sometimes i think of people as looking

like pam brown

sometimes i’m actually thinking of

helen garner

sometimes maggie beer

who i try keep out of mind

as best i can but she

often sneaks in any way
i see a person in the park

they look like my grade prep teacher

she passed away recently and her

stuff – bookshelves, dining chairs –

were put on the nature strip

dad saw them when he was

doing his route

and asked me if i wanted any of it
i see someone playing giant jenga

and he looks like atticus finch

he’s kiwi and has tattoos and he

gives me a cider

because i can open his bottle 
i go to sydney and i see

pam brown wearing an army camouflage jacket
luke saw helen garner at la trobe

she was feeling a little faint

i thought i saw helen garner at the zoo once

in the butterfly room

but i looked over to my niece to make sure she was ok

and the vision was all of a sudden gone
i see jacky from high school on the train

she smiles at me

she’s wearing a black dress

thinking about abstract expressionism 
sometimes i see industrial zoning

and i think of javant biarujia

i think of peter bakowski’s famous

beret…………………

on the highest shelf at

hill of content bookshop, shimmering

then i feel that if people, generally, looked more

like ania walwicz

our cities would be more beautiful

in an interesting way
i’m going to the movies

and i see some guy who looks like

georg grosz

and i get to worrying

he looks like a beware of the dog sign
on the bike path i think i see warren whitney

miss that guy, what a good face

remember him wearing a free palestine

t shirt and shorts

bashing the white board with some new idea
sometimes i think of marty hiatt as

looking like a seal

other times as looking like a

disney cartoon prince
i like to think of pam brown

working as a postie in some golden year

wearing hi vis

picture this in melbourne because

i’m a narcissist 
i think of pam brown going to school in america

and meeting eileen myles

they probably wore

normal things

t shirts, trousers
i think of writers not as working class

but as middle class

without the steady money

at least i think i see things this way

my ideal job is working at a personal computer

in a giant, bustling room of people

and instead of doing my work

i’m writing poems
i imagine the working class not

as you say

in offices, but in factories

pate factories to be precise

i imagine shakespeare

wearing something irrelevant

to match his plays

as he does the visiting rounds like a storm
he’s no longer even into those ancient stories

even in a form that is possible to understand

by normal people

and we don’t care who’s putting it on! 
if you give shakespeare to a pate factory

say, in narre warren

they will probably churn it into the mix

along with the chicken livers and the peppercorns

i think of pate as kind of like d h lawrence
sometimes i think of people

as looking like d h lawrence

when i’m walking up a hill on some

generic holiday

and they do not wave or flag me down

and i run on