Just round from the shop

I'm told it's good to look up at the buildings you blunder past every day on your way to god-knows-where. That often some architectural surprise awaits you near the corner or just round from the shop.

But I'm not sure that if I ever get to god-knows-where, having enjoyed such a diversion, I'll be any better equipped to return.

At Least One

I'm told they turn inside you
Ticking out their time;
These cogs within cogs
Are forever untuned,
I'm told.

But I see at least one cog
Up there too,
In the big old sky,
That is forever
And perfectly
In tune.

Elsewhere

The woman was like a tide
Of silk and tendril arms,
Washing forward then back then forward
To the last bus driver.

He sat serenely ten-to-twoing his wheel,
Eyes straight, feet splayed,
Easing the old bird into neutral.

She called within inches of his face
For directions to a street he didn't,
It turned out, know.

So idle in Alexandria we sunk
While she didn't know why he didn't know
What she thought she knew he should have known.
An interchange.

I looked out at warehouse walls,
Empty corners slicked with night,
At black traffic swelling and
Subsiding beyond view,
And chanced
That that was all that could take her
From this farcical confinement -
Theatre of the 370 -
When, waving away any pathos,
She surged forward, tripped on one step,
Hurdled another, and finally found
Her audience among the elsewhere.

In short

It must not be a declaration.
Yet it may,
On occasion,
Be
One
Sixth of one.

It may not, in any event,
Forsake
Purely
For argument's sake,
Firmness or unfuzziness or
Freedom from flimsy
Linguistic games
(that everbody loathes).

In short:

Hoick

It doesn't have to be situational,
She explained to him.
It can be abstract - free of place -
And just as good.

Just.
Good.

The words rolled in his mouth.

And why the preoccupation with rhyme?
It's childish and unflattering and quote
No poem was ever better for it unquote.

Why.
Rhyme.

He eagerly licked his last malteser.

One more thing,
She urged, hoicking her pants above her hips:
I was horribly, horribly drunk.

The Falling Man

(A relative of James Taylor's Walking Man, who walks while the other man stops and talks.)

The Adventure

the old man moves forward
his face is a fire
his hands blistered claws
that grip the spaces
in front of him

foolish protestant voices
he thought he'd left behind
leave him now
he can only feel his way

the fields of flowers
he saved for them
are gone
he can only see
streaked falling shapes

what he saw when
first told of the adventure
of immolation

Home

Passengers, side by side, shifting as the bus turns
Leftwards and leaning, urbanely unimpressed:
Back.
Pulsing gently between bends, silently and in unison,
All stomaching the churning of
Big black wheels sucking rain-slicked bitumen beneath them.
All effortlessly mourning the routine
Workaday journey past long pavements
Strewn with mashed newsprint
And bowed, scampering salarymen.

One man is leaning the wrong way,
Intent on taking some flesh
From the young woman beside him.
He is strangely alluring, it appears to her, standing now for his stop,
Surrendering his favourite seat and
Stepping off with one eye.

He is quickening for home, food and sexual love,
Having worked his shift
And earned his day.

Pebble Bridge

The Game

The game of wanting
And wanting to wash yourself,
Your eyes, livid inside
'Open gestures of kindness'
'Public offers of help'
'Outward expressions of faith'
And the crowded personas
That scratch at your mask.

To bring yourself down in fits
To call out, find your feet, fall, then recall
The game of wanting to hold some poise
Tucked in your shirt for later.

Like peppercorn seed, fresh picked
From spectral midnight gardens,
Drips of boiled bromureide
Lidded inside
Tiny black-burned pots;
This: an open gesture of malevolence.
A mystic mother's murmuring
Of poisoned floral picture frames,
Of Drapes and dresses and wretched
Romances.

To watch the wake tenderly rise
From long-shaded afternoons
And a percolating childhood
Undrawn.

The game of wanting
And wanting to waste yourself,
Your I's, livid inside
'Open gutters of kindness'
'Public ablutions of help'
'Outward excretions of faith'
And the clammy personas
That melt from your mask.

Conversion

Please stop walking;
The cymbals on your feet
Are confusing the cat.

The book in your hand,
A blunter instrument,
Is discomfiting the dog.

And please stop crying;
Your mother will think
Your father has failed,
And you father will think
He's left something at home.

The day started well
Didn't it?
Well, it started:
Page One.
Didn't it.

And now how will it end?
I don't know.
Will it end as it may not have begun?
Nobody knows.

The tribe is flooding in
Full of gush and burble
Filling every corner of the house
With laughter.
Some without grace,
Some without knowledge.

And still you clutch your book,
and still you pace the room.

"Morning Constitutional" ... "Morning"

The Small Movements

Tonight the small movements
Are all that separate me
From the people I love.

They are contained yet
From within like skin unstretched
On bone rising
Before breaking
The surface
Before starting
The slow entropic dissolution toward inertia,
Ambient atomised unerringly
Kinetic: The Background.

I think of a floating plastic bag,
Its crimpled translucence
And jellyfish breath
Drawing and discharging air
That is swollen
And thick
With heat.

I wonder: what is this life?

Orange Slices

Unknown Area

Mishydranation

"Asthma: A Multi-Headed Hydra or Misunderstood Genus?"

"MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] - the Multi-headed Hydra. When you play with the bulls you must look out for the horns. In the case of the MBTA, there’s a difference - the bull has many heads - and all of them are disconnected."

"Taming the Multi-Headed Hydra: Mobile Management Becomes a Vendor Must-Have."

"The West’s plight vis-à-vis radical Islam is therefore akin to Hercules’ epic encounter with the multi-headed Hydra-monster."

I'm not impressed by this.

What I've learnt tonight is that Hydra was a swamp-dwelling, poison-oozing water serpent of Lerna who had a terribly disagreeable, ultimately fatal, encounter with Hercules and Iolaus (The H's nephew and chauffeur). These men charioted in from out of town, probably in the morning and without any warning, sought out the piteous chthonic beast and over the course of the next few hours delivered upon it a frenzied series of cuts, cauterisations and club strokes until only one of its nine heads remained unlopped. Hercules then ripped this "immortal head" - which could not be harmed by ordinary weapons - off its stump with his bare hands and buried it beneath a heavy stone. The slaying of Hydra was one of The H's twelve labours (imposed on him as punishment for flipping out and murdering his own wife and children).

So let's get this straight: up until its final moments, Hydra always had multiple heads. Some say nine, others a hundred. History fades. But, please, let's ditch the over-description.

Also, there was only ever one Hydra of Lerna. It was not a bull and almost certainly didn't cohabit with bulls (as, let's be frank, it would have multi-bitten a bull's face if one was ever foolish enough to stray near the swamp looking for a drink or a clump of fresh clover).

Finally, though Hydra grew a few more heads and was assisted by a crab and generally acquitted itself well in what must have been a challenging defensive effort, The H eventually prevailed. Point being: Hydra was never tamed.

Time to pack the station wagon

In a recently published newspaper essay, Thomas Homer-Dixon predicts that the total collapse of society is fairly likely to occur fairly soon. He threads together three ologies to explain that too much complexity driven by too few sources of cheap energy will lead to too little resilience in the event of "simultaneous high levels of distress and conflict at several levels of society." He uses the cheerful expression "massive state breakdown" to describe massive state breakdown, but he certainly doesn't do so cheerfully. Here are the rudiments.

Sociology

"[America sociologist Jack] Goldstone has shown that societies are far more likely to break down when they're overloaded by converging stresses - say, rapid population growth, scarcity of key resources and a financial crisis."

Anthropology

"After studying ancient and modern societies, [American anthropologist Joseph] Tainter has concluded that they generally respond to stress by making their institutions and technologies more complex. A society dealing with a prolonged drought, for example, might build elaborate irrigation systems so it uses water more efficiently on its farms and it might create another layer of bureaucracy to make sure everyone follows water-sharing rules. In the short and medium terms, this greater complexity often produces big benefits - such as more food - and most people are better off."

"But Tainter has also found that greater complexity doesn't produce benefits forever, because it's costly. The cost is paid in the currency of energy ... "

"[He] argues that investments in complexity eventually produce what economists call 'diminishing marginal returns'."

"In time, the benefits of greater complexity fall to zero and can even become negative. As an expanding portion of society's wealth is sucked into further boosting complexity, its reserves to deal with unexpected contingencies fall, making it more susceptible to sudden, sever shocks from the outside."

Ecology

"[Canadian ecologist Buzz] Holling [contends] that any living system - from forest ecologies to modern economies - naturally tends to become more complex, internally connected and efficient over time, regardless of whether it needs complexity to solve its problems. Eventually it becomes so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances - and so well organised as an efficient and productive system - that when a shock pushes it outside that range, it can't cope. And the system's high connectedness helps any shock travel farther and faster across the system as a whole. Overall, then, the system becomes more rigid and brittle - in a word, less resilient."

Now, here's the nub of the problem (the "contradiction" in Homer-Dixon's terms). Modern societies are responding to increasingly intense "internal pressures" - such as the rich-poor divide, global warming, disease outbreaks and the "diffusion of technologies for mass violence away from governments to small groups of people (including terrorists)" - by developing "steadily more complex institutions and technologies" which require "higher inputs of high-quality energy." But this is occurring at a time when supplies of "abundant, cheap, high-quality energy" are drying up.

Soon it will be time to pack the station wagon.

Things on Strings

The Rich Prospect of a Kill

Pierced through tinted panes
Out back of Bennelong point
The sharp neon baubles chill
Noblesse oblige or
Brash near certainty.

Centrifugal gemstoned hands,
Hard-skinned and hunger-clawed,
Set wine in glasses on a whirl.

And nostrils dilating
At the rich prospect of a kill.

A Quayside Sting

I was standing at the Circular Quay bus stop trying to remember whether the 897 would take me to where I needed to go. I was looking in the direction of, but not really properly noticing, a couple of kooky Japanese street performers when a strong voice beside me hissed, "pathetic".

I was truly shocked. I turned to the woman responsible for this totally uninvited judgement and said, "oh, it's a shame you feel that way cos I quite like it". I realise now that my response was instinctive, serving, first, to deflect the woman's hostility with a degree of honest and positive - though, I must confess, slightly confected - appraisal, and, second, to leave the way open for a discussion - ambitious as this may now seem.

Yet she was merciless: "I've seen things like this before, but much better".

I turned away. I couldn't face her anymore. I turned away from the kooky Japanese street performers too. And a little while later, as the 897 trundled me into the rest of my afternoon, I tried but failed to forget about this well-groomed, boutique-bag-clutching, heavily and expensively bejewelled woman. Of all the people at the crowded bus stop, why did she choose me to envenomate with her aggression and negativity?

Billablast

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(Original photo by Rob Taggart)

Curve Ball

I Spose

I spose it does getcha
This waitin'
Scannin'
Twitchin'
Down the scope thirsty
For 'em
Every dust-fucked second eh

This door boys
Poot-poot
'Nother 'ere
Ack-ack eh

Like dancin'
Scamprin' little monkeys
On the clay
No two thoughts
For the circus
Screams

Outta laughs
Outta fuck'n askin'

When we could be killin'
Or cryin'
Or goin' fuckin' home

I spose

Solidarity Starfish-style

STOP!

Splash Shield

Pods

An author's unacknowledged irony

Everybody's superior
To everybody
Til the tv celeb
Arrives

Ascendancy trades
Between floors
Between times
On one-way conveyances

Never down

But now
Clacking prams
And HIM

HIS people

Scrabbling to the rostrum
Low-heeled and gulping
Piped air
Confers all that HE
Intended

Vastness of place and
Order
The supremacy of Man

Something about the virute
Of humility

Satisfied?

The checkout attendant tightly scrunched the note she'd been handed then released it onto the counter.

There was a pause while she (and I) inspected the unsprung currency lying before us.

She lifted her eyes briefly to meet mine and then, satisfied?, completed the transaction.

Are you checking for counterfeits?

No, I don't know, the boss just tell me to.

But why? What are you checking for?

I don't know. If it's a hundred the boss ask.

Sorry, but what I mean is what is it you're aiming to find out by doing that?

I don't know.

But then there's no point in doing it, is there?, if you don't know what you're doing it for.

I know.

Bone Frame II

Bone Frame I

You can have all your power
If that's what you need;
I don't see the resemblances.

I've got all my power, yes,
Moulded in the melodrama of these
Miniature bedroom plasticines

'Your iconoclasm substitutes for
Orgasm,'
That is what you said.

And faithfully I was quoted
Out of pretext
Oh, let's just get our pants off!

Post-breakfast Footsteps

"I'm becoming a mug."
And so it seemed.
Each devotion, no matter how sweet,
Was ignored (like marmalade)
Or returned unreconstituted (like sour pulp).

"This silence is degrading."
And so it became.
My love, set forth for Infinity,
Rudely left unnamed in the echo
Of post-breakfast footsteps.

A Glass at Midnight

Time of the mongrel at my foot
Scraping for a coin that's born
In the carpet in a grave of hair.

Miles of the poles in the room's corners.
The eskimostars in an octagon. Worlds
Within this box.

I hold the cipher of the voided world,
Four fingers holding the sea in a glass,
Incumbent an arm on the ashtray table.

Time in the tughoot night stops
A religion that grows on the window.
I let the glass drop. A bridge falls.
Flatten the midnight on the fingered tightrope.
All the dumb days draw on.

Harold Pinter, 1951

Hand Tool

Kottke I

The virtuoso's Side One Suite

Inverts its name.
Such dexterity, such pluck
Easily assures this - and more;
It's almost a detraction.

Slightly German reflections

1. The flood myth: a mighty roe deer cull (with no evidence of surplus).

2. Decanting cant Kant can't turn your aunt into an ant (unless she's already an ant, in which case it's (debatably) fairly likely you are also an ant and so (arguably) incapable of decanting any variety of philosophy let alone that difficult metaphysical cross-stitch popular two centuries or so ago).

3. If it starts with "Mein" it's mine but if it ends with "Kampf" it's no one in particular's - and yet also everyone's, as SEEING through the mesmerising ORATORY of a man with well-groomed facial hair is a struggle (at the worst of times).

4. Your tuba is everything, it's how you find love, it's your airlift to the afterlife.

Look down

You're not going nowhere
Is not just.

A missatement.

You're past halfway
In this maelstrom.

What do you make of that?

South Melbourne Night (1962)

Source Unknown

A quote (from Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore):

Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House now stands, was first named Limeburners' Point by the colonists because it was mantled in a deposit of mollusc shells, built up over thousands of years of uninterrupted gorging.

A footnote (from the same source):

Bennelong was an Iora tribesman, the first black to learn English, drink rum, wear clothes and eat the invaders' strange food. He was rewarded for his curiosity with the friendship of Governor Phillip - and a small brick hut, about 12 feet square, in which he lived on the end of what is now Bennelong Point. "Love and war," a colonial diarist noted, "were his favourite pursuits." He went to England with Phillip in 1792 and was much feted as an exotic Noble Savage, the first native Australian to be seen in London. But he lost most of his curiosity value after a year or two, and it was not until the end of 1795 that he returned to Sydney, with the newly appointed governor, John Hunter. By then he fitted neither his old tribal world nor the carceral microcosm of the whites, whose tolerance of the blacks had begun to disintegrate after Phillip's departure. Bennelong became increasingly sodden and pugnacious with rum, and died at the age of about 40 in 1813.

More detail (care of the Australian Electoral Commision's Origins of Electoral Division Names website):

Bennelong NSW Aboriginal man befriended by Governor Phillip in 1789.

An observation (source unknown):

Bennelong is our Prime Minister's electoral division.

The Human Donkey

The human donkey's snout tilts upwards,
Its dark occupant's eyes almost perceptibly moving
Beneath a square gauze chin patch,
Straining for prospective coin poppers or, at the least,
Some form of harbour-city husbandry.

But the passers-by, tired of seeing
So many such animals
Contorted and cut from their herd,
Veer and leer and bustle on to their next
Glitzy destination.

Look Up

(unless you're unable ...)

Elliptic Evening

Monomen

Same thing 'cept more mod(al)ity

Sideshow to and fro

They swivelled without squeaking
Until someone took to one with a bat
Then it was on coz I mean he really took to it
With popped-out eyes and hissing and blasphemy
Trying to knock its big bloody mouth off its face

And just as, beneath the festooned globes, a crowd started to gather,
In one crazy decompression, the bat lost its air
And the man dropped to the dirt sobbing and pleading
For rain

Mornings

Saw a man eating a meat pie like a sandwich.

Wondered what he'd make of Assertiveness at Work: A Practical Guide to Handling Awkward Situations.

Heard a man articulate the word "Ar-Chi-Bald" before stepping off the bus.

Thought as he passed he'd laugh at my face, being as it is so undistinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics. (He didn't even look at me.)

Expected Lina the loquacious fifteen dollar hairstylist.

Got Leon the taciturn fifteen dollar barber. (But still enjoyed an excellent haircut.)

Speculated about what a Ukrainian soldier might require hairstyle-wise.

Didn't get far beyond my reflection.

Imagined myself at a deli raising my palm to refuse ten cents change before realising that that was the same palm into which a freshly ground coffee bean had just been poured. (Further imagined that it cost me ten cents to replace it.)

Imagined standing on a street corner waving hello to an old woman I'd never met or seen before. Imagined that her back was to me as she plodded and swayed towards a launderette, dragging behind her a long trail of knotted-together bed sheets.

Mornings.

Rage on the Cosmic Carriageway

(Click to enlarge ...)

Rolling Night

Stone Sea II

Over There

Stone Sea I

One of these things

Scenes I ought to have drawn #2

A man wearing tight bicycle shorts is stooping over a copy of Duchamp's wheel at an American art gallery. His lips are turned slightly upward and he is squinting. Behind the man is a woman, also in tight bicycle shorts, who is waving her arms above her head and shouting, "don't panic, he's a black belt".

Gum nut

True Stories

I've just finished reading Inga Clendinnen's Boyer Lectures (1999) -- collected in a book titled True Stories. The lectures are about the role history plays in shaping a national story. About how 'bad history' is the product of false or sanitised narratives designed to serve specific political or cultural purposes. Clendinnen cites the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in post-apartheid South Africa, as an agency through which 'good history' was learnt and recorded. She explains that the commission's chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

wanted the new state to begin not with no history, not with false history, but with a true history forged out of its divided but shared past. And it worked. Vengeance, reparation, even justice, turned out to be less important than knowledge. From now on, no one in South Africa can deny the past or falsify it. South Africans, black and white, have their true stories. Some will still cry for justice, but the worst of the agony has been assuaged and rendered unavailable for disreputable use by that extraordinary collective enterprise in good history.

Reading about -- being reminded of -- the atrocities and injustices enacted upon Australian Aborigines by white frontiermen, missionaries and politicians has strengthened my belief that it's time we, for the sake of our national healing and so that we can all move forward, set down, in the style of the TRC, a deep store of good public history related to the contact-zone (in particular) and the "colonial question" (more generally).

Let's have it out so that none of this Black Armband cynicism can continue to eat away at our shared past and future.

They're Behind You III

(With apologies to Will Oldham.)

They're Behind You II

They're Behind You I

Miro Rip Off

(Though I didn't know it at the time ...)

A poem by Philip Larkin

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Sky Pebbles