Acknowledgements
Versions of poems in this collection have previously appeared in ars poetica, Blue Like Tea anthology (Five Islands Press, 2000), Coppertales, Divan, eClang, Hobo, Imago, Journal of Australian Studies (JAS), Linq, Mangrove, Modern Movement, New Music: an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry (Five Islands Press, 2001), Red Lamp, Resurgence (UK), Short Fuse anthology (USA), SideWalk, Social Alternatives, Small Packages, The Drunken Boat (USA), Verandah and on the 1998 ABCTV special, Voices.
Bacchanalia was written with assistance from a 1997 Individual Project Grant from Arts Queensland.
Many thanks to the hard men and women of Queensland poetry – particularly Melissa Ashley,
Paul Hardacre, Jayne Fenton Keane and Samuel Wagan Watson for their encouragement and support.
This book is dedicated to S.P. Krause.
Contents
1. Kurilpa (Place of Rats)
Kangaroo Point Field, 1830
Musgrave Park, 1897
Brereton Street, 1993
Of Ants and Men
Birdhouse
Browning Street
Montague Road
Orleigh Park
Lorca In Highgate Hill
Odin in Sussex Street
Ragnarok
Paul
Paul 2
The Week it Rained Forever
Observations From the Herb Garden
The Male Project
Caul
Always Be a Fin, Circling
Why Did the Chicken Strangle Itself?
2. Bacchanalia
Hammer
Tongue of Shells
Rural Epidural
Yellow Spot
Crow the Birdbrain
Strawberry Season
How the Man Became a Flower
Stars in My Eyes My Country
1234 I Love the Marine Corp
Fleshpetal
Butterfly Effect
The Green Emerald of Dying
A Brief History of Sperm
Cincinnati Zoo, 1914
Il Duce
Colditz
Flowers From Hell
Chernobyl
Snake
Virgins
Time & Cock
All Poetry
On Wookiees, the SAS & Poetry
Les Murray, Removalist
1. Kurilpa (Place of Rats)
Kangaroo Point Field 1830
after a couple of days
he began to stink.
when the wind was right
you could smell him
clear to woolloongabba
& cowper’s plains.
the stick which held his
head up from his chest
broke under the dead
weight of his chin.
from a distance he looked
asleep or deep in prayer
blessing the cornfield
& its ripe, molten ears.
his arms tied with hemp
turned him into some kind
of ship’s figurehead – a triton
lashed to the bow of brisbane.
straw, seeped from the wounds
of his crucifixion like water
& blood jetting out of jesus.
this bogeyman propped up
to frighten his own people
from kangaroo point.
flies, crawled over his skin
anointed his wounds
with the black litany
of their fleet tongues.
as the afternoon waned
his shadow departed from
the scarecrow of his body
tip-toed to the edge
of the cornfield & hesitated:
this old spirit unsure
of its powers
of botanomancy
in the midst of this new
green industry.
sometime later as
night settled upon him
sticky as a cobweb,
the southern cross drained
into the cup of his skull
like a strong, dark liquid.
in the morning
the crop lay flattened.
his effigy was
nowhere to be found.
Musgrave Park, 1897
We plant’d seedlin’s over the bodies.
It was hard work diggin’ inta the shale
splint–earth but someone had ta do it.
I ‘d only carv’d out four feet of rock
when the skin off me palms separat’d
like cream off the top of fresh milk.
‘Ere I was in Musgrave Park,
in the middle of the blackest night
I ‘d seen in thirty seasons of skirmishin’.
Not since ‘66 when we run ‘em Mick
& Kraut squatters out of the park, had I
seen such a ruckus as this business.
We had the most trouble with Billy.
He was a big bastard & didn’t want ta go.
Kept playin’ the grinnin’ fool & laughin’
in our faces. We wip’d the smile clean off
his nosh tho’. I still piss me’self at the stupid
look he gave us when Smithy put a ball
in his chest. His hole need’d lot’s of work.
Me hands felt like a draughthorse had trod
on ’em. ‘Em young’uns was much easier ta
do in tho’. We didn’t waste our bullets –
clubb’d ‘em like they was a pair of possums.
Their missus kick’d up a real stink after that,
scratch’d at our eyes like a bitch on heat.
I did ‘er with me bowie knife like a fat sheep.
Dunno what kinda trees theys were. Some
that used ta grow ‘ere, I think. But theys sure
shot up quick as houses in West End.
Must have bin the horseshit we shovell’d in.
Or all that water from the big flood. I retir’d
from the corp after that. Went & start’d me
own orchard up on Dornoch Terrace.
Ya should’a seen ‘em oranges.
Big as suns sinkin’ inta the flesh of Mt Coot-ha.
‘Em trees are still there, if you look hard enough.
The wind in their leaves;
roots scrapin’ over shale bones.
Brereton Street, 1993
Musgrave Park
The hoop pines could do nothing.
Nor the kauri, nor the figs.
Brereton Street, Sub-station
The handcuffs could do nothing.
Nor the choke hold, nor the vomit.
Oxford Street, Hostel
The mag-lite could do nothing.
Nor the gutter, nor the gun metal moon.
Brisbane City Watch house
The police could do nothing.
Nor the blue lights, nor the red lights.
Royal Brisbane Hospital
The emergency staff could do nothing.
Nor the oxygen, nor the i.c.u.
Brisbane Transit Centre
The glass doors could do nothing.
Nor the blue men, nor the black men.
Brereton Street Footpath
The concrete could do nothing.
nor the frangipani, nor the chain-link fence.
No one could do anything
on the 7th November, 1993
in West End.
Of Ants & Men
Now that it is gone
& the concrete ejaculate
has stiffened on the pale earth;
it is hard to remember what used
to be there on the corner of Russell
& Edmonstone Streets.
In Musgrave Park
the Jagera man stands in
silhouette underneath the thick
crane arms of a Moreton Bay fig,
remembering how good Babylon felt.
At his feet, small black ants mould
crop circles out of dust.
On the footpath the heels
of the barefooted feral girl
adapt well to the hot, sticky bitumen.
It is only the memory of the thin
walls of the ant-farm that gives
her instep some trouble.
She has not yet learnt to walk
on broken promises.
At the edge of the park
cars bunch like a convoy
of workers backed up on a leaf.
On the construction site, a few
sugar ant soldiers jerk their black
jaws about pulling every sweet
scent out of the air for miles.
Now that it is gone
it is hard to find anything that
belongs here amongst the kauri
& the bunya pines.
Only the ants are still active,
crawling over the feet of the Jagera man;
reorganising his entire afternoon
with their small, blunt heads.
Birdhouse
And look the April sparrows
They are throated with worms
And cannot sing
Gregory Corso
Ted (we find out his name later)
sits on a bench outside the 711
& flaps his wings at my approach.
Mumbles something about a dollar
& a bus trip home to the country.
A huge beard (pre-Hagrid) of brown
& cream feathers dwarfs his face,
but his eyes are pure star sapphires
& can pick out the smallest notes.
He understands the flute city’s
skeleton is hollow as bird bones,
& searches for the finger-holes.
Ted hangs out on the steps
& watches me; a battered hawk
re-introduced to the wilderness
after a long fluorescent captivity.
Finding nothing to satisfy a shrill
hunger, I ask the counter-staff,
“Who’s your friend?”
But the shop assistant is high
on a rush of barcodes & sees
only the sliding doors.
I press fifty cents into Ted’s paw
& he shuffles back to his perch
his falcon hood firmly in place.
On the way home I avoid eye
contact with the other predators,
too afraid to look into my own
birdhouse & find a tuft of down
sprouting from behind my ear.
Browning Street
At 2am
he asked
for the music
to be turned down
just a little.
The knife
he never expected
stage-dived
into his belly
like a stitch.
His blood coiled
along the floor;
a black extension
cord looping down
the hall, tripping
him up as he shut
the door to his
single room.
The cigarette burns
on the bedspread
his mother gave him
for xmas wept openly
like stigmata as more
red roses blossomed
on the thick, 50’s
floral carpet.
Sometime,
in the early hours
of the morning,
an albino cockroach
anointed his bare feet.
The world
didn’t miss
a beat.
Montague Road
The moon’s eyelid was stitched
shut when the glossy shell
of his mustang grew wings & flew;
a black metallic Pegasus that nosedived
into the steel shutters of the Mt Olympus
clothing factory at 140 kph.
A shudder ran up & down the spine
of Montague Road as they eased the ebony
carcass onto a flatbed hearse & drove it
into the dawn rust of a police yard.
Warehouses tingled with gooseflesh
as fig trees showered the procession
with droplets of rose water.
The day broke into tears.
The crows that had secreted themselves
amongst the crowd, dispersed into the sky;
a murder of helium balloons,
their bellies empty with air.
When they extracted the metal splinters
out of his body the earth groaned
as if its own teeth had been pulled.
The bitumen road picked itself
off the ground, dusted the indicator glass
from its midnight clothes & reset
its jaws like a Venus flytrap.
Orleigh Park
The night hid everything.
Stars, houses, people, universes.
The river a slab of opaque glass
none of us could see through.
It murmured every now & then.
Told us the universal truths were
inconsequential as the mist
that rolled off the river’s
slick brown tongue like a lie.
The wind drilled into our bones;
a cancer gnawing at the marrow of time.
We each nursed our private fears,
soothed them gently as a newborn.
Everything froze in this moment.
Trees, grass, clouds, darkness.
Our hearts arced like the wings
of the fruitbats we disturbed
from their nosferatu slumber.
Dogs erupted in volcanic anger
& long bladed grass cut our bare feet.
The earth licked its snout in anticipation.
They had me on my knees to worship
the dawn I would never see.
They found me the next morning.
Sunlight crept into the exposed drain
of my throat like a trail of sugar ants
weaving their way into a kid’s party.
Fig trees blossomed with crows.
Lorca in Highgate Hill
for Federico Garcia Lorca
“and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”
Allen Ginsberg
I saw you Mr Lorca
in the Night Owl
on Gladstone Road
Highgate Hill.
You were bending
over copies of Playboy
& Penthouse
staring into the eyes
of Miss July.
Outside
a pollozanic bulk carrier
charged up the hill
as if it were one
of your Andalusian bulls
blind with fury.
Its twin exhaust pipes;
spears thrust into the shoulder
of a labouring beast
grinding gears into death.
Its carbon monoxide,
spittle escaping from the mouth
of an out of shape Matador
gored in the diesel tank.
Inside the store
everything was quiet
as if a great stadium of people
had suddenly fallen silent
to watch a red flower
blossom on the sand.
There was a bandage
wrapped around your head.
Your eyes were dulled
as if you had just stepped
out of a civil war
or killed your brother.
Your long khaki overcoat
concealed the poetry within you.
Miss July looked the other way
as you undid your fly.
I watched you on
the closed circuit video.
A blue Galician angel
playing with yourself
near the Peters ice-cream.
When you came
to the plastic cap-gun,
a single tear sprouted from your eye
& crawled down your face
like a transparent maggot.
I saw you Mr Lorca
steal a chocolate bar
& give it to the little boy
who stood on the footpath
dismembering a camellia,
petal by petal.
I followed you Mr Lorca
curious to see how you would
react to my pansexual suburb.
Outside Café Q, lesbians
cuddled like comrades in trenches
& small, strange dogs were
dragged into oblivion
by their nose rings.
I lost you Mr Lorca
on the corner of Dornoch Terrace
& Hampstead Road.
You disappeared into a fig tree,
chattering new poems
from your cicada husk.
Old lizard.
You have time now
to look at the stars,
for the worms are
finished with you.
Your butterflies
laid their eggs deep
inside Walt Whitman’s beard
before they died.
Your poems are hatching
all over the world.
Odin in Sussex Street
The children’s heads float along the fence;
five puff-balls disintegrate in the stiff breeze.
Outside my small blue fibro flat, palm trees.
One brown arm snapped off in a thunderstorm,
crushing the orange bell head of a nasturium.
Above all this the moon, bloated with helium.
Cockroaches upturned – lacquered coffee tables;
the wedge shaped head of a blue tongue present
snaking through the grass, the Midgard serpent.
In the blood red brick archway of the Uniting Church,
a one eyed homeless man fingers a clear plastic bag.
My Valkyrie tests her atomic will; both her feet drag.
The raven of hunger pecks through his old disguise;
parishioners weave the basket of their god about him.
Nobody can look him in the eye – this new Odin.
Ragnarok
Where the house was
there are flowers now.
Where the children once played
there are only thistles.
In the long term
it would be better
if these pansies
replaced people.
If chrysanthemums
fed on our flesh,
if cocos palms collected
the souls of the dead.
Jacarandas are boils
on the face of the city.
Moreton Bay figs,
old derelicts
asleep in coffins
by the Brisbane river.
Hoop pines are home
to the fears of crow-kind.
They house these thieves
of the bones of the earth.
In what would have once
been the classic backyard
a single mango tree awaits
the whim of the landscape architect.
Yggsdrasil – tree of heaven
awaits Ragnarok in West End.
Paul
Men come looking for Paul.
Men with black beards flecked with grey.
Men who ask if he’s left a forwarding address.
I tell them I’m trying to concentrate
on the future & not on the past.
I tell them I never met Paul
& that I don’t know what he looks like.
I suggest that maybe the cats
know where he is – since rumour has it
they used to sleep in Paul’s bed.
Blueboy casually rubs the mystery
of Paul’s whereabouts into their legs.
The men scratch at their beards
unconvinced & try to look past me
into the flat, as if they suspect I might
be hiding him in the bathroom.
I tell them again – I’ve never
met Paul, but that he’s already
starting to piss me off.
Paul 2
I look for traces of Paul but find none.
His memory has been whitewashed
by a new coat of Dulux interior paint.
His smell, eradicated by synthetic polymers
& air fresheners lingers only in the brains
of alley cats. Finding no hard evidence of him
I look for the circumstantial & open
the back door where two cats greet me
like grey stone gargoyles – their mouths
unhinged rabbit traps.
The cats overrun my position
& nose their way into the flat,
mewling for Paul in their secret
language of tongue rough teeth.
One of them checks out the bedroom
but returns empty-pawed.
I think Paul was a cat lover,
but you can’t be too sure these days.
Maybe he tortured cats – stubbed out
cigarettes on the soft pad of their toes,
or yanked their claws like nails out of wood.
I find nothing to back me up on this theory.
No butts, not even a whisker lodged behind
the green enamel vanity basin.
For now, Paul remains a mystery.
A John Doe understood by only a few strays
& the Dalmatian next door.
Its head trained to the Hills Hoist
like a diseased white rose.
I sit then, inside the hollow skull
of the lounge-room & begin to fear
the channel flicking loyalty of cats.
The Week It Rained Forever
The black faced cuckoo shrike,
the grey cloak of its shoulders
hunched against the weather
sits weeping on the telegraph wire.
Its small, electric grief trickles
some forty feet into my left eye.
It becomes my sorrow.
It has been raining all week.
The crows have been silenced,
black mouths gagged with raincloud.
Cars slip around corners leaving
indicator glass spread like tarot cards
on the greasy deck of the road.
The future is written in oil.
It seems the earth is mostly water.
The clawed feet of the cuckoo shrike
hum like a pair of tuning forks
It seems fidgety up there on the wire,
as if it would take flight rather than
stare down the elements like
a rusted weather-vain.
From its perch, the shards of glass
shine like red & orange berries.
Mt Coot-ha is hidden by the sky
of the mind as I wipe the sorrow
from my eye like sleep.
I never notice the bird disintegrate
beneath the thunderstorm.
Later, I watch for blue skies
& the crows to rise from the dead.
Observations From the Herb Garden
The world is not what it seems.
The beetle’s legs wind down;
a miniature bull covered with
cowboy ants trying to hang on.
The cat’s eyes are the light green
of comfrey leaves, they flash at you
as it blocks the concrete footpath.
Tiny grasshoppers (an air-cav unit
from Apocalypse Now) snip Rorschach
shapes out of the chocolate mint.
The nasturtiums overflow;
a chlorophyll waterfall drenches honey
bees in their tiger-striped gun ships.
Bright orange suns have formed in
the cluster galaxy of marigold leaves.
A one-legged locust sets a new
tightrope altitude record across
the clothesline’s metal artery.
The lavender pines for the Alps,
for cataphracts crushing frosted
purple stems & Romans underfoot.
Skinks cable-ski through the grass,
climb sheer brick cliffs & lose
the virginity of their tails
in extreme reptilian games.
The blue tongue lizard snorts
sunlight through its solar panel nose.
Mrs Gnome hides behind the lemon
balm , wondering when Mr Gnome
will send her a postcard from Brazil.
The basil is not surviving its full body
transplant – limbs wither & blacken
with frostbite as the anti-rejection drugs
wear off like hand-me-down insecticide.
I retreat upstairs as midges begin
their kamikaze runs into the dull
battleship flesh of my arms, thinking
the lantana’s bite is much
worse than its bark.
The Male Project
You almost miss the bus
talking with some old guys.
Stick out a left hand (sinister);
nail it down at the last second
like a botched crucifixion.
Scrabble aboard with limp,
pay 70 cents for the pension.
As you walk up the aisle,
look out for any attractive women
preferably by themselves.
If wearing sunglasses (compulsory)
remember, don’t turn your head
just your eyes. Check out;
face, hair, tits, tats, figure.
Once spotted, quickly plan your move.
Engage two primary school boys
in very mature, adult conversation.
“Wow, what an angel”.
“What do you think I should do boys?”
“Do you think I should just go up
& ask her if she’s got a boyfriend?”
When the bus pulls in at the next stop
wave the boys goodbye & move to the seat
in the row opposite the woman & her son.
Carefully remove cheap sunglasses
& put them in your shirt pocket.
Turn your head ever so slightly
toward them. Bide your time.
It is a bonus if the son is sitting
nearest to you & if they’re playing
a game of eyespy (which they are).
Insinuate yourself into their game
by answering when it’s the boy’s turn.
“I spy with my little eye something
beginning with A.”
“Antenna”. “No”. “Air”. (Arsehole?)
“I spy with my little eye something
beginning with D.”
“Drugs.” “No.” “Driver.” (Dickhead?)
Its always good to get a little smile.
After trying to ignore you, his mother
will reassert her power by playing along.
Pretty soon a three-way conversation
will take place, centred around the game.
Occasionally, make eye contact with her,
commenting on the cleverness of her boy.
Smile when you can, not too much
as to appear sleazy.
As they get of the bus together,
say Goodbye, but get a good look
at her arse & fantasise about
your cock slipping in from behind.
This is your male project.
Caul
There is an old fishermen’s superstition:
you cannot rescue a drowning man
you cannot cheat the sea of its due.
The surf was turning
in on itself like a grey
woollen blanket when
the man approached to
douse himself with salt.
He was on the beach
filling his pockets with
memories when he found
a stone, half buried under
the driftwood of his thoughts.
He was mapping out
the coastline of his
unconscious,
his fears a light plane
dipping below the horizon.
The stone was grey
as the eyes of Oceanos,
ground to perfection
by the cool indifference
of the cosmos.
It fit snugly into his palm
like a concealed weapon.
He had the urge
to skip it across the water
but something stayed his hand,
made him polish it
with the sweat of his fingers
until it gleamed like a WWII medal.
He was drowning
because a long time ago
he had lost his caul;
his father’s cap of birth-
skin which he kept
in the coat pocket
of his mind.
He felt better with
the stone brushing against
his skin like a Burmese kitten.
He nursed it sitting there
in his trench until the storm
hurled him back through
the drunken forest
of casuarinas.
When her eyes
fell upon him
a great weight fled
from his shoulders;
the stone dug
into his palm
like a coral knife.
The sea knew
it had been cheated
of its due.
Always Be a Fin, Circling
His self-doubt surfaced one afternoon
as he was staring into the glass
abyss of a Coke machine.
Its dorsal fin, brocaded with spikes
cut through the inlet of his thought
with a shark’s dull arrogance.
When he tried to reel it in
it thrashed about in his hands;
punched holes in the air with its mouth.
As he wrestled with it, trying
to hook a finger under its gill,
a spine skewered his lip.
He looked around for help,
but no one was willing to touch it.
He pulled at peoples’ sleeves
as they boarded the express
but no one paid him attention.
They had already decided:
it was an emergency
of no consequence.
After a while he didn’t care
that there was something wrong.
Across from the station, a morass
of white sand devoured a casuarina.
Its silicon throat pulsed
with each green swallow.
It was not until he was standing
in front of the toilet-mirror, trying
to pull the bony dart out of his body,
that he realised a second quill
had lodged itself under his breastbone.
Panic cracked across his face.
He tried to worm his way out,
but an avalanche of travel bags
blocked the door sealing off his escape.
In the confusion, someone backed into him
driving the chest-spike deeper into
the aquarium of his heart.
He knew as he fell
against the sink,
there’d always
be a fin, circling.
Why Did the Chicken Strangle Itself?
I have your feather, I never forget.
Vicki Viidikas
No one will know for sure.
But there was the enamelled beak
poking through the blue orthodox
domes of our front picket fence.
Melissa found it. Rhiannon’s pet
chicken. Arrested, as the empty
case moth cocoon still attached
to the broken gate.
It could not be missed.
Its body hung on the wooden
flipside; an auto-erotic asphyxiation
gone wrong. It’s lace garter neck
stripped of its hierarchy on death’s
wedding list. Hung. A warning perhaps
against the complacency of our skin
& wishbone pecking order. Against,
the crematorium’s bright red comb.
2. Bacchanalia
Hammer
The river’s broad back was still.
An arm of steel bridged it, seeking
comfort from its huge shoulder of water.
Now & then a train flickered by, briefly
illuminating the peppercorn darkness
which ground, ground down the day.
Pretty soon the trees were just silhouettes;
shadow puppet-gods orchestrating the night.
As the last sparks from the arc-welding sun
embered the horizon, clouds of blue smoke
dissipated before a wind which blew
in from somewhere cold. There was
a chill to everything. Here, no one had
eyes, only blowholes that had to be kept
open by chipping away at the ice with tusks.
Eventually, the anvil of the earth cracked
apart as frostbitten skulls hammered it.
Everyone was late for something.
Only the night was on time
keeping its tight schedule, falling
at the right moment on every living thing.
Lulling some into sleep, awakening others
& occasionally killing those
who had no idea it was coming.
Tongue of Shells
The ocean kept rolling
its aquamarine tongue
around & around in the liquid
sky of its mouth.
Tried to spit out its thick
salty words like blood.
To communicate something urgent
but couldn’t.
In frustration it dumped people
brittle as driftwood into the beach.
Drowned some, or thrashed them
against rocks when it was misunderstood.
But no one could interpret
what it was trying to say.
Not even the man & his sea-nymph
daughter who floated the length
of its silicon lip & picked
stories out of its teeth
like fish bones.
Even the blue-bottles
washed up with the tide
were misconstrued.
Their mute chorus silenced
by a shard of cuttlefish backbone.
Their sign language dissolved
into empty voice bubbles;
pale rider crabs in quicksand.
At the water’s edge, strands
of shark egg delicate as crystal,
caught on nets of razor-wire.
It was only when it had flattened
the sea nymph’s castle, that the man
& his daughter realised what the ocean
was trying to tell them.
Your language may be secret
but mine is the tongue of shells.
Rural Epidural
Fifty metres from the Bowenville
turn-off nothing remains of the man
& his Mack truck, except shards
of red indicator glass scattered
like sorghum over an alluvial
plain of bitumen.
Brown-eared daisies
lean against the power pole;
a ribcage of cellophane heaves
like the chest of a cattle dog.
Petals droop their tongues into
the pseudo-water of a heat mirage.
Crystals of Carlton Cold stubbies
numerous as bindi-eyes puncture
the road to its asphalt spine.
Pain evaporates like diesel
into the pink-blue sky.
In the dead grass
a ghost road has been cut.
Bypasses the blocked artery
of the Warrego highway;
avoids the heart of the matter.
Further along two farmers
stand in the middle of their
small crops planting thoughts
in the fertile imagination
of stone-fruit.
A tree has skinned
its knee on a car.
Somebody brings
it flowers.
On the outskirts
of Toowoomba my parents
point as we pass his house.
Outside in the front yard
the body of his semi-trailer
lies beheaded.
Here & there a hubcap
twinkles on the side of the road
like the eye of a crow.
Yellow Spot
Talking to my mother on the phone
& I could sow this inner city carpet
with my own blood; but its been a good
season hasn’t it? With all the rain
they expected a bumper crop in the summer,
but too much water on the brain is a bad thing.
I could send a thunderstorm down the line to her
but she doesn’t need it anymore; tells me
yellow spot has snaked into the crops
& will not let go.
The Malu silos turning truck loads
of farmers away, their shrivelled wheat
unwanted as a mouse plague. No one
in the district knowing exactly what to do.
Some, their emotion bubbling to the surface
like unstoppable artesian bores, put
their crops to the torch, burn out
their confusion, their helpless rage.
This summer, the rains
return as black ash.
Almost as an afterthought, she tells me
Grainco will buy some of their barley for feed.
I hang up the telephone & discover
the yellow spot has infected me as well,
as my childhood begins to turn brown
& the leaves of my thought wilt
in the hot, humid air.
I end the day looking
for something to burn myself.
Crow the Birdbrain
or how Crow lost his marbles
but gained his freedom
Crow did not know
that he was a crow.
He did not remember being
snatched from the nest.
He did not remember the boys
who crushed his siblings underfoot
as if they were grasshoppers.
Crow certainly did not remember
having his tongue split in two
by the Publican so he could talk
to the rest of the clientele
in the Public Bar.
Crow stood all day
at one end of the counter
answering the questions
of the coalminers & farmers
who came from miles around
to hear him speak.
Crow did not mind being their oracle.
He was happy to sit & listen,
offer advice where he could.
Mostly they told Crow sad things,
like how little Billy Bremner
drowned in a cattle trough
or how the drought was sucking
everybody dry.
Crow took particular attention
when they told him the details
of how old man Cummerow
killed himself with his
Belgian shotgun.
After they had finished
telling Crow these things,
he would cock one beady eye
puff out his chest like a bellows,
look everyone in the face
& tell them how he saw it.
For years Crow attended his flock
like a diligent country Pastor,
soothing grown men of their fears,
propping up their egos,
enriching their lives with a quiet joke.
In this way Crow
grew quite famous.
Then one day Crow overheard
a conversation between a melon
farmer & a fruit grower from out
of the district.
They swapped stories about
how many thieving crows
they had killed in their lifetime.
Crow stood there without blinking
& listened.
Suddenly the fruit grower
turned to Crow & said;
‘How does it make you feel
to know that I have killed thousands
of your brothers & sisters?’
For the first time in his life
Crow was utterly speechless.
He thought that the two men
had mistaken him for someone else.
‘How does it make you feel
to know that I hung your dead
brothers & sisters on my fence
by their scrawny toes?’
Crow tried to explain to the men
that he was not a crow but human.
But when he opened his mouth,
he could only utter an inhuman cackle.
‘How does it make you feel
to know that I crushed your brothers
& sisters to death while they were
still inside their eggs?’
Crow looked into the mirror
behind the bar for reassurance,
but he only saw a large black crow
staring back at him.
It was now that Crow
who thought he was a human
& not a crow at all –
went completely mad.
Crow cleared the bar in seconds.
He leapt upon the two farmers
& scratched out their eyes
with his wicked talons.
He saved most of his rage
for the Publican though,
& took special pleasure
in ripping out his tongue
as if it were a giant bloodworm
Crow sucked out of the earth.
Then Crow who had been
in denial over the existence
of his wings all these years,
used them to smash through
the pub’s window & flew off
into the sunset.
Nobody ever knew what
became of Crow after that.
Some believed he perished
in the desert or died in a hail
of shotgun pellets as he tried
to steal his first melon.
The strongest clue
to the fate of Crow came
one day in the Ducklo pub.
A jackeroo from out West
swore that one evening as
he camped in the bush,
a crow landed in the tree
next to him & simply said;
‘I may be crazy, but you
can call me Crow.
Strawberry Season
How does a poet see them;
these black worms on his
red strawberries?
Dwarf leeches sucking fruit blood
bloated with vitamins in the July sun.
Coarse hairs circumnavigating a nipple,
worshipping the erect plateau of ruby flesh.
Australopithecus huddled around a lightning
struck tree, thumbs extended like twigs.
Black snakes drinking from a red clay pan,
sunset mirrored in their tinted window eyes.
Basaltic dolmens encircling a sun dial
graffitied by snot-green, Neolithic lichen.
Hairless skunk kittens pawing at pink teats,
white stripes painted on by Pepi La Phew.
Mascared eyelashes orbiting bloodshot eyes,
a volcanic headache depositing ash on the brain.
Hyenas tug of war with an antelope carcass,
bite craters littered over its dead surface.
The black of a zebra crossing; intersecting
with the singularity of a hit and run.
Killer whales playing with an emperor penguin,
red ink fountaining from the pen of its beak.
Crows loosening the blue tongue of a child,
on the womb canvas, a cuneiform of polyps.
How does a gardener see them?
These black worms on his
red strawberries?
He lets the heel of his boot
create the metaphor for him.
How the Man Became a Flower
He walked out into a bare paddock, looked around.
Made sure there were no other flowers watching.
Then taking some seeds out of his trouser pocket
he swallowed them like a bunch of tranquillisers
& waited for nature to take her course.
Twenty minutes later, the tips of his fingers
sprouted into snapdragons. Curious, he raised
the bouquet to his nose. The faint perfume
triggered a response in his brain which blossomed
into a sunflower & opened a crack in his skull.
When this huge fist of a flower withered & died,
its black teardrop seeds fell onto his shoulders
where they buried themselves to wait
for the next season in his skin.
When he tried to see what he had become,
the man realised that two honey bees had
substituted themselves for his eyes & that
now he could only see in ultra-violet.
Suddenly, all of his spring splendour
vanished like a dandelion-clock in the wind.
The impatiens that crowned his toes
were not pink but blood red.
The field of pansies along his arms
stared at him with eight pairs of crystalline eyes.
Small, white spiders hopped over his mouth.
When he tried to raise his voice, he couldn’t.
His widow’s tongue was rooted firmly
to his hothouse mouth.
He found he couldn’t swallow either,
or dislodge the callistemon
caught in his throat-stem.
It was only when a swarm of honey eaters
licked his teeth-buds clean of nectar,
that he could utter a small noise
like the petal of a rose shearing off.
‘I do not want to become a flower’, he moaned
spitting out watermelons seeds as his body,
tired of being root-bound, sunk its bulb
further into the ground.
Unable to move, the man-flower
felt something slide across his chest
of leaves & screamed as the first
thick caterpillar began to feast
on his new green flesh.
Stars in My Eyes My Country
for Martin Bryant
My blue-green eyes
are the planet earth
opening & closing;
a Gaia face-mask
for the smoke & dust
of my civilisation.
I blink away the tears
& gunpowder fumes
that leach into my
universe’s skin.
Sometimes I want to drag
a cut throat razor across
my eyes like in that film,
Un Chien Andalou
(The Andalusian Dog).
Let everything I have
ever seen or will witness
on the Seven Nightly News
be purged from
my satellite skull.
Open wide the fly-screens
of my brain & let a billion
deaths head moths extinguish
themselves on the sticky
flypaper of my soul.
I have stars
in my eyes
my country;
comets shooting
through my veins.
A lump of asteroid
stuck in my throat.
Shoot me. Shoot me
my country.
1234 I Love the Marine Corp
The bomb
was half a ton of TNT
stuffed into a suitcase
wedged under the front seat
of a delivery truck driven
into the Headquarters
of the USMC
Beirut.
Body parts
were plastered
all over the dormitories
like seventies,
psychedelic wallpaper.
Bone fragments
were found in the lungs
of enlisted men.
In the remains
of the laundry,
Corporals wiped
their comrades
off their fatigues
with Kleenex.
The suicide bomber
left behind a VHS cassette
& a tear stained copy
of the Koran.
In the desert
Mohammed turned
a tortoise onto its back
& walked through
a mine field.
On the walls
of the Embassy,
the blood of Americans
hardened into sap.
Fleshpetal
In this country
there are two landmines
for every one of us.
Eight unexploded shells
half an armoured car,
a quarter of the wing of a plane
& a thousand rounds of ammunition.
If it wanted to
this country could kill us
ten times over.
Murder entire generations
of playwrights.
If it wanted to
this country could
eliminate our history
with a hair-pin trigger
or a signature.
In this country
there are two deaths
for every birth.
Three deaths
for every poem written.
In this country
the flowers
will kill you.
Butterfly Effect
The earth was too spongy
& would not let me kill.
The centipede kept twisting
around on the ground,
like the Indian terrorist on TV
in full commando roll, spinning
over the New Delhi tarmac.
The earth was protecting
its own as best it could.
Again & again I struck
with the sole of my boot
as Presidents winged
their way across oceans,
a young mass murderer
smiled from the dock &
a million Tutsi refugees
marched in hunger across
the spine of civilisation.
The earth finally yielded
to the pressure of our kind.
The centipede died as it lived,
in heady, microscopic anger.
With the toe of my boot
I flung it under a shroud
of leaf litter & continued
uprooting Madeira vine.
Some of the Presidents
flicked ash out the window
of their planes & were later
assassinated by their bodyguards.
The young mass murderer
rolled his head around & around,
swelled himself up with time
like a water-clock & from the air
a million Tutsi refugees mimicked
a giant, wounded centipede
crawling away to die.
The Green Emerald of Dying
In a back alley in Bogota
a woman lies spreadeagle
with the tears of archangels
flooding the smooth, brown
cello skin of her stomach.
Above her, the delta of the moon
drip feeds the body of the universe.
She is trying to swallow stars
but the blood is singing softly to her.
A lullaby leaks from her left ear
& croons slowly down her cheek
to the ground where her daughter
hand paints a house & a sun
with the crayon stick of her finger;
dipping it into the wet concrete
congealing to her mother’s head.
Later, when the world sat bolt upright
in bed & remembered how bright
had been the emeralds of her eyes
it sent a stray dog to lick the heavy flesh
of her lids that now shone with
the bluish tint of lapis lazuli.
Her daughter, not quite four
sat beside her mother’s body
until she was led away into
a night she would long remember
beneath the men who spasmed
inside of her like maggots
see-sawing into flyhood.
A Brief History of Sperm
who will howl, in the dead of night, for your dark time.
Federico Garcia Lorca
For four hours each day
the Greek girl vomited
into the toilet bowl before breakfast.
Every morning she sat down
to a sliver of Special K.
She’s nervous about the wedding
was all her mother
would say.
& this in a letter
to the North Pole;
Dear Santa
my mummy and daddy
never stop hitting me
and yelling at me
could I please have
a new mummy
and daddy for Xmas.
Millions of sperm-children
died in the war to end all wars.
Billions more in shower cubicles
throughout the twentieth century.
These lost boys & girls drain
down to the ocean’s blue womb;
fertilise the world with
egg-white entropy.
Sperm counts drop
as the seas gradually rise
& all hell breaks loose on
the Western intellectual front.
Who will howl
in the dead of night
for your dark time.
No one. No one
at all.
Cincinnati Zoo, 1914
It was I who discovered/the last Passenger Pigeon/dead in her cage/I her humble cleaner/everyday I came/a priest attending/this innocent on death row/I was more to her/than just a shit shoveller/I kept her private aviary/clean as a whistle/changed her water & seed/listened to the final/early morning confessions/of her race.
One day/I tried to touch her/coax her closer with some panacum/I wondered/what it would feel like/to caress/the swansong of a species/rub her powdery chest feathers/see the dinosaur claws/pinch the flesh of my hands/I advanced/palms outstretched/like a disciple/beckoning for salvation.
I didn’t mean to frighten her/she crawled/to the furthermost/corner of her perch/her tiny agitated head/bobbed up & down/her wings flapped madly/like a weather-cock/caught in a hurricane/she flew once into the wire/blood beaded on her beak/I was gone.
The chicken wire bit/into my fingers/like the macaws at feeding time/my blood trickled/onto the newspaper floor/stained the Kaiser red/I stood there/not knowing what the first man/to discover the end of a species/should do/not knowing what to do/when it was I who killed her.
She lay on her back/the damp straw/still warm/her beautiful head bent under/a glazed wing/ her neck broken/flying into the chicken wire/of her dusk suicide/the last crazed member of her sect/feathers askew/claws curled in perfect question marks/her eyes eaten out by ants/thick on her head as lice/just another dead pigeon/I brushed them off/best I could/had to tell the Head Zookeeper/we’d failed God again.
I thought of my counterpart/who’d found the last/African Quagga/dead in its stable/Amsterdam Zoo/1883/fed it some clover by mistake/ bloated up with gas/like a dead body on the front/the cleaner was found in his apartment/one week later/all the best intentions of the West/could not save/either of them.
I delivered her last rites/carefully brushed her feathers/back into place/laid her head out straight/her seed & water were untouched/she had refused her last meal/shit clung to her perch/at the end/she too had been scared shitless/of death.
On the way out/I plucked some feathers/my job blew out into history/I heard/the British Museum wanted to stuff her/to display our failure/to the rest of the World/the Head Zookeeper/did not bother to wire London back.
Three years later/I enlisted in the Great War/shipped out from New York harbour/one bright August morning/her feathers I kept/in a glass phial/for good luck/as I stepped ashore in France/my own extinction began.
Il Duce
‘I will be your Emperor’, he
declared as they fitted his noose
& yanked it tight as a bow-tie.
As the sun’s dialogue wore on
they cut him off in the middle
of an old speech about Caesar.
His laurel crown withered
& was driven into the slush
as the crowd surged forward.
He hung there in mid-sentence
as crows marched out his eyes
from his skull’s amphitheatre.
They never knew who cut him down.
A fanatical peasant they presumed
clinging to the Elysian glories.
The golden eagles, a hint of bronze
winking through columns of wood-smoke.
Horse-hair plumes hard as a jaw-line.
Years later, bed-time stories
would brow-beat at grandparents:
‘Just how black did his tongue go?’
Colditz
The Nazis war machine
really couldn’t afford them –
but because he had bedazzled them all,
because the little alchemist
Goebbels had discovered the secret
of turning his tongue,
into a silver strip of magnesium –
he was able to pull as many frontline
units as he wanted from the last ditch
defence of Berlin.
These storm-troopers reduced to extras
dressed in scratchy period uniforms,
paid off with cigarettes for his epic
70mm propaganda masterpiece.
The lightning bolts of his eyes
flared as he moved the set pieces.
His megaphone laced with spittle,
his secretaries glancing skyward,
his artistic dream corroding
hour by hour in the tin
canister of his head.
The director of darkness
losing his light.
Flowers from Hell
for Nguyen Chi Thien
- The Politics of Victory
i am so proud of my country i could cry. today we won a great victory
over france over the west over imperialism. i could kiss these cadres
parading through the streets of hanoi. i am so proud of my country
i think my tongue might burst like a firework.
- The Politics of Disillusionment
i cannot believe it could happen here. what am i to do? what would aristotle do? how can i just stand around & watch them cart away my friends? this land reform is nothing but sheer bloody murder. they are denouncing everyone who opposes them. my country is going insane. my heart burns like a skull left out in the sun. what would plato do?
- The Politics of Revolt
this is madness. as an intellectual i must oppose my government. i must oppose my country. the land reform was nothing but a purge. pure systematic murder. i cannot stand for this any longer. ho chi minh & his central committee cronies must be stopped. ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. how i thank the french for my education.
- The Politics of Repression
they have killed my country. they have butchered intellectualism. today i saw a red guard bayonet a professor of anthropology through the stomach. he could not believe it even when he was dying. i cannot believe it now. how did we let this happen? even the French did not kill so many of our own people. yesterday i saw a dog lap up the blood of a little girl. i wonder if she was a good communist?
- The Politics of Poetry
i cannot help myself. i must be a poet. i must write poetry. i must tell my people how our country is killing itself. i must tell the world how we are cutting our own throat. language is the last resort against tyranny. words enflame my heart. i must be a poet. i must write poetry. i write poetry like i have to take a piss.
- The Politics of Diplomacy
i cannot get into the french embassy. they are watching me. i walk down the road to the british consul. no one stops me as i walk straight in through the front door. finally, a military policeman challenges. i show him my manuscript & demand an audience with the ambassador. after a long while i am led into his private quarters. i hand him my letter, photographs & four hundred hand written poems. he flips through my manuscript briefly. on finding no secret documents he looks up disappointed. “these are only poems”, he says.
- The Politics of Arrest
i walk into his waiting arms as if i were a child & he, my stern, dead father. the captain of intelligence clips me behind the ear – am i the bad son again? he asks why have i betrayed my country. i tell him – this is not my country anymore. i get pistol whipped for good measure. they put a bag over my head & bundle me into the back of a jeep. the british ambassador will have burnt my poems by now. somewhere a dog barks.
- The Politics of Torture
i do not hate the cadres they are just doing their job. they have wives & children & dogs to feed. they are only following orders. i do not hate them when they tie my arms behind my back & work me over with their rifle butts. they know i am a famous poet. i do not even hate them when they stick electrodes under my armpits. sometimes they ask me to recite a poem while they do it. when my yelling irritates them, they clamp the wires on my balls. my screams are sound poetry. I do not hate them. i refuse to hate my fellow countrymen who have no say when they live or die.
- The Politics of Dysentery
there are about seventy of us inside the shipping container. the sickest sleep near the latrine & sacrifice themselves to make room for the rest of us. yesterday we lost a nobel prize nominee, a novelist and a composer of traditional mountain ballads. i think that they are more heroic than cosmonauts. today i nursed a poor southern girl with tb – blood flecked her lips like sweet, sticky papaya. she died in my arms & i didn’t even have the strength to bury her rice-paper thin body. i believe they have re-educated her.
- The Politics of Hunger
the hungerstrikers do not starve themselves in protest against the prison conditions, or even against the state. they starve themselves so they can die quicker. sometimes when they turn, the cadres will not feed them unless they sign a confession declaring the treason of their bodies. in our country it is now a crime to kill yourself.
- The Politics of Dogs & Buffalo
sometimes i hear the dogs yapping outside & i wonder which poor bastard they have bailed up now. i envy the mindless dogs of our country – because they have more of a voice than i do. i envy the hard working, uneducated buffalo – because they get to write down more poems than me, with every hoof print that shatters the ground of my starved nation. i envy these beasts because they can shit outside anytime they want.
- The Politics of Sanity
to keep sane i memorised seven hundred poems over twenty seven years in prison.
- The Politics of Amnesty
my lungs save me. they think i have been re-educated enough. they think that i will never be able to write another poem in my life. they think i’m a good communist now. they think that i cannot harm the state – that i have no more voice left. they are wrong.
- The Politics of Pen & Paper
it is 1991. i have not held a pen since 1979. my hand shakes as it tries to remember how to write.
- The Politics of Flowers
one day i will send my country some flowers from hell.
Chernobyl
(i)
I fly through some
kind of fairy dust.
The air glitters as
my rotor blades slice
through the atomic
weight of morning.
The intense heat
bear hugs my body
like a Siberian army
overcoat.
My ears roar
with a sonic boom
as I pour concrete
on reactor number 5.
It is like spitting
into an ocean
of invisible hate.
Blood trickles down
my cheeks like sideburns.
My half life cut in half
again & again as I
turn for home.
They keep their distance
when I put her down.
(ii)
On my fifth trip
the fluid wants to
flee my body, looks
for an escape hatch
through my mouth.
My lips froth red,
as if I’ve drunk
a sweet plum wine.
On my seventh trip
I miss the reactor
pour my cement onto
an admin centre.
Bury those already
dead under twenty tons
of lime and ash.
I create a new Pompeii.
On my tenth trip
I crash land –
the tail rotor spins
into the pine forest
decapitating trees
like Czarists.
I take another chopper.
No one stops me.
On my twelfth trip
I strip off the protective suit.
The heat no longer bothers me;
my face red with snow burn.
My ship glows like a firefly
in the evening sky.
On my twentieth trip
my body mutinies in mid-air.
Men in silver suits fish me
out of the sardine tin cabin.
An ambulance crouches
at the end of the tarmac.
Behind the stretcher, bulldozers
shove my helicopter into a hole
the size of a soccer field.
(iii)
In the army hospital
the faces of the doctors
melt like radiation clocks
at ground zero.
There are other men here.
Their bodies boiled lobster,
their fists tight as claws,
skin hard as shell.
Someone hands out
the Star of Lenin
like sugar candy.
(iv)
My wife will be
putting the children
to bed by now.
I try to speak to them
but my tongue refuses
to leave the volcano
of my mouth.
From the bed
I can see a haze
on the horizon,
faint as a nebulae.
They have stopped
giving us food.
(v)
Our nurse
incapacitated by
her cosmonaut suit,
wheels in six glasses
of water & six cyanide
pills on a steel trolley.
Behind her,
a procession of lead-lined
coffins black as hearses
skid to a stop.
They wait patiently
for the new stars
they have created
to go nova.
Outside my window
the first sparrow drops
to the earth like a stone.
Snake
Then the Lord God said to the snake, “You will be punished for this; you alone of all the animals must bear this curse: From now on you will crawl on your belly, and you will have to eat dust as long as you live. I will make you and the woman hate each other; her offspring and yours will always be enemies. Her offspring will crush your head, and you will bite their heel.”
Genesis 3:14-15
(i)
At around 2am
the snake struck her
under the cover of darkness.
The fingers of its teeth
pinched all the flesh it could find.
Somewhere, a baby Heracles
started crying.
(ii)
Nothing grew
where the blood of the dragon
ran out and scalded the earth.
Not a flower, not a weed
could be raised from
the burnt ground.
Vegetables wilted
in their beds
and butterflies
baked to death
in the hot steam
of its dying breath.
In solidarity
with the worm
children swarmed
over the land
picking every hill
clean of grass.
When there was
nothing left to pull out
the seed of the woman
bruised the serpent’s head
dark as plum flesh.
Only by putting
out its own eyes
could the snake
see its mistake.
See where it went wrong.
(iii)
“Adam & Eve
The serpent cracked
The mirror
In a thousand pieces,
& the apple
was his rock.”
Federico Garcia Lorca, Initium
As long as he could
remember the snake had
always been called names.
Satan. Samael.
Prince of demons.
The Angel of Death.
The Great Dragon.
One day he decided
to do something
about it.
In playgrounds
all over the world
children gagged as
the worms of their
tongues started to
weave and dance
like cobras.
(iv)
One day the woman
studded her armour
with knives, waded
out into the river
and waited.
The worm
could not help itself
and was cut to pieces
as it coiled its body
around her.
The fast flowing river
washed the shreds away
before the snake could
grow back together.
She knew
as the armour
fell at her feet
that it would return
to bite the heels
of her offspring.
(v)
“Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
Matthew 10:16
The steel radials
did not damage
the snake at all.
It lunged, slack-jawed
at its knight-protectors
as their makeshift spears
drove it off the road
and into the trees.
Somewhere deep
below Britain,
St George trembled
as the old serpent
grew young again.
The would be heroes
got back into the car
ready to sow dragon’s teeth
with Mother Nature.
Anytime. Anywhere.
Camouflaged
by the leaf litter,
the carpet snake could
still sense the egg-warmth
of the bitumen road
radiating through the
thermometer of its tongue.
(vi)
Once, noted the woman
the serpent licked my ear
as I slept.
It was more
a tickle than a bite.
In the morning
I could see the future
clearly, even though
I was a blind dragon
and he my husband.
(vii)
The snake which
bit the boy’s father
is coming after him.
Black poison clenched
between its teeth
like a dagger.
Sometimes he sees it
curled at the foot
of the world; its ebony
body blotting out the sun.
Jormungandar,
the great serpent son
biting his own tail
cursing his absent
father,
Loki.
Virgins
for Ann Wallace
that night shazza & i got shitfaced on a bottle of rum a bottle of vodka anything we could find in my mother’s bar we made cocktails mixed shit together sharon chucked all over the toilet floor the piss coursed through our bodies like molten lead it was the easter break nobody was home for days we were bored shitless broke into my brother’s room found his stash of ciggies & pornos up in his cupboard stupid place to hide them as if mum wouldn’t find it playboys penthouses hustler (pretty boring) electric blue black label european mags fat hairy chested men with purple tipped cocks shoved them into black women white women asian women put their pricks into cunts arses mouths between breasts sometimes three men shoved their cocks into one woman the woman were skinny sometimes really young always smiling (even with a mouthful of jism) there were stories to go with the pictures fantasies in shoe shops garages abandoned offices parks in three languages english french german a tri-nations spectacular that always ended the same way a huge ejaculation over the women their cheeks mouths breasts arses my pussy started to get really wet i thought about how johnno liked to do it doggy most of all in the cemetery “i’d like to fuck an angel” he would say laughing coiling my hair tighter around his wrist like a cowboy doing campdraught we put the mags back & then found my step-dad’s stash of videos xxx rated blue asia teen pussies anal action blacks on blondes we fast forwarded to the good parts gangbanging huge black men shoving enormous 12-14 inch cocks into the arses pussies mouths of huge breasted white women i was really wet sharon’s face flushed pink the phone rang i thought it was my parent’s but it was johnno he wanted us to come over to the saleyards said he had something to show us he sounded weird & fucked off his face we jumped into my father’s patrol i was so pissed that shazza had to drive when we got there it was almost nine o’clock pitch black johnno was there with the gang frank lachlan jodie scott drinking straight johnny walker smoking durries i grabbed johnno let him finger me in his ute he came as soon as i put my mouth over his cock i spat his cum out onto his new leopard skin seat covers he got mad yelled at me to fuck off out of his car the others pissed themselves laughing & went into the sheep-pens there were noises more yelling & bleating johnno & i got out of the ute & went to have a look frank was fucking a sheep from behind when he came he took out his bowie knife & slit its throat from ear to ear it screamed & kicked & thrashed on the ground blood jetted everywhere frank was covered in it the others joined in grabbed lumps of wood fence posts pipes anything to hand johnno grabbed sharon & i by the arms & took us into the yard the stupid sheep didn’t run they stood in the middle bleating johnno caught one by the head & gave it to shazza she was a virgin i knew johnno wanted to bust her cherry really bad i flogged his bowie knife out of its sheath i was angry at him for being so obvious sharon kept smiling at him i wanted to cut her throat i grabbed the sheep by the wool on its head it felt like a mass of pubes mud & shit got on my jeans i looked at johnno & shazza necking i screamed at him they looked up as i rammed the knife home again & again she didn’t look like a sheep she looked like a unicorn a dumb fucking unicorn.
Time & Cock
Neal, we’ll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let’s be the angel’s of the world’s desire
and take the world to bed with us before
we die.
Allen Ginsberg
1.
I think time has wilted my cock
& my testicles, these are now blunt
weapons that hang off the edge of the world
& swing like a fleshy pendulum
over the abyss of the Passaic;
my birth water welcomes me home.
Did I mention to you that I never picked up
an angel that wasn’t looking for it.
2.
All the water pipes are frozen solid
& I have to piss out the window again.
I watch my stream of yellow urine burn
through the snow like an oxy torch.
I try to write my name, but the steam
obscures everything; neon, snowflakes,
stars.
3.
My sperm are too lazy to swim.
They are more like hippopotami
supporting their greasy, grey weight
amongst the reeds & water lilies;
growing fat with age, more accustomed
to the dog paddle downstream
& the placing of an occasional hickey
on a tourist.
4.
I cannot take the world to bed anymore.
It pissed off years ago with Pioneer 10
& Carl Sagan. They sanctioned the first
intergalactic nudity & let NASA give out
Adam’s & Eve’s address to the universe.
In the end we lost the war, Neal, but got
our wish – became angels of the world’s desire
as young American men came all over Vietnam,
& everyone fucked the earth up the ass.
All Poetry
for Michael Dransfield
I twisted my youth
around the wreckage
of my motorbike
left beside the highway
in 1972.
I injected bits
of my flesh & metal
into the blue vein
of this country.
I swam in the bloodstream
of your children.
I lived in the poems
you mouthed.
When they hit me
from behind
I never stood a chance
of hitting them back.
I spread myself out
thin – a cyborg coming
to grief on the slick
of a twentieth century
road surface.
I was Voyager
caressing the moons
of Jupiter with my
atmospheric lens.
Sulphur & exhilaration
at the needle-tip
of self discovery.
They watched me explode.
The wreckers were
good at identifying
both car & body parts;
bought my soul for fifty bucks
& junked the rest.
My mind ticked
over like a two stroke
cutting a swathe
through wet grass.
My legs,
broken spokes
a country doctor
patched with pethidine.
My arms,
chopper handlebars
crucified to the chrome
of a hospital bed.
My heart,
a lawnmower engine
flooded & stalled
on a cattle grid.
My eyes,
headlights smashed
in by a drunk.
My thumbs,
shock absorbers
torn like a rubber glove
leaving no fingerprint.
My blood,
brake fluid that
leaked from the tip
of my penis & pooled
at the feet of an off-duty
policeman.
Tomorrow,
when the neons
flick into my skull
& the nurses slide
their smiles into me,
I will scream
with the realisation
of what I’ve become.
When you pick my brain,
I will be part animal
part machine –
all poetry.
On Wookiee’s, the SAS & poetry.
for Sam
The two-stroke sun retracts its clogged
blades through a tortoise-shell afternoon.
There’s another campaign on the wide-screen.
An upper house of ants tackle the leftover’s
from a kid’s party. Lollipops; war memorials
to fun liquefy inside made in china body bags.
In one of those hard to get at hotspots, confetti
dissidents escaped the catcher’s tawny frog-mouth.
Sam, as we sit now in judgement, George Lucas
sues the creators of Star Balls & the empire
strikes at Mohammed’s children’s children –
trying to get their heads around T.S Eliot.
‘Catpig’, who’s never seen a Wookiee before
or even a droid, sits on John Forbes’s mug-shot.
Her fishing line strength de-sex stitch tickles.
Wet washing powder tongue goose pimples his poems.
Sam, you’re right. The only literary career
left for a poet these days is the bloody SAS.
Poets of the machine. You know, we’ve got
to smoke them readers out of their holes &
carpet bomb bookstores with fuel-air poetry.
Little word machines in the rhetoric of war.
All artists are ‘evildoers’. “Remember, there’s
a poster back West with POET written on it!”
Sam, we’re closing the gap with forbesian
thinking. Thumbing through the 80’s & 90’s
tracing the gestalt of the anti-American
Poetry Association of Australasia. (NZ incl.)
The adult teeth of his words pushing
through & our gums bleeding.
Les Murray, Removalist
The freckled back of poetry
flexes prismatically through
the front door’s stained glass
kookaburra. Warped cells bunch
with rhythm; a paper crease vein
pulses in Antigone Kefala’s tongue
& groove neck. Melanomas gather;
flies thick on the crust of art.
On the enclosed verandah, spiders
cocoon time’s black idiom in bone.
In the small bedroom, she moves
a wardrobe language by rocking
it’s silky oak feet from side to side.
Hires a ‘big dinger’ for the real
heavy lifting – weighed down with
things she just can’t throw out.
Les Murray, removalist, drops
boxes of books, bends the covers
of new Icelandic translations,
dog-ears modern Australian poetry.
His workman’s crack, book-ended
between slabs of Boetian flesh,
entrances like a CWA cake stall.
Antigone tut tuts from the hallway
literature’s going to the gym now
(another new year’s resolution).
A tai-bo of new terminology;
the good fat stripped from obliques
of 20th century vernacular, portly
lyrical abdominals & quads of metaphor
lean as the Thorpedo (our greatest
cultural lungfish aside from Tangles
& Tugga & that Warwick Todd guy) –
all chucked on plastic.
Les hitches his stubbies up, dumps
Kefala’s boxes in the new library,
thumbs through a copy of Johnston’s
The Sea Cucumber he found hidden
under the kitchen sink cupboard.
Digs out strands of Greek rhetoric
from the plughole, a parting domestic
gesture. Fingers the congealed
plasticity of our final words
on the subject. Charges $25.00
per hour for elite removal.
On Wookiee’s, the SAS & Poetry.
for Sam Wagan Watson
The two-stroke sun retracts its clogged
blades through a tortoise-shell afternoon.
There’s another campaign on the wide-screen.
An upper house of ants tackle the leftover’s
from a kid’s party. Lollipops; war memorials
to fun liquefy inside made in china body bags.
In one of those hard to get at hotspots, confetti
dissidents escaped the catcher’s tawny frog-mouth.
Sam, as we sit now in judgement, George Lucas
sues the creators of Star Balls & the empire
strikes at Mohammed’s children’s children –
trying to get their heads around T.S Eliot.
‘Catpig’, who’s never seen a Wookiee before
or even a droid, sits on John Forbes’s mug-shot.
Her fishing line strength de-sex stitch tickles.
Wet washing powder tongue goose pimples his poems.
Sam, you’re right. The only literary career
left for a poet these days is the bloody SAS.
Poets of the machine. You know, we’ve got
to smoke them readers out of their holes &
carpet bomb bookstores with fuel-air poetry.
Little word machines in the rhetoric of war.
All artists are ‘evildoers’. “Remember, there’s
a poster back West with POET written on it!”
Sam, we’re closing the gap with forbesian
thinking. Thumbing through the 80’s & 90’s
tracing the gestalt of the anti-American
Poetry Association of Australasia. (NZ incl.)
The adult teeth of his words pushing
through & our gums bleeding.
Bitter as the cud 