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Peering Between Packets Of Dry Dog Food At Coles, Close To Midnight In Burwood, 2009
February 26, 2009
Peering Between Packets Of Dry Dog Food At Coles, Close To Midnight In Burwood, 2009
You see yourself standing in the next aisle.
You're fairly sure it's you;
you have your height, build
and the same hair
as the last time you saw yourself:
the day you were walking briskly, head down,
through the kitchen of a two-bedroom weatherboard mess
in a bad end of Clayton, careful
not to make eye contact.
Yes, you're fairly sure it's you, although
you've got your back to yourself,
and you're an aisle away, staring at frozen pizzas,
half-obscured by packets and tins and the distance of two years
and other times five, maybe more,
and you know if you wait for yourself any longer you'll
turn around and
know.
So instead you
lean down and place your handful of
green bags, half-filled with
sponges, gloves,
steel wool, oven spray;
all assorted cleaning products of yet another bad end
quietly on the ground
and you make yourself walk through the check-out
and past the automatic doors
and into your car before you can be sure.
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Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
June 8 , 2009
A parody / improvement of Wallace Stevens's
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
I
Thermal Imaging.
Blackbird is all yellowy-red if alive.
Blue if dead.
Unless you like, killed it in a microwave.
II
Electron microscope.
Blackbird is now 2,000,000 times bigger.
Gosh.
That's a big blackbird.
III
Capsule Endoscopy.
Make your blackbird swallow that pill.
Camera takes photos as it passes through.
‘Check out my bird's gastrointestinal tract', you say.
‘I'm pretty sure it has cancer.'
IV
Caricature.
Draw a funny picture of your blackbird
With a really big beak.
Look at it.
Wonder if it's racist.
V
Philosophically.
The blackbird is really just a big pile of atoms.
It's mostly empty space.
So are you.
We are all so insubstantial.
VI
Life Drawing.
Yeah you sexy blackbird.
Get all naked and stuff.
It's sexy naked art time,
Sexy blackbird.
VII
Nuclear Medicine.
Inject some radionuclide into your blackbird.
It gives off gamma radiation.
Bird Hulks out.
VIII
Japanese Proto-Expressionism.
Get Kōshirō Onchi to do a woodblock print of your blackbird.
Wonder who Kōshirō Onchi is.
IX
Ultraviolet Light.
Your blackbird's eyes can see it.
Give me those eyes, blackbird.
X
Ultrasound.
Have you gotten your blackbird pregnant?
That was very wrong of you.
I am quite upset with you now.
XI
Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
Insert your blackbird in the MRI machine.
Your blackbird didn't tell you it had a pacemaker.
Oh no, it's tearing it right out of your blackbird's chest.
There is blood everywhere.
The bird is screaming.
This is a horrible thing.
XII
Fatalistically.
The blackbird's actions are free.
But any action taken by the blackbird invariably works towards its inevitable end.
Nothing the blackbird can do or could have done would or will save it from death.
Even immortality cannot stop entropy.
XIII
Poetically.
Get Wallace Stevens to write poems about your blackbird.
Your poems aren't even funny Wallace Stevens.
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An Ex of Mine Has Sent Me an Email
August 27, 2008
A ex of mine had sent me an email
After several years of silence
The long and short of it was
That she was enjoying life
And had joined a cult
So
That night
I sat down and
From 10pm to 3am
I researched intently
I read the organisation's literature
And their spiritual theories
I got my head around the idea
That the universe is
A fluid reality
We choose to experience
And can change with our thoughts
I got my head around the idea
That their founder is a person
Who fraudulently represents their qualifications
And I got my head around
The money my ex had paid for each course she had done
As she recruited more people
And advanced up the steps
Of a multi-level marketing company
In which profit percentages are sent upstream
That was kind of like a pyramid
I cross-referenced this information critical of the company
And poured my understandings
Into a three page
Logically argued and well referenced letter
Detailing my concerns for her well-being
Expressing my belief in her best intentions
And appealing to my ex
To keep her eyes open
I never sent it
Not because I didn't want to help
But because
It has been my experience
That you can not save anyone
Who does not want
To be saved
And
Knowing her
If it was not this particular thing
Then it would have been another
So I closed the email
And went to bed
Anyway, I thought
As I fell asleep,
She had dumped me
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Delicatessen Queen
2007
In a fluorescent meat kingdom
She stands tall and proud
A fierce regal creature
Queen of the Deli
A simple hairnet her crown
A stained apron her robes
A cleaver borne in scarred hands
As were it a sceptre
Her eyes blue and cold
As ice neath dead fish
Her face stoic, lips fixed
Her heart is but meat
My Queen rules her chilled nation
With dispassionate beauty
But inside I know
That she's delicate-essen
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Three Meals
2007
There are three meals that will stay with me my whole life:
One is as I sat with my sister and father
In a small upstairs restaurant in Hanoi
And watched a tiny finch
Dance in a red cage
The second is the greasy chips
On a cold winter's night in Prudhoe
When I was drunk and away and
Free for the first time
The third meal
Was when I was a young depressed student
And you showed up at my door
Probably stoned, but with a big paper bag
Full of groceries and fresh bread and a flower
Nobody else has done anything like that.
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The Girl at the Coffee Counter
2007
There's something troubling when
The girl at the coffee counter
Insists
On spending a whole minute
Playing
Guess my name
It's not the act itself
Which is kind of flattering
Or that she keeps guessing
Greek names
When I tell her it's Scottish
It's that her very first guess
Happens to be
The name
Of the shopping centre
She's working in
I hope she's okay.
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Four Cigarettes
2007
1.
She sits on the balcony at the end of the night
Stares up at the sky
Feels a change in the air
the cigarette is a quiet companion
2.
She sits as a passenger on the drive between lovers
Smothering cigarettes
On the arm of the mirror
the melted dot is an inscrutable face
3.
She sits in the doorway of a new home
Biting her tongue to keep
From betraying old wounds
smoke clings to her clothes like a child
4.
She sits on the balcony, legs over the edge
Stares at the sky
And hears nothing but the rain
the wind makes the ash pirouette
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Cassie
2007
Cassie was never really the same after she came down
Kinda like on a cartoon where one day they'll change a voice actor
While everything else looks exactly the same