We all need a methodology to live by

To take just one example, Catholics are

rarely ashed on on the sports field, but

public life is another matter. Such

unfortunate exhibitions are not beyond

the episteme of The Sorrowful

Cappuccino, known locally as the

Foamo (and by the next town’s residents

as the Sad Flat White), either. Their own

eateries are nothing to skite about. The

area is known as a place, and as a way

of being, for a number of prelates, Irish-

Italian doyennes, anarcho-royalists …

They are if you like, the local memes

living like goats while hiding their elitism

under a glaze of pseudonyms and

nicknames. Much is projected onto the

local stock. Darth Vader for example,  is

a bull possessing his owner’s

temperament (he is referred to as In-Joke

by his owner). He himself only answers to

calls which include the names of food, or

cows. Roan Sarsaparilla is his favourite
When do we get back to the people, I

imagine exasperated readers fuming

sagging like wet matches in anticipation
Get there we will – once they’re out of

their shiny robes and we have paid our

dues to the district geese which patrol

this imaginary outpost of meta-colonial

Europe. Is it dream or allegory?

Marsupial geese!? (Yes they exist. More

strongly than we do in fact.) The

congeries of readers rouse, I like to think

at this point, pushing their catosaurs to

the floor to lick at hair and make their

terrible, but quiet music. We have been

here before of course: ritual is nothing if

not repetition; the geese as white as milk

flung on car ice. (Do I feel anything? Am

I frigid, too?) Geese exact tribute and

take it in their pouches, flying like

winged puddings or possums over

eucalypt orchards with their amazing fruit-

leaves. (So jammy!) What miracles we

live by and under on the south coast

made mundane by the poets, who must

beat it into our heads so our heads have

something to think with. This can only

be an overview, which much

fragmentation can also be read as. Geese

time has such a lovely wing-beaty quality

whatever the dropped young say. A

former pope lies on a couch by a window

(actually a bunch of quilted orange crates)

and reads Dumas to the other furniture he

has made. The pathos would be stronger

if decontextualised, and we saw not Darth

and Sarsaparilla going at it like pistons of

love on a float demonstrating emotions or

perhaps the wrong way to find a snake in

a hole. Not by just sticking your arm in. I

feel it is worth overstating, given the

chance of saving a life. But popes and

candlestick makers and dental floss

merchants from Cork all die more often

by falling out of trees and breaking their

falls with ropes, or trying to dry up their

uncried tears with pills and so on, any

wren will tell you humans don’t wait for

someone to knock on their front door

with an axe. If you’re human you already

know that. It’s not usually part of the

intro but something morbid’s gotten hold

of my tongue tonight, maybe a little ghost

peg. Maybe a little grey pear moth trying

to have its say – but a good spit should

send it on its way. I’m really just trying to

evoke something of the life on the green

hills or ridges, I don’t mean to exaggerate

the slopes that wind to the houses that

have no reason for being there really

except that people live in them. Anyone

would think they were castles or chapels

the way people hold onto them, and give

them names like Chartres, or Medici

View. As indeed the Medici Creek does

run by this  address. It’s known as the

Bloodstream to the school kids, who

like to mock. Medici is a local

abbreviation for medicine, and the

waters are miraculously healing when

consumed in sensible amounts, and if

sourced upstream of sickening bathers
A Duchess, who had a Milanese aura

some said, and was in hiding from some

love affair of another century, or

flirtation with devil worship, or perhaps

was sensitive to the fumes of cars, or the

sounds of punk bands and pooper

scoopers on city cement, and who liked

to while away her leisure hours making

badminton rackets from leftover chicken

coops or unwatched apple trees, was the

owner of Sarsaparilla, but luckily had no

drama-generating notions of keeping

Darth and Sars apart. ‘Lettuce sandwich’

she would call, ‘cheezels’ and the two

would come jogging in her direction to

be fed, not necessarily on those things

cited, but whatever was handy and vego
You see how, if we carry on long

enough, the mysteries fall away, and the

monks come out of their collective

wombat holes. Their disregard for money

illustrated by the bags of ducats and

doubloons that are stored and go

untouched in the area’s damson trees. A

word I once thought was the male version

of damsel, and whenever there were

lightning storms, and the counts – and

countesses – went slashing with their

cutlasses through the gardens and yards, I

would giggle to myself, damsons in

distress! damsons in distress! Readers

may wonder why I never touched the

moneybags, or presume I was scared to

but that would be to misunderstand the

different realms that we inhabit. Or to

put it another way, it would disorder

everything. When I go into The

Sorrowful Cappuccino and talk to the

waiters, whose names are Mark and Jo

but are known by rather vulgar

nicknames, and call themselves Pablo

and Dora, I don’t let the food items

know that I can hear them complaining

or that the chair supporting the cushion I

sit on would rather be reading Ferrante

by the absorption method: I stay strictly

within the fictonormative bounds

because tentative new, or fantastically

old realities are fragile, and I want the

geese to stay put in the sky and the hills

and ridges, and the phony, or time-

travelling analogies, with their midnight

chess matches, and their Borgia cuisine

competitions, and their spontaneous foot-

path lectures on gruel etiquette and crypt

aesthetics, to stay alive, in all the poetic

senses of the word