That’s how
to get those
sharp creases.

 

Nurture sloshes unseen

into the wolfing-down soil

and our garden grows wildly

food out-competing the weeds.

Its nature wanting nothing more.

 

I lived in the ground floor back room
Of an old terrace house when rent was cheap
& the place was full of old guys with a grog problem.

Every fortnight after pension day
They put in their money & I went
Down to the hotel for casks of cheap wine …

That night they’d stomp about
Fighting & yelling & chucking up until
The following day when I’d do it again
Until the money ran out.

That yellow gloss back room was separate
Where I lived with a rusty gas ring
But the ghost was a problem …

About once a week when I was asleep
He’d be there & I’d wake up –
It didn’t matter how many blankets
Or if I turned on the electric heater
It was frigid.
One night I saw a shape
Standing near the door like he wasn’t sure
He could come in so I got the idea
He was a timid sort of guy –
He moved close
To me but he was cold & looking
For a way to get in.

It felt too creepy so I went out & sat
In a warm coffee bar up the road
Then the next day I left – the old men
Were sorry so I told them what
Happened & Carl – a shell shocked
Veteran of the war in Africa – said they
Came to him too because it was boring
& they still can’t talk with Germans ….

 

 

 

Some old bastard’s moved in

There when I wipe away the shower dew

All Why Is It So hair and no accent

Thinning with ridiculous spread to other parts

The Vulcan hand meld doesn’t faze him

He reaches back the same way

Pushing at the same point

Spreading my nose in a kiwi welcome mockery

Framed by faux verdant art deco

Leaning in to invisibility

The heave ho can’t touch him

No bum’s rush to grapple

And each morning his hirsutey ears are bigger.

 

 

 

Writ on the run: for five dollar you can expect a pat,

nothing more; though I’d amend to:

He took to the wheel like a spider

to Little Miss Muffet & would be larder

if that honking in discreet liquids weren’t so

acrimonious, so hallowed be as we

bid adieu to that death pit tosser

come to haunt us with his threat

of Sacred Amputation (you won’t feel a thing). Fat

& soft now (gone those days of lean & mean) I’ve had it

with sacrifice for the common good while it sails on, the

Good Ship Psychosis with its natty crew of blind drunk

rappers rapping to Mozart’s Seventh. Seek

you more issue? Want to know why

we must to people fly? Why nanny men

must marry themselves? Why

there’s a rent in every skin? Speaking

of rent boys – if you have the floor

you have the knife. What you’d do for butchers

you’d best do for those Mayan kids about to be flayed

by that grumpy priest whose hand extended over time

hesitates to shake yours, & with good reason: They will

be back, the nacoms & this time these harbingers

of Yucatan Astonishment won’t take No

for an answer – Is not

our beest best? Yes, obviously & more

the manor you, & more the mooch, & more

the number that you pick (any number between

one & two) as you flag down a passing rickshaw

& skedaddle, your arrival at Beauty Ponds

perfectly timed: a sisterly pat from Muffet

who in your skin will dance for Xipe.

 

 

 

 

I read Cambodia is full of ghosts.

Actually “Spirits of the dead”.

Are these exactly the same ?

My  head is often filled

with spirits of the dead.

Sometimes               when I sleep at night

ghosts creep out

and I wake up                    in a prison bed

white coats telling me :

You’re not well again.

 

 

Perhaps I’m really Cambodian ?

I shouldn’t read such things

before I go to bed.

 

 

Under the blankets

the dead of night.

 

Let’s include the entire town I think as I down dark dregs.

Come for a drive, she says. We leave for the edge where crested bell birds sing after the storm, voice their survival or the chance of a feathery fuck. I photograph rubbish. Fixed in my lens the discarded becomes a joke, a story, a recycled abstraction. Robyn’s eye is programmed otherwise. Look, she points at a vacant plot of ironstone pebbles, red and black, colours of blood and tar, the local football team. Hello darling. Sweetness. She croons to the invisible. Clicks off pixels. I look-look, look-look until I see, a spider the size of a hundred and thousand. She points out more invisible darlings, pokes the habitats of the minuscule, until tired of our trespass never-say-die ants attack and staple themselves to our flesh. We try to leave but fall into the next clans land. We stamp a path out of there.

Next day, I am still open to the small-small world. Grasshoppers eyes black banded like a cartoon thief, an ant with pincers so big they could kill a camel, a European bee lost in spinifex, a flattened green mantis being dismantled by clean-up-Australia ants, centipedes fight, all legs — no arms, in a trapdoor spider’s eight eyes I am multiplied, it collapses its legs umbrella like, dives into its circular house leaves the door ajar. Hello darling. Sweetness?