Skye is a 2 bit whore:
“The Nomads Motorcycling Club are inviting local residents”

jumping castles on Chinchen Street filled with April fools.

Walking down the drain as a form of object oriented ontology (ooo)

eventually finding every piece of a child’s rubber jigsaw mat,

as the local kids obliviously, trick or treat their HQ.

When I need to flatter it I reference South King Street twenty years ago:

the pebblecrete poles of the East End speaking to an historicist melancholy

plastered all over Instagram. The soundtrack still Bob Hudson in the 70s,

 ‘eh geday’, or mythic 80s youth working at The Waratah Philadelphia

Cream Cheese Factory listening to ‘How Soon Is Now?’

These days you can catch a straight-edge punk food-blogging his morning eggs

Benedict or a container ship called ‘Fiction’ loaded with speculative realism.

The newspaper tells me that, in America,

nine little baby girls called Pistol were born last year.





pj harvey
c’mon billy. you said

something. (down

by the water.)

in chinatown, hungover.

so i draw a line.

baby, baby. (bad mouth.)

kamikaze. i want a pistol,

i want a gun.

parked in ultimo.

wait, what? brutalist.

up past fox studios,

that thai place. coogee.

new year’s eve

(on a rooftop in brooklyn)





one nation
misato is serving drinks & miyuki

is waiting tables & haru is at

her second job & kohei’s in the kitchen

but miki took the day off & miu hasn’t

been seen in weeks. clive is on a call &

chris rolled out early & mikey’s playing

hockey & haruki’s getting his knees

checked out. i’m in the basement,

mixin’ up the medicine. it’s all so political.

(so poetic. much artifice. the doge, like in

venice.) search & destroy, kids,

search & destroy. pauline was our palin,

a few years early. so aussie, so bondy,

karma considered as a credit card statement.





brisvegas misremembered
wish being et cetera to the excess

there’s no lack completely

lactose tolerant &

moderately middle-aged half

the wardrobe full of lycra

the rest is mostly uniqlo &

triathlons are best left to those who

can swim, lifeguards in a panic &

what a job description, what a lark,

collecting sisters & cousins until,

at the end of an eight hour

spreadsheet binge, you have to wonder

if frank saw it coming & decided to

simply embrace it, not that we need liquor





Caliope sits:
While Shok busks on Maitland Road, you feel better knowing he’s out there

doing it for all of us. The ghost of Leo Malley, shaking a fist like earthquake

damage to an awning. Tonight I’m watching the Chinese dating show

If You Are The One on SBS 2, and missing Fu Manchu.

Sympathy for Sydney’s poor cousin: the rough & tumblr

of a Lucas Grogan tea-towel and outside the gallery Brett Whitely

has laid a mothra of an egg. The aesthetic is a form of white primitivism

— who knew when I read those sonnets in the library, that I’d later be writing

them in situ, from an office in a world-class ‘gumtree’ University.

While you, the anti-Don Draper of Tokyo, can’t even enjoy a blade of grass

without a whisky handy. It must be Suntory Time, or bedtime (for democracy,

if not the kids). Oh public transport envy! But here the beaches

are over-exposed and under-developed, the surfers are analogue

and I still call all the pelicans at the Cowrie Hole, Mr Percival.





chinese signal
a baby designs a shovel & so he digs, courtesy

japan agriculture, as the climate of shame

elicits amnesia constantly, like yeats.

modernism read backwards is a prelude

to the victorians, & should we go to

the night markets again there’s more than

one hand she’d like to be holding, as if

the beach wasn’t a series of problems,

liminal, fluid, not set in stone & barely

a requirement, operators transcribing the

latest chinese signal, & to elicit a

dependency is a fine thing, among tokens

of her regard. she said / he said. they were

in the shower when the earth quaked





evidently absent
after you finish the re-org, that is, after you

write a last sonnet, that is, after the kids have

grown up, that is, once we’ve had enough of

each other & agreed it’s best to part, that is,

once you can read the newspaper & fill in

all the necessary forms, that is, after you’re

tired of waiting & hopelessness, that is,

if you feel hopeless on occasions, well, why

not, you’re not an idiot, that is, before

the minute hand sweeps around to begin the next

cycle, but just as it announces the current

cycle’s end, that is, after the regrets &

bitterness have aged to a sheen, that is, then,

& only then, capriciousness permitting.





religious
as the buddha said,

we’re all out of our fucking minds!

& later, relaxed into groundlessness,

returned again & again,

to the breath, to a slightest motion,

pissing everything against a wall.

& wrapped quietly, giggling,

as the buddha said, relaxed,

into groundlessness, again & again,

returned, pissing everything

out of our fucking minds!

& later, the breath,

a slightest motion.

a wall, as the buddha said.





Paleo:
The Hamilton Station Hotel with its neon on the blink versus the Hoshino

resort’s endamame on high, perched above the clouds.

Walking with my mother out the breakwater, as she casts her life’s segue

into and out of the human genome. There’s a Misao Okawa in us all,

drinking hot chocolates the way our ancestors made them.

You know we once shared a stage with Jen Cloher, who last year toured

to Tennant Creek. I remember speeding down the Sturt Hwy in a hotted up

red hire car singing ‘Lady Marmalade’, and nearly hitting a brumby.

Now, I’m hardly living in Detroit though a local shop sells pannikins

and Mason jars, the post-industrial as an in situ conceit.

There are small advances, like how I can now walk into a hospital ward

without fainting, read historical fiction, sleep in the same bed as someone.

I finished Burial Rites yesterday and finally switched the car radio

to ABC Classic FM, surprised the breakfast announcer ums.





again
discounting the eschatology of fail in

the eating & drinking corner (toranomon,

toranomon), your number, waiting for it

to be called, popular song continues

without you, everyone you ever wanted is

here to assist, insufferable diplomas

arranged on the wall & when the doctor

anaesthetises your inner ears you flail &

fall as horny as a teenager but what

you normalise returns & fades on the

ginza line, desire ranged along carriages,

& some time after, back in shimbashi,

a small tremor, two boys look out the window,

watch the signs swing above the ginza lion





unwanted, unwashed
japanese brides drink red wine in the rose

garden as hiro mimes concern, milking

his suave baby’s aplomb. i was

dreaming when i wrote this &

you’re going to the beach all day. shame

about the rain, about the platitudes.

umbrella town. café under the keikyu line,

11:38 am, it is saturday, june 11 in the

year of earthquake fever. you know how

we smell after sex? you wanna smell like

that now? i mean, in a little while? there’s

work to be done first. unwanted,

unwashed. you get used to the weird.

someone starts up their limousine.





switcheroo
the first time with a broken arm is

hardly duchampian, although

the circumstances approach

& you can, after a fashion,

make art from it, appearing heartless

or detached at best.
afterwards, the psychodrama returns,

amplified & obtuse in a third language.
what you miss most, if you stop to think,

is the thrill of quotation, life as

a series of in-jokes.
so to irony, yeah? you’re travolta &

you’re nic cage, the doves wheel

& teeter, heading skywards.





Coal and Cedar:
There’s a middle-aged woman painting abstract expressionism in Maryville

and a valley full of Rothko in the fluro vest economy, reminds me

of my OCD Down’s brother’s un-necessary wardrobe (a cos-play council

worker). Driving past the Diocese there’s the besser block housie hall,

the tribunal tucked around the corner (annulling). There’s always a local

Weegee with his point and click: the actual being virtualised and the virtual

actualised. I’m too lazy with a camera but sometimes I do notice a detail

that proves I’m not a replicant: the milk bottle shaped glass in the Deco Dairy

Farmer’s Building (now selling cars). Once, out on a boat on the harbour,

I caught an eel that nearly cut off its own blood supply wrapping itself around

the line (a bit like these poems). As the white whale, Mingaloo (with hardly a

barnacle on him), snuck past. Some of the old fellah surfers have eyes as blue

as the ocean, but you know it’s bogus, like un-signposted speakeasy bars

the public secret is still knowing what not to know. 





saturday
it returned plucking flowers in the field

on the stroll road. (we were out of it,

your majesty, but you wouldn’t be

bloody dead for quids.) i went to newcastle

once, he said, inaccurately. now & forever,

up from betty bay, or sitting on the steps in

coogee, smoking furiously. it returned,

plucking flowers. life’s a shambles,

a friggin’ shambles. watching pokemons

watching pokemons fight with pokemons.

sometimes on TV. sunday, monday, off

on tuesday. in the field. behind on payments.

shambling on the stroll road. protocol?

protocol. tomorrow isn’t saturday.





superdemander
less an age than a phase, more transient,

earlier versions too frail to fail so here we are

& here we go again, waiting for a seat in

the smoking section to clock hourly updates,

temperature data in real time via sms

as if, once recorded on a spreadsheet,

the domain can be flattened & constrained,

retiring the risk of mistaking the model for the

system. last year was teal & this year is lilac

& next year you might conceivably finish, but

first, the official television of FC Barcelona &

so on, it’s hard to ignore the superdemander,

not that we’re more strung out than usual,

not that we’re actively thinking to ignore





russians
you have to get drunk to read

in translation, whitman via o’hara

via mayakovsky via the keikyu line,

usually you catch the 7:43 & transfer

at shinagawa. the kids are asleep

& europe is a hot mess while america is

only a mystery & later we can run

around the palace & debate ethics until

the cows come home, lowing quietly

as the skyline shifts & shimmies.

a tractor in otemachi would be a fine thing.

the best poetics are completely mad,

she said, just totally barking, otherwise

all you have are performance reviews.