Poems
Retired, my father
tells me things.
He saw, far out to sea,
a great Pacific gull,
hefty, hook-beaked,
hound a crow,
slim brushstroke of ink.
To hell with what you think of me.
I’ve started drinking martinis at three.
I wake, I walk, I write, I sleep.
I snooze the alarm. I doze. I read.
We have the White Louse. His name is Donal Dump. He is the Resident, and he heads the Dump maladministration, squillionaires and a sprain-surgeon, a Cabinet of all the talons. They call him a racial spigot. He sees it as he calls it, which makes him spigot. He squitters Twitter on the shitter, and we titter after. He only squeaks for us.
... (read more)An Oka kamikaze rocket bomb
Sits in the vestibule, its rising sun
Ablaze with pride.
Names of the fallen are on CD-ROM.
The war might have been lost. The peace was won:
A resurrection after suicide.
An insight examines a lifetime
while an ocean flows under my feet.
My feet no longer feel
since my body’s beside itself.
I ...
Writing a line, as if from bed, on a lovely, handmade
organ based on Gerald Murnane, the Goroke novelist
last seen pouring a glass of amber silk and swaying
imperceptibly enough to be called coincidental to Hot
... (read more)As my plane drops down in turbulence
I think of you and of Salt Lake City,
I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes
and of Omaha and of adamant plains.
... (read more)Authorised visits,
temporarily easing Grafton Correctional Centre blues,
a young girl walks shadow-hardened corridors to see a black inmate,
observe her little brown fingers
Don’t feel sorry about it, if you remember
blue Darlinghurst nights like particular quilts
a generation of painters saw
before we arrived there, or found ourselves