for Toby Fitch



Scrape hard for the ruins, duke,

I am at Heide thinking of birth

and you, you are at the NSW

thinking of Bacon and me.

Think hamburgers of slag metal

and contortion scrapped.

Agreed, cloister as bedroom,

as squat indefinition.

This is not the last we speak of Isao,

blistering light, the long-necked

poppies, calmatives, moral

cuckoldry, comeuppance-ville.

The orifices of the work were vistas

in the rambles, he vaunts, tied

weightless to the tallest tangerine,

buds not fruit like hung by nativity,

not kumquat, the genii to first

love affair’s drive in Lesmurdie,

homestead instead, pageant of weeping,

vacant workshop.

Hard-done-by severance nearby

still night, for you and me, we say, yes,

hard to come by such quality silence.

Flung spigot to the well flue,

well-deep cited to my surprise

is hardly treading.

And the waters of Yarra reflux,

which could’ve been aspic, after all.

You want money? What will Cashies

give for Edward Gordon Craig’s

screens? To stave off the present

drafted, instead – since summer’s

lovely hue cheapens the north-facing –

a gelding correspondence. They circle

Moonee Ponds racecourse bullet-shy,

cowboy and charlatan-dogged.
The Bacon I hope sealed that moratorium

where salvia booms, tendentious

cowed mass any place if drugged for the win,

hence the 10,000 falls easily. Winsome

salvia gave this Clifton Hill ramble

something to look forward to, when I give up

my taxi, that is, as lasso it makes a great

burden. Whence brew

no blues rushing, and at speed ugly, no doubt,

but the flesh accumulated, like that

Marinetti turn – if only he’d bartered

better with the spirit world – miraculous,

for flesh to tear all fleshly.
Enter attack of the beast, a consolation

as much as influential, since if favour for the machine

by Tiffany’s on Collins reproduces M. H.

shredding his unpurposive trachea,

I should like to ask M. H., who knows

Schopenhauer, how M.H. remains the denomination

common in a fruit fly transition?

Petitionary memo, yes, I decide otherwise, leaving it

to a reader to enjoy the more interesting task,

regarding denominators, of working out of which

M.H. here is speaking. Two or more.
Cloister as bedroom is best lit, and sharpest view

of the weeping pageant – doppelgangers too in the glare

of triffids. The lasso marks around this neck, the smoke trail.

There is no clean way to shirk devoted correspondents.