fred’s farm

yes this is a field of gunmetal glinting like weather
an entire ecology of dead thistles mapping a drought
barbs pain dull remembering poisons of beestings &
the skull-eye fits perfectly a climbing stick found hill-
side. let’s take a photo here of the air’s texture looking
down into damwater figure out some key property of
atomic nature the push of things against another. let
no one say that sheep can’t really move if encouraged
when it’s a distance issue the soundlessness is affecting
as a cinematic device. this dog resembles more closely a
seal than say a different dog & really the same is else-
where too. owls pocket into roofy line-drawings I’m
imagining that everything is a sketch or a story told
hundreds of times at the dinner table. (months ago
on saying I was interested in oral histories I was made
to feel oversexed and dead-keen on performing fellatio.)
rhubarb is a barometer of the times, heirloom parsleys
grow into mad reunions, tomatoes hang on tho pecked
into pumice. predictably all the wool smells of dinner
farmdogs bray fig trees are irrelevant bowsers like delta

The essay as

An essay of mine (based on a conference paper given at The Art of the Real in Newcastle, May 2008) has been published here at TEXT.

down on luck

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

leonard cohen

because ever since god-knows-when
these are the waits traditional to
christmas – chinese dinners & ham
radios, eucalypts bled into watercolour
: “the sun poured down like honey.”
irish drums behave, in this instance,
as genetic coding

a purpose-built jigsaw tray that pulled
the skin & nail off my big toe – the
exact geometries of resemblance &
what it means to have sameness

sneaking behind a cactus garden for a
joint with uncle P : the ants so fat they
pop under shoes, or worse, climb to altitudes

puddingless and clotted, and with one
large gravy spoon, drunk. a desperation
or else, a physics kit, skull tattoos, underwear
embossed with glyphs of semi-quavers &

the smell of lavender a hit of snuff

waking hours, poems i – xi

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.

[this is]

tearing & shredding. the jesus-like man starts to destroy all his plaster-of-paris doppelgangers. and he’s raging atop small mountains of sweet potatoes. there’s a whole collection of things to be cleansed and purged, a whole wooden room full of plaster to be smashed. and then, hours of sleep to recoup, curled in a wet noodle on a pile of dust and shards.

*

what is happening. (that’s not a question, by the way. what is happening, as in, [this is] what is happening.) there is tearing & shredding, in that order.

wet smells

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).

indignity

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

sport’s the real winner

spread out broken on a rug i felt the grass go wet with cold, the feeling in my legs a heavy and purpled mottle. a swimming carnival when the sun goes down, or being in damp clothes after rain, or the feeling of falling asleep in the car and waking with dull kidneys. there was wind were there wasn’t wind before, and i wanted to tear the clover out and make a small scarf for my jugular. you had two pincers for ankle bones, and i could see them cutting across the grass as you sweated chunks of sand.