three unfinished pieces (2008)

1. moving targets

what goes here
where everything emphasised

sun barely fitting through

(how to de-advertise?)

______if buying surprise
__________________((this shortlived)
how to not be irritated?

is it we’re more ourselves
___________________-'outside',
in writing? _________(these super-questions…)

we keep interrupted
keep cold

sometimes we let the world/room fall away,
_________________________disappoint

the ‘better’ word is patient & waits
__________________________(despite this)
we jump state


2. unopened

_____________________we’re old nouns
but softcopies also
_____-our heads slip in the wet

(this the sleep between the shell of the seed)

we cross a ravine by way of a fallen pine trunk,

still panicked by multiple senses of ‘lie’
_______-& ‘yes’

___________a chance to re-read
______________ourselves

__so far
______we know only a few basic words
____________of this other language
_____________________________we are making.


3. filmic glow

we bend the light, pack it down

that constant act,
_____________consumables,
technology’s very joke

when the day melts,
__________________-tired of ideas,
___________-spills easy complaint

we love & hate poets as they love & hate
________________-(truth arrives late
______________________________little-known)

these works we forever talk of writing, but never
_____________________________-deliver

‘truly major motion picture’,
__________-how we feel after that

_______________________film nursing / injuring

________________this has been... needing
________________to happen
____________to us

too much coherence

"[John Ashbery] seems to fear too much coherence as being a form of dishonesty or falseness ... [because] an orderly syntax sometimes forces the poet to lie, to say easy things that he had not intended." - Stephen Stepanchev describing John Ashbery in Modern American Poetry Since 1945 (sourced from Samizdat Blog).

collaborative shoutout / some pet projects

Collaboration is a topic which has been, well, bugging me a lot lately: I keep waking with the thought, ‘we poets need to collaborate more, dammit!’ Not just with other poets, but with creators from other fields, from far and wide. There’s no doubt that recent technological advances have opened many doors for artistic collaboration, but I still feel the potential is largely untapped. I’ve been involved in collaborative blogs in the past, but I have three other pet projects in this vein:

1. Harnessing the potential of wikis for online collaboration between poets, as well as other writers/creators.

2. Thieving an approach/technique from electronic music, namely remixing (where any number of other writers are given license to remix an original piece, with the results being published side by side... or not). I've tried this out once with a friend, and thought it worked well. The crux of this one is feeling comfortable about someone else 'messing' with your work, and maybe transforming it into something very different from what you'd originally intended.

3: Videopoetry, in the tradition of the mind-flexing music clips you see on Rage at 2am, being a collaboration between poet(s), scriptwriter(s), filmmaker(s), musician(s), kitchen sink(s), and maybe someone with one of those ‘managerial’ brains to make the whole thing come together.

Also, for a long time I've been wanting to collaborate with a visual artist / painter / photogapher, writing poems based on their work, and/or having them producing artwork based on my poems... which isn't to say that other poets couldn't also be involved. There's plenty of potential to play games with this kind of arrangement, where maybe you collaborate on a work bit by bit, reacting to different stages of drafting/creation, with the ability to lead the collaboration in a new direction, or follow the lead of your collaborative partner on a particular idea or effect...

Anyone interested to take part in one or more of these ideas? If so, post a comment, or email me (my email's available in my Blogger profile).

chapel st (2008)

lemon, water, sun, saliva

day spins into hubcap

drowsed / stun-gun sun

so coloured up, the crave district

"... you fkn loser ..."

overdress & fuzz with desire

rear denim of 2 thin boys-in-love

street smokes, spits

what a postcard

someone's nonna sucks from KFC cup

fume of Marlboro

Natasha is a party

rushed heels

cross against lights phone clammed to ear

our waiter = pretentious wanker

the pointing tongue

coffee versus boredom

An earlier version of this poem was published in bambikino 9, November 2008.

A train, outbound (2007)

It takes minutes to leave the city. But to leave the city, mentally…

There are always nervous questions prior to departure. You must peel these off.

See this industrial district? It has fled nature.

Likewise I sometimes believe writing is an avoidance; you opt for a conversation with yourself. Living very far apart.

The houses have satellite dishes as standard; ears to the wind. Powerline towers, like posts of an enormous fence. These are and are not life-conductors.

Fields in which to expand, cease? As if cities were centres of forgetting. Gazing out the window, I swim the wild grass.


Published in Shadowtrain #23, October 2009.
 
Below: 'Powersource' by Patrice Lynne Young

Otoliths #9

Received word from Mark Young the other day that 2 of my poems (post-rock and ny dream) will show up in issue 9 of Otoliths, which happens to be one of my favourite e-zines.

Issue 8 recently went live. Definitely check it if you're into experimental &/or visual poetry.

stock (2008)

tabs on what others are
doing perhaps leaving
you sipping the wake of
their excellence so
time to rethink the tint
of your calling card &
all manoeuvres as
pedestrian evasive
action stalling tactics
you were always a
next time boy your
room off-limits to
the living its abject
stuffiness sock stenches
those unwanted wanted
things your hibernation
hoard & feigning
upheavals to buy more
time to yourself the
retreat into trivia to
dull & dilute this
friendlessness perfected


As published in Thirteen Myna Birds, September 2009.

how to tell people what they'll never know (2008)

madness collects behind your ears
you might do some writing
or not
you think you could be Hitchcock on Hitchcock
after all we have no qualms speaking for them
(the revered dead)
the arced arrows suggest they could swap places
as post-death it becomes a question of editing
epitomising naturalness of artifice
but this hurts you
fights the grain
of your practice of living
i.e. thicker absorption
i.e. there really is an apple after all
& also driving on wrong side of road
where possible, where impossible

recurring poem #2

H.D. : Oread

Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks;
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
















H.D. (1886-1961)

Poetry Sz

Received some great news last week: one of my poems, Down slow (song of samsara), will be featured in the March edition (#25) of Jill Chan's e-zine Poetry Sz: demystifying mental illness.

I strongly recommend checking out the previous issues. There's high-quality work all the way back through the archives, and the theme of the e-zine gives it a tight focus, while allowing for as many different voices and poetic approaches as there are manifestations of mental illness.

For Edwin (2008)

"If we continue in our mindful observation there will no longer be a duality between observer and observed."
- Thich Nhat Hanh


We have always been as weightless as this.

Our modest collection of questions.

Holes full of nets; nets full of holes.

No waiting: all things are present.

Eye observes itself.


As published in The Cartier Street Review, February 2009.

recurring poem #1

... first of a series of poems by (very significant) others, selected for properties of recurrence / return.


Robert Creeley: The Skeleton

The element in which they live,
the shell going outward until
it never can end, formless,
seen on a clear night as stars,
the term of life given them
to come back to, down to,
and then to be in
themselves only, only skin.












Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

easy poem (2007)

i like what is happening________________-(a wet painting)

this body______________-_-_________breathing others

oversleeping________________a haze and smile to things


faces gift_____________-______seductions glow restless

and i cried today_________--_-_______________easily

i go where words are________-_______--(no shortage felt)

Paradise Anthology launch

The Paradise Anthology has been created as a ‘paradise’ for emerging Australian writers and artists. It is published in association with the Victorian Writers Centre and supported by the City of Port Phillip and Salon Productions Australia. My poem Saturday, Brunswick St is featured in the anthology.

The launch of the anthology is taking place on Tuesday the 5th of Feb from 6:30pm at the St Kilda Public Library, 150 Carlisle St, St Kilda. Entry is free.

A word from the event hosts: "Guests for the anthology launch include Rosemary Cameron (Director of the Melbourne Writers Festival), Rebecca Barnard, Brian Nankervis from Rockwiz, Greg Arnold from Things of Stone and Wood, Erica Grundell from Naked Raven and Michael Crane will be performing with Trish Anderson and a choir and twenty poets reading short poems. The new mayor of St Kilda might be there too."

Hope to see you there...

an accident

"If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other, may the reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before him. We are all one; our inconsequential minds are much alike, and circumstances so influence us that it is something of an accident that you are the reader and I the writer - the unsure, ardent writer - of my verses."

- Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to the 1923 edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires.

ny dream (with bits of Berrigan) (2008)

It's 57am in Ted Berrigan.
Never been to New York but
how hard can it be? OK.
Came to me 'first thing' - words
woke me. I needed a gun
in the dream & knew why.
Now I've no idea but
gladly. I do need peach /
tree / mountain surgery...
"What am I saying?

Only this." City's a cut-up.
Pass the scissors. Stray. It's
raining bots & eggs, but
this isn't that poem so
it was really snowing &
raining car stereos
pushing out hiphop grinding
woofers gorgeous blaq-
skinned it's 2008pm in New
York it's 5am in my bedhead
street surgeons pulling fast ones
that one's got a knife! thank yr
stainproof suit time your
coffee so you're peaking
for the meeting 2:15pm.


Note: "What am I saying? / Only this." - Ted Berrigan, 'Words for Love'. "it was really snowing & raining" - Frank O'Hara, 'POEM (Lana Turner Has Collapsed)'.

As published in Otoliths 9 (May 2008).

refuse (2008)

(after Silliman... sort of)

A day under repair. Remember my foot dead as a book. Was trying to type but the window was ghosted. Coming down with something: perhaps a poem. My turn to cook? Half-life: blurs of transaction between us. Go through phases, moods, like some old moon. Naming will not keep pace. Downloading Derrida. I just looked as it ticked over. All have a tic about time. Distraction blizzards. Dwelling in the centre of your hand. You’ve lost me. Cherry-fingers blemish the page. A guilt that grows back. Comedown. Log out and log back in again. Need to work back late, keep watch till dawn. As the market clouds. Subtler words leave exit wounds. Remove nothing from the scene of the theft. All this slowdying. Emissions. Heavy myself with. Punjabi pop music strays from another apartment, as if dappling me with colour. I wasn’t quite full. Was deleting old songs. The crouched hand of love (from a song of Creeley’s). New window. Drawn to stories of failures. Driver error. Lab rats in lab coats? They were subtitles for a different film altogether. Photograph these powers of persuasion. But does he look happy to you? Shooting animations in Timezone. Heroic dopamine flow. The doctor suggests closing both eyes. Hyperrealism of high definition. Have fun with it. Happy snaps, sad snaps. Exit the bed as if this were the only exit. Bivouac: noun; a military encampment made with tents or improvised shelters, without protection from enemy fire. We have overslept. Just one more snooze before we assemble. Living faceless, mouth grows pretty dry. Keep meat away. Touch of the air, air of the touch. Refused endings. Everything’s not you in one sense, but in another: come home. Swim your body for the first time. Untie these roads and lift them from you.

3. my father passing (2008)

never soon,
not yet

he may clutch
at our clutching –

I should not foresee
it yet, but

clenched words, their
echo of approach,

open tears,
eyes breaking

with the weight,
slowing of

his beautiful
weight.

2. my father arising (2008)

in freshened
time attending
to himself,

gifting himself
attentiveness,
switching

off the channels
that pulse at him,
unneeded tentacles.

the segment
hard in him

dropped
like a catch –

his smile as
he dissolves.

Dorothy Porter

In August 2006 I was awarded a mentorship through the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), which entitled me to a year's instruction with a mentor of my choice.

I'd taken a creative writing / poetry class Dorothy Porter gave while she was writer in residence at Melbourne Uni in 1998, and her advice and views on poetry had a strong impact on me. So it was a great honour that she was able to make herself available as my mentor during 2007.

We had meetings throughout the year at the Royal Hotel in Clifton Hill. Hers was a Sauvignon Blanc, mine a mineral water(!). We'd chat about what we were writing and how we were writing it; what we'd been reading, watching, listening to. We exchanged books, CDs, DVDs and talked at length about their arcane properties and effects. I was given further insight into the scenes, cliques, politics and history of Australian poetry. By way of barter I offered what I could in terms of insight into the current state of rock & roll (I compiled several mix CDs as evidence, each a labour of love), electronic media and online poetry...

Dorothy's sage advice came thick and fast throughout the year, but in particular, there were two acts of generous and wise counsel from Dorothy that will continue to reverberate...

First of these was Dorothy's passing on of the vision of her own mentor, the late Bruce Beaver. Some of his poems had been familiar to me beforehand, but Dorothy was able to offer a much more fully realised picture of his life and life's work. Not only did Beaver provide Australia's own enduring answer to the Confessional Poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, et al), he is also one of 'our' great visionaries. For the uninitiated, Dorothy's brief biography of Beaver and selection of his poems over at Poetry International Web will provide some proof for these claims.

The second piece of especially wise counsel was Dorothy's insistence that I re-read Euripides' The Bacchae. This was to be partly considered as research for my book-in-progress, How to be hungry, with its themes of drug use, (dis)connection, alternate ways of seeing/experiencing the world, and how the status quo demands to be threatened by Bacchic/Dionysian rites. All of these themes are mirrored (and magnified) in The Bacchae. A very good call on Dorothy's part.

Thank you, Dorothy, for everything. And thankyou to the ASA for offering and organising this brilliant opportunity.

- Stu

videopoem #2

Three Lions - Roderick Coover (video) and Nick Montfort (text).

"Filmed in Puerto Rico, this one minute loop is a work developed under the Oulipo tradition of creating under constraints. The one minute loop is read by Brett Keyser. Gallery premiere Esther Klein Gallery 2007; festival premiere, Philadelphia Film Festival 2007. This is the first in the CURRENCY Series."

(by way of) introduction

Some 200 posts in, figured it was time to write an intro to this here blog.

In my practice at least, where there's poetry, there are petri dishes & test tubes, lab rats in lab coats. Everything is experiment. Some failed, some foiled. Some sometimes semi-successful? (only to be dragged down by lame alliteration)

I post stuff here once it's reached some degree of 'readiness' (my judgement can sometimes be wayward, but hey). Once it's posted, I will continue to edit it on here. Everything here is 'in progress' / unfinished; there are annoying roadworks everywhere.

More recent posts are likely to be the most raw, therefore. Sometimes I'll fall out of love with a piece and it will disappear off the face of the blog.

Fact is, I go through phases and moods, like some old moon.

If you want to taste a sample of my work, and see how it has evolved (or not), check out the 'specials' list on the sidebar for poems which are special for one reason or another. Some are personal favourites, some are dedicated to friends, some received accolades, etc. Published poems are also tagged (if you click on the tag all published poems will surface). The links to 'poems elsewhere' on the sidebar is also worth a look. The 'kindred' and 'miscellany' listings provide useful escape routes if you just want to get the hell outta here.

This place started purely as a repository for my poems, but more recently I've been looking to add spice by way of quotes, audio and 'videopoems' (more on those later). In future I'd like to post more of my own ravings re poetics, etc. I'm aiming to feature a variety of content, and am always open to comments and suggestions.

So then, maybe this is more disclaimer than intro.

- Your humble apologist (shown below in pretentious chin-stroking bookshelf-backdropped mode)

1. my father down (2007)

my father down
in the crush
tearful beautiful

if only you could see him under
the machine
__(raining blades,
__time seeping in all ten directions)

my father visibly embarrassed
my father visibly beautiful
___is not what needs fixing

what to fix
___& what first?
nothing’s cheap except the heat

my father failing under it,
or the heat fails him

never thought we’d ask
but come on winter
___need your muscular hand
___on this particular shoulder
______tense as glass

protest (2008)

hear they're going to close us down...
who are these people?
where are the women?

nothing ventured...
air your grievances

the same silence cannot be broken twice
so be wise

Alchemy (2007)

(the third of 3 Brett Whiteleys)

... he became his admirers. - W. H. Auden, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats'


You’ve succumbed. Tall Poppy,
they crave to say you’ve over-stepped.
Don’t go too far. Stay too far. Settle
your petals against the sand; today’s
a hot one on ego beach. Where we
can see, between the flags!
Swim on a rope.
_________How’d you expect us
to eat all this? What,
weren’t you thinking?
What weren’t you thinking?
_____________Too long
in the kitchen, sniffling;
we want to feel your pain
but not forever. Brett,
it seemed someone was missing,
was not listening.
___________Your rockstar
mirrorgazes; hallucinating
momentary masterpieces,
blown away as studio dust
or shot up as lunch.
_____________You
painted our waiting,
expectations in exquisite detail.

We’ve been tailgating you,
true, your faulty tail lights.

This was a painting of ambition,
Icarus flightpath. Ambition is there
on the canvas, waving, screaming,
drowning in world. It writ large.








Alchemy at brettwhiteley.org

videopoem #1

the books - smells like content

vindictment (2007)

all about you I guess, snapped pencil freakcase who know all & better you awkward as source code you hyperverbal / you question mark in parentheses / yet another tangled wizard’s sigil

[Sure, let’s all erect vindictive monuments. (Maybe this is yours.) Depicts: your retreat into desert. Lived off sand. Thought it through your fingers. Read visions off the moons of your fingernails. Pursued by built-in bestiary. Juiced all gately cacti in sight but still a raging thirst. Only so much the eye can plan and prepare for.]

but in fact i love you yet again you the poem lived / thinking in tongues

[An error has occurred. Start with what you have. Could it be yours?]

you once troubling precocious, nascent psychic talents intimidating highschool teachers (we go way back) / always your scarf stitched with cryptograms, formulae

[I don’t have the patience.]

careers in prophecy? ditch day-job to contest/corrupt all assumptions

[Software is not for you: it does things you’ve asked for. You realise your mail keep bouncing?]

time to resign yourself to fallout, the recluse's winter? but you persist repairing dead philosophers / philosophy as repair, beyond repair & yet life in the beast still dehydrated gills / dabbling in junk gather skulls unzipping peripheries

[Squeezed prophetics out of manga-dreams. You the hero / a thousand traces. Such an immortal. Statue of light.]

you’re not the only delusionist flexing to grandmaster the Web / yours just another unseen site / face the fact I am half your traffic

[That’s right, ring the psychic hotline. Don’t like the forecast? So… ring another hotline.]

two aspects

"... the idea of portraiture and the idea of the recreation of the word. I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense." - Gertrude Stein, 1946.

Pictured: Picasso's portrait of Stein.

telltale (2007)

bloodshots (red cables cross my eyes) –
_-telltale,
______obvious I’ve used

_________________lip-cracks / foodless sta-
______________________sis / cold-core bones

_____________________-afternoon: slight OD,
________________-fell asleep online

___________________evening:
__________you arrive home /
___________my straight act:
_______________________no trace,
_______________________paraphernalia locked away /
_____________________affectionate lies

bud (2007)

Have history with you
makes it hard to be
with you when I am. It’s
so beautiful outside, but
outside of what? Hey
now the sun is mighty
loud. Birds call me out,
heavy on the roofs.
Disciplined gardens.
Sidestepping trenches
& amber barrier mesh.
Just another castle
under construction.
Slick & unimpressive. As
if some new wild epoch
could bud in the suburbs.

optional (2007)

which hut? /
train passes overhead /
options fly / day party:
sun as DJ / the clouds
the wider painting /
meditate with
confidence, sleep with
confidence / world
comes more as an
abstract / how to
put these / two
birds talk on a wire /
together / hut them?

repackaging 'evil' (2007)

on the track to the city
a snake says, ‘trust me’,
and what could be
simpler? it’s just an
advertisement, but
clearly everyone
is implicated

/ way the ads burst
volumed at our outer
skin to nudge the inner
what big hoofs more
than a little tampering
with our brittle
___________/ forever
surrounded by cranes
fishing for significance
they hold our dossiers
as if ‘connect’ means my
brand is your brand but
i can’t get no, no no no


Note: "i can’t get no, no no no" - The Rolling Stones, 'Satisfaction'.

As published in Snorkel #9, April 2009.

audio

If you'd like to hear me reading Self-portrait (with wires, city & no clothes), click here to download the .wav file. The file is optimised for playback via QuickTime. Other players (e.g. Windows Media Player) may require a codec to play the file. For some reason I think the audio has been ever-so-slightly sped up, so that my voice sounds higher than normal (as if I'd just inhaled a balloon full of helium!)

The poem was originally published in Verandah 22, and this reading was recorded for the Images & Texts on the Verandah exhibit at Deakin University.

ear tells me

"When I write, words or phrases come to me. I don’t go to them or start with a plan. I start with scraps and pieces and something comes. I never know. I never sit down intentionally to say something. It comes to me. But as I work more on a poem a meaning is established and then I must continue until I feel it's done or undone. To an almost alarming extent -- alarming for me -- sound creates meaning. Sound is the core. If a line doesn't sound right, and I do always have single lines or single words in mind, if a line doesn't have some sort of rhythm to it, if my ear tells me it's wrong, I have to get rid of it, or change it, and a new meaning may come then."

- Susan Howe (pictured), from The Difficulties (1989).

desist (2007)

(after Stan Brakhage's desistfilm)

the night (is it night?) is
_____-____________-teeth,
_sitting round dumbing stuff
________-we have cool haircuts
_______-if this is the 50s,
_____both sexes thrown in dark room
__________-music loud enough that we can’t

____music through a glass, a fly

_boredom sits
______-reading your shoe
__________________tugging our own hairs

_surface-bound
_-sit round dumbing stuff
__________starting cigarettes
____________stacking a house of books,
__his shortlived match sculptures

_later run out
screaming deaf into treescraped
__ horizons, bracken
__________________-slow our fire
_________descend to
__________________________magnified touch

_at some point back in the room
caught ourselves paused
__-dancing it was kindergarten
______________plus an ashtray

____________________our flesh blur
___________________________strung
__________________________refused that kiss________


As published in Sein und Werden 'cinematique', Spring 2009 (print edition).

Note: A poor quality copy of Stan Brakhage's early work desistfilm can be viewed here. There is sound, but you'll need to turn up the volume. I recommend tracking down a copy of the Criterion DVD By Brakhage: An Anthology in order to approach his films through a medium closer to the one they were intended for (i.e. a cinema).

notes on status (2007)

Today you toddle off
elaborately inane, to where your profile

fills out like a bin-liner caught by the
wind.

– John Forbes, ‘Colonial Aubade’


ha survive in a corporate office
without actually working (just
live there, haunt the espresso
machine)

see brother, la revolution begins on every page, in
every line

in gel caps /
in the deepest blues

only to find that
nothing beards us like a lack
of ritual responsibilities

a life of not being able to
pop a balloon with a stick of celery

(not the place itself but your slim scared imaginings of)

like spring racing ‘carnival’,
fashions in the field yet
another vocabulary for
status to shake around in...

deep in the bowels of
some corporate tent or other
you realise luxury is irresistible,
has its own set of ‘classique’ emotions

& one day, with a dab of brio and your lucky haircut,
you could have your very own war

(thief!)

perfectionism (2007)

make all these minor adjustments what does it matter no one
turns up except other
DSMIV entrants other tangled wizards
their pet tangents
_____________-brands of solipsism software variety the
_______________price of life
_______________________-me making my
_______________________-minor adjustments
beginning to believe technology's a blind alley though we too are
technologies writing ourselves blind / written out /
the trees still living seem hunched in doubt
______________________________hey!
_________________________________turn up the light or
________________________________________is that as
____________________________high as it goes?

mondays (2007)

monday nights catching up with the
boys operating system updates new
Radiohead all these burnt offerings
leap druglike from hand to hand behind
raised boot of the car not mine i’m not
'the driver' i have no poison file me
under monk the
___tv jokes bounce off me like sponges

though dead soldiers pile
til the bussie busies us
with his pisa-phallus of
_____________empties

look at us the weary
tribesmen surrounding
a table fire built from
mobiles, keys, sunnies
_(dancefloor handbags?)

damn pokie pub twittering
machines money travels
thrilling nowhere adventures
___________ of a 10c piece

because suspicious of everything
while counting down your stardom
rain on your parade since mine's
already soaked i really dropped the
room make mental note to email you
__________another long apology

as 4 blooded men we agree
PCs are distraction files
& files of nectar for the
dumb-bum bumble bee got
tissues? only 1 sting til the
____drowse of the next life

we make our exit as something
heroic but this too collapses
__eaten under the idiot lights

watch out if not for nuggets
of bottle glass we could
walk barefoot as bronze
kids in a holiday eden
engrossed in our triple
____________scoops

at this intersection of
stressors taxi honks
when cut off & therein
how language, as
threat, first
_________pounced?

stem (2007)

a watched rain never falls. alone in our many rooms craving left-aloneness.

*

stem overgrown with thought. seated in lotus position.

*

we map disappearances. small birds wrapped daily. cannot drink the river.

*

rowing three hours each way between us. to arrive at degrees of fidelity. granting the eye permission to lick.

*

think we’re coping better with crop failures. though there are times we want to murder the fruit. unpeel what is peeled. how we never know how to hold what's dying.

*

in spite of our ghosts, go scuttling in party shoes. go scuttling, eyes wrapped in sheets. ditching dharma, ditching precepts.

*

our housedust. a lint magnet. stem the breath with fluff. dustmites fed on skinflakes.

*

if the rain would pile upon itself. if the harvest. bring breath to what is said.

*

lotus position. the spine a stem.

*

to err. still planting the heart. craving left-aloneness. listening for dry echo.

*

i say tremble then. break with the room. strew dust. be spilt.

*

you say stay faithful. wear blue on blue days.

Image & Text reading

On Thursday the 4th of October I was one of three featured poets who took part in the Image & Text reading at Deakin University. I was honoured to share the bill with Angela Costi and Judith Rodriguez... plus there was an open mic section which included Peter Davis.

Thanks to all who came along and took part. The readings were fantastic. Thanks also to Karen Le Rossignol for organising the event.

I selected poems which (mainly) fitted in with the image / text theme. This was my set list:

Drive-thru
Vipassana
pollen
Heartwood
Art, Life and The Other Thing
Saturday, Brunswick St
Self-portrait (with wires, city & no clothes)
I will not carry