomach the other on my neck.

Fingers on my nape pluck
murmurs and sighs from emptiness.

Then choke me
rub my gut hole
up down up down up down
people coming from all around
I'm rattling into song
you're howling
like Dylan's dog

'til the coins are cased
clipped away

lean me

against the wall

smoke your post-tune cigarette
I'll straighten out my thin bones

and re-apply my lipstick

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Poet

I'm the very picture of red-lipped
hot-blooded petulance:
you comment on the glow of my cheeks –
rouge has done wonders

for my complexion. You see,
I'm usually very pale, & look as though
I'm wasting away. A touch of colour,
& I suddenly take on

all the lethargic allure of consumption.
I mean, the truth is,
I'm being consumed by madness. My eyes see
your face, everywhere, in every

thing. In fact, all my work,
these scribblings, well – they're all
about you, somehow.
Except, nothing I write comes from me

at all – it's like there's something
else, some voice
inside my head,
or maybe something larger –

speaking through me.
And also, you see,
I am likely to die
violently, any moment now,

by my own hand. My life's work
will be cut short,
and people will lament the death of another
thirty-something smoking housewife.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Gestation

This is the way I want it: the risk like sex,
unprotected, its gender unknown,
its anomalies untested and what is perfection?

This shape, my new scoliosis as permanent
as the lengthening shadow of my abdomen.
I hope, I hope for nothing but a simpler metrics.

And psycho-babble: before there is a sound
there is a movement that is sound-full
and then the hard talk of fluid.

And the doppler effect: it transforms the abstract
to the concrete for what else could make
that whooshing? Yet there is my own heart.

So if meaning can be stroked into anything,
stuck waiting for assistance out of a chair
on the timber deck, I am the umbilicus.

doing nothing, my new predilection
is sore feet: inch by inch my first language
if only I could minus the nerve endings.

Here, give me a leg-up, I'm sweating primed
for escape, skewiff as I sway-sway between
a diminished focus where the toilet is and I am.

I know I am an animal and standing bent
is just a thing you get used to like defecation
and my position is squat and deliver.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Jeep

Know your luck, stray from it as soon as it is known. Luminous party – despite a sky purple with rage, pummelling taxis. Formulaic, these desires seem very old and I can't stop tearing up the evidence. Life gets sodden in the torrential rain. The horror is, so far I approve only of this moment. Spirituality a la Hollywood interposes its blank cheque and I wish I had a particular friend with whom to drink. That place with the black walls, the unending core. It taught me to keep promises. It's just like the Hotel California: check out any time you like but you cannot leave. This city is a map of adaptive desire, like the DNA of a tree. Thoughts spill into my lap. I shake them back into the air like an apron full of daisies.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

The Mini-Series

Dads play with old train sets –
'It wouldn't kill you to be nice.'

On the soft beach
when there's no surf.

It's the little things you do
for five per cent deposit.

The bar is empty
Send them home to their wives.

The violinist has abandoned
the orchestra, the pits.

Stepping into the great southern ocean
no preservatives, all natural.

Saints on TV
when tomorrow is another day.

The lovebirds should be fun
the actor is now far too old.

The steam age has returned
get the baby and the billy can.

Rates are fixed for six months
but you better finish your beer.

'We'll all die using pills.'
We ride the white horses.

I cannot accept that
the dollar is steady.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Air Frost

Patrick Jones: Air Frost

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Powder-monkey for Luigi

He arrived from Italy in 1952.
20 years old with “Just enough
English to get by.” Started work
at the reservoir in 1955. Was
nationalised in Williamstown in 1956.

I arrived outside his house one
sunny afternoon in 1992. I knew it
was his place before I spotted
the number, his son with a bucket
of soapy water, washing his monaro
in the drive.

Still with the water works after
37 years, he shook my hand
with pride. Proudly introduced me to
his wife and family. The good mate
wwho lived next door.

Even then, before I could start
the interview, he had to show me
the vegie garden. Explain the tomatoes,
cucumbers and zucchini. Open
a bottle of beer.

“I was in charge of a group
of Greek men,” he said, explaining
the detonation pattern he used to blast
the spillway into shape. “I couldn't
speak Greek, and they couldn't understand
me.”

10 drilling holes to lay 200
charges of gelignite, hooked up to a
main lead 500 feet long, the whole
show orchestrated by the
universal language of waving hands.
Shaking and nodding heads. Later,

in the spring, for only the
second time, the reservoir flooded
down the spillway. And as I watched
the foamy lace-like patterns
the water made, spilling out across
the concrete face, I thought of Luigi
and his men.

And for a moment felt the shudder
of exploding earth under my feet,
like the first time they set foot
on Australian soil.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Midnight Cowboy

You do your dreaming on Greyhound buses
do all your dreaming between destinations

In the New York smog will follow you like a hangover
you'll buy a postcard to catch a view
hustle women with hard-baked skin
by asking directions to the Statue of Liberty

Why should these diamond hearted women pay for sex
when you've got Free Lunch written all over you?

the starts here aren't silver spurs
you'd better get your blonde as creamed-corn self
your white picket fence of a smile off the street corner, 'Boy',
out of the dark glimmer of a movie theatre
where your dick slips pale &#amp; limp out of some guy's hand

This is no wide open range, no B-grade western
&#amp; you are, 'Honey', B-grade all the way
just another cliche staggering through neon

A bummed cigarette, the flicked tongue
of a lighter in the palm of your hand
is the closest you'll come
to a happy ending.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

A Rare Talent

The ability to recognise samples,
to pinpoint the source of a sound
the slides from left to right speaker
under the drum track, under the bass,
weaving between the snare and the hi-hat
and is gone in an instant,
the ability to smile knowingly
and reference such sounds,
to be able to say with confidence
that it's a five second grab
from the opening track
on Duck Rock, Malcolm McLaren's
1983 experimental world music opus,
and to be able to go further,
to cite the two hit singles that came
from that album, or to be able to
recite an amusing anecdote from
the days when he was the manager
of the Sex Pistols – this ability,
while undeniably interesting
in and of itself, and while it might
even be considered to be entertaining,
and even though it is a truly
unjust reflection of the time and effort
you have expended in order to possess
it, this ability will be of absolutely no use
to you in that job interview next week.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Australia

Ross Fitch: Australia

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Walking Through the Blue Gate

Walking through, in/out: my son a shadow? His mind marks the boundaries, he
sees only mercy. Out of my quiet yard and body – a threat to nothings. Confusion
fails and a clear truth emerges from my thigh…
In my skirts I carry his birthdays, I'm the ring: he's the stone.

I feel like I've eaten last week's donuts. I take on the uncommitted sins of my
unborn children. Storms will come, I'm not there but only passing. I take not a
teaspoon of hell to my lips, but of the waters of heaven I take great draughts.

Feet grow slowly, blisters quickly, in the living room they grow like mushrooms. In
my books I travel, in my mind I live and die the deaths from overhead wires and
hawks. My father instructed me in the abstract, ensured the real was ever strange.

 
*
 

Angels aren't opposites, there's always a human figure to draw on. What are we
burning? There's gold in death, and cold ash, I taste it with you: every embrace the
last.

Like an epic, dozens of my generation go mad and are infected; I feel nothing; I
observe from my post behind her ear, as we go singing through the gate.

This is my fit, frame by frame. I wait, as if a child, for the terrible experience. The
lies and truth combine in the error only I can tell. I choose the orange – it reveals a
murderer's face. If anyone knew if it suited me, what would it mean? I've already
used it, they've already copied me.

Where you're going means Japanese colours, cool denim drinks at the innocent's
club. I see their destinations, crunch on its magic. I sent you on, noone knows
why. I couldn't be the tears that formed you, my heart the subjective pump. That
act changed me, made me the mother I'll always envy.

 
*
 

I dabbed soil on my son's brow, a Russian treatment for ego.

Wilde, Borges, Foucault – a pie I foil and carry. Orphaned by god, I become the
sunlight on the gate ( that I interrupt), the moth asleep (that I wake). Suffering for
belief has many forms (all traps). What have I added to my cv since '75, since 9
o'clock? I drank you like beer, like an alcoholic, like banana milk, like piano music.
I run when not under observation, now I twine like wisteria, an old lilac soul.

It's a lonely moral, a shock to the emptiness of knitting, channel-surfing. I've never
done this before.

 
*
 

Jesus reflects on my glasses – or fire does. Nietzsche's child's the garden's
apostrophe. You'd think I'd nothing in common with love, but I look to it in secret. I
tell the gate of my loneliness, overlaying the morning's music, embarrassing the
peony. It's my fit, my gamble, my fellatio. There's no over, this isn't a cover. If only I
was Kuan-Yin. Inside me are countless reactions. I sear and scrape. Will I wake
up Australian? Will I save anything? Cool any flame? The flowers tremble in their
heresy.
I've been shown the killing example, and go through the motions. I lie to both sides.
Absolve me. I couldn't get a girl so I headed for ecstasy. There's no through.
Suppose it's night. I pretend to normality, I don't shake, or scratch; avoid mystique
and metaphysique. In my leotard invisible against the gate, a red S on my chest
could be a cockscomb. I lack the military touch, the easy recycling of a million
stockings.

 
*
 

“I'm only Kafka,” I say on my way. The light is Keats; I lumber, prosaic. I do
everything, it's everywhere. I pretend to be a dream, I mar the peace of ash.

I fear the failure of the image: sitting with Whitman in olive tree silence. I can't leave
‘the sunlight,' can't go back ‘through the gate'. I risk Vedic sickness – but nothing
more – to draw the red from his skin. “Forget ice,” I say. Forget bodies.

Dream or nightmare? Them becomes em in my excitement. Centuries click over
(what was I reading?). I stop writing, regear my sensitivity. The past's always now
— in the scarlet whatever, in the cabbage damage. Blue stasis gives way.

I'll know the colour when I close my eyes (flickering with illness). Breaking for the
short timber.

 
*
 

My four fingers reach for you, my enigma enters you. We go into the winepress
together: you leave it alone. The worst comes and is still to come. Resignation
fights with expectations. Is fame the hand or cheek? The slow experiment
continues…

We die to become angels. The air and ways reverse. A teacher shames us for our
angst, yet our axes express a violence that rocks. My decadence consists in this: a
hydrangean childhood, brown last century glass. You think I can't stick Marx to
this?

The circumscribed spirit, the interpretive tendency: my German legacy? The Irish
ship played its radical part (convicts aside). The anachronisms of blood and
memory. A faint eroticism my hands can ignore. No parents in sight, no erasers
needed. Automatic sainthood.

 
*
 

Like riding, like fucking, I point my angelic toe. My psyche's cage opens. My
Catholic substance leads me along a line of despair, the first line I remember.

Into the city of thinking. What once was pseudo is orthodox. The revolution awaits
an eclipse, and then it's cloudy, there's the washing… The roses assemble
(they're prophets). I breathe in moonlight: avoiding nothing, embracing urgency.

Drowning in waterlight, I yell the “Prayer of the Hostile”. Iron clangs, semen burns
on the steps. This is not my beautiful life. I kneel down hard in the church of
anxiety. The comfort of splinters in lukewarm hands.

A subconscious Sunday. George Eliot without a novel. The dirt erupts and my feet
relax. I meet noone. Through the cold early fog, far from god's skin, I bring my
orange tone like snow, like a slow motion pinball. Forgive me – and I'm warm.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Beat

tap dancing vaudevillians
gypsy wagoned in crop circles
decked out with thumpers
and tweeters and sub-woofers
pumping out the hits of the 70s
snake charming smoke signals through the windows of combi
vans
staging puppet shows for the
community

come here angel dusted
snorting quick lime
blowing trumpets
clowning foolishly
winking at me like a star
playing all that folksy braided gnome music
complicating
my poor cartwheeling
toadstooling brain fungus
the little spores waiting there for the future
like eggs

i try to
concentrate on the
crop dusting,
killing insects,
cut and painting the little sprigs of willow
down by the river popping fuses

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Jelly-drunk by 11pm

The only thing I drank was stout beer.
I drank it compulsively,
I called it my 'milk'.
Now I've had 3 bottles and it feels ok so I'll go for some more.

I ran pell-mell to the bottle-o!
With each leap my leg-ligaments achieved a kind of ecstasy,
a kind of mild pain.
And as I ran, I secrungered sums of saliva in my mouth,
I spat 'the food' onto that street there.

I walked into the bottle-o and I watched an insect bounce
arrhythmically off a light-bulb, like a buzzing moon.
It made me laugh a tad,
I looked at
him; that other guy but he didn't laugh (Plainly: only the jokes
I laugh at are up to the current standards.)
'I prefer coke mixed from
a syrup,' he explained to his girl.

I bought some excellent stout beer made in South Australia,
my favourite kind; 'Southwark',
and as I walked home I saw a vagrant and considered myself
to be the artist coz I looked at that ugly, haggard old man
as if he was a thing of beauty.
(I was filled to the brim, I thought, with no talent.)

At home, I sat at my desk and watched a cockroach for a while.
The cockroach, I imagined
as a solid shell of crystal charcoal.
But then I just squashed it into a tissue didn't I.
Yes, I did.

And the temperature was just perfect.
I was cake-stoned, phone boned,
alive and joined like lego
to a childlike mood
passing
over me like a roar of joy.
My flesh was keen,
I was binge-thinking about the times they guffawed at my jokes,
I was falling in love with new music,
I was contemplating an affair with the Virgin Mary.
See, I'm a fire-soldier;
I like pretending that I'm the king of the room
at parties.
In my head I take on the role of 'king'.
I went to the john didn't I.
I focussed and began lacquering the porcelain with my wis
and then I began drinking again in my room.
I imagined myself drinking the souls of those fermented plants.
I'm taking these vegetable souls with me, I thought.

Drunk and movement on the roof,
a special episode at the dunny.
I piss and concentrate on the glistening circle of light.
By now I've had about 10 standard drinks
and my blood is warm like my skin
in spring
when the thawing sun strikes it
as I leave the shade…

And later I come across all kinds of advice to myself,
desperately scribbled in journals:
'When you drink… when drunk,
you may drink with a drunken, heedless energy.
But when you're sober,
you regret drinking poison
with the energy of the ocean (a flower).'

Now, I'm listening intently to those beats there on the radio
and I feel around for a pen.
I love the leather feel of the pen in my jelly raw fingers,
so I write something, something very serious.

Note for tomorrow:
The rapport I have with drink
seems gentle and friendly for now,

like clag glue.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Grey Sundays and Unanswered Prayers

Συννεφιασμενη Κυριακη μοιαζειζ με την καρδια μου*

α.

It took one song, the song of grey Sundays and unanswered prayers

a bottle of whiskey and two shots of Koumandaria, sweeter than whiskey

but the deeper diver, a plate of olives and bread

half a packet of Karellia and the mere smell of weed, the loss of half

week’s pay on a poker game with greedy brother-in-laws

the loss of wife’s respect when she searched pockets the next day

and he moved in trance from corner table to the middle of the room, found himself

in the sacred space where every table and chair parted and the smoke couldn’t

penetrate, nor the eyes or mouths of the watchers, he closed his eyes anyway

became awash in music and lyrics, grey Sundays and unanswered prayers

he knew the ritual of Zembekiko, better than a Priest knew the liturgy

hands raised just above head like they were nailed in midair

but those hands were fighting against life, not death, two fingers clicked the

steady rhythm of wave against rock, an arm swung loose like a broken mast

then up erect again, a crazed battle over gravity

to untrained eyes he might have seemed drunk and disorderly, a dance of madness for sailors on a sinking ship, but the stumbles forward were timed precision

each hop, step and whack from hand to foot a chaotic sequence of storytelling,

he is the eldest son, with mortgage-one to father and mortgage-two

to bank, and the wife’s ten years younger, into Beatles and the truth

money is made scaling and slicing frozen fish, the knife often plays funny tricks

pretends to carve into sea flesh but finds human, mostly his, and the doctor

throws him morphine when his stitching back the skin but won’t give him any

extra for those slow nights when the pain’s sunk in and he wakes up to grey Sundays and unanswered prayers…
 
 
β.

Outside the blue sky swamped by the grey, turns temperamental

storming those inside shadows of candle flame, incense smoke

and many heads tinted with years of prayer, bend even lower to receive

the blessed chant Δοζα Πατρι και τω Υιω και τω Αγιω Πνευματι…

in the back pew he sits with others who hover between worship and sin

he’s there as eldest son, as husband, as father, his daughter is now old enough

to cross herself from right to left, he tilts her head to the floor when the Priest

passes by dipping olive branch into goblet of holy water, and flick, flick flicking

showering heads, he wants the water to bless her little soul but he never bends low enough, his eyes get stung by the divine, the hanky is dragged out

to wipe away unwelcome tears, his little girl reaches for hanky too

to dry her wet curls, he puts hanky away, she says Please, he says No, he wants the holy water to stay with her as long as possible, she still has a chance.

 
 
γ.

The girl is nine but could pass as twelve, she thinks more than she talks imagines more than she prays, likes to cross herself from left to right when her Dad’s not looking, if Dad could just once take her with him when he visited the Priest

behind the altar, behind the wall of golden framed Christs, Virgin Marys and Saints, behind the sliding doors that look like Royal Gates, behind the large eye of God that never stops staring at her, there’s the sacred space where men and boys can go and they hold these private talks about… about?… she’s asked Mixali, her cousin to tell her, It’s not your business, he says with the authority of his father, girls are forbidden, another brat, Tony, will tell her what goes on if she gives him her entire stamp book, but the stamps are from Russia and China and Yiayia gave her the old and young Makarios stamps, she can’t, so she’s never told

she waits with the widows, wives and daughters, some wondering more loudly than others, τι κανουν μεξα κει, παιξουν χαρτια? they drinking wine that’s what they do, holy business, it’s holy business, private, sssshhhhh

the men and boys slink out, silent, the Priest remains, chanting from scripture

the girl’s Dad takes her by the hand out of the Church into the bright… the sun has now run away from the clouds, she lets go of her Dad and runs all the way to the car

never stopping to look back.

 
 

δ.

She saw her Dad rise from the table like he was being blessed by invisible hands

they drew him forth to the dance floor, the cigarette lay limp in his mouth, a forgotten friend, he raised his hands and became anointed with bouzouki and song, everybody was watching her Dad, nobody talked, nobody clapped, he was their guardian from the other side, he would dance the battle of life and death for them, he would risk his sanity for theirs, she wanted to help him, to dance the madness away with him, to search for the unsteady feeling and bang it into submission, she got up because the hands wanted to bless her too, she wished she was old enough to smoke so the cigarette could hang from her mouth too, she knew there was feeling before there were steps, and this dance had no human teacher, and she clicked her fingers like wave against rock, her Dad opened his eyes, his face became as stern as it was in Church, she had entered the sacred space, girls are forbidden, ssshhhhh, hide

she swung herself back to the corner but Dad caught her arm in flight, held it to his, placed the hanky in her hand and nodded, she was Allowed In, the hanky flapped in her hand, a strong sail in a crazy wind, and they danced to sorrow and sin.
 
 
 

* The first line from a famous Greek rembetiko song (Tsitsanis, 1943): 'Cloudy Sunday, you look like my heart.'

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Tramz

Maibee dhai point aor wai hoem flangkt biiy erlen u gauntlet uv lantenz and maibee noebul beests hou greet us winsing and groening yet kwiiyetur dhan rain aar onvoiz: good mauning good kreetcur, wel met! Dhats wot ii wont tou sai wen ii see you ugain and iim steeming, breedhing dragen uv flaimz uv daun wingkz uloen on dhiy erliy wotc wuns maur.

Wun mauning peetur tompsen sed welkum tou wintur, u kiind tiim, kleen tiim, tiim tou riflekt and ubiid in krisp teerbreez fresh frum waistlandz daon saoth; dhen dhu skii bigan tou tern and dhen kaaz kaim aot liik joguz aur pijenz, tiim and plais mistureez ur antholujeez, songz and tailz rilaited on pasij-hum, wooshez ulong roedz leeving hoem.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Patti Smith Was Right

these cold, known objects
are not very likeable –
aluminium frames
& curved glass with optical tricks –
but I am 'at ease'
at this show,
there are some nice little-grin ideas –
like television
screening outside
on the suburban home's front lawn,
& time-delay verité videos
to amuse the usually uncrackable
hardened gallery-goer

 
*
 

have I flipped ? into a strangely placid
political zone a lack of clutter
and environmental concern –
these things are so simple,
two hours here & I begin to enjoy
Dan Graham
more than Soutine, Braque, Delaunay,
Bourgeois, Basquiat, Sherrie Levine,
Agnes Martin – although
I can not deny my memory
of her beautiful mid-1960's picture –
'Milk River' –
nor her small collection
of pick-up trucks
glinting with polish – all driveable
& parked
outside her desert home.

 
*
 

I spend over an hour watching,
surrendering to
Dan Graham's big 'Rock/God' video
that makes a simple
anthropological connection
between US tribal & religious ritual –
group dancing, shaking, speaking in tongues-
and mosh pits and rock music –
so when Patti Smith sings
Jesus died for somebody's sins
but not mine
I am converted.

 
*
 

Patti Smith was right,
twenty-five years ago,
to say that rock music,
meaning, then, for her, punk-rock,
would replace painting
& sculpture
as representative of untranscended
life itself.

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Catalogue: Life As Tableware

accessorise with simple, elegant shapes
choose muted bones, the subtle variations of sin
harvested from the last century

the alluring sparkle of toenails and teeth
and the reflective qualities of glazed eyes
mix well with hair
shorn from a passive
human animal
to be woven into the fabric of your life

Item:
A bound foot in classic white china
suitable for any occasion: $9.00

A pair of ankles
shaped into aluminium platters
Small $16.95, large $44.95

Wrinkled knees of hand-woven
cotton and fragrant vestier reed. $16.95

The pelvis makes an ideal drinks trolley
or side table. Drak cherry, 54 cm diameter. $129

The torso has a mirrored
black plate to reflect and increase
the drama of the spine. $27.95

The head, a contemporary form in silver-
painted timber. Small, $82, large $125

Ceramic brown cheekbones
work beautifully as a serving platter
or candle plate. $44.95

Existence is funky and retro. Life comes in a dark
cherry-stain timber veneer
with chrome frame. Mortality is made
from top quality stainless steel. Humanity is
smoothly polished aluminium inside,
a charcoal finish outside. $119

Posted in 09: MUSIC | Tagged

Paul Mitchell Interviews Kevin Hart

Do you have, as the pop song goes, the 'music in you'?

I think the music of words is always in me, almost to the exclusion of any other sort of music, and perhaps necessarily so for me. I almost never play music at home – I like to work in silence – and I'm completely uneducated in music.

Continue reading

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged ,

Paul Mitchell Interviews Paul Grover

Studio: a Journal of Christians Writing recently turned 20. In its pages it has published the work of a variety of Australian writers, including Les Murray and Kevin Hart. Paul Mitchell spoke to the journal's managing editor, Paul Grover, about the spirit in the journey.

Continue reading

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged ,