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Windows Wound Down
parked under
a chalky old light pole,
windows wound down,
dozing on the front seat,
on the radio
Chinese classical music
hot night tonight,
across the road
a man is wearing
his hat, indoors.
the stars that I love,
when I remember
to look at them,
blink above the building
*
I’ve memorised
a Keats sonnet
for February
a Tom Clark poem
for March
&
julienned the carrots
for spicy carrots
with harissa, cumin,
parsley, garlic, lemon,
while listening
to crazy music –
Albert Ayler
*
a Czech poetry paperback
bought in 1971,
there’s a 30 cent ticket
to the Penguin Reserve
on Phillip Island
and a poignant note
tucked between the pages
of a poem marked with a pencilled ‘x’
‘x’ – Vladimir Holan, Changes –
This is our hope : that we have passed
the limits of the last reality.
But while consciousness disappears
it is the very consciousness
whose constant changes
remain . . .
the note –
P
I can’t bring myself to write
what’s in my head
I am splitting up north I guess
I love you
B
*
The Collected Poems
of Gwen Harwood
is on the table
but I should
prepare a talk
for Zines in April
*
going on online,
a small discussion
(between 3 poets)
about experimental poetry
and free verse that one poet says
is really
anecdotal ‘sincerity’
wrapped up in the unified ‘I’
oh dear I think that must mean me,
with whom I am definitely stuck,
I have
my limitations, though
not always ‘sincere’,
and never ‘unified’ –
only paranoid
*
do carpenters
read novels
about carpenters?
do pastrycooks
about pastrycooks?
poets read novels
by poets,
like
Roberto Bolano
yes, it seems so
*
another phone call
more cancer
and another
a month later
like Michael said,
now we’ll spend
the rest of our lives
watching our friends die.
*
End of the First Week
*
by the time they caught Karadzic
everyone here had forgotten
who he was, what he’d done
*
water on mars?
let’s fuck mars up too
space terrain
flag a claim,
space fear sphere,
see you tomorrow
*
why not
recalibrate your lifestyle
how did Jean Genet
live in hotels
for so long?
*
she wiped her face
with the wettex
then turned to kiss me
let me
track your parcel
darling
*
find a city,
well, find a city first, I agree,
find myself a city to live in.
David Byrne, Cities
I can’t google-map my past,
where we lived is classified
*
cept
f u Peter P !
u know y
*
walk the spoodle
and the labradoodle
past the pot of pesto
under the patio gas heater
grown men
with ridiculous dogs
*
End of the Second Week
*
the podiatrist’s fingertips
are orange with nicotine,
my corn recoils
*
lithium eclipse
a new cocktail
ice wine
a minor fever
*
booking into
the Nasty Uncles Hotel
one moonlit night,
a double-bed room,
a nasty argument,
a bus stop
*
the first Koreans of the season,
cloth hats, one silver coolie,
comic-print backpacks,
peering over fences at plants
imported from Korea –
it’s Spring
*
End of the Third Week
*
gone solar
*
cicadas sucking sap
underground –
that’s optimism
*
I’m not going
to Zines in April,
too old too tired too late
but
still in opposition –
dead prepositions,
and needless adverbs
*
industrialising pollination
my white paper poem
has
no conclusion
I would like to see
some viridian,
in my opinion
a neglected colour
*
End of the Month
First published in Cultural Studies Review 16.1 (2010)
Rehab for Everyone
hands so cold
fingers cold
tucked under legs
sitting in insect hiss
low white noise
gas heater undertone
no other sound
nothing
almost asleep,
a car pulling up the hill
a currawong
does that shrill thing
into pink air
a huge open yawn
almost breaks my jaw
the pen that makes the marks
alters the angles of the letters
a patch
of yesterday’s chocolate
stuck to my corduroy sleeve –
a signal
imagined and interpreted
we look back
at the years in the tops
waiting to be taken out of time
red brick
wall map of Australia
grass green carpet
mustard coloured plastic chairs
clumpy piling on the mittens
mitts on the keyboard
pushing thoughts and jingles
out
to Dublin to Seattle,
Adelaide, Kane`ohe,
Faversham, Glebe
sadly notating dim trivia
me-minus-you
outside community
literary festivals
can’t help anyone
like a rehab book sale
making mistakes,
so different
from being morally wrong
in an unsettling world
it‘s a rabbit life,
built the walls from Castrol cases
black tyre ribbons
strewn
like a giant’s licorice
under the striated cutting
siding on the highway,
say goodbye
to the Woodford bends
sometimes the clunky
can incandesce
but I want to know
how to vitalize gawkiness,
sometimes
I’m in my no-mind sometimes
in a technological mindlessness
sometimes nowhere near limber,
although that’s unusual
some people
just float along all the time
accumulating the placid
sometimes
when you think you’re going down
you’re not,
you’re going straight ahead
to a utopia of modernity.
First published in HEAT 21 (2009) and Parthenon West Review 7 (2010)
©Pam Brown |
