For Natalie

There is no poem in me
Crows on the evening, no platypus in the Darebin,
A catalogue of weeds versus herbs,
My right leg tweaks
There is no poem in me.

There is no answer in me
Cry the crows dryly:
Teenagers look down
Might is purple
Quiet hatred of bright things
Caterpillars
No answer in me.

There is no power in me
Not just black and blue birds confirm
That one.
Out in any weather I accept it
Righteousness or desire or wise planning
Not enough;
Reach and touch with invisible fingers of
Art all you like
No power no cry.

No Bastion in me
Crows beating gulls again:
A reef too far and in the middle of life
Turn to the abstracted common weal
Of my fracking occupation – am I
Still in that teenage place,
So many poems in me
There are none?

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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.

New Aquarium!!!!

So my website has been updated and I’m on leave for a week, just for the crack of it. Few plans. I have mapped a ride going along the ring road and down the Diamond Creek Bike path into the CBD, which is about 45k and a precursor to doing a proper Olympic triathlon distance, which I think is 1.5k swim, 40k bike, and 10k run. Not sure I will be doing that. We’ll see how we go with the ride. If I wind up in the city I’ll take a leisurely swim at the City Baths and then – maybe – ride home, but there should be no problem about taking a train besides borrowing a Myki ticket.

Finish that fantastic Terrence Deacon book Incomplete Nature, and relax with some fiction. Who knows, maybe I’ll finish that poem about Gough in China.

Well, because the angel fish are breeding and their young are being eaten in the big communal aquarium, I sacrificed my tattoo plan for a King George whiting on my forearm, to be based on the fabulous Roger Swainston art. This to me was a long-term project anyway, since the colours of a whiting are so subtle and tattooing generally so crude, that I don’t trust the artist to do Swainston justice. Besides, I had not asked permission. So while that one waits, Cathy and I went out and bought a small antique table for the hallway, and a three foot tank, with all the bits (more expensive than the tank). I am not chickening out of the tatt! And besides, it is very vain….

So besides my tax return, I may be doing some gardening in an aquarium. Then I’ll leave it for a couple of weeks. If the fry get eaten once or twice, well, that’s nature, and we’ll try to rescue them in nursery, but once the new environment is ready, they will have only themselves to blame if they get too hungry and gobble them up. As Natalie pointed out, I can be the God of Angels, then. Mwah-hah-hah-hah!

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.

Lives of them Saints

i: Beautiful Death

Can a tree become a Saint?
Even a frail old elm beset
With auto fuel unburned
Cable rollout, and blight?
And was it a Saint as a sapling?
Or did it wildly sway
Care less, if it grew crookedly
Where its leaves might be falling
If its roots gripped right?

Its Miracle we believe we know:
Stone and light and water Grow
Sweet relief its dappled Shadow
(For gull as well as helpful crow)
An April Glow –
It’s just a tree
It does nothing intentionally;
Cathedral but not holy
No eyes to pluck or see
Freedom but not free;
It cannot praise a god
Nor can it suffer for a god
Nor merit fire from a god
Nor intercede –

Saving it might prove my own sainthood
Were I pure in my regard
But I’d be a fickle angel, I do not care
If it’s disembowelled, when twigs are bare.

ii: Loving Death

Alien chocolate is a civilised way to go
As I pass that way the chocolatier will know:
A melting moment, passion of compassion
Gentle fair trade cream of passing
A taste of what I was transmitted
I can’t use it and the chocolatier collects it
Regret, relief, and fear alike, made easy
Swapped, for a sugar posy of me.

The light still pours down Footscray way
And we exalted still warble hearts out
Flung wide to the great whatever
Still stumble, swoon, and sway
Fall drunk on bitter arses, and spout
Bullshit, without being a believer.

Love survives death, whose shadow is more powerful;
Chocolate might smooth one and coat the other, will
Not give you life or a love to come or a perfect world –
It’s confectionery, but for the moment trumps it all.

Grace in my breast where I had thrilled at what I dread
Seeping into off times where once I held my head
Grace, where only opiates and singing soothed my heart –
I can at last succumb to chocolate and, with grace, depart.

iii: St Cão, patron Saint of return

You know what’s good, you are stung by lies:
Even the Lord when He tells you He will Be Back Soon
And you’ll have a run and play ball or frisbees
Is off to a tragic aftermath or a summit in Cancun
And then the credit ceiling talks go on all night
And you and She have your things and even throw
But She won’t require advice on things of State
Like that malevolent thrush or crow.
Without a tongue, with too much tongue
Your drooling torment at the Door of Light
Of smells and scraps and rapt attention:
You may not move but neck stretched tight
May know bliss and might not miss His blessed
Charity when it descends and floor is messed.

He bears it so our hymn to him is a sigh
We turn as we sing it slowly seeking rest
And a tune would only cock his head awry
So for solace huff the one that smells best.
If cats though scornful hold the mysteries
It is in grass and poles and trees we read signs
Where he adds his own humble commentaries
And steaming green votary beneath pines.
If vaulting speed is the ecstasy of nature,
Our dismay over odour adoration is error:
Communion is immersion in wriggling ordure,
And fight, chase, and rough song, wholly warrior.
Mud the baptism and street water wine
This bone is the bread is the body divine.

Makeshift Hearts

Makeshift Heart IX: upon the decay and death of Thatcher

My beloved gave me a nutcase bell with a glowing green brain on it
The damn thing broke within a couple of days but I cannot remove it
And so as I go pedalling for my life I cannot help it my brain tinkles:
Synapses alight with chemical connection in creative destruction
Neural Darwin makes up my mind. By fits and by starts I love everybody
And such is my heaven, my humanist hell. I fly down the road, ringing.

We all tinkle along the high way feeling individual, checking the backdrop
Holding the stage and at once making shift the trees, buffeted by crosswinds
And making a little breeze. Internal to a fault and when we finally raise the head
It’s a mystery how we let the situation get so out of hand. And it shall so remain
It’s bigger than me or you, larger than intention, than community – but not a brain. Yet
Joy is bigger than my skull and fear and pain as well, but is all of it bigger, and what about

Surprise, and what do we mean when we love as a nation, a tribe, or a village?
Can the Commonwealth fear falling when iron and coal take a plunge? Fear incontinent death?
Its balls do not shrink nor can it get giddy nor hoarse with lust; undone with grief does it hold its head
Bawling in its pillow although it despised the prick or stagger fist first down the high street hoping
For relief? Can it stand outside her window hollering through snot risibly humiliated by trust?
Would it assault with a Hoover if that was to hand or chug whatever till it heaved its guts?

Surely not. The Baroness is a shadow, just like The Eternal General Secretary, Dear Leader,
And she steams to war the way my sister doesn’t, for one harsh word will halt our kind
But she, flickering storyboard, just gets rewritten and tested off off Broadway. Still steams
Her complications elsewhere, death-soft voice pealing Family but knocking Grandma
Down in the street going from office to office to bloody with a lie in her Gorbachev and Putin
Lying well in her future safely forgotten at a stroke. The trick is having a character, any

So delineated you may be the animal venal crushing the bones of small warm things
For fun and profit and them shitting beneath the footfall of sundry public in the broad way
As long as the act may be charitably read and without upchuck or adipose tears O repeated until
Glory, within the confines of your shadow. All it takes is a charade of consistency within
Your form to, upon your miserable passage to as daft oblivion as anyone’s, be considered,
With only boldness and rehearsal to your credit, our misery forgotten and history yours,

Great. Both sides use infallible bullshit detectors and both sides perfectly right
And we, we are bitter discovering the function of a gut is digestion not
Election. Baked goodness goes down a way our leaders do not, but both in the end turn
To shit. If we cannot string together thoughts of a minute how can the Commonwealth?
Leaves dashing against my north window have a better chance of collective wisdom
Meerkats at least alert. We prattle for years and now drone for billions, hysteria not even
Functional anymore. It was the making of us – some clarity could make it again.

I gave my beloved a ring to join us; my beloved gave one to me
And as part of that I am amazed how gentle I can be
And forced outside to tinkle and inside tinkle more
And captured by a thinking love which ties me to the law
And law in turn makes outlaws of whom love admits its truth
And outlaws public servants if they outlive their youth
And public servants influence as they grasp the way things fall
The green brain needs no cogs replaced: its tinkle tinkles all.

Trip to Supermarket

Hand is poised above the box –
I have never made the harder choice
The harder choice chose me
There was nothing much between my love
And eternity.

Poise in hand above the tin –
Lonely can of cannelloni
Riding on a magic pony
They all think you are a phony
But I think you’re my homie.

Hand above the poison can –
Soner SybeR Elias
Working in a bank
Executive recruitment
Bonus on the crank
Will you “SONER SYBEr ELIAS”,
Graffito by the rail,
Remain hirsute in fifty years?
Will you write at all?

Pausing hand above the candle –
A drop of milt a foil a jerk on Sunday rudder
And mewling puking fears come true
No matter how many times I practice
The surprise is a moment away
Try out releasing or hanging on to the end
Fear dances hands and voice box and balls
Oh strings
Snuffed unexpectedly all the same.

Poisson hand above the curve –
The deviant wins in time
Strangeness separates from the beast
Oddness from our selves
But what does magic achieve
If euphoria echoes Sugar leave alone God?
Who seriously studied play dodges them cogs
Doomed to note them rocking sleeping leave alone smashed.

Peas and ham above the clam –
It is the day of the Labrador, every home a niche
Every shade as long as it’s Lab, Lake Victoria-ish
As raptor cross with crow against the cloud
And ibis track their gossip in the mud
And spaniel, Staffy, poodle, sniff their poos
La Labrador lollops quietly toward their shoes.
Nothing is endangered. Great white Lab, ringtail Lab, Labraminke fetched
Labracoralpolyp, Yellow (River) Lab, small traderador, patched
Spliced and indigenous enough, an ecosystem of Labrador
Just like the original, perfection, just a little fatter.
We will every one of us be Labrador, our hair, our clothes, our fruitador,
All adaptive radiation all the time, into love, to grief, and grinning whore
We will all be thylacineador, benefactor, dictator, shopper too
With the fusty breath of Capital we’ll wag and gnaw a shoe.

Prison harangue above the gramme –
I’d be a better man if I knew what I was in the first place
(I have a list somewhere) but as the sky is casually amazing
Until I cannot open my gob in the hospice, lips sweet with heroin
I will go on about things with a less than perfect grasp
Just to shine up my ignorance, just to get somewhere.

A hand is poised above the box –
The cat lies dead inside
Spoilers in the preview
Or the physicist lied.

Makeshift Heart VIII: Rest

Sleep is not a hunger but a thirst and coffee will not slake it
The taste of water only lasts a moment and leaves the ravelled care still knit
The shape in wakeful bed attempts a dream but cannot make it fit
The eye a child awakes is aged but has more liquid in it.
Sleep is not a country but a town in which the innocent might visit
And where in getting back that state a pillow might help find it
And when to understand a rock a rock might help explain it
The eye designs the awful in the ordinary but inside terror comfort.
Sleep is no inspiration but a death and too much makes an idiot
The channel though the ruins of befuddle and bedraggle has too much ocean in it
The wet depression separating fields of agony and joy carries trout
The eye discerns what heart in foolish slumber wants to fillet.
I dreamed a dog goanna transformed into a small blond girl with significance in one eye
What she would say remains in sleep but I emerged once more rested in the ordinary light of day.

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Pope Meat Scandal – Select with Care

Traces of Ratzinger hidden in primates
Unheathy concealment in Milanese meat
Requires prophylaxis in African states
American pork cannot hope to compete.
Abort the career, continue the practise
Forcibly penetrating like with unlike
Good for the poor soul and never mind justice
Infallibly tell him get on his bike.
Say it in Latin, American, silence
We know what it is regardless of white smoke
The lambs in your care stuffed with lies and with violence
Remains on the floor of the abbatoir of hope.
Insidious occasion, watching your face
Watching sad crocodiles in a one horse race.

Makeshift Heart VII: Idling

Puddles all smell of my dog
Bush of crimson fruit disturbed make parrots
Cloud gaps as well resemble rabbits
Tangled pool floor flashes “water made me”
Like a rabbit too he bounces post bunny
Soft light tells me we’ll make it.
Magpie pants drooping in the undergrowth
Dog can see time in a copperhead snake
For that matter me too in a heartbeat
It’s a jellyfish it’s a moon it’s a reef it’s a pelican
It’s true love it’s a shadow it’s only shade.

Makeshift Heart VI

Woman raving at her fence
Child or anima return?
Mate or name your breakdown
Is it home or house you burn?
Trees whisper lullabies
Call or answer duly?
Sin, echt or key indicator
Elm mother or just a storm?

The places I struggle
A sea I swim alone
A look over shoulder
A mildewed hotel room
All common fears beneath
Not enough to render
More than merely sorry
If I am not insane.

State the simple simply
River courses through it
Red gums shade and speckle it
Rainbows belled must hunt in it:
The gamble of saying
It must be worth it
Even if the reader
Tums out to be a fence.

Makeshift Heart V:

one step back

 

Sing of every thing
Be dumb enough to believe
So hopeless you can cry
Meditate in a park
Or wander on a beach
GSoH will help
Leaves bearing your name
Blown away by some fool
Aren’t enough to dent you
I have lived half mad
Lucid dreaming
Did not know I lived but
Even god gets water
In the goggles sometimes
On the analogue digital edge is the breath
Parse fail quality assurance of death
When junk mail bites
When the enemy slights
When everyone seems daft
l simply remember ridiculous things
Dumb fucker
Grief trucker
Chew loud
Act proud
Take space
Start race
Pay attention!
Have gumption!
Petty liar
Wet fire
Shallow grave.

Makeshift Heart IV:

some moral compromises

Go on grab a flake
Go on tuna bake
Go on, you just put in the hours
Never mind the whys or the hows.
A big office arse needs an aubergine grill
And cold pressed, my oath, only eat who I kill.

Vicarious baiter.

You know about boating
You know it’s promoting
You know economics is right
Reads our minds even drowning in flight.
The blood runs south till we get to the gate
Think I give a rat’s for your politics, mate?

Vicious blather.

Can clear up your swine flu
Can open your heart too
Can clear you up every which way
Some new miracle, bless, everyday.
Love, pity, and silver, need a look that can skid
Off the eyes of macaque I would kill for my kid.

Victory is bitter.

You can get it in your car
From coffee in a bar
You can get it and go on unfussed
The furtive and guilty are the faces I trust.

Virtue’s a bother.

Makeshift Heart III

for H

You heard when she said what he did, afraid
Remained when he did what he did, delayed.
Helplessness is an art form, an air raid:
Start, and a muddle, an ending betrayed.
Live through this and death is nothing, sister
Some things pale somethings sit and fester
No idea what living average cost her
Tripping through the office, an impostor.
We slide and we borrow and we wake
Give an hour for every moment we can take
Daily participate in that mistake
Get up and slide and borrow, and fake.
All witnesses, professional and not
Participate anyway in the plot.
Shadow my shadow my widow my murderer
Regret my egret in the field of complaint
Callow my fellow and hollow the wanderer
My family witnesses, none is a saint.
Action if prison if action if warren:
Rondelet gaol and sonnet retreat
Take me to places I do not intend
Sacrifice gently or give up abrupt.
Who reads the papers who writes the papers:
Capulet-Montague baby instead;
Here comes the Chopper to chop off your fingers –
Inkwell of history or another man’s blood.
Hush, hush child. No one is better.
Just thorns upon roses I grew for my mother.

Lift your feet as you tread through the long stalks
Take the hill low, down now, and slither boy
In a bunny ear the very plant talks –
So knee backs burn, it’s the marvellous ploy.
Something else, something even grateful, carved:
Scrimshaw of action, sayings carved
On love and ego even in blood carved
Still witness, false agency, if heart carved.
Lasing memory, no object sintering
(Swan dusk and gold whiting its own reward)
Is the hunt or fish standing still still standing
Decide recreation or cave coward?
Hush, you hush you child. No one gets better
Impossibly murdering their father.

Do the sing do the song of my ancestor
Just because we do Mambo Toraja
Step swing step up boy and step swing return
Flappy just happy in the grip of the past –
Saw nothing then do nothing now
Lordy, hush, I’m home at last.

Makeshift Heart II

Magnolia silvereye sing your fractious heart out
Be that as it may you say or you could not fly
Be that as it may or your heart would be too stout
Lighter by the argument l murmur and I sigh
Experimentally trying l remain a lump
Day too blue and sun too bright and poppies close to tears
Regard the night and dog walk and work it as a pump
I can tell myself to fight the shadow it appears
And fail but twig and twitch my own be that as it may
So that DNA may care but why should I die
So long then I walk lighter with one out of the way
Seeing evening and car park and workplace silvereye
Struggling midlife like rank teenagers into wings
Waking up at least a bit embarrassed to these things.

Makeshift Heart I

When I smell the red red rose, do I,
Hear the rosy baby cry, do I?
Baby’s pricked by hatred of the lie
And, while pricks don’t make me want to die,
Do I?

Good die younger and greats live on:
Kneel unneeded, die, no song,
All the shadows gently long:
I’m no longer sure what’s wrong.

The meadow is nothing without my complaint:
The grass leaves too high or too wet.
Regardless fall sparrows, I’m too young for sight:
Whole forests without my regret.

God is departing after all this time.
Heaven’s choir-shape left after all this time.
Laughing at my own hosannas this time:
The narcissist pulls on his coat.

Does grace fall with tears or weep at the sight
Does my chest form a cup or a cavern?
Wishing meteors after promised delight
Helps opportunists to govern.

Wishing won’t clear my muddle
Will not make me less awful
Put Jimmy Savile on trial
Or an icon on dial
But it gives me a shovel
And I dig like the devil
Till outside feels like the middle:
It’s not, love, and never will be
So hold onto me.

Ancient dance of tears
Modesty taken for weakness
A fish’s twitch is a choreography
Or a lowly reaction.
Our vanity supposes
They are happy and we are right
But vegetarians will eat us in the end.

If This Goes On

When the payday dracula comes disguised as your son
The natural corporate offspring is a robot
Operated by a teenager, avoiding detention
With morons cheating quatrains by Captcha, bombing mosques by Kinect.

It is not no oddity could predict we would not fly cars
By September Eleven Oh-one, who knew we’d hold it against
That past’s Future, our own no space mercantiles, ours no bug fights,
We laugh, power pointing there, Love and Reason always elsewhere.

Their stooge is not the future’s enemy. The Boxer is just
Distraction, strategic delay for cost effective sponsor change.
Far from dim-witted, choosing not to make the decision with his head
But by the faith beaten into him by other clever believers:

The head they hold has its limits yet we suspect we do not
So wisdom must lie elsewhere, we reason. We dream of waking
So we can sleep, of grief so we can weep: noxious passion
For the pimply mind of The Market, our belief.

Don’t mix your doom echo with The Shape of Things.
It isn’t even your shape, come to that, just noise:
See the Boxer relish your panic, easy fixed by his poll
And nothing else. “What’s the good of it?” Indeed.

Good is decent people extrapolating.

Death Takes a Take

If Death directed a Major Motion Picture we’d get a musical:
Sound of Music, Carousel, and Rocky Horror, shot 4D,
Celestial, karmic, infernal, choreography and and all that jazz by Fosse;
Or just director’s comments on the DVD and deleted scenes, alternate endings –
Links to extinct contests or sites we can blog to oblivion.

If Death directed a Major Motion Picture we’d get no sequels:
The same thing but different is not Hell but reassurance,
Remakes, fanfic, tactfully nipped by franchisor –
Or each iteration as fresh as the first time you ducked the huge rolling ball,
Gagged at shot vomit, only handsomer, more dimensional leads each time, Clooney for Grant.

If Death directed a Major Motion Picture we’d get more than bargained for:
Hamlet’s quivering obsession our heart’s, Kent’s illness at the green stuff our gut’s,
The Stooge’s hammer blow to the brain our own hollow tone –
Or a cynical knowledge of all endings, all cheap short cuts, all bastardised Odysseys,
Sad gap after original novel, stolen MacGuffin, better Danish original.

But Death does not direct, lucky, gets Associate Producer credit:
As we recline in the dark, hoping nobody sees our tears, we let go
For better or worse, richer or poorer, in the Auteur’s sleight of hands –
And whether we pray for Goddard but get Stone or for Jackson but get Bakshi,
Smuggle your own sweet snacks for the popcorn is too dear.

Tranquility Station

Counting pickets, count the beat
Wear wrong footwear, use wrong feet
Folding answers till they’re neat
Keep Poseidon sweet.
Click the heel, no answer rush
Slow to anger, quick to blush
Smile to fill the question hush
Pattern turns to mush.
Cross aorta, spit and miss
Tidy breathing, tidy bliss
Meditate, and cross goes criss
Must be more to this.
Edge of truth, buttery boon
Out of reach, live cartoon
Mumble something out of tune
And go home way too soon.
Irritation, puff the flame
Seriousness, just the same
A god and everything a game
Or totally lame.
Put a stone down, put a stone
Doan down darn down down down
One foot after another
Only one, only one,
One.
A wave sweeps in and laves all our little wrinkles away.
Hush, hush, there is nothing outside this.

Looked at Clouds that Way and Ate Them

Before the oboe the phrase of the crane,
Before the bird and the wood,
Squirting along in the Mesozoic sea
Colouring your tentacles with love –
Bumble me tumble me each one a meal
Deep in the belly of the moon:
I eat the children, and
I drink the sea, and
I eat the cauliflower sky.

Towers encrusted with oysters and cheese
Pastry facades line the street:
Black pudding ribbon and footpath molé
Baked glaze and furniture parfait –
Rumble me grumble me menu me morning
Break fast the order of the day:
I eat the women and
Sip on the trees and
Pigeon pot tartin swooping by.

Sontag streaks rheteors or Berlioz, bassoons,
Homer, the wobble and the slap:
No accountant for taste, boys, but I eat it all
Roll big mouth wise by Sublime –
Fumble me stumble me stupid by design,
Experts and master chefs devoured:
Boson your captain and
Strong force the street tanks!
We eat the labour everyday.

Why Crows Beat Gulls

Solstice 2012

Another beat closer to distant appreciation
Taken only by the odd prick of a camera
Phone. Growing deliberate so as not to break
The nice chat. The young curmudgeon cycles
Slower than the pure research product
Proven by a meeting where action points
The Way up a hill steeper than the doped
Competitors’. Race on.

The crow is more important than the seagull:
(Everybody knows this)
Nobler blue sheen, her eye more dangerous,
Expansive beat meditation, not promiscuous
Nor restless jostle nor footless wander –
Boot free, really, as we scatter through history –
Wondering why we went that way and not
This. Kronk.

Crane’s arc, melody to building, rising frame,
In turn, rhythm to the lift and weft of the yellow
Steel across the sky, a beat to the song of its birth year.
Julia mother made your revolution, and the years will make
Your use. I have only this sense, dear,
That plain speaking occurs to me only
On the final downstroke. Over the hill to a quiet
Fall. Say it.

Wedding Song

for John and Henny

Today our gold is mixed and made
As we kneel and wash in this stream
That runs like breath across this glade
Into our common dream

And all our gifts are assembled here
On this day in the sight of the world
The ardour of our age grows clear
See the banners unfurled

Sing me for you and the wind blows true
Sing you for me and the wind blows free

Our natures are waiting for answer
Our years may prove what we’ll be
Though chance and fate make us wonder
It’s divinity

And our love gives us moment to dance
Though our days will seem more like a tree
Than a floor where we shuffle romance
Without a company

Sing all for us and the sun shines just
Sing us for all and the sun won’t fall

Our trick of the light speeds the play
(Even strangers announce it’s too soon)
Toward Heaven knows what and won’t say
Like a loon

The state we’re approaching is innocence
The remembered present its boss
The instant and name fall in balance
Then we cross

Sing sky for hills and the rain fulfills
Sing valley for sky and the storm has passed by

– Paul Voermans, Preston 2001

Poise

The cycling craze is upon us.
Living in our skin of Lycra,
Therapy in repetition of our knees,
The road’s song and its scholar
Teach us a halt

Is not acceptable; for if you stop
You have only your legs,
No matter how shapely, to fight
Inertia.  The lead unto temptation is inevitable
Running lights, runaway, through
A mechanical economical gradient
Down to imaginary equilibrium.

Punctuated.

I cannot hate you I am prey
To it myself.  But if you cannot believe
My evolution, I cannot credit yours.
The climate of opinion values a bushy
Authenticity because of too many facts
Statistically getting in the way of the truth.  The truth is
I am sick of you.  You cant you box you
Ride triumphal through the arches –
No hands, Ma –
While we stand mesmerised by the drugs
You do not have to take to crash
Or crash through our living
Rooms. Your ambition at once too big and too
Small.  Just whatever it takes to get you
Through the amber lights.

Organ donor.

There.  I am losing it just like you.
Let us relaunch our poor poise or
Be just history.

Even Fear Grows Old

for Donald on his 60th

Every child is an oracle
Telling the present;
While you rub the sleep from your eyes
They park on your chest.

Ambitions are accidental.
I mortared my want
Round decisions found like rocks in my shoes –
They read as a list.

What wasn’t possible
Is now old and frequent.
No matter what the fat man whispers,
Never mind the schoolboy fears,
Collect these paper scraps of prayers
And burn in the west.

GBNT: Repeat Till True

 

(for The Hon Tony Abbott MHR)

 

Great Big New Tax
Great Big New Tax
Great Big New Tax
Great big new dacks,
Cape, wig, shoes, slacks.
Eight Whig nude cracks.
Greed: Pink, beaucoup Batts.
State twigs coup facts:
Hate prig, adieu pacts,
Inchoate creed, true acts,
Misstate, renege, pooh-pooh facts,
Deflate dick who quacks.
M-8, brig: subdue blacks.
Greys beg: no smacks.
Freight bricks, brew attacks.
Rape gig – adieu sacs.
Sedate zigs undo zags.
Kuwait rig blew wax.
Ornate, thick flute clacks.
Escape vig, ooh whacks!
Irate: “Slick Rieu sucks!”
“Bait jig!” mew cats.
God Dog: no ticks.
Grape, fig: fruit bats.
Bake pig, chew stacks,
Create egg fondue packs,
Mate sick spew snacks,
Straight swig, wazoo tracks.
Late, dig blue sax…
Fate glitch rue? Relax.
 

Winter Solstice 2010

Duck Hole Lake Tasmania
for Annie Dillard (there’s a platypus in that lake somewhere)

When I think of poetry I reach for magpie song
Muddle monkeys waddle below
Power startled by this sharp correlation
Mystery and recognition widen His eyes
This through the phrase
That thumps through the eyes
To the heart

Doomed and small but so what?
Solstice without wine but with fire
Tonight I taught my son to sew
Figuring the path from verb to breath to nerve
Via the heart

We imagine for a poem we simply do
But doing all the time imagine on the run
And simply don’t

Now at the sweet end of exhalation
Low point of light
We wait

For all of it to confuse us again

Shake Sugaree

Met the wonderful Miss Glenda for dinner the other night at Rumi, which is an elegant but loud Lebanese restaurant in East Brunswick.  It’s Lebanese in the sense that many smart restaurants in Melbourne are Greek, French, or whatever.  Ethnicity is a train track rather than a station, to mangle what Samuel Delany said about the meanings of words.

The meaning of our ethnicity is as confused as anything else.  I heard an interview with my late mother, firm but gentle in her insistence that she felt Dutch, or, at most, a Teenager, no matter how persistently Maria Zijlstra sought traces of minority identity.  Her family had lived in the Indonesian archepeligo for over two hundred years.  Aboriginal-Irish-English-Scottish Australians are politically regarded as Indigenous, which is a good thing.  My mother was regarded as an Indo.  (This group, during the Japanese occupation of the Indonesian archipelago, was too large to imprison.)  Her point to Maria was, though, that your immediate surroundings count for so much.

And  the ethnicity we make, like a track laid down in front of us (and taken up too sometimes, or at least let rust), can be taken into your imagination to produce fine food.

I would like to write about my ethnicity that way.  (I’d also like to not fill people up uncomfortably the way Rumi doesn’t.)

We Roast

We’ve been advised to go home early or late because of the 45 degree temperatures today.  I’ve been hard at work, of course, so I’m leaving late.  Spare a thought for me on the bike.  But I must leave sometime to save the poor pooch, who has taken to playing with his water and backup water, leaving him with nothing.

I’m off now.

[LATER]

It wasn’t so bad after all, since there was cloud cover and the temp was down to the low forties.  As I rode I contemplated the fact of the chill on the opposite side of the world.  I now see it’s warmer in London: 1°C.  This weather is so fierce.   Apart from anything else, this kind of thing is going to make our lives so much more expensive.  Surely it will be cheaper to spend the money on evening the climate out.  But the struggle is more religious than logical.

We see the Liberals in this country led by a man whose basic idea seems to be that people were born in sin and that this is the tendency, our motivation.  So it’s what – the Hobbesian, vs the Administrators?  Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition, is a man in the mould of John Howard, not in that they have the same beliefs, because belief, although the maker and motivation of the person Abbott, is not the motivator of the politician Abbott.  In other words, anything for power.  This may stem from a deeper belief in the strong man, which trumps many of his other beliefs.  He’s not simple, but it seems to me that it falls into place – including his amicable relationships with the likes of the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard – when you consider that first and foremost he is a professional politician.  This, John Howard showed himself as time and again, to the point where he lost his seat.

So Abbott plays the best angle he can, considering Prime Minister Rudd’s position just one more angle, which of course it may be (and may be simply in happy coincidence with Rudd’s convictions).  And if this game is motivated by anything like a conviction it is in an unsubtle interpretation of Hobbes.  We know Abbott believes that Original Sin is the well of everything.

I believe it is not, though I am agnostic about the short-sightedness of love, so I may wind up agreeing with Hobbes on that.  I am an atheist and also reckon there are better metaphors than Original Sin to describe our state, be that one of hopeless Homer Simpsonism or the poetry of Anarchism.

Age and bitterness will no doubt decide me.

(Though it’s nice to see Bob Hawke so positive with his heart so rent.)

When I got home sure enough Teddy Boy the dog had kicked over all its water supplies and when I ran the tap for him he drank so vigorously he vomited, drank again, ate the vomit and, while I was having a cold shower, ate two of Oscar’s Pokemon caramels off the table.

Google told me that I should watch out for panting and lying down.  Thanks.  It’s 40°C guys!

So I’ve Been Delinquent – Indubitably!

Well yes, we did get married.  I haven’t posted for so long it seems that this website has been forgotten.  In fact I’ve grown a little allergic to this whole business of publishing on line because of a couple of site invasions by phishers.  Wordpress has almost been ditched; I’ve had a go at the security and gotten rid of the unwieldy – and so, risky – Leftwrites.  But I suspect that it will only slow the attackers….  Had a word (several) to the service provider, who don’t notify you if you have trouble, though they have services that do that for them.

Wedding 23902 Watching the Reading
Tom, Ant, Suzie and Fiona.

Ant, Fiona, Suzie and Tom.

But enough grumbling.  Life is good and so is the weather.  The novel is still not published but we will go into that during this year, and the next novel as well.

The fishing is not too bad, there are, as usual, far too many things going on to report adequately.  There is a dog:

 

Teddy Boy

Already far bigger than this.  There was Mia’s visit, Tim’s come to work at DIIRD and Xmas and all that.  Phew.  I’ll add more details later.

Video of Mia, Natalie, Oscar and baby Teddyboy! (Needs Real Player or similar to play.) Mia, Natalie, Oscar and Baby Teddy Boy (VideoLAN Version)

Wreeding on a Trip

Well the wedding is nearly here and with it the honeymoon.  We’re determined to travel light this time – a four wheel drive seems packed for two weeks on the road but we’re talking two 32 L day packs – and we’re casting about for novels to take with us.

I’ve put Accellerando and Little Brother on my crackberry, as well as Ulysses and Pride and Prejudice – could re-read that anytimebut Cathy reckons she’s not enamored of reading stuff on such a small screen.  I, too, like the image of myself on a balcony in Portugal overlooking the Atlantic and staining the pages of some tome I’ve not had time to read.  The idea is to bring something with lots of pages and small print, or several books with small print – anyway, something to save us from the floating population of Airportery.  So far:

  1. Infinite Jest (I’m reading Consider the Lobster and love it)
  2. The Slap (Cathy’s book club is doing it, but, though it’s 580 pages, it’s big print and margins)
  3. The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
  4. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (I know, it’s not long or anything, but it’s so beautiful and funny)
  5. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land

See, the books have to be (1) swappable between us and (b) good value on the abovementioned basis of weight thrift.  If anyone’s got suggestions, do tell.

New Server New Life

I’ve been labouring at IT, dang it.  I really hate the stuff.  I’ve moved a whole bunch of sites off the old Rumspringe Coop server to a commercial hosting provider.  No more operating system problems!  The downside is that their email service is very slow, but on the whole I’d recommend it.  So I’ll probably be doing my future father-in-law’s website in this area, if he ever gets around to giving me the info.  He’s a celebrant.

Oh, yes, and by the way, I mean my new father-in-law!  I didn’t mean that Fiona’s dad was rising from the dead.  No, it’s a new life – woohoo!  Not whoo-hooing about my new father-in-law, though he’s a good chap; it’s all about Cathy and I getting married next year.

We’ve been looking at rings.  Much more fun than IT, though expensive.  Apparently you’re supposed to do the most expensive thing with the engagement rather than the wedding.  I suppose you’re convincing the rellies that you can afford to keep the little woman, by offering up three months wages.  Please.  Anyhow, we’re going to make the rings the same ones, and modify them a little for the wedding, adding some stones of the Hayward clan.

So congratulate me.  Not on the server, please!