Festival Poem 4: using galahs to keep the time

some artful galahs have me fooled

at three in the morning, or half past –

upended from my swag by their song

I cast myself half-sleeping

or better, I am cast by some higher

force that only fatigue can summon –

into the dark, sheet-lightning dashed

and vaporous, along a path

I know from last night to be the colour

of the hull of an old metal barge until,

caged light globe faltering,

I come upon the toilet and shower block

behind the empty stockyards –

at my entrance, startled spiders dart

up the self-flushing urinal trough

the metallic smell of which piques

my salivary glands so severely

that at the same time I sight my face

and those of countless moths on the Perspex

mirror, I taste iron, as though while I slept

I had been sucking on an open wound,

and I cough and my eyes water,

and something inside me leaves off

atomised, like insect spray in the sharp light,

to the jagged corners of the tin toilet doors,

the paperless dispenser swathed in a sheath

of love notes so thick

that the collected ink almost heaps

above the metal like brail –

the cane toad shit on the concrete floor,

the cane toads sitting in the showers,

the mosquito bite minefield laid

across my back and under my eyebrows

and inside my bellybutton –

the agony of the final hours

before sunrise for a restless poet

divested by drugs of poems to write

or rather, of words to supply them –

onto the ant-ridden patio

where before me the sleeping horses

look like stickers already used,

and the world the plastic contact

left with their outlines –

what I ought to do is collapse

into one of those shapely voids,

get bucked get kicked get nuzzled

by emptiness, real emptiness,

and logic hardly matters anytime –

the showground lights up tomorrow,

I wonder which woman’s strawberry 

shortcake will win the gold medal, 

what the name of her husband will be,

what sort of hairstyle she’ll have,

whether she dreams of cakes or other things

at night, and about the embroidery

on the table cloth

upon which the cakes are piled –

will its fringes be tasseled or lace

or will be it an heirloom quilt, crocheted?

what sort of clout the gold

garners around Clermont town –

I am ready for breakfast

but loath to conduct my small hands

noisily into the trailer

before the others are awake –

I am ready to be on the road –

to live and die somewhere

far away from everything that warms me –

I am ready to go home –

and then a little fox terrier

surfs the raging sets of its tail

towards me – I paw at its nose

and by the collar bring it closer

and closer and closer

until it lies upturned in my lap,

its cow print nipples tingling to the touch –

but then the engine of our only neighbour

(an old Winnebago) roars –

the dog goes running and I am left

with nothing but the scent of it

on my fingers, as a fingernail

of gleaming morning lifts –

and those artful galahs,

their sunrise song legitimated,

are the colour, it pains me now to see,

of my nonna’s bedroom.

Festival Poem 3: Swimming

today she has worn her best

and most transparent bra, and removed

the diamante from her navel –

she has whiled away the cool morning

smoking the last of her ice,

steam cleaning the blackened pipe

bumping a little ketamine that wars

with the Times Square hallucinations

behind her eyes –

tonguing the big gap between

her front teeth, swimming with me

in the turbid Murray, and searching

for softer words to describe

her ‘molotov cocktail childhood’ –

gum leaves have begun to hail,

sucked downward so urgently by the wind –

we speak of bricks and feathers falling –

I prefer the leaves to hailstones

but she doesn’t, nor does she like

the silence, but the slime

on the deadwood outcrop we’re on

and the cottage cheese clouds,

trellis of vapour trails and the chill

of greenish mud on her skin,

the sepia tear mark on my left sclera

and gravel pits and wombat holes

full of drugs – giving over

to glib pleasures, and Iceland, and Turkey –

the current sluices through her toes,

leaves duck shit behind her nails –

dogs fetching sticks are swept downstream,

ferried back by their dreadlocked owners –

black nail polish now the flecked

pattern of a cheap men’s business shirt,

she is picking at a white head

on her knee, a spectacle too savage

for me to watch, too savage for me

not to watch, and presently I think how good

it would be to fuck in some hidden corner

of this huge canopied bush,

to sink with the creature before me

to a seabed and garble out jagged

ills freely – to wait for her twitches to cease

and love until love ensconces us like a pelt –

but she has sun burn

and isn’t at ease – the nipples I can see

through her bra have softened,

the phone number she leaves me,

I discover a few days later, belongs

to her dad – I am not sure if this

is a bad or good thing. 

Festival Poem 2: Beauty

a balled-up towel in a pile of logs

orbs on the brow

of a gravel hill

with the windy urgency of clouds

overtopping the sun, and scorpions

waiting out the midday heat, and can I say

the foggy fixity

of the coloured spots on our eyes –

she conducts her straw to the bottom

of the coconut and sits her wet black

bathers on the powdery dirt beside me –

the blonde hairs around her navel

glow like gem specks in the dry bed

of a creek, and bent forward,

her little stomach dissembles

into folds and kidney shapes

– I think of the blushing creases    

she will have when she sits up,

and how crazily she’ll stare

as I iron them out – after a time

she asks about the towel,

says it looks like a pearl in a ribcage,

that we should take it to the lost and found –

there’s a lost and found here, right?

but I don’t know – this might be

a hippie festival but it doesn’t mean

we ought to discover beauty

in every trifling thing – then

she points to a little naked girl

splashing in the mud wallow

and says, no, I don’t think she is,

at least not like the towel –

instead of asking why, I ask about coconut water

and remark that the clouds, purplish before, have turned

pink like the down in a cheap Disney sleeping bag.

description of a bedroom setting, description of a sideboard

Our bedroom set was the second least expensive in Ikea’s least expensive range, costing $289.99 on sale, and was called the ANDERS package. The set consisted of a four-post bed – some reasonably nice lathwork had been done on the posts – and two bedside tables, all made in Romania from Russian pine, possibly old growth Russian pine if recent headlines were anything to go by, as well as a ‘medium-firm’ mattress which was made in China from Indian latex and cotton. The bed was higher off the ground and more stately than I would have liked, quasi-stately, and its slats were made of a paler, flimsier wood, almost as flimsy as balsa. We’d also bought a pair of Swedish-made ELSA lamps on the same day at $14 each. Sarah kept some plastic bags – made in China from linear polyethylene granules – with department store logos under the bed with out-of-season shoes in them and our king size doona draped right onto the carpeted floor on both sides. The carpet pile was school classroom short, and grey. The doona was red wine coloured and had black Asian lettering on it. The table draws slid in and out on white plastic rollers that rolled like buckled bicycle wheels. After using my table for three weeks I decided that it was too small to accommodate all the things I liked to have near me as I slept, and too cheaply finished to have to use or even look at, and so I had put it in the spare bedroom – it was still the only thing in the spare bedroom – and taken the sideboard from the rumpus room and placed it lengthways along the edge of the bed. Being long and tall for a sideboard it meant that I had to get out at the foot of the bed every morning and that it hurt if I rolled too far over in the night. Sarah had neither supported the change nor opposed it.

There was a towel between her legs now, slowly receiving the come I’d just left in her, and I was brushing her hair. She had found this weird at the beginning of our relationship, a bit “faggy”, that I liked to brush her hair, so shockingly thick and black and angular, and to have her lie between my open legs as I did so. But over time – more than three years – she’d grown used to it and had, I thought, begun to enjoy it, even if it was simply the noble enjoyment of giving me pleasure. Because resolving all the tangles until I could bury my spread fingers to her scalp and slide them effortlessly from root to tip gave me a huge amount of pleasure. There was a practical reason why free-spirited people often had long hair; tending to it was pleasurable, meditative. I was holding the back of her right arm at the tricep; my thumb traced the contraceptive implant in a kind of exultant caress. Swimming had broadened her shoulders and made her back muscles bigger, more shadowy. Her waist was small, her hips hard and wide. I looked down and could see the beginnings of her arse crack, the allure of which had left me in tears the first time I saw it. It was still only three in the afternoon.

“Steve’s going to show tomorrow morning, isn’t he?” She asked.

I hummed in assent.

“But how can you know for sure if you don’t call him?”

“Babe, do you have to call your boss every morning to make sure work’s on?”

“No,” she replied, flinching as I brushed out a tangle too aggressively, “but that’s a silly comparison. My work doesn’t just randomly not happen”

“Neither does mine. He’ll show”

“Okay,” she said, “but don’t blame me if you end up going on another walk”.

By the time I had finished with her hair, Sarah had slid her underpants back on, and declined my request that she accompany me to dinner with Lucinda the following night. Her reasons for declining had to do with a Tupperware party, a baby shower, and the fact that she knew I wouldn’t have gone either given the chance. Sensing that I was upset, she turned around to face me, kneeling so that her knees just graced my knob. We kissed twice. I cupped her stomach and teased her bellybutton ring. Her hair was like the silhouette of a flame.

She spoke in sensual, suggestive tones. “Why don’t we go out for dinner tonight, just you and me? We could go to the Thai place in Greensborough, get a tonne of roti bread and peanut sauce, those crazy chilli cocktails…”

I agreed and made the earliest booking possible, five-thirty. That left two unfilled hours; Sarah made baby clothes while I slept.

Infernally heavy, the sideboard was walnut and two-toned: the frame and the hollow rectangular legs were beige, as were the four draws in the middle of the unit, while the cupboards on either side and all the handles were dark brown. It was, I’d always thought, a beautiful object in the sense that it was clean. It was also the only piece of furniture I’d inherited from my parents. Our neighbour from over the road, a cabinetmaker called Neil Kenneth Jefferies, had built it for them cheap when I was in prep. We lived on Lower Plenty then and I could still remember Jefferies and my dad heaving it through the press of traffic, putting it down at both median strips to sit on, exhausted and maybe a little strung out from playing all that chicken. My sisters and I were gathered on the footpath with our pyjamas on as if it was the only thing happening in the world at that moment, mum standing behind us like a duck with her brood. I could still remember how big and hairy our neighbour’s forearms looked, dropped down between his legs and then akimbo because he was out of breath, forming bunches the size of garlic bulbs at his bent elbows. Also how neat his bald head looked in the sunlight.

Cars beeped at them. If a car beeped at something other than a sexy young woman or another car then it was probably a bloke wearing a costume of some sort, or his birthday suit, or just a plain-clothed bloke who was spastically drunk, or else a bloke – or two – carrying something unusual.

Once safely across, the sideboard was threaded through our front door without incident and placed against the wall in the hallway underneath an ugly Kandinsky print. I never understood how people could like or even tolerate Kandinsky. Then some records were put atop it, and a record player that I never saw being used. But for the profuseness of their thanks at the time, and the affectations of gratitude on their faces, and the fact that it had been built to their own specifications, my parents were never happy with the sideboard. They seemed to declare their mutual antipathy towards it at every opportunity; maybe it made them want to fuck each other more.

“It’s just too antique,” one would say.

“And the sharpness of those corners – was he out to blind the kids?”

Once Neil Kenneth Jefferies had left the neighbourhood the sideboard was relocated to the garage, where it sat beneath a big blue tarpaulin until I’d picked it up and brought it to Watsonia, less than a month ago. That equalled twenty years of concealment. Interestingly, I was to see and hear the innocuous name of our former neighbour much later, after my parents had died, during his much-publicised trial for child molestation, in which my sister Sinead gave testimony, and subsequent twenty year sentence. In no way did this affect my fondness for the sideboard, which my parents had replaced all those years ago with a pine-finished Laminex one from Ikea.

Festival Poem 1: Nangs

the nitrous oxide canisters

carpeting our dust-blown campsite,

their nibs all punctured

(a hole for every airless high)

clink like rival marbles

as I rake them with a palm frond

from amongst the glitter-daubed detritus

of faces and splayed

stubbled legs and tool box

radios and wristbands and convex eyes—

shoot open tubes of gold body paint

onto blanched bush soil,

butchy boys, translucent spiders,

psytrance album covers, blow flies

blanketing the two compost heaps

between fire-bugged, moribund gums—

like little warheads blazoned with red

AUSTRIA and a seven digit serial number,

sold in boxes with lemon squash

and cream gateaux printed on the sides

of the plastic-buffered

cardboard—anodised chrome

tanks of oxygen

constriction

and auditory ringing

on centrifugal refrain

and mirth and absenteeism

and blotchy sight and baritone

acrobatics, supine acrobatics,

a sort of carnival parlance

interposing the jerks the writhes—

but chiefly of the glinting piles

pounded by steel-capped boots

into the earth in the night,

hidden under Boliviano carpets

in iceless Eskies with Sea Sheppard

and White Stripes stickers

on the hummus-smeared lid,

in the dregs of unnumbered bottles

of sports and fruit drinks and gin

and multivitamins, in sleeping

bag linings, between tarpaulin folds,

in pockets in the sticky pits of knees,

feathery headdresses—

it is morning and I am outcast

by being more than half alive—

my nonna’s counterpane

spills from the unzipped swag

like the alcohol from my pores—

one hundred and twenty seven

is the final figure I arrive at—

fewer than the quantity

found on a square metre

of the Back of Burke dance floor.