Coronation

sing an ordinary girl
sitting on a wall
humming tunelessly to sunshine
just like anybody else
looking forward to a juicy chop
hiding all her peas
praise the ordinary sunshine
la
till mummy’s evening bell
will tinkle
call her in to splash her face
chatter some and see
a sunburned freckle
shining warm in shadow
la
country sunshine
country sleep

under the green sea of our face
we manage forever the seeker
duty giving dull and fine stuff power alike
which keeps rising like a blood well
Jacob’s pillow out of Perthshire rock
flitting scarlet finches every one diadem flashing
one feather cape for that matter
one bunny fur bush hat
like an other
become
olive and balsam making the great salad
labour perfecting buffalo cheese as well
given millennia we can
make wonder
simple
trees anointed by spring
creak with it
defy gravity in divine transpiration
say

hold      to      hold      to      hold      to

you are my queen
what secret line can make more of that?
years and floods ringing through us from faraway she
coronation sofa giving mossy beneath us all
for ever and ever
today
she is properly resigning to glory

Burning Beans on New Year’s Eve

(verses I forgot)

Chaff like petals on a coffee Buddha fretting:
Sunday roast does stink up a worthy one,
some other me in love with gods and gallimaufry

rates me so awful we skip to the next crack, 223°
daily jabber with this guy over, in the face of it,
growing small. Is metaphor low serotonin now?

Always roast to primes, my father never said
seedy common or exclusive composites—
that cloud burns away with the vision fade

fogged instead, memory for desire
one small circle the other’s child and the other—
more than I can say. Is more TV apprehension?

Shooting through unlikely integers annually
child-me plumped for quite a lot, fingers done,
and now, repetitively, quite a lot more

moving onto whatever’s next and, failing that,
inventing next, my page never neat as a story
loss of day, joke-made, boredom-perfect,

beans abandoned to the fireworks.

Two Friends

Well it’s done.

Printed (don’t ask me) and sent for the first read. Pretty nervous. However, I find there is not just joy in finishing it. I have written something quite worth reading, I reckon. As I like to think, I’m onto something.

The subject matter started with my family. Started thinking of it and actually had a go in 1979. Research began 1993 with a trip to Indonesia. Several interviews with my father before that but none of it used—in this one, anyway.

It did not remain with my family. For a long time (is it really forty-four years?) I struggled with facts and historical accuracy. Now I’ve read enough and seen enough to think I’ve had a respectable go at the history; that’s just labour, but the real breakthrough was not trying to tell the story of my family at all. Just inspire a story. Otherwise, it’s history—which is fine, but I’m no historian. I am a storyteller.

I can’t help thinking that perhaps I ought to pick another title. Then I think, nah.

One small reason, apart from the fact that the title is utterly appropriate, and that an editor may still have a say in the matter, is that the novel I wrote before Two Friends was Three Friends. Don’t worry, I don’t have One Friend in mind, yet. (It is possible, but I have thought of a much, much better title for the WIP and the novel I excerpted earlier on this site is called Written on the Golden Page.)

The “friends” thing is no coincidence, or gimmick. Finally, I started thinking about what I’ve written, and if there is anything I am actually writing about without knowing it. The thinking goes like this. Deep thought is a little pretentious in someone like me, suburban boy without a degree, believing writers need to have a job besides writing, to correct the lack of observation and formula writing I see, as much in myself as the genres I’ve traversed.

It turns out what I’ve been on about is friendship. My homelife, I always took as a mess, and now that it’s not a mess, it’s not worth writing about. So, friends have always been my joy and sorrow.

All my novels were really about making friends, some lovers, some betrayers, some just a gang of fools. So here is a title in which “friends” and “two” mean something. Here is doubling; here is enmity; company; hilarity; separation—making friends.

So there we have it: begun as biographical historical; now it’s an historical fantasy. Hope you can read it soon.

We Live in a House

First poem of the house, last of 2022. It came to me as I lay thinking about why things that make no sense return so regularly. Very significant, or not.

a building site

Here, because so little of my work gets sent out, because I’m working on three books at once, and because what we have here is at least a little of the surface of our building project, I’ve released another few thoughts on this place, driven by Cathy’s need for a shed and my own increasing despair at the vast and growing concrete slab of Melbourne.

I have to say it smells consistently sweet here.

Shed: exhortation

(because we live here only nominally)

Each beam every
Noggin complicates our space:
Word by phrase populate this
Address number: lose fingerprint gain
Split nail and puzzle order
And reward and nature and
Material layer and temperature and flow
Walk me through in dreams: nobody
Told you to do it except vision of
Vista-filled clearing
Insisted like a dog nose, eye
Singular and no question once
Four o’clock spreadsheet found
End and first line:
Cliché by mangled conjunction
Clad in stone and steel and soft sheet
Insulated glassily, questions
Delayed for their time their
Own population in town mind
Rented and full anyway of
Blithe new furniture
Build by kingfisher
Puddle and fur
Finch and eagle glancing
Drip and feather
Path of koala unalterable
Treeward certainly change,
I shall little by minor sprain
Cheek by stumble in sweet
Repeated ignorance build
Repose:
This field is my ocean and I
Bloody fisherman
Dwell until closing time paddocky—
Until next mishap—proud fashioning
Love severally large
As usual as foolishly as due by
Law and preparation and fate
Soft turned in the way of water
Away from a street holding fast
Something next in mind never
Far away.

Grey violence of first magpie
Permit me to pray
One more day.

Paul Voermans 2022

Chipping Away

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like anything is happening. Until it does. We are living in South Gippsland now, without a house for two years. Slowly, things have improved: composting toilet; worm farm septic (without a house we just dump the “solids” into the land of wormies); hot water (a Victorian clawfoot bath with a shower soon to have Cathy’s tiles); woodfired oven+heater. So we are not completely without amenities any more, but it’s taken many months. We have internet, just, by virtue of an directional antenna I put up on the shed. We have a TV my mate Tim lent us, and of course we have the coffee roaster and machine we had in Reservoir.

So we are not destitute, though we’re existing on Cathy’s pottery and my super only. Can’t get the dole because the we have the money to pay for the house, technically. I have applied for some jobs, but none successfully so far. An irrational reaction was to start a fantasy novel. Written on the Golden Page. This is now in first draft!

Encountering Two Friends, also in first draft, after a year’s resting, I am pleased and surprised to say it’s a novel I’m drawn to read, unlike many I come across these days! Surely that’s not simply my conceit, never having read it, and a year’s setting aside…. I know already what to do with it, but I’ll go through it in the way I’ve taught myself, doing synopses as a story told, as a series of scenes, as what it might be, as a text I’m digging in for meaning, then a synopsis of it as it should be, and another of each chapter as they ought to be. Finally a retype and a third pass, plus whatever obsessive tinkering I get up to, with another pass or two after comment and hopefully editorial suggestions. Five drafts, I suppose. A lot of fact checking.

I am settled into writing in the morning and building in the afternoon. Roughly. Today a poem called, “Parma with Chilli Chorizo Before Bed” about lighting a fire and a cat dream. No building due to website rebuilding.

Cathy is finished the house tiles. They are so beautiful. (More later.)

All of a sudden, after frustration of planning and the universal pandemic delays, we get a house delivered in three weeks! I hope to keep this site up-to-date a bit more. So you’ll get a shot of the delivery, perhaps. Wish us luck. We may be living in it in November. inshallah, as my old dad used to say.

New Life, New Novel

Because we have only Cathy’s income to live on, and are used to a fair bit more than that, there are 3:30am moments when I Really Ought to Do Something About Money. Of course, if a job exists that would let me take weeks off in the first month to build the workshop and only do days that suit me I’d—but wait! There is! I COULD WRITE A NOVEL THAT WOULD ACTUALLY SELL COPIES!! So I started noodling on the laptop. I mean, if it’s going to be airport fodder I can avoid writing the whole elaborate rotate-13-times-widdershins-on-the-cushion-draft-on-paper-then-input-then-input-again thing, surely. Noodling. Anyway, I discovered two things: noodling always turns into Something. And twothly, I am incapable of writing something that doesn’t interest me, so whatever I write is going to be less airporty than all that. I mean, I like airportly books as much as the next snob, but I have only one in me, surely, and this isn’t it. (Is it?) I have learned from trying this: my writing survives the worst assault I can make on it, driving four hours back and forth from home to new home (building site), actively trying to write relatably yet plotlessly; and that such an “assault” jettisons some serious baggage I’ve accumulated. And I do plot! This move to our new place is all about jettisoning, so here is another break with my private rules.

An extract, from what I’ve been calling Written on the Golden Page: a game of light and darkness. It’s a fantasy! For someone who maintains all fiction is fantasy, this is just being honest. I cannot deny, though, that my favourite authors in the genre as published include Joanna Russ, Christopher Stasheff, Patricia McKillop, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula Le Guin, Phillip Pullman, Samuel Delany, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, and Fritz Lieber. Yes of course Tolkein and Lewis, but you may find it interesting—and without reason but time—that I haven’t read much Pratchett or Bradbury. I have, though, read Vincent King, Norton Juster, EE Nesbit, and Richard Cowper. Anyway. Who knows if it will find the cutting room floor?

I do know it’s fun.

      The bup did it. They had been avoiding meaningful conversation successfully. They had gotten rooms—though only two, by some misunderstanding they didn’t dare question—and meals and directions to a place near but not too near the Library, unmemorably they hoped. The innkeeper, an individual of very wrinkled face and skin hard not to goggle at because it was as pale as any of them had encountered in person, had hardly looked up, so exhausted were they from the evening’s festivities.
      Colly ruined all of this by cuteness.
      Colly was a variegated bup. Khaki and deep green blotches like leaf shadow, with a coral pink and ivory speckling on their belly. Everybody looked at Colly and nobody at the westerners. As it happened, there was a huge bunch of bups at the hotel, who did not appear to belong to anybody but came and went with people, hoping for scraps or play.
      Colly met them as a long-lost pal. They went straight to wrestling and growling, frills raised then falling again when mouthed or swiped with a (potentially) razor sharp paw. In Colly’s eyes, the downcast look of months of travel without complaint, leading and tracking good-naturedly but wearing as much as it had the humans, evaporated. They romped on the hardwood courtyard at the centre of the inn, where below aquatic mammals that only lived here in the east and which Dwey said were “careens” splashed and rolled hoping for scraps of the bup scraps. The water chucked and wooshed and careens peeped and slapped flat fingers on the pylons to whatever tune they were singing in their mournful language. It was a kind of permanent carnival. The bups raced as a pack from one side to the courtyard to the other, drumming loudly as they galloped. Plants filled the space and the animals bumped heavily into them, shaking leaves and autumn blossoms to the grey boards.
      After they had established their status within the pack (happily at the bottom) Colly charmed a huge bone from a kitchen hand by skidding to halt at the feet of a woman on a break.
      “Colly,” they said. Their only word besides swearing.
      She grinned and scritched Colly, who began to purr loudly, a western trait not unknown here but rare and highly prized. This delighted the hand, who went in and came out with something plainly meant for a soup.
      “Shh Colly!” the hand told them, dropping it at their feet.
      Colly looked at the hand in disbelief, then down at the bone. They licked it experimentally as if to test that it was not something else just resembling a bone. They clamped onto it with a needle-tooth grip nobody could break.
      Which was just a challenge to the other bups. When they raced past first one bup, then another peeled off and on their return from whatever game was going on a few more smelled and then saw Colly’s prize. Soon all of them surrounded Colly. They, too, could not believe what had happened. Colly was growling and gnawing, heedless. The other bups crept up on her, bellies to the boards and frills and spines flat to their backs.
      They stopped. Colly crunched and slurped. There was plenty of meat on it, eucalyptus fragrant, probably the massive thigh of a drop bear. The pack shuffled forward. One or two began to whine. When finally Colly glanced up, thirteen drooling faces oggled their gift. There came a loud whine.
      They pounced.
      Colly was quick, fit from her long trek. The bone was easily as big as their head but they lifted it and galloped across the garden of pots and hanging flowers and ferns to the far side, crashing and zigzagging.
      With a collective howl, the bups set off in pursuit. There was no good exit from the courtyard except by steps that led down to the water where it was occasionally necessary to receive glee shells and nautilus via submarine troa. After a half circle, knocking down chairs and tripping the linen boy, and another cross of the courtyard, Colly made a beeline to the steps, which she made in twos and threes for the water, where she propped.
      The rest of the bups spilled over and around her, into the drink. Yelps and splashes burbles, more splashing.
      Bups can swim but only after a fashion. Almost half of the thirteen were in real danger of drowning, if not saved by the careens, who slipped over rolling green swell and reached under them with tail and, steadying with hands, flipped them back up the seps into the courtyard where the shocked bups flopped and flapped about, too stunned to do anything but weep and pant. Watching the fiasco, Colly dropped their bone to say her word, feeling quite safe. She did not count on the careens, who were as omnivorous as bups. One slipped it from below Colly’s snout and dived. The rest followed and soon the bups were looking at one another as if they suspected that the treat was not gone but hidden by one of their own kind. They were yelping softly, even as they licked their wet feathers.
      Every person at the inn was now in the courtyard.

Written on the Golden Page, Paul Voermans 2022. Reproduce this as long as you tell me.

Whole Body Lessons

Just as we were packing the kayaks I heard the cute squidgy sound and looked up to see vibrant green barreling overhead in a volley up to the steps at the end of our street. Where there is a bower in the bushes, blue plastic from fizzy CO₂ and cooking propane in a tempting trail leading to what to me looks like a wicker bird from a craft nation flag. Only not creepy. Cool and a bit sexy. Pegs. Bottle tops. Mmm.

Now the whole body is a bit sore. Not too bad. I have been looking at kayaks for some time now, dating back to the time we went to Mallacoota and tried the Hobie kayaks with the foot-powered turtle paddles. They are certainly interesting but I think I’d screw up the paddles pretty quickly. Also, they are bricks when you’re not paddling. So if you need to steer with a hand paddle for some reason forget it. All this is fine, I’d say, if you’re not going to fish in shallow water, and there is little seagrass or other aquatic vegetation, and you want to pump leg more than arm.

When I decided on a “pathway to retirement” I noted this as necessary equipment for living rural, along with chainsaw (check), trailer (check), ute (uh, not quite), and, oh, a house (don’t get me started). Some of these items are worth a little sketch on their own—three-phase solar, electric car, Cathy’s kiln—to which I may or may not get around. My mate Tim and I have been talking for some time about the seagrass beds just off Yanakie, and a couple of bits of Shallow Inlet, as places to explore for sustainable flathead and King George whiting. Or to find them not, just be. You could do these with an aluminium boat with two stroke outboard and hard spiked anchor; you could also drift in a 4.3m fishing “sit on top” kayak, silently dangling soft lure among twice as many species of seabirds I can identify and above starfish and flounder and rays and cunjevoi, and that “lungs of the bay” seagrass. All of which of course is good for you old body, too.

It will also be a doddle to launch from Toora, where we used to live, by the milk plant where our father assaulted his boss and got fired, by the garage where he cooked roo in a caldron, by the tadpole drain I followed to the sea, and where there are also seagrass shallows surrounding the boat ramp and an area called Swan Bay, for obvious reasons if you have ever seen a ragged V (a “glide”? a “skein”?) slitting a dawn surface there. Just toward the channel we have set off at dawn and found ourselves in fog and in the still grew aware that dolphins had surrounded us. I have a picture somewhere of this, but you’ll have to make do with dawn on another day, near Yanakie.

We’re locked down, so it’s not easy to kayak, even masked and nobody nearby and police approved (the divvy van passed and we waved and they waved). We had agreed, Cathy and I, that if anybody was about we would go home. Ready not to go, we went. Inexperienced middle-aged idiots shouldn’t get out on the ocean except when it’s very calm here and the only place we can launch is the Erskine River, a few hundred metres from our door.

So we set off. Our first launch on a bright day and two hours of regulation exercise to spend. Tense with one another, dealing carefully with the non-theoretical mass of them on the roof, using blanket on each car and straps. We drove around the corner and over the speed bumps by the empty caravan park gingerly. We packed goods into a waterproof bag. Each kayak has a trolley you strap on one end; it is 35 kilos. One has to stand in the car doorway to reach and grab an inset handle slide the kayak down to the other without losing control. All masked and wetsuited in the unexpected sun. You strap the wheels on one end then heave and trolley to the water. We agreed to do our own on our own. We did it.

On the empty water, we discovered we had one thing wrong and the instructions had one thing wrong. We paddled out carefully then back in to fix the rudders and seats. We agreed on how we might set up and we scoured the beach and shallow water for the split pin from Cathy’s rudder, then put a keyring on her rudder, a much better solution than a pin, reclipped the lumbar support of our seats, strapped them taut, set off again.

Paddling is as difficult as you want to make near the Erskine mouth. There was a wind and there was a current, neither as strong as it gets. Tanin water. Bream territory. Dry reeds and what Cathy calls “fake mangrove”. We went up, we went down—not too close to the beach—discovering how it felt to paddle as hard as, that if you just stopped paddling, you could glide silently observing cormorant and duck and wren, looking out for fish and rocks and likely snags where the bream might take a fly in predawn summer, under the clear heavens and beside the odd boardwalk runner or dog walker. We still felt guilty that this might not be proper lockdown behaviour, that this was what city people cannot do in these circumstances. We are up to the stage of locking down where everyone ought to have an idea of what is safe and not—ought to—I still see the looks in people’s eyes when I’m running and puffing, mask-less, though generally I do my best to cross the street or turn a corner. We are good. We get tested. We are fully vaccinated.

We learned you should stick with your companion. We learned rowing backwards to turn. I crashed into three things. We splashed one another, a skill needing much more practice. I thought about bailing tools and upper body strength. This is not excercise that will easily puff you out, but it is the whole body and the whole mind you involve when you row. It’s always been a notion, that I might regularly exercise this way. (Once I got my son a rowing machine to help him recover from his adenoid-induced apnoea, knowing it was my own idea of exercise.) We do have many more things to improve about our kayaking routine and perhaps we need a checklist for boating, like my father-in-law, because when you go on the water the feeling of surrender to a larger power only comes with careful and clean preparation, maintenance habits, weather watching, and good practise. Never disrespect the sea gods.

I don’t think we’ll be going out on Loutit Bay until we have ourselves better prepared with the right lifejackets and perhaps an electric motor as well —purely for safety, mind—and a study of tides and currents and a final move to Gippsland are defiinitely in order, because it can be quiet here on the Great Ocean Road but it’s the shoals of Corner and Shallow Inlets, with whiting scales there the glittering shades of the sand and flathead skin like the spotted rich mud, that I’m imagining pretty much daily, and fear only rationally, and know. So it will be a while before we reach peak kayak. Before we feed ourselves with a handful of shells. This won’t be the last time I’ll be writing about it.

Didn’t seem like we had done that much exercise, but by the end of our stint, tying craft to car roof, I ran into headfirst into the stern. That’s what we call chop-your-leg-off-o’clock. We drove carefully back to our temporary home and unloaded carefully beneath the carefree flights of randy bowerbirds.

Today I’m a bit sore. Good sore. We learned a lot. And we did it without killing ourselves, or one another. Good sore.

Complicate that

it’s still a day
still
waiting
empty of a morning
born standing
dying to move
see
how many count
turns
cards
rules
grains
marks
scents
sins
shadows
exchanges
shortest day
how few visions dance
shortest unmatchable day.

Lordsy Prayersies SNEAK PREVIEW!

Free and gratis extract of a series in reply to Christian mediation, Lordsy Prayersies. I think it’s XIII, therefore enough to reply to Berryman.

A Rationale for Angling

shows us Taoist Fishing swollen bunions
plays us TikTok elderly Sports God
Offers Lumbar Yearning to Ice Chest
(inaction replay with punk effects)
scrolls Buddhist boasting snaps tonight
perhaps no fat rainbow lent to proud iPhone;
a cloudburst, rather, extinction glory cropped
Caspian terns wheeling heedless in a storm;
can only stand the moon in flushing water
where bream might rise to swallow it
only offer ocean or ferny streams
mindless flotation or hopeless battle:
better the half-moon than my family
lead swell heaving than my enemy.

Shipping Container Painting with Birdsong

came across two saucy wrens
name of Gough and Bobby
both with classic eyebrows
cries
classic curiosity
talked of time that won’t return
when tertiary school was free
lingering by Eumemmering creek
far from the liberal sea
their interest complimented me
mine seemed to please them also
looking forward to conversation
like great debates but moreso
they know all the gossip
who’s visiting at what bush
when i talk back to one or both
nobody tells me shoosh
cock their tiny heads
hop upon barbed wire
say to me what i must hear
warn of coming fire
say to me
i’m listening
tell us what we must do
hard to hear as ever it was
Bob and Gough you will cut through
i work and you attend
you speak and i listen for signs
sounds only
like little twittering birds
but you know aeons

Solstice 2020:persistence

Stillness like caramel
slips
dissolves
burnt
on tongue and swallow
feeling so much so
it’s yet to be
paint-spattered and weary.
Everything stands in for love
even death and seasons
for parts of love at least.

He stands listening to the rain
in the neighbourhood of your simile.
He is alarmed still at his invincibility
the charm of his own grin.
The poo Rorschach fooled him,
sometimes shit is just shit.
The overexamined life not worth extra—
genuine complacency costs
more than the petrochemical kind.
And anyway he’d rather walk.

NOTE TO GO WITH THE FIRE ALARM INSTRUCTIONS

the new occupiers at our joint got this note

• respect the geckos
• watch the blackbirds but just grumble
• doves nest in the treefern
• rats cross the fence (not possums)
• at dusk our bats do not stop
• but almonds and apples and apricots and figs draw parrots on a single day
• keep mulch and water on the magnolias
• gall wasp want drowning twice a year
• mice foiling when weather drives them in
• when the days are baking three days still
• you may then vent night air
• (don’t cook indoors)
• (not just because the grill knob’s dodgy)
• bee keeper
• bird watcher
• arrak distiller
• pomegranate adorner
• Olafur Arnalds player
• all okay
• UFO survivor
• dog stoner
• rose stripper
• council dobber
• watch out let lips thin
• when the day reaches in
• shutter
• in the seasons of wattle and butterfly and eel
• respect the snakes early
• (if kookaburras are pairing you’re okay)
• on the edges and at water
• (bin chickens eat them too)
• walk for cranes
• gargle to magpies in their own voice
• no matter what nonsense
• (to shirtless cyclists this does not apply)
• keep the wild pear parrot poo off your car
• find the frogmouth if you can
• welcome the passage of wind back to front but not north-south
• listen for the rain but don’t count on it
• drier here and uphill on a treadly
• down on your way into town
• or the Westgarth or all fish and chips
• always down to the creek in eel flood
• when shampoo and shit run freely
• where in fennel autumn a platypus and even button quail
• let alone thrip and wild bees and cicadas throng
• be in on New Year and out Saturday mornings
• specify grams to the pasta dude
• scoops to the nuts
• and individual prawns
• while metres of boerewors
• thumbs of fetta
• and single slices of margherita will do
• afternoons of mud crab
• slow minutes of vegan banh mi
• late nights of mixed lot everything salad
• high noons of mowing
• and midnight choppers
• fireworks! Whenever
• buy yourself time here
• have the silly stuff delivered
• do not go out unless you must
• until the cats roast their brains on the heating
• and dogs in the noon of the sun
• feel it here
• do
• with all your hearts and your kids and grandkids
• godmothers and uncles and cream-faced teens
• regret schooling as much as they won’t remember yours
• die here if you can
• moving on is for wimps
• live in dark as well as your friends of the sucker under tin
• pale and a bit bitey if disturbed
• live here and nowhere else
• this deserves you and you this
• live here fortunately and lucky and kind
• long and eager and free
• wait till your children bust out
• live here some more
• some thing more
• be gentle to the moths and spiders
• even the Jack Russell next door loves you
• all day
• sometimes everyone and everything is just fine
• you cannot buy that for money
• but you can
• you did

My New Novel–The White Library

This morning I noticed that US voting booths look like Star Wars All Terrain Scout Transports.

This news is a climb down from yesterday’s buzz: I am so pleased to announce The White Library is on the PS Publishing website! You can pre-order here hopefully in time for Christmas. Do get the lovely print edition.

Way down at the end of this kind of long post is the excerpt they published in the PS Newsletter. I have to say I’m pleased with the design and editing process. I have to thank everyone involved, especially at this time of our collective and private lives, to get this out at all. And I’m so impressed by the sheer energy of the PS folks, with so much going on there.

The White library is a novel on one level about the Dotcom explosion. It’s a science fiction story of course, so bears little resemblance to the real State Library of Victoria, or the people there, or what went on there in the nineties.

Except for the excitement.

Dotcom? State Library? Well, yes. Now, it seems weird to have thought that the internet might not change the world if not promoted. If you could connect all the information around the world and use it to help people it needed organisation and collection, nurturing, so a library of course was a good place to start. It’s still a good place. Back then, I was the proud possessor of a 2400 baud modem and a 486, upon which I marvelled at the Bodleian Library’s illustrated manuscripts as they downloaded for 20 minutes an image.

From the other side of the world!

I volunteered for the only Australian website I could find, which turned out to have been published on a Mac Classic on Gary Hardy’s desk (or perhaps under it) at RMIT. A friend told me about it and when I browsed there with Netscape 0.98 the site had crashed. No matter.

The site was VICNET and turned out to be a joint venture soon after housed at the State Library of Victoria. I was the second volunteer. First was Carey Handfield, well-known SF fan and publisher at Norstrilia Press (where I first saw print, along with Greg Egan and early work by Gerald Murnane). We stood before goggling community groups trying to make real the concept that computers could be joined to one another in some kind of web.

When a job opened up there I showed up with my HTML of the VICNET website on a floppy disk, no matter that I was no designer and that it slowed the page loading, a real issue back then. I became a modem whisperer and in the end a more or less genuine tech. VICNET was one of two commercial ISPs in the country, eventually developing a budget and contracts measured in millions of dollars. Thanks to its founders Stuart Hall and Gary Hardy, Adrian Bates and Indra Kurzeme (three out of four of whom are librarians), it established the concept of free internet in libraries; it built and crashed Wi-Fi and broadband and databased websites and site searches; it confronted web filtering and censorship, content moderation, and cyber security–all for the first time.

VICNET grew into the biggest and most popular website in the country by giving sites away, designing them on behalf of the organisations, and roaming the state showing the contents to other groups. (The elderly were particularly responsive.) That there was any Victorian content at all was down to us. We published the first sites for the Melbourne Comedy Festival, The Age, The Department of Premier and Cabinet, The Council for the Ageing, The Australian Grand Prix, Readings Bookstore (I developed a version of the legendary front window which advertised shared houses), 3RRR shows, and a host of our own inventions that we convinced the Thatcherite State Premier and Treasurer, Jeff Kennett and Alan Stockdale to sponsor, sites like MC2 and Skills.net which basically invented web-based social media. (Not that we would want to take credit, but it was all happening in many places at once back then and features fed from one place to another.)

I started a site called Post-paid Poetry, where people sent money (to a PO Box!) if they liked a poem and wanted to support. I wrote the first databased ancestry website, at least in the country, possibly anywhere. I also devised an intranet, for my sins, in order to track knowledge and customers in what would now be something like SalesForce. Back then we called it the Duck Database, for its duck buttons, and our support website sported the Tip-o’-the-Week for many months: “Socks first, then shoes.”

VICNET was populated by a weird menagerie of types, from pale programmers to garrulous unionists to atypical librarians (is there a type? not really), growing from four to over sixty before it was destroyed for basically ideological reasons.

My novel is about so much else besides inventing the internet as we went along. But the friendship and wild business and home jiggery pokery of those days is a strong part of it. The single-mindedness necessary for creativity, too. It’s a novel, which in my fairly naturalistic style has people in it I hope are believable, even if the incredible is its air and poetic imagination its soil. These are the people, in all their variety and imperfection, necessary to bring something new into the world.

She knew him for an idiot on sight, but it did not stop her loving him. Helped. She didn’t know it at the time. Had no idea what it was. She just went over a calming one, seven, four, five . . . The sequence unfolded in serene paisley. Angela did sense he stood for everything unquiet and maddening in the universe. She was drawn to it as a goldfish is mesmerised by the motionless cat above. Knowing if she stayed inside herself and her numbers and their shapes she would die more surely than by this cat lofting her out of her world. Beyond the surface tension. She took her chances in the air. She stopped counting. She watched him noticing things. She knew this much: nothing got by him, perhaps not the movement of the planet in the solar system, Milky Way in galaxy cluster. He teetered on it all as they spiralled off in multiple attractors. It was a wonder more of his hair was not standing on end. While she noticed nothing. It was his agony and people wanted to please him in it, and he them, and it turned into a competition. No, after you. She did not know how she knew such a thing. Imitating someone who knew such stuff paid off unpredictably. More than imitating. Being is destiny. Frederic Hillacre, pleased to meet you. Angela Donohoe, of course. Waggish chin tilt. This had to be self-satire, so she smiled. The sparkling Nordic eyes locked with Angela for a moment and then his mouth dropped open. That—that was realising something and that, changing gears. She had practised them herself. Freddy transformed visibly from duffer wringing his hands on tiptoe into the inspired opportunist who’d invented this “Byllion Book Search Unit”. Less awfully, the Unit. Angela forced herself to keep looking up. “So what are you currently on?” “Pardon?” Chair? Medication? Parole? Back to the planets spinning round suns spinning round spinning . . . Knowing he was doing it and following his reasoning were different things. “Remuneration. Piles of silver. Spondulicks. We can only offer you a pittance of a skerrick of a sou, I’m afraid. And when can you start?” Flying through the air. She could almost see his whiskers. Little fish you have to fly. “15,485,863.” An outrageous lie but a lovely prime, light and airy. “Thirteen,” he snapped. It was so swift it could have been rehearsed, except he’d picked a lovely prime as well. Wooshing. Suddenly he looked alarmed. Or was it gas? “Done.” Angela held out a hand. That was what they did in the book. The large Freddy hand coming to meet her own flappy moist part was more delicate than hers, only larger because he was tall, tall, tall. She had called his bluff and he had not hesitated. Just like in The Job is Landed. A good sign. Then the interview began.

On Attaining the Natural State

for Donald

Come misremember these:
the moon on a trapeze
Arlecchino and a fly—
the three of rule cannot apply
to an albatross—
no fight with getting small
no wandering the hall
no time to wonder why
he isn’t that stopping guy
or on a horse.
We took a left turn
(Hell shall overflow)
black cap and neck scarf
hero Twins to go
town cold as stone
no nobelium in sun so
reactors improvise:
this was the bloody story,
the eyeball getting hoary
it’s easy to forget
we haven’t seen what happens yet—
uncarved we try.

Da dumb da dumb da dumb
da dear da dear da dear
day die day die day die
his innocence of state returns
by thy beard and long grey eye.

Hound of Baskerville Street

for Teddy Boy

The dog of the situation
waits
for the Angry Man
opening gates
bearing in mind NO PULLING
She hates
your jerking differential of rates.

Sniffing
which
Now
to rush isn’t the same
as how
all four of us follow this game:
rolling Old Cow did a crash
what a shame
as per normal
Yours Truly to blame.

It’s not he’s some
furry assassin
Her ongoing faithful protection
wants a bump
beyond visualisation—
a reverse in the guy’s situation.

And he once saw Angry Cat
disappear
in contretemps
with a Rolling Thing rear.

WATCHER

Gumnuts rain on her car like rain
that does not sting if he knows its reason
but if it is to fall is like dread
is dread and such dread to
blast every very thing but love she said
in a word (as in mortality hazard ratio)
syllable in a word (as in crude death rate)
letter in a syllable in a word (as in R0)
as in a curve in a letter in a syllable in a word at last hooked
as in a serif in—breath caught

whose small terrors and wonders add up
to the band to the nation to the world
of magpie that watches man
that only the woman notices knowing
he could unflinch the man
high in the gumnut tree
he could he could who with a falling coo
could unflinch more if coming closer could
release them unto gargling play
all the while could so do
thrilling with the same beak
better corvid than we think
shrike bastard or national carillon
who is she to say
who? Indeed, she nods
feeling cloven in three
warding bearing striking
all at once
sprayed nutted cut
before they might settle into dreams
pied light and feathers
falling
undisturbed.

That’s condign reward for crimes he assumed
murder in his little dreams big enough for the world.

Newly unhappy or routinely altered
he has imagined this day this swoop
the signs were there in black and amber
spike and a chip flying from his scalp

for the reason of the world is
to do what must and not what her hands want
which would deal solitaire all day long
out of fear of the beak and laws of nature

trees where creatures lurk and wait
when they might perch and sing
the falling of a day some other’s way
to a dawn that is a joy to rise without us.

She closes the window and drives.

God-shaped Dance Hall

“For that which I work
I do not acknowledge
for not what I will
this I practise but
what I hate
this I do.”

Dance to that if you can.

Hello brother the Lord sang
Hello sister sang the younger man, listening
Too few stories for your life?
Her everybody day is a mystical playground
Song of grey fellowship with the humans—
She is dead or rather not dead but over there
Dancing with the dead in grey festival with shades
While he is speaking her dance and timbre
Making good the promise of news even if it is letters
NYKPDLMVRE over and over like the name of god
Or the god breath and mantra of her steps.
The Bible on this phone has a paywall of China
Of porcelain that nobody breaks but ancient geeks:
If only love were all you needed he would possess just one
And never have to read again.

“Come Lord she’s right beneath both our feet dancing.”

The breath the breath is catching
Believe her or not that’s what’s going on.

Solstice 2020: Shock and Awful on the Vegetable Way

Death once half-achieved
he returned
hands colder than work.

I’ve gathered the worst lessons all along:
what was a snail more shelly than before
what was a belly softer than a song:
punishment for each moment I was sure.
I lived my time on stalks of my own words
watching as trees take a bite of the earth
choral truth accreted by girls in beards
while I gave succour to fools for their wealth:
I am waking once again to their slap
the call of the weird wants me all alone
that evil scares me is my one true trick—
what they’re finally good for, and that’s fine,
it was in my nature to space these verbs
tidy packets of shocked-out wombat turds.

Small brown treefrogs ring
ringing stars
nearer than error.

Buck doesn’t turn to
keeps chewing—
koalas eat light.

Breath more certain for not getting noticed
drops kindly deeper if given a chance
we steady our hearts and do not pretend
veering careful if not smart from defence
beneath a new moon on to the next beast
captured by the verge in shock at the lights
much if not pretty back to the slant crossed.
When you’re asking what must change consider
we’ll arrive there anyway soon enough
walk or drive how we got there we’ll wonder
one breath at a time or another breath
together, it’s hard to say isn’t it?
So why do you have to be a fuckwit?

Horizon’s gone pale
treefrogs sleep
I hear traffic now.

Hope You Do

massive whens

When we recover
we’ll dance
when we hear
toast and pray
when we are more
shout and laugh
when less
simply smile
when we die
we shall suffer and not
when not
we will no more
when we wander
when such songs
when such blessings
we heft.

IMPATIENCE

I saw Jacinda Ardern riding the other hill
blowing a bubble of gum
on way to a small cloud of love and
impatient flesh knowing just métier taught
you flinched not
at the rain.

On another hill I see pedalling for their love
on the other side
must be comfort to the poor
your heart always deserving the most cynical grab
marching unafraid on
to its end.

I saw Gough Whitlam here or maybe there on a farcical chopper
arms agley like Samothraki wings
cruising on to victory over time
born again this century and your bright eyebrows knowing he was right
tattooed into place
miss nothing.

Seeing Little Betty Isn’t nursing on her degree down south
brazenly provocative pervert cancelling
smirk not exactly joyous power over your body
all of me flinching at the very thought of her
no forgetting myself
compassion ends.

On the other hand I got the pillow that you dream on
with pure air I might like and hard boiled confection
is this what I get when I paid for connection?
Ludic body doesn’t know or care about what you made with your algorithm
even if I only wanna know about love
done like a bought one.

I talked to some of you and thought kindly of the rest
before I met your ordinary indifference and grew
suspicious you’re an idiot
so certain legs go further yet eyes long on to wings
I am perfectly OK with my difference
if it’s all the same.

Felt your Leading Vector deep deep in my pleura
going on inflaming news for his own sticky ends
the truth in his corpus
aching to complete before they’re ready
anticipating the end
so instrumental.

Actually I love you with every bit of my body
even the foreign quasi-living matter
with all the depth and breadth and height my lungs can muster,
on, these graces fall from air to water to air and such ordinary graces
even unto death unknowing
invent wonder.

THE END OF EVERYTHING

When the sleep-bellied River rolls over clear
and wombats can stay from the Shoulders
till the flathead Rise Up in Joyous Choral my dear
and the miner birds fall short of Words,

Darling cleave to me and I shall cleave to you
until we cleave to the dust Both Together
cleave my dear Heart to me and you Know I’ll cleave to you
till love and lust cleave to dust and Forever—

when the sun-drooping branches won’t Fire
and the bellbird Cathedral won’t echo
till the elvers never Struggle from the Far Coral Sea
and Sunburn and Bumps never snapper,

this smoky morning
cleave to me and I shall cleave to you
until we cleave to the dust each together
cleave your Love unto me and all my Faith I’ll cleave to you
for every god cleaves to dry dust together—

in the far haze Ikara won’t purple it’s Jolly
and Mallee dirt bleaches your palm
till the spring doesn’t wait for the wattle busting Gold
and our hard summer star will go gentle,

that sweet evening
cleave to me as I cleave to you
until we cleave to the dust together
cleave to me and I shall cleave to you while darling
all the heavens cleave to dust altogether.

Mallee Rain

for my bike

riding curves
chocolate creek a river
slipping its edges
i am alone
wet as any thing will [be]
first foot down to mudded cadenza
inevitably
going down
mudlarks scatter
dangerous proof
how every thing returns
after we pass [so] logically
asymptotic courses run
dust rain spattering less than narrow man
addled on the grass
truth forcing breath and sentence
to punctured closure on a gorge-side turning
error rolling [on] error
tumbling [to] in caesura
for want of patience with uncharming
weather.

[Your] mud currawong [only] suffers what it has to
[i push]

curves

Help

You’re simply there
a cloud on the moon
not water
impossible to breathe
madman on the street
all talk and talk
whereof you cannot speak
all fourth walls
vapour
what’s the use of peace
you quack
it breaks us apart.

Let’s break together
like eggs in a game
tumbling
in on one another
bowling like friends for
all that we can manage for
what is is what we can be doing
more or less the same
all of these nouns are
written in the margins
like songs at a meeting
of fools.

Give me five dollars
I will build a casino of paper
I could really use a shave
but this is better it has drawers
that close and everything
like a bought one
children and dogs never think it will come
to this what’s that
all about it never ceases
to amaze me the power
a little honest exchange gets you
bump into anyone in this place.

no heart a rock

they’re spraying Hong Kong people blue
so this is me and that is you
so spray me too
joy arrives a-wailing
hope for longer childhood
hope for wetter nappies
they’re spraying Hong Kong people blue
why not Heidelberg Olympic too
why you?

no heart a rock but this
rock a heart
all those stars All that
surf you never
visit Stupid brain never comes when you call
down some viral hole with a wombat
it will never get
connected to everything just a little bit
arses big or pert must accept the regulation bite
joy is the hard part

worm-beknownst born rock swaddled
take joy where
you get it Where
you never visit Where
age finally sees black wattle Where—
really
sees—
weary you get that now about that gentle gold
blood on the late black wattle is all
over joy:
spray me too
fucking dare you

They are spraying Hong Kong people blue
breaking heads on trains
putting kids on planes.
All
sorts of things
seventeen by count so far Or just
One.
Extinguishment, drowning what they knew
court completes our terror Doing
the easy part—
they’re spraying Queensland handcuffs blue
wouldn’t you?

what we saw

seamed by two am blue radio
analogue purpose beauty enough
like early magnolia reach
child mother stagger
refinery flame
this seated organism
all night-blind before intent
will in moments touch morning
mystery of forward motion
for the still kind
fair swap on the reason day line
no other time you know
seeing her is like a dream
only better at not yet a thing
not stream
blue radio numbers dog sense
so far with this logic swim in love
porpoise words to mirror surface
above below above
as we go we rhyme
thought to sense
light to time
radio numbers said
to memory of stuff
no dream ever mislaid
purely sitting on the bedspread cuff
still completely lost the while
more or less or more
than less without knowing what we saw
as certain as a smile

Ye Olde Went in His Sleep at Least

I am stupiding with age
ye fresh arterial blood clot
is blackening on the stage

i’m liquoring to eejit
ye povo amygdala
pickling to a walnut

i’m shrunkening to sundown
ye don’t even embig
in imagination

ye braine is gathered with bits of twine
how I don’t but know it’s mine
criss-cross gartering divine
accident or design
mighty fine

better out continent than in
may be

but let me die awake
spitting clueless gruel
stood on the painful table
not done yet
only my own stupid
flickering still
but mine.

little itches: the business of change

there’s a place my everything is due
clattering parrots barge through it
you and I suck a margin we can’t keep
waiting for disaster

à vos marques, prêts, faites vos jeux…

only this blank strategy it’s true
secret of sleep is believe it
we all of us shat a tax got on the cheap
clenching on disaster

ready me for something like prayer steady me
ready me said the dragonfly weeping your name
ready me for something like prayer steady me
ready me steady me on purpose

light in a room without you
night time without the hard bit
we both will swallow blood before we leap
stalling love’s disaster

it’s always in flames it’s always in flames
this time no-one’s waiting on the borders
from want to should is a couple of years
it’s a difficulty with orders

little itch that tempts you back to
living, though you know it ends in worm shit
my love we are rounded with a sleep
one last sweet disaster

steady me ready me winds away winds away
steady me cast your kindness to the air
steady me ready me winds away winds away
steady me ready me for fire

arise, shine, burn as well fuck that dew
even so enraged you have to spit
me and you are nicking stuff that keeps
past oceans of disaster

winter solstice 2019:

remember this if it hurts and have a nice lie down

for Mia

easy as swans
passing it covers you
plead for darkness
because the cover because
the very cold because
sweet belief in dawn

Christmas 2018

for Cathy

Where is that crow going?
Same place as us.
Look at it rowing
Between a slog and a swallow.
Once heard it groaning
Now it fills the expanse
Mirror black where the oil spill was
Speck of midnight at noon
A little storm in the blue
No reminder of awful death,
My love, sweet shade in the belting sun
Soft dusk two words two words two words
All the murder soft-loud following-joining
Slowing the progress of twilight.
So we’re going the way of that crow my love
So the oceans are filling
With trivia
So bad men do great
While good women groan
So the trial of God secret
And appealed
So I am unkind—
Call low-hard soft-loud to your murder
From our crooks above the creek bend
Hunched and bright dark
We’ll answer.

Winter Solstice 2018: Ya Boo Sucks

If life gives you lemons fuck lemonade
All that sugar—just suck.
Find yourself winded on the kitchen floor
Don’t get up, lie a while and feel the dirt
Check your bits why don’t you
Consider
Giving up whatever knocked you down
Thank your stars for arms and legs
And move on—but not just yet
Where’s the hurry to do?
This is not wallowing.
If you’re humble about your failure—
Anybody could have done it
Shit just chose you—
Every now and again
Fail gloriously.
Bless and be still.

Time for a Good Hot Cuppa

Sleeplessness is awful
Insomnia is worse.
Dreaming of pomegranates
Left on our porch
Only to find they’re real—
Or did our porch dream them?
Why not bathe in cool tea
Instead of drinking your shame
All alongside the night?
Find our neighbour left the fruit
But still give credit to the porch:
Bathing in reality is not entirely sweet.
I shall run toward my story
After market, after poetry.
Now, where is that strainer?

Summer Solstice 2017: diary of a good year

Saw Alexander Putin waiting for a latte extra hot
They utterly failed to call him Put-in, not Poo-tin
I don’t know why he didn’t tell them call me Al
Now he’ll badmouth Melbourne coffee snobs at Summits.
As if Turnbull wasn’t bad enough in the queue
Deciding who and on what terms we would get mugs.
All I can depend on is the rain. 

The mighty cycle wheelwright robot of Dandenong:
No condition of special treatment and never was a banker,
I suspect its second career will run to dancer or neurosurgeon
But I would like to see it pulling coffees at ten to nine
Its citizenship unquestioned because an owned thing
Rights in the clear because it got no rights to speak of.
And all it can depend on is the rain. 

Now I that I am and grown to be a man
With a hey-ho and thicker every way
A little book is like a fire
And the rain it raineth every day. 

Like the preschooler sulking in her gutter
We forgot the good activities we got there
Let the bad things run away with the silver
Just because we were tired that afternoon
And had the headache. Is it so amazing that
We have worried that we have arrived at the final finish?
All we can depend on is a category five storm. 
All that is certain is grass. 

A hundred trillion bacteria can’t be wrong.
No damned oligarch or damned AI has them,
The solecism I trust I never uttered is down to them,
The guts to have a biome underrated:
All that was my enemy isn’t just pretending friendship
It’s me unrecognised all co-evolved in this mirror for all these ages–
And it’s pretence got me in this pickle in the first place.
For goodness sake go outside the rain is fine.

percentage game

now I am a snake
come October alarm clocks
cry – pesky mynahs

mornings by the creek
ceviche growling grass frog –
post-noon bake

now I am a snake
pretty basic black or brown
stick – lying doggo

grassy-banded spine
belly occasionally
crimson of attack

executive-shy
at rowing kookaburras
now I am a snake

now I am simple
reasons – in a hard black eye
slip by for goodness’ sake

snake I am right now
flicking through risk management
slides – no breaks

pleased as New Year sun
eminently singular –
not even in wait

five month news cycle
more lowly than the shade line
by April’s footnote

entity

now I am a tree
small birds sing in me
never need to take a pee
no need of Brie
folly
introspectivity,
a Commonwealth of filigree
from grubs at my extremity
to nematodes hunting darkly,
brachiating heavily
atmospherically
deeply.

now I am a tree –
nudity!
well graced by leaves occasionally
florally
annually
radially
and a gust one day to topple me
and wear golden dishes fungusy
and rings leave shelter hollowly,
marsupially
alive a good brown century
merging incrementally
humus free.

never dance no eucalypts dance;
may ballerina curtsy may cleave to wind –
I will see human types in flames
set themselves, more wild than woods.

now I am a tree
love the mind I see in thee
miss my idiotic mind flea
traded weak lights close to me
for distance fusing brightly
love of nationality
for grasping a geography
multiculturality
for blind subsoil inquiry
far from passivity
sentient graduality.

language is distance one from another
an admission of more than one forest
language is also time away from language
or else we’d have nothing to say:
the death of the word is never a tree
it’s the chattering monkey in it.

bats

sun bleaching lilac
wind stripping magnolia –
be kind to this fig

Solstice 2017: distracting

It is another year and we are not broken
Rather in the middle still, in the thick
The thicky thick thickly dense
Once which we were struck for
The rattan we still cringe before
A caning struggled not to pass on –
Craft and restrain and laugh.
Where once we were a mess
Today we fold and bless
You’d never get a guess
I’m not one to confess.
We do not demonstrate.
We are not broken and so we do not lie.
Our hearts are full and that is enough.
We indicate in our own way
And proceed.

It is another year and love is still awake
Another moon still passing;
It is another year and we are still listening
To the long ago and far away;
It is another year and we are no longer cold –
Rude as we like still what’s put off arrives –
It’s another year hooray!
I can scarcely bear to look
Stand with fingers on my eyes
No stops for my ears and nothing still
Still beating. Can bear it if we sing.

Another year slips by.

three haiku on the verge of a solstice

i
stupid dew that frosts
you can snap better than this –
sublime and try again

ii
if my flesh is grass
yours is this magnolia
rocking in the storm

iii
go then silly year –
across foggy stubble lands
on the blackbird’s back

Marathon Haiku

Driving Up

following pale cracks
toward a yearning old sun –
surprised by the glare

Marathon Running

welcome swallows bank
by a slate sea dish
crow beats into light

Waiting for a Bus

above still saltbush
banksia honeyeaters
go on with business

Autumn Equinox 2017: guide to show judging

Comparing your skin to my guts, tamer
Your liver spots to my innocence, older
Your friends to my resting bitch fear, happier
Remarks to reactions, hedgerows to bedroom,
Wrinkles to giggles, rashes to tickles, radio to playlist,
Handbags contain time and elegance and not just stuff
And my mouth holds competitions with yours.
This is how it’s done, an achievement, really
My own aims make me but not you
Not a bad one thumbs up for sure just so
Focused on the pain blinded:
Crows fly close to the field
A parrot blows away
They advance on the road and blow back to shelter
Lines are long here
Untangled
All the birds are here
Incomparable
But I can’t give you what you want
It’s incomprehensible
Solidity of certainty of design of care
Kind rectitude daffy with follow-through
Next day kookaburras row past as a couple
Covering the parts the other might miss
Arse feather floats to my feet
And I judge it is safe enough to cross.
Have to subscribe to some other minor crisis
This one is busy packing to depart
Predictively incorrect as usual I judge
And smarter than anyone allowed:
The animals in our lives hover at the edges
Unconsidered. Caged by evolution as we
It flowers quietly while we’re not looking
Beneath the resting face
In the atmosphere left in a lift as you step away into life
In the guilt left by normal ploughing through the day
In the blue sky
What I should do
What I have to do
What I must do
What I have done
These movements have nothing to do with you.
Grace so simple if you already have it
Uglier climbing the hill.

Summer Solstice 2016: Distraction

for UKL

“The necessity of having to do
Something” – make particular, dress, argue
Generally run in old road ruts, true
A well-worn course – “gives you something to do.”

An older fellow, socks labour Day-Glo
If the rest of me is deep romantic
My world playing catch-up will not pass you
Betting on our collision coming back,
On a big game hunt with no tomorrow
Shocking accident never wonders why
I am preposterous as a dog now
Christmas-awful traffic whizzing by,
This time is a fact as your credit is
In the moment before it turns to shit
Sweetest glade, après sweet Anopheles
Morning time until I remember it,
Rebel outgrowth is a grand old cypress
Refusing investment in a death flame
Shot out it’s like a tree with testicles
Sunwise go the nostrums all the same.

This dog does not spit dirt from a mouthful
His fines let fall the flies to gently lull.

Grammar of Parts: II

They cannot hold those facing eternity
And, taking ages, hold. They run across
A landscape unhurried after urgency
Imagined. Whorls bake into pastry cases
Evidence crunched and analysed on a tongue
Where good to go and not welcome play
Identically and sometimes both at once.
Show me your hand and what I see is your palm
But the tips are the pupils of that hand
Or, if unpicking a tangle of hooks
And fish slime, just one. They work so hard
You should give them a break and tickle them too
Lick some ice cream off them, buy some gloves
For goodness’ sake, bite your nails if you must,
Please don’t swallow. Unless you’re a god, that is
Whose touch gives light and even a hangnail is
Infinite. Tap time my dear, know that place.
Fingers may be digital but your tips
Analogue. They are not your employees.

Grammar of Parts: I

Frankentwitter

Once all that’s left is my certificate
Not even rubble
A guy, you can sew him up from all my posts
Will be good enough to run for office –
Good enough? Superior! Going to win!
So why not have at it before I die?
I am a post-thought guy. High up
Everything is media anyway.

Once did nature, yeah:
That yellow liar with its blossom, not yellow really, see?
A conspiracy of colour,
Your opportunist dog robs your pity, just a thief
Probably a rapist,
This berry won’t be fruit later, I fear
Your loser sky gives it over so *needlessly* to the night.
Go on, sing a song of sixpence gone
That teeny little bird, for you, I’ll flame it
That’s a whole Realm of disappointment!
You know, its nature is to blame? Nature. Ah.
And I release my sadness, a great great sadness
Greater than any seen before, gotta be honest
It goes post and everyone agrees:
It’s a Revolution, it’s History. Sorry if I offend you.

La-la.

Once I’m a handwritten entry in a church
Maybe some sort of clipping flyspeckled
Children forget you anyhow. Friends.
Who needs to be any of it? We’ve come so far.
No really. It’s great and I mean that sincerely
To live here down the side of your feed.
What I can do with that will amaze you.
No really. You can love me from that.
I have just so many friends, I can’t tell you.
You may call it drift and I may be getting on
Well past my bedtime, but even completely
Extinct I am still that guy. Whispers to self
Wanders like a satire round the square,
Sometimes I give a little hum. Cheerful
That’s me. Post-me, more so, bet on it.

Once somebody wrote a book
Dead person clawing up to hold us down
Unreasonably with permanence when he
Had no business. No I love life just as I
Love women. Let me press my nothing against you.
It doesn’t signify anyway. So I might as well have it.
I have aspirational thoughts, just as good
Better, ‘cause who’s got time for thinking right?
I’ve got guys for that, as long as they agree
See what a winner can do. See the importance of me
Post-me, me, naturally. That’s why deletion is such a gift!
I did a book once and it sold real well. Not as good as a building
Because it’s more permanent. Everyone knows the future is temporary.
Or better.

Once I got a legacy and naturally it’s a big one
Don’t believe they tell you that it’s small
But see we’re going to spend the legacy now
What’s the use of dead memory? That’s the smart move
Proves the legacy is magnificent too.
Cheer up! None of that’s gonna happen anyway.
You ask me it’s cleaner, purer, very clean.
You go for legacy legacy you can’t tell what’s going to happen,
And then I’m sad again. Real sad.
But then I have lunch. And post-lunch it’s totally clear
Just a nap and I’m fired upbeat for appearances
In your feed, well the side of your feed is good too –
Where do I sign?

Once I signed a thing, yeah.

All Hallows

Shadows in the wind
Crows playing in the wild bright
A shock in those suits

Song

gesticulated rataplan in dream.
The angel Chardonnay
left sugar on the table,
walked. Even.
Life is in motion:
Breezes in the blood:
Growling grass over at a step
Painted ladies collide on the knees
Mynah takes magpie takes dog
Oil slicker dove cock bobbing
Wattle glares, bouncing
(Stinking away)
Fine weeds unmown waving too
Street water cool as sin and arse-deep
Rolling drunk sweet on rubble flattering on toward
Fallacy of platypus
Lies of blackfish
However, elver –
Cormorant pied unreasonably past
The duck’s just gone
Valeria’s reclining and hanging on at once
As if stoned and cannot leave
Dragonfly is dancing casually off left bank
Thrip by the eyeful arrested
In a dead guilty tree top
Ecstasy of ravens declaring innocence,
Knowing.
Steep coming up
followed by a slope
everything is a thought
passing by

Winter’s End

Little golden baby guppies
Furry fighting biting puppies
Hammock and a pillow
Sunshine butter fellow
Ease because we can
Ease because we can.

Three times two is plenty
And a one-third twice is life
I calculate what makes us laugh:
Nothing makes us laugh like age.
Live with me without answers
Till we nod at horror’s yucky trousers
Lie until we lie for real
In a garden.

I get back from mud and rushing stormwater
Parrot, egret, and near-season box gum;
You are under midnight drizzle chasing moonlight
More difficult to do than tell it in a pitchy brochure:
What’s put off to get there is time recovered:
A glimpse of eternity in the shifting banks.
When we wash it off, warm up, tidy adverbs
Save and take advice on its passage into the world,
If we have time to examine the trace in daylight
With a breeze running by through screen door
Into domesticity; if we can filter the ordinary impression
Even our best friends can’t help but offer with just a look,
If the leash of probability is for an instant lifted
And the detail still keen in our eyes
Just in the gap between forgetting and distraction:
What was always present
What will always be
How we do anything real:
Just make it up as we go along, that’s all,
No parliament of effort and no industry of fools.
See it.

How the end is new again, the formula spinning sideways
Just from faithful mimesis because it’s so or it would hurt
Putting in the miles because by now you know the pay
Stepping into puddles without a beat, getting wet –
For Jesus as it were. For particles of heaven
Spinning lazily – fine bargain after all. Spring.

August is the kindest month to sums.

Makeshift Heart XIX: productivity

The heart it melts constantly
You would think it had a limit
It proceeds from some southern glacier
Kept climate change regardless
In the sticks.

Apart from the melting constant
It keeps time rather badly
Operating as if tuned by some other
Alien duid with a set of auto tools
And an ape.

It anticipates your great ideas
And, like a canine weatherman
Your woes, and yet throughout beats
Within quite narrow parameters
Of a muscle.

Like vongole it has no brain of its own
Dependent on the tide and shifting
Sand for a meal, only squirting departure
For defence, and clamming up
To the knife.

Still it’s got me. Wanders when it should sing
Clamours when silent running is the order
Not about to let me do the needful
Perfect in every way as long as there is no world
To be saved.

Solstice 2016: so bite me

for Jo Cox

Each recipe is a bucket list
Beet sequence Fibonacci strawberry
The end not dusty just a bit crumby
Misery more honoured in the fridge
Than here in the end of the world pot pie

“I can not…”

I get the dusk is more than ooh, now
Dawn awaiting first light dreaded, desired
Dark hours decorating regret, my sleep
Or exquisite shadows connections bring
All those parts on the part of other souls

“…can not hold her hand…”

The meaning of a day a bland cry
Lived not watched as the offices run by
Rising for a moment all gonna die
And somnambulant side stroke once again
Take bearings, light out new for the headland

Of crust. You may have burnt it, salted
Turned to mush, let it go cold on deck –
There is always another until not
Nibble around the raw bit and shut up
Remember that cake you dropped and rescued

“It was nice.”

Here at the perfect turn of the year
Turn in enough and knock back shots
Bust the dumb orbit of hate
The night owns enough
Without complaint
Take this bit
Bite it
So.

Haiku for Rowan

if I really strain
i can hear myself aging –
and not just my creaks

who can hear each step?
a fly child’s garden has some:
house spider foot poems

Dawn Stinks, Sined Nigel

for Karlos

Rage against the light or its dying
Or punt downstream in a pleasure craft for two
(Poop poop)
The foolish inventions of another time had their own uncharted value
Do not seek to know what Nigel can do for you:
Nigel is as Nigel does
Nigel is for the best in the best of Nigel possible worlds
So I did it Nigel’s way
For more years than I care to say to the likes of you.

Nigel helped me steer a course into myself
Nigel is a solid friend in times of trouble
(Even if you stink)
Because he helps you see
He is the one who would know where you’d be
When you fell
As you will
Because you do stink
You see.

So I’ll make my peace with Nigel
And the pile of steaming balderdash he stands for
And in. And something of his foolish luck
One foot on that cliff and one on cloud
One eye on the punchline and the other
For crying out loud it’s taking him to another trip
The pratfall to end them all.

We live in hope that something of his foolish luck will rub off
At least with a little elbow grease and Wonder Soap it might.

We know what stinks.
It’s okay, okay?
We know what stinks
It stinks
Okay.

Four Vessels

for Cathy, after seven years

My heart is full
Our pulse of days
Simply cupped both ends
By our hands knit
Shaping turning light
My heart is full

My head is light
We chase the wheel
Across the night we race
No dog at our heels
(Though it could be)
My head is light

My eyes are wide
To catch us growing
Enough to see what may turn
Out or up or turn about
Transformed inside this fire
My eyes are wide

My head is wide
My heart is light
My eyes are full
And bones are mineral ware
Of course
The other vessels loft them
Toward our sun

JOBS AND GROWTH: once more with feeling

(thanks to Oscar for the mans in road)

i Speeches
Jobs and growth
Blobs what float
Flubs and bloat
For rubes and oafs
Gets on goat
Grubs in brogues
Yards and strophe
Two-word pith
Absent oath
Grandstand wroth
Stabs my faith

ii Monies
Jobs and growth
Bobs and groats
Fads and totes
Pud’s plum duff
Analogue of tough
Squibs but throes
Lord’s new clothes
Sheds income trove
Cod grand farce
Ords go south

Judge my half
Stubbs and girth
Bearded louche
Wads of gelt
Bloods and Goths
Mads up north
Slobs down south
Babs and Judiths
Plebs and toffs

Lobes of worth
Minds make wealth
Needs fund prof
Chav shines forth

iii Positive Planetary
Jobs and growth
Labs got proof
Global warmth
We burned gross
Ice lands float

Breed the most
Scads and loaf
Feeds the earth
Robs it first

Greed and wrath
Grabs for turf
Flood sand epitaph
Crabs and crows
Gods and ghosts

iv Human Relations
Jobs and growth
Aid’s poor worth
Dogs cut fifth ¹
Mob sails forth
Babes in froth
Sobs shored off

Jubblies strewth
Club won’t morph
Boardroom blows
Head felt groped
Slap that mouth
Grab the roads

Subs say stealth
Pledge Yank troth
Just spend gobs
Hijabs and cloth
Hoods and coats
Dead in both

v Intern Ships
Jobs and growth
Mans in road
Slobs and sloth
Yobs and scrotes
Swab dat boat

vi Medicine
Jobs and growth
Open slather
Sads and meth
Carbs in teeth
Abs or sloth
Slabs and smokes
No jabs dopes
Dibs my death
Drugs end groans
Sods plan gulf
End free health

vii Culture and Myth
Jobs and growth
Boobs on toast
Snobs and poofs
Rebs and filth
Sobs and ruth
Lives and truth
Burbs and youth
Seeds inmost
Hubs of grace

Growth is no job
Growth is the lie
Growth is the little man that lives in the sky
Growth is no elbow
Growth is the limb
Growth is what stays on after sin after sin
Growth is no terror
Growth is the love
Growth is the searing pain not from above
Leave my growth alone
Talk to us of something else
Growth my eye.

—
1
According to calculations by the Development Policy Centre at ANU, the government’s budget cuts mark both the largest ever multi-year aid cuts (33%) and largest ever single year cut (20% and $1 billion in 2015-16). This will see Australian aid fall to 0.22% of Gross National Income (a global measure of donor generosity) in 2017-18, the lowest level in Australia’s history. http://www.lowyinstitute.org/issues/australian-foreign-aid

GUY NUDE PORTRY

dating to the nobbliest ancientest most civil liaison
ye emergent fresh from yung silver spaceships
ports delievers poerms stark buckety buck
)part from the glassy globe on theer heeds(

them gricks i bell eve wore only lief
covering iambic petroglyphs
hole meat ears long
write big pots them gricks

pro-claimed and wobbled
pro-claimed and did irony buckety buck
an folding shirts proust as peach no two ways
them wars the days – proust for goods raison

no fury guys off course
smooth men’s these was
smoother end before oar tame
noah puffy parade that they evolutionary stagedey

war soup eerier than the furry bruther iaian awe sister eon
apes eh?
that wear soup eerier is all part of the stragedy:
Just a drive. Like any other. To think.

so sang little potato arsed fatty
sang you youse bucky buck sang
yore truant than yo nose
a true who man bean

a port

ah salad ieaou so stained up!

Tiny Icarus

Dad started to slip
Words and pavement
His wife took holidays with sister Caitlin
Even pot wouldn’t arouse her
Flushed and sceptically sidelong
And the kids called
Money and trouble
Solely.

So he ordered a wing kit
As seen in Hundred Days a Bird
Custom featured
Carefully researched
Swapped notes on boards
Followed leads to the good stuff
Practised in front of the Samsung
When she was working late
Began to dream of it
In meetings see himself
Outside the window
Blue miles over his gridlock
Everyone mousy below:

He stormy petrel
Skua calm black cockatoo
A gale in his tail
Loft in his pin feathers
Hot blood and fur on talons
Over
Utterly over it
Little people.

Compared to Lycra Lamborghini
Solid gold jet ski coast view kitchen
Single origin Paleo breast implants
New Orleans pinger brothel princess tats
We have purity
A day of arrival
Simply opened
Simply donned
Everyone should do it
Shame it cost a town-house.

And opening
And rising
And startled yes at first
It isn’t some more grand flight
Isn’t crane
Albatross
Buzzard romance
Dark or light
A myna
Quarrelling air row torpedo
Still it is flight
It is height
Opposite of weight
Forgotten hate
Known late
Beats never knowing at all.

There has to be a nature you can’t fight
The Indian myna is his truth
A hop and be still in the air
Light though fat high though hopeless
Sure of yourself the way a bigger bird cannot
Is not.

And rising from the glade carefully selected
Near enough the coast and close enough to find home again
Afterward because it’s his first and he may not disappear until a fourth or even tenth
Though not to say goodbye but to refine his aims
While a person can still make aims to give a bird
To make the best departure he can
He pauses.

Gliding past the gloating moment
He knows about hubris
Still something rises to his new throat
Something about walking
A memory of whole body happiness
A snapshot of the myna walking
The rolling clown he has become
Only able to fly
Only
On
O
Heart stops
Beak snaps
At nothing.

A bird
Something remarkable
A bird falls dead from the sky
Smacks the gravel verge
Motorists turn from it
And already forgetting
Drive calmly on.

Only the thud in their memories.

Makeshift Heart XI: Joy

Joy is everywhere undeserved
A face a stepmother could love and serve
Mark the billboard’s smiling power
Verse the quatrain’s unplanned bower
And swerve.

Making some kind of sorrow right
Paradise in a couple of heartbeats
Hush the pesky natural twitter
Bend the screaming slippery carp
With love.

Black magnolia bud wrapped tight
Holding off fruit and dismay together
Pay what you must to remember it well
Egg the dog who slinks by the fight
Don’t survive.

But the elver returns from the west
One more time through fishing hands
Burrow in my beating tissue baby
Release, please release that pitiful crab
Just wave.

Peppertree cover me my memory is baking
Alien come again in innocence like before
Kind of kinder in the order we want to mean
Blessing less the happiness than the sense.
I am a meander made of untradable words
Enamour meaning amiable by understood
Plain and poor not unattainably more like
Effortless calm salience gliding home.

A bottle rolling down an empty beach –
Roaring tide takes the answer.
There to bend and could we reach:
This gift has no measure.

Solstice 2013: Notes on a visit to a country spurned

 
for Edward Gough Whitlam 1916-2014

The great benefit of Modern History,
Fast forward swipe on frame and Botox aside,
Is an Actor’s life on Facebookery
In touch minus foolish detail crisply fried,
Allowing so much more flexible achievement
Accountability intelligence and knowledge management,
To say nothing of bereavement
To say nothing of any moment
Doing nothing at all.

If you were born today
Where would China be?
Where is Cabramatta?
Have we mislaid them
Or are they on a table somewhere
Near some loose change?
And by China I mean Sri Lanka
And if by Cabrarmatta not a Morwell
Then you would quietly consider
Where to stand and take whatever
Steps to register its moment
With yours with theirs with ours.

For you are no Actor
Historical Economical Tragical Comical
Even farcical Khemlanical Morosical
Even Shakespherical is at once too grand
And removed from observation too humble
Like a short thought from Twitter land:
An Actor’s business and yours
Though both in their own ways deeds
And though both reach forward
Depart into different times
Yours without Exeunt omnes, or rhymes.

We all we hate captivity
Up that island tent city
Our kids excised from their migration zone
Our own lips sewn
Tortured and persecuted
But now investigated
Longing only not to think
Of family rolling in the drink
What the horror what attack
What might go down if we go back
How even this much kindness shown
Eats up our hostage family’s time
And blights a generation
And blasts our equilibrium
And worse.

A child must rise
Who, feeling this
Knowing that the cause
Is what it always was
Still acts
On those causes –
Perhaps loses –

Who has given thought to the raven night
Who has ample grace for this fucking blight
Who has enough but but enough to lead
Who will wake this place from zombie greed
Who refuses to own the confusion
Who slays and plucks and stuffs distraction
Who swallows patience patience patience
Who crashes crashes law with conscience.

Balancing on a mountain of my stuff
Uttering surrounding sea until it’s rough:
Innocent pile, a simpleton’s curse,
Extravagant protection never works.
I cannot tell you what came over me
How it benefited my family:
I gathered fear and amusement for years
Then looked around one day and there I was.
And all it took was a repetition
That we were foundering in an ocean –
But all that awful History leaves you calm
And though it is your job you do seem warm –
So I’ve chosen to believe that we can sing
To believe just this once we can all sing –
Though you may only listen to us sing
Beyond your eyes you know what we might sing

I look in drunken on my sleeping boy
Smoke off frozen spring rolls from the kitchen
Violent moon blanks his face with an angle
And I get what that pollie said to me:
One day my orphan will not make it home
Wind and rain and ocean swell wear rocks too
Longest night extending without solace
Faces eloquent with fear pass him by –
All this as it should be naturally
It’s the lovingkindness of history
To think that we might grapple with the real
To think that we might grapple with the real.

Makeshift Heart X: Regain its natural state

Those newly born cannot worry they are unloved
Only horror could not see their blessing
Innocence at the end cannot pray it’s survived
In horror’s arms and macking.
If I surface without my burden
If I stroll and discard it on my way
Or dig it into nematodes and garden
Or fold over touch and touch play
I might accidentally clear the weather –
Yes, a dip and a crisp and a cup help forget –
Then come back to complain full of bother:
All that without lifting it yet!
And in the night I’m hunting by streams
Impossible interminable coelacanth dreams
Innocence yearns from ignorant meadows
While the ancients of days glide by in the shadows.
That moment the sea rips and takes off, and
Your dream in its jaw, shaking, you’re shaking
With hope without hope, at last work at hand
This squally dawn at last, magic nothing, is nothing
Short of miracle, rhyming black swan with moron
But also mallard with dolphin and cormorant with seal:
Speech at last innocent of a thing out of harmony
Lord’s prayer about law from love, grace out of music –
At all events reasonable, a thought of the heart,
Not some idiot hope, void on void shift for night.