rave sketch - the woman, the cardigan and the alpacas

this one has quite the story –

some of it ayahuasca-blotched, it’s true.

Peru, visa a year past expiry

Quechua-speaking boyfriend gunning

for New Zealand citizenship with little success.

we were doing sculpture with

scrap metal in Pisac. then I conceived

and he and his long black hair left me

half alone at the sheer feet of the ruins.

the flight out was from Cusco.

I knew they would look at my papers and

charge me the earth. I didn’t

want to abort – dilettantism

describes what hurt me more, why I cried

so much those hot, high altitude, pre-departure

days. us expat hippies had to be disabused

and how? just by look, feel.

all my clothes stank of kitsch, I wanted to change my clothes

I wanted something homespun, something Peruano

to take away that wasn’t inside me, doomed.

in a dead end tendril of

one of the nauseating market

strips was a store like all the others

except that it had stairs. I went up the stairs

unbidden – it was wet with cat piss

there, the little dim room

full of cats upon scratchy, beautiful cardigans.

play with us

said some sisters in Spanish

playing. cases of vegetable dyes

lay wide open on a table

as if the man who entered through an archway

on bandy legs, the whole of him

not more than five feet long

was about to be a clown.

I lay naked on bluestone in my head –

the watery cold of it drowning

all the bad smells and odd feelings.

I can soil myself with impunity if I want –

really, I remember thinking that.

the man was called Hippolyto

and he had peanut brittle shards in his gums

instead of teeth.

in Spanish, which one would you like?

in Spanish, try first –

for those two words the price would now be less.

footfall when walking around

made a swampy noise. there were yellow puddles

at the base of a few piles I avoided.

the cats, mostly kittens, were sound asleep.

alpaca, Hippolyto assured me

and when, towards the back, I found this one

attracted by its teal and Nazca Lines

a story an Australian had told

at the vegetarian restaurant in Pisac

came to mind – a group of wild boar

hunters were camped on scrubland

somewhere in rural New South Wales. they’d arrived

late, paid their dues

to the property owners, made a ragbag campfire

which they sat around a while

before chaining

their four Bull Arabs to a tree and turning in.

next morning, two were free

and diabolically bloody.

a man showed up.

he was holding a rifle.

those fucking mutts got in and killed four of my best

he screamed – prize-winning

alpacas at the next station over

out to stud, too big to eat

but not to tear to shreds.

you city hunters

you weekend warriors don’t know anything

about how it is. he looked more sad than

angry when he said, ten grand a piece or you’re dead.

a perfect fit.

veinte soles? señora

was his answer, cupped hands

outstretched like an old roadside pauper.

I almost cried for the face he wore

gave him forty I hardly had

did up the buttons – like wheels

on a wooden toy train –

as I walked back down the stairs.

that was ten years ago.

of all my Peruvian keepsakes

it’s lasted me the longest – what
does it matter that I later found out

it was only low-grade lambswool?

rave sketch - going home

This bed is Eternal Chaos

                           -and wake in a stream of light

-Gary Snyder, 'The Manichaeans'

our laser show gloaming.

          rain opening her diary to its saddest pages

(Thai maiden moon, hollow cheeks frightened

and clear from noon uncleared by timely clouds –

clay in kids’ art classes, clumped unhandled

red before each gaped face

from the box, a machine-smoothed slab of universe –)

my licked toes squirm with alterity.

eyes blink space.

          Aden is in the banana-seed-sized entries.

dancers adjust their clothes to

          the order of not-dancers’ clothes.

arching so split ends grace his collarbone

          a movement off mouth

until I feel the dew and the unhooked pole.

his face in dying headlamp

light is a wave train through my middle.

joined like the two-headed serpent

          we have gone home a while

this mattress is air eggs, sunflower-seeded.

                                    —we stare til the batteries die.

stagehands pull cables

power down decks, clink glasses of champagne

up where the DJs were.

          altar of shiny offerings

          handed back to dumber holiness.

a moment as the crowd exhales to leave

chants break out, they are

          drummed behind on rubbish

and muddy thighs, the dead to rights smile of a star

                                                               already dead.

a motorised sofa bed

          bogs itself goading mud and is out of beer.

our tent shivers –

          in the drawn eerie quiet

blow on my nape, blow with an open mouth

wetness from inside him pools there

                                            I feel it –

together we make five seas for warmth

and rills of toxic sweat.

outback rain is lucky

even for those who have to pack up in it.

          roads to the city will bottleneck

                       but ease quickly. there may be accidents –

let them happen, little ones. if one dozes

the others are wider awake.

we are rafting on these waters

                       both bodies wept

double sleeping bag like the Mariana –

                        when we leave

                        I'll fall to dreaming, he will drive

 and quote the Ramayana.

rave sketch - secrets

skipping the shuttle bus back

(I was in town to buy muesli)

I walk with a group of others to the creek.

it’s mouth-deep where

in a barbecue area

                             two women, likely yoga instructors

                             stand on their heads, eyeing drab bushes

I can see beyond, from atop a picnic table

to the clear water I imagine drowning them.

in headstands, blood rushes so urgently to mine

the weight a secret

we’ll not even let out in love

until a zephyr fells me

and in a heap of liquids

                                    and cells I lie

a shallow urgent river.

I smile serenely, I smile true.

I would eat myself before a stranger

                            If I had to, just for living.

                            in dreams I’ve gnawed off toes

burned all my forearm hair

to get at the smouldering flesh.

in reality I eat every scab, slice myself to drink.

once I nearly pulled a tooth

for the enamel victual, and to send a body down my throat.

legs spread-eagled, pretty heads still.

what are the crying hatchlings

in the eucalypt sails overhead

about to be given by the mother
                                            crow returning soon?

rave sketch - prose poem of refilling a camelback

To refill his Camelback, Aden leaves the dance floor for the first time since it was night and not early morning. His bare heels don’t sink in stomped alluvium anymore, and he can hear to think. His ears are ringing. At last, the idea of coming down, or the idea of the idea, the ability even to countenance that this has to end and there has to be a deficit to pay, settles somewhere in his thoughts like the condensation in a kitchen after a big loaf of bread has baked. He’s surprised to find his strides are almost lithe, fresh. Atmospherically, there’s little happening – milder than cool, birdnoise just audible above the pounding kick drum, which seems ridiculously out of place now, magpies mainly but also kookaburras, cockatoos, maybe a distant cockcrow. Other birds an enthusiast or someone with the app could name.

At the trough, all the taps are in use. Face washing, tooth brushing, one man refilling a fifty-liter drum, clear plastic so thick it’s bluish, like crystal, which must supply his entire campsite. The distance from the dance floor is such that only in a squint can Aden hear music. Miraculous how the natural amphitheatre can staunch so much of the bleeding, Aden thinks, grey mud between his toes. Nausea at the smell of fresh espresso, a feeling of invincibility, a feeling of being on the verge of collapse, maybe death, maybe madness, maybe outright crying as he steps up, fumbles the bladder onto the end of the muddy aperture and starts the pour. Eerie signposts, all feeling, tropical fruits under waxed paper under sunlight such as will soon beam over the hills, sweat tents empty. Not Lily – she could sleep through a bushfire.

He has a sudden urge to void his bowels, to be purged of absolutely everything. The calm is like none he can remember and yet much of the driftwood running on in his mind is black, suicidal, simply evil. He shakes his head, as if to shake off a blowfly, concentrates on filling. Progress is slow – the water tank must be on its last legs. Shifting position so that his back digs into the edge of the trough and his arms jag back, armless, Aden stares beyond the campgrounds into country. On the ridge, some of the gum trunks look to be blackened. Black Saturday was four years ago, he says aloud after a time. Black Saturday, was four years, ago. Misbehaviour infiltrates his lips. A Japanese hippy, holding a bottle of bargain store shampoo, taps his shoulder and says, excuse me, but you are finished.

rave sketch - deep thought after dancing

Aden on the orchid bed, night bridge

to frilled, pirouetting versions of his past.

Aden on the lotus petal, diecast

holding the wrapper of a thrown-away frozen mango, people below the colour                                 

     of children’s comforters

outside the village, the silence east-sloping.

the silence will partner him soon enough

and wager his chewed-up lips

                                               on musical scores above the sky

no pull to the air’s riptide.

the moonsense will ease him down

giving him living room, and a gentle light to drink.

and why not? the ravers still stream through the skeletal forest

on their fourth high edge to edge.

the strafing still fools, the country flashes on and off.

within, in the crosshatch, and good Lily

and her lone lover-son…real Aden, smoothing the frills out.

Upper Peninsula Poem

water feeds a tear-shaped swale

through a throat

wide as a new mother's waist.

overheads, copses bleed

orange, yellow, cinnabar

leaves into limpid sky. the lake

shallow to the green

demarcation line

between twenty-two eyes and

America's blurry edges.

I have my hands full

with pine needles.

they also fill my nose

when I crush them, and

their colour becomes mine.

along the beach

paling driftwood teases

into piles that penguins might nest in

men set alight.

skipping, I eat the white

glare, catch the others

close to a tide-cleared point

and kneel before them smiling

when the timer goes off.

rave sketch - the melaleuca man

eat enough of these green ants here

     and even if you were to die

somewhere in the bush, it wouldn’t

     be from scurvy. this tree

they’re on, a type of melaleuca. koori

     kids suck its flowers, you’ll see

why. taste one stem to tip and bless

     the morning. you see?

when I went walkabout those ten or

     twenty years, I’d see

a melaleuca near a billabong and set

     to meditating, still as, oh

the permafrost used to be still, and I’d

     contemplate Being

flayed of its ornamentation, like a paper-

     bark down to hard wood

but also ornamented with everything

     Everything – trees, no trees

green ants, no green ants, seven billion

     ashrams, all possible.

the emptiness of the outback reveals

     in time, a grub, a speck of red

dust to be infinite. do you understand?

     when I tasted of the ascorbic

acid, when I sucked of the honey flower

     Ishvara also tasted of the acid

and sucked of the honey so loved

     by our inner children.

yes I do, one son and one daughter

     but they were taken.

my neighbours – this is when I lived

     in Far North Queensland –

“expressed concerns” to the authorities

     never to me, about what

made a parent good. I home-schooled,

     kept their hair long, their feet

toughened. we ate in a way the Great

     Mother could in theory let her

whole brood eat. we lived for her wisdom

     but broke no laws, looked down

on no one. were they hungry sometimes?

     listen, hunger is a pedagogue

worth listening to, Atman and Brahman

     coalesce on an empty stomach

but my kids were never hungrier than any others

     because by hunger they really

meant malnourishment. they took away

     my kids on the picket-waves of

malnourishment. I prepared them for life

     as it is instead of inbreeding

illusions heaped on Illusion – clothing, food

     fuel, money, timelines

more than life, death, and the cycles – I

     taught them how to take water

from the ground, how to walk for days without

     fatigue, deliver dingo pups

need little and surpass. I taught them to round

     out the vowels in their AUM.

I took them to Portland, Oregon to see grandma.

     they were round, they read

like professors. they were blissful kids

      and I was a bad father.

well of course I fought – I fought with this charcoal

     beard here, this leather-skin, these

fatless ribs of mine. was that battle winnable?

     when I’m up the peninsula

I’ll see them. if you were to see and hear them

     you’d know I won the war.

   

     fifty-nine kilograms

when last I weighed myself. that, I believe

     was in 2004.

but you’re really asking something

     much heavier!

and I could tell you, I do these tours, I live like

     this for an audience. you’d

believe it. a festivalgoer, I could say, doesn’t

     listen but worships

the names on the lifestyle notice board

     cuts the city

to be a weeklong disciple, where credulity

     and discernment

are one, where you’re either in the lotus

     position or unholy

maybe even “square” among folks your age.

     I teach bush food

as its foraged and eaten in The Middle Way.

     I hide the grace in green ants

because receptivity and gullibility collapse when

     you speak of the spirit or the earth.

there’s no line, horrifyingly, to demarcate them.

     I teach at these festivals

which some may call pernicious – drugs

     and fossil fuel power and all –

to the cause, wreck the bush, quarantine

     our magic from the cities

relegate our magic to the realm of holiday

     for one reason – the alternative

sounds our death knell. If we listen we survive

     and folks here, whatever else

they might want, want to listen and love.

     here, suck another flower –

you, me, the sweetness – everything’s Ishvara.

    and the very same laws that govern

this beautiful melaleuca's growth, remember

     rear hearts and hurricanes too

your sweetheart's eyes, that poem you're jotting.

rave sketch - the water truck

where headwind-stiffened

prayer flags

strung as markers along the rabbit-proof fences

pigmented with lichen, rust and

ripped clothes, sidelining

a final single-lane

decline to the campgrounds

end – where prayer flags end

          a water truck’s bulk begins.

crowns at the ridgeline. full warhead tank concealed

behind the cabin and ingot-

sized hazards strobing, before

in the down-going, a wholeness comes to light

like the full extent of a King

Brown uncoiling on a highway

shoulder, or French braid wound

tightly round a woman’s hair like a hose

come loose in a difficult sutra.

a many-threaded scream, like the wholeness, grows.

stilling heat begrudges

          the sudden ecstasy.

it’s the bi-hourly sweep to saturate the dust

pale as David’s moulting

golden retriever’s black-cushioned

bed by his swag

(rolled rough, bow-tied like boots).

without it, the festival site would

whirly-whirl into oblivion.

it’s the bi-hourly centrifugal force – recycled

water mists a dust-like drift, a

constant smokescreen the truck

emerges from, prophetic ten-tonne mirage.

          storm smell

sings its rites to Lily and Aden

like sheet lightning to a crowd

milling on the shore

of a lukewarm ocean

eager to night-float in the flashes

and see everything.

          storm smell in the uncontested

aridness splinters midday

          samadhi. for their soil-

tinged ablutions, south camp

devotees sweep from far and wide with pack

hearts pack fervour, a joyful

counterpoint to the mania of

an overdose or other sobering hurt.

they jostle for position in

the slipstream of the massive

mandala till sated –

drenched. then they disappear

as the watered paths stomped to mud

turn bone dry

          in mercuric blinks.

when the truck is within his sights

and running his ken

Aden goes. left alone

in the five-tarp shelter

flagging lamely in the treeless wind

Lily gives in and goes too.

and although she is boiling

despite having queued forever

that morning for a five-dollar

          two-minute shower

she feels little urge to duck

her whole head of braided blonde hair beneath the sprinkler

loosing water only 
good for this. content instead

with the vivifying waves

of vapour, and with the way the waves

age Aden’s beard and eyebrows.

content also to watch, skirt stuck to her body

the squat ceaseless

rainbow make its rounds.

unfinished rave sketch - a long morning walk alone

he leaves her

on a massage table inside

the lotus temple

in slightly wrinkled hands

with baluster

veins like drought sky.

when they disjoin after

a goodbye kiss she seems to breathe

coconut butter, she seems frightened.

he says, go to where you

just are. the hands on her back are

too cold. at her behest, they’re rubbed

together like firesticks until

he sees tiny noodles of black

skin roll up in the friction. he winces, the same hands

raise the fresh towel above where

her French lace knickers start

and fall to her knots

again. he tears away.

Stonehenge in hay bales

swarms with long-haired kids, some of their necks

still clung to

by earmuffs from earlier dance floor

piggy-back rides. one father’s dreadlocks

have matted to form a single

sun-frizzed black beavertail, his camera

expensive-looking, hanging on their play.

he’s almost stopped by the sign

reading Influential Gaia Demystified

out front of a workshop space

inside which a large crowd

sits cross-legged as an old man

with a Robin Hood hat speaks into a microphone

but he wants to walk. it’s good

to have left her a while. she’d be asking why he swung his arms

so fast, why his was the physiognomy

of someone who didn’t love her.

last night, she’d pulled his sleeves in the UV blue

of the chill stage as if to say, relationships resolved themselves

in cliff edges

when the abyss was acid-filled, as if to say

all that matters is

we know we own each other.

as in a blink

he is going to the northernmost

fence line but only knows it

if he focuses

and his focuses for the moment are

the smell of eggs being fried

on a dirty hot plate

the wine-cellar coolness of the air

the sunlight angling

like sex hair through the gum trees

and his missing her...