Looking over the shoulder of an English language-learner
a list of idioms, e.g., falling in love           and
a realisation (an ‘oh yes’)      it’s giving itself a
verb,           not loving but falling            a
bad feeling       or small shock         like slipping in
socks on a plank of wood             gutty and
uncontrolled     Another is ‘ to try one’s luck,’ something
obvious to me: trial or experiment, ‘give it a go’.
At this point we look out the bus window        at
the passing weathers and think           idioms or
not            this day is cracking its yolk everywhere

a note on the composition of these poems: last year, nick, fred, pat, george & i started a project in which we each recorded our voice for a full day — our waking hours — & then transcribed all the language we spoke. recently, nick & i used each other’s sound recording & transcriptions to compose a series of poems — both written & sound-based — for a collaborative performance at a night called ’semaphore’, curated by jes tyrell & kathy gray. the following are eleven poems that i wrote, using nick’s language as source material. some syntactical & grammatical liberties were taken, such as altering verb forms & in some instances adding or removing prepositions, but other than that, the language is as-is.

**

i.

but surely – if there’s no democratic resolution
– they’ve got more chances of getting chicks.
bodily memory: you know, just, the continual,
ongoing fucked up-ness of the world. is the issue
with the language, or with what he’s saying?
fuck fuck fuck! fuck! cunt! I always, I always,
sort of, need spinach, really.

ii.

or you tend to always fail. but what do you die of
when you get hung? after my second dark ale, I
push it into that category of being, you know.
you should have that threshold too. ‘shut up with
your nationalism,’ & ‘if you don’t want to, call this
number.’ it’s ridiculous, the absolute archetype of
the rightwing do-si-do. trying to start some
guerilla-vandal thing, a sort of famous new line of
cistern toilets, I think I said, that I, just, by the
end of it, I absolutely despised it.

iii.

and oh, I just crumpled inwards, inwardly,
you know: but it’s been so relentlessly
propagated that everyone else propagates it
as well. you know, and like, you forget it,
you know, because, well, I mean, some people
don’t forget it, sometimes I forget it, but every time
you see him you just recognise – you can’t have a
maverick anymore.

iv.

I’m just wandering around like a spare testicle.
that’s why I don’t have a special pen, because I
never keep a pen for more than five minutes. so
we’re going to have horseradish cream? jesus
christ. we’re going to recolonise an island for the
pièce de résistance. I always look for you up this
alleyway, it’s only natural for it extend across all
of the options (I’ve got a few ASIO connections,
I could make a few calls.) pho is really pronounced
‘fa’.

v.

so are you going to have to go back & confront
these gangsters? yeah, you know, bow ties, yeah.
um, ‘eat my pussy and suck my dick’. I would say
a contingent factor in a dynamic system, because
I’m an irrational being. it’s that manipulation that
successfully manipulates the middle-class liberals.
nice theory, not sure it really works in practice:
it’s much more serious than jerry bruckheimer.

vi.

eggplant & coke? I might go to the pisser.
you know what I like best about being scruffy
& unshaven? we don’t leave our pants in the
lounge room. after you enter the world, you
get a complimentary pronoun: it’s a reverse
tadpole type of thing. headlights turn off when
you turn off the engine, you can’t drink &
talk at the same time.

vii.

a blender goes in handy, when I go home.
you have to change the way it looks to meet
the function, just absolutely critique the shit out
of commercial industrial design. the train line
goes under it, or next to it, & they aren’t automatically
linking to all of the pages. ‘call for writers’ – piss off.
there’s definitely an edith piaf in there, white wine
& chicken stock & then heaps of olive oil. that kind
of, almost, hyper-intimacy that you can get
with animals, & with humans, I suppose.

viii.

he’s worried he’s getting too much oestrogen. this
is something you’ve got to work at, I see torrents
of water running down a road, literally shot by a
sniper. & then some smart arse journalist goes,
you know, ‘oh,’ & ‘gangsta I’m the only authentic
thing in hip-hop.’ feeling like a pork frenzy right
now, I just found one & had my way with it. I
scoured town, for that, for my sick little baby.
yeah, yeah, that’s right – I’m amazing at the gallic
shrug. I don’t mean your dad, I mean the collective
dad. they have to change the direction they’re moving.

ix.

& then lachlan lee throws his burger at you. you
should never underestimate the role of the catholic
church: it’s all fandangle & shit. ‘women are not
goats?’ anyway, so no potato, no capsicum. mute
that shit. get your priorities right. I’m going to burn
some of his books in retaliation. I wouldn’t
burn the Erotica book, though, it’s howard’s
most valuable mythology. I saw jesus in a sugar
beet field. he said, he said, he was out in auburn.

x.

rudd & gillard just played straight into a new
language; I have to say that I can think of
another way of reading it. they go there &
then they leave, & then they start attacking
& being really combative & saying ‘donnez-
moi,’ ‘give me.’ it’s obscene. that’s why need more
people like wet, silly cat, some sort of cartoon
character frown, ball & chain. that’s standard
rhetoric, you know – it is just a small bullet wound.

xi.
it’s a long way between sending people an email
& raiding them (I wasn’t referring to us, baby.)
he stood there & very calmly whispered in his
ear about a copy of machiavelli. we been shakin’
our hips together, using film conventions, sitting
& licking, there’s nothing better. self-satisfied,
smug emotions? I love you too, but I mean, who
are you talking to, what were you expecting? it’s
just a funny sounding combination of two words.

there are two things next to my bed: one, a half-full cup of steeped ginger chunks in a tea cup; and two, a sprig of the season’s first jasmine bloom, picked five days ago. both these things are stinky in the finest sense – their smell is deep and pungent, sweet and acrid, filling my sleep with memories of the body.

the ginger is a familiar bodily feeling, that of sickness and tight throats, the heavy sideways dozing that happens when half your head is drained of mucous and the other half is holding it all at capacity. this mucous is solid, shifting with the squeaking pressure of tectonic plates. the ginger is a heat felt right down at the back of the throat, a wet and pleasant heat.

the jasmine is the smell of warmth too, warm evening spent tucked into the roots of lantana, hidden, eating the meat from cold chicken bones and swatting the large, blood-dumb mosquitoes of early spring. these were nights that were long and unknowable, nights that started with mustard coloured skies, nights that brought a new colony of foetal guinea pigs, birthed in small wet beans in a cage, mostly dead by morning. (it may be a dramatised memory, but the jasmine in this image is wild and all-encompassing, covering the weatherboard and growing deep into the kitchen cupboards and the bathroom tiles. the smell was too wonderful and it elicited such a quick breath that the bloom month was spent in a dizzying state of hyperventilation).

the shame was misplaced but i felt
it anyway, the indignity of my insides
and the thought of those things being
made real to someone, not just to my
imagination or to the warm, not-really-there
awareness of the body and its habits

i had time to kill so i went to a record shop
and idly fingered a woody guthrie boxset
with cheeks wet and flushed-feeling like pastry.
and then i left, unable to concentrate, and
sat in a cafe that was playing the kind of music
you hear in documentaries about stripclubs in estonia,
shrill techno stuff with trilling sexed-up bird calls of
oooooh oooooh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

on the train, i sat next to a half-full styrofoam
container of discarded chips. they were sweating a
dull, cold grease and a smell of starch and lard.
i held the oversized envelope between my knees
and watched as people dropped like dumb bullets
into the carriage and across the seats

walking home late last night along paramatta road, i watched as the seagulls lined up along the roof of a warehouse next to stanmore mcdonalds, waiting for an opportune moment to swoop down for a stray chip, or crumbs of mayo-soaked bread. this mcdonalds has recently undergone a renovation, with the aim of looking more like the kind of modern, dimly-lit café that the discerning diner might like to visit. the gaudy, plasticy reds and yellows of the eighties fast food aesthetic has been replaced with square lines, wooden beams and chrome signage. i guess the hope is that any reservations that people may have about mcdonalds are soothed by the gentle, sophisticated, hip model of the future. for me, though, who only ever walks past the carpark and exhaust fans from the kitchen, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place is the sound of gulls and the smell of pig fat.

when i first moved to stanmore and noticed the seagulls – which apart from on friday nights when the carpark is an ad hoc nightclub and pick-up joint, are the most regular presence – i was disoriented, wondering where they come from. stanmore seems so neatly knitted into the inner west that you can easily forget that there is water close by. the annandale canals, which run off from glebe point, are just to the north, and the harbour curves around almost half of an imagined three-sixty degree circle around the suburb. thinking of the other suburbs i’ve lived in, there is more or less the same sense that there is water everywhere: the central network of port jackson, botany bay to the south, and, of course, the ocean to the east. each network is so complex that it is often difficult to locate yourself when at the edge of the water. i remember one night a couple of years ago, nick and i drove down to balmain late at night in heavy fog and walked around the foreshore. after about fifteen minutes, we realised that we had lost our point of reference – the harbour bridge – and we no longer knew which direction the small scalloped inlet we were following was facing.

as i passed mcdonalds last night, i realised that most of the cars parked in the lot had people in them, mostly on their own, silently eating their food. as though the design of the space, with the tacked-on drive thru, was not alienating enough, people choose to eat their food from inside their cars, lights out and windows up. i imagined that this sort of practice would displease the gulls greatly, who were still lined up on the warehouse, ready to brawl for flotsam. further down bridge road, a woman in jogging gear got out of her car and ran to the wheelie bins of an apartment block to throw her bag of rubbish away. the bag was sizable, no doubt filled with the cheap mess of plastic and waxy paper. she jogged back to her car and drove off. i could still smell the pig fat as i turned into albany road.

* a note on the map

after thinking about this, i wanted to see if i could draw a map of the waters that surround each of the houses i’ve lived in. the map is obviously not conclusive, nor particularly accurate, but was done mainly from memory and include any part of water that i have a connection to, or experiential knowledge of. i referred to a sydway street directory to clarify names in some cases.