Time to go

A message on my shirt says
Look around you
There are lessons less grave
Than this

A woman in a corner
Turned away
Says they're behind you
Those you came for

Anyway

And a dog
There's a dog yowling
Till I know it's time

To leave

This grey light falling
From someone's

Home

Heals my bones

Oh near, home

Monday evening with Bob

From All I really want to do

I ain't lookin' to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyse you
Categorise you
Finalise you
Or advertise you

Fish Corral II

Fish Corral I

Glee is submarine

Thoughtless Bubbles

Early Life II

Early Life I

The Scavenger

I have entered a gap
Narrow and sheer
Bleak beyond reckoning
And blasted with stone

Were it not for my
Hunger to be someone else
To scavenge their joy
I'd be home now
Deep in the valley
Where it is
Bleak beyond reckoning
And blasted with stone

Personal Growth

Winter Comes Early

Tango-tapping Cultureman

House of reprobates

The comment:

You have to ask: what sort of constituency would regard the opposition’s juvenile, petulant, tactless, gormless, insolent, impudent, smug, stupid, brattish and incurably unamusing parliamentary behaviour as worthy? As worthy of our democracy’s primary law-making institution? As worthy of a legislature that has so many urgent generational challenges facing it (such as climate change, the water crisis, Aboriginal disadvantage)?

I know.

The juvenile, petulant, tactless, gormless, insolent, impudent, smug, stupid, brattish and incurably unamusing morons who voted for them.

(With all due respect.)

The response

Thanks for reprinting the thesaurus [blog handle deleted]. It seems you laborites are in desperate need of an education.

The repsonse to the response:

[blog handle deleted], are you juvenile, petulant, tactless, gormless, insolent, impudent, smug, stupid, brattish, incurably unamusing or a moron?

If so, which of these would you say is your most endearing attribute?

If not, let me ask you this: are you lacking in empathy, broad-mindedness, nuanced modes of understanding, tolerance of difference, wariness of overt demonstrations of dogmatism or insidious attempts at political, religious or ideological indoctrination? Further, do you suffer from a lack of compassion, sensitivity, sophistication, subtlety or reasonableness?

Two more questions: are you either (a) a member of the Exclusive Brethren's blog vigilance unit (the one based in Junee)?; or (b) Bronwyn Bishop?

Geo-editorial

Geo-contemplation

Starwisp and Knot Inspection

Booting puddle (or just some funny hat)

Misplaced Comment #2

Dinosaurs are big-boned.

Notes: (1) This comment would be received more favourably if spoken without any special emphasis on the word 'dinosaurs'.

(2) If spoken to a large man or woman who, rightly or wrongly, thinks in euphemisms, this comment would be received unfavourably were it delivered with special emphasis on the word 'dinosaurs'.

(3) Dinosaurs are, of course, extinct: a tense problem. Also, some dinosaurs were not, actually, big-boned: a factual problem. Two very good ripostes in the event of an unkind application of this comment.

Gap

Misplaced comment #1

Shuttle diplomacy is subtle for anyone with a speech impediment.

Notes: (1) In writing what I have just written, I do not wish to demean those who have a speech impediment. I do acknowledge, however, that my words could inspire such an interpretation. Therefore, I propose that all parties concerned sit down, perhaps in groups of three or four spread through the rooms of a big stately building, and talk long into the night. We can have mixed nuts and juice.

(2) I once saw a man perform a punk version of Hamlet (part of a series of productions called Speed Shakespeare), which featured lots of profane language and not a great deal of subtlety (that was the point, of course, which I (kind of) got and (kind of) appreciated). His speech during the performance was flawless; it was only when I spoke to him after the show that I discovered his profound stutter.

The bush

I caught the train to the bush this morning. The 7.40 Illawarra service took me from Central to Waterfall. From the station I walked through a scout camp to the top of a mountain. From the mountain I followed a fire trail to a pool in Heathcote creek, where I swam. After my swim I walked to Heathcote township and had a cup of coffee. Then I caught the 3.28 Eastern Suburbs service back to Central.

I saw a monitor, a skink and a finch.

We caught the train to the bush this morning. The 7.40 Illawarra service took us from Central to Waterfall. From the station we walked through a scout camp towards a mountain. We lost our way among some big rocks but we were not alarmed. We found it again near an electricity pylon. We followed painted dots to the top of the mountain. Afterwards, we swam in a pool and ate muesli bars and dates. We caught the 3.28 Eastern Suburbs service back to Central.

We saw a monitor and a skink. I saw a finch.

Two men caught the train to a suburb south of Sydney. They were destined for a mountain but didn't know it until they met a man in a truck. They were destined to swim in the valley beneath the mountain but didn't know it until the heat came. They talked and drank and followed a steel pipeline, scaled with rust. One of them thought about coffee until, early in the afternoon, he drank one (a dark brew). He then thought about food.

They both saw native animals. It is possible one saw one more than the other.

Petrified Shell

Prone to Repeating

However many things you say now
Will not be true tomorrow
Will be less if you are
More if you're not
Prone to repeating
"I'm tired of you"

So have a stab old son

Disembodied Conversation

Plenty fish

An allegorical or metaphorical saying or narrative; an allegory, a fable, an apologue; a comparison, a similitude. Also: a proverb, a maxim; an enigmatic or mystical saying (now arch.).

How many times does it need to be repeated?

Pardon?

This.

Oh yes. The Parable. Fish stocks restored - crazy; dying man revived - didn't happen.

(Laughter)

So. None?

(Laughter)

Conversation

Then she gave a little squeak.

No!

No. With a much higher pitch.

No!

Closer, but still higher.

Yes ...

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