a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was blusters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!
As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.
I have neglected to pay tributeto the Stone Age aristocracy?I refer to the fat.We were probably the earliestcivilized, and civilizing, humans,the first to win the leisure,sweet boredom, life-enhancing sprawlthat require style.Tribesfolk spared us and cared for usfor good reasons. Our reasons.As age’s counterfeits, forerunners of the city,we survived, and multiplied. Out of self-defencewe invented the…
and cats undulated scream-driven round its seismograph—and climbed up to us with an indrawn gasp of girls.Smiles and yelling could be exchanged as they crestedthen they’d pitch over, straining back in a shriekthat volleyed as the cars were snatched from sightin the abyss, and were soon back. Weekdays they rested,and I rested all days. There…
Lead drips out ofa burning farm rail.Their Civil War.Critics didn’t like it,said it was obscure –The title was the rifleboth American sides bore,lead was its heavy bullet,the Minié, which toreoften wet with blood and serainto the farmyard timbersand forests of that era,wood that, burnt even now,might still re-melt and pourout runs of silvery ichorthe size…
panic, or break a hipor spit purée at the staffat the end of gender,never a happy ender –yet in the pastel lightof indoors, there is a ladywho has distilled to lovebeyond the fall of memory.She sits holding handswith an ancient womanwho calls her brother and Georgeas bees summarise the garden.
welling out of red-black wounds.In the white of a droughtthis happens. The hardcourt game.Logs that fume are mostly cattle,inverted, stubby. Tree stumps are kilns.Walloped, wiped, hand-pumped,even this day rolls over, slowly.At dusk, a family drives sheepout through the yellowof the Aboriginal flag.
under that pole the lightning’s tied to.No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp.We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tuskedthe balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow,…
