Archive | July, 2010

A Very Big Bean (Eric Dando)

31 Jul

The caravan heats up like a little oven in the midday sun.  Jill is stretched out on the bed sweating.  She is too skinny.  Her little heart skips a beat inside its birdcage and catches up to her again.  Jill’s heart is like a skinny little bird: squawk, squawk, squawk.

The caravan is parked on top of the tallest, baldest hill around.  The cupboards are bare.  It will not rain.  And the sun.  It has baked the land into bread, the crust has all cracked open and blown away.

* * *

Jack is walking to The Butcher to sell their skinny cow and meets an old man, he’s just standing there on the road waiting for him.  The old man wants to buy Jack’s cow, but he doesn’t have any money, all he has is a bean.  He lifts the bean out of a sack.

‘Jesus,’ says Jack quietly, ‘that’s the biggest bean I’ve ever seen.’

Jack holds the bean up to the sun, sniffs it.  ‘Be careful,’ says the old man, stepping away a little, ‘it’s a magic bean!’

When Jack gets home with his magic bean Jill is very angry.  She was hoping for cash, she goes stomping through the caravan with her steel capped boots and Jack’s magic bean.  She wants to know what Jack was thinking.  ‘You’re a fucking idiot.’ she says, ‘We’re going to starve, fe fo fi fum, you can stick it in your ear mate, you can stick it up your bum.’

And she throws the bean out the window.

Jack follows the bean, covers it in cow shit, drowns it with the hose.  Dancing on the end of his shovel, singing…’Magic bean, you are my magic bean, the biggest bean I ever seen.’

* * *

Jack has swapped the family cow for a bean but it won’t flower till mid-summer and they are hungry.  Very very hungry.  And now he’s dancing.

It’s too much for Jill, she is looking at Jack through the window of the caravan, he can’t hear what she’s saying to him, she articulates each word slowly, she is saying ‘Jack you are a fucking idiot.  A fucking idiot.  Jack you are a fucking idiot.’

Jill has been seeing The Butcher on the sly.  She is sick of Jack’s stupid mystical shit.  She’s fucking sick of it.

* * *

The Butcher is putting his apron back on, Jill leans over and whispers something to him and The Butcher gives her something wrapped up in newspaper.

She unwraps it when she gets home, but is disappointed.  A cow’s liver and a note: ‘Sweets for the sweet, sweet meat, sweet meat, sweet meat.’  She has no idea what it’s supposed to mean, it scares her.  She was talking about money when she was whispering in his ear.  Idiots.  She was surrounded by idiots.  She buries The Butcher’s liver under the bean shoot when Jack isn’t looking at it.

* * *

The bean had been growing again.  It always grew the most when Jack wasn’t looking at it.  Jack deliberately didn’t look at it all day and it was already as big as the caravan.

* * *

Jack climbed up into the bean stalk and now Jill can’t get him down.  ‘Jack,’ she shouts, ‘get down here, you miserable cunt, go and get a fucking job.’

She potters around below with her watering can and her empty birdcage, planting daffodils and ox tongues and lamb’s hearts around the stalk of the bean.

* * *

It is growing on him.  Jack inches upwards, ever upwards, tangled angelically on the tips of shooting nodes, smiling his wide idiot grin.  Tendrils gently twine themselves around Jacks wrists and tighten. Others bind his legs.  They could have ripped him in half, pulled him apart like a Christmas bon-bon. But this is a gentle magic noble bean.

And this is the exciting magical part:  Jack’s co2 is absorbed by the stigmata in the leaves of the bean, o2 from the leaves and stem is absorbed into his alveoli.  The bean becomes him and Jack becomes the bean.  The sun makes it happen.  Nitrogen nodules the size of footballs anchor themselves onto the roots of the bean far below Jill’s feet.

Jack has no idea when the bean will stop growing.  Look down Jack, go on, look down.  Jesus that’s a long way down.

* * *

The Giant’s house is on top of a cloud.  Surrounded by blackberry canes.  Blackberries will grow anywhere.  There are rabbits in the blackberries, there are foxes eating rabbits in the blackberries.  Weeds within weeds within weeds.

Jack is riding on bean shoots, they take him right over the blackberries and foxes and rabbits to The Giant’s house.  Weeeee…

They drop him gently onto the front step, curled up in a bundle of flower buds.  Beautiful, it was magic and noble and gentle.

* * *

The Giant is sitting on the end of a huge wooden table with his head in his hands, listening to terribly sad songs on the magic harp.  It has turned him into a depressive housebound fool.  The Giant’s tears flow out in little waterfalls over the blackberries, making them sour and dry and unpalatable. Only the foxes will eat them.

The Giant has a chicken that lays golden eggs.  It’s a magic chicken.  The golden eggs are also magic.

* * *

Jack is an idiot.  It is true.  He only climbed the bean because it was there, he had no idea that it would take him to riches beyond belief.  Stealing the harp and the magic chicken was easy.  Jack just walked in and took them.  He didn’t even see The Giant sitting there.  The Giant was so big that Jack did not see him.

Listening to the harp for so long has made The Giant soft and melancholy and sentimental.  The Giant didn’t chase him.  The Giant was a poofta. The Giant was weak as piss.

* * *

The Butcher is showing Jill his butcher’s shop window, sticking it into her like half a stuck spider against the bean stalk.  They work up quite a rhythm until Jill is hit on the head by the first bean of the season.  It knocks her unconscious.  The Butcher runs away in fright.  ‘Beans!’ he screams,  ‘Great big falling beans!’

Jack climbs down from the bean shoot with the harp that sings and the magic chicken, sees Jill lying in the dirt bleeding.  Takes her into the caravan and bathes her head, puts her feet up.

And when Jill wakes up, the first thing she sees is the suitcase full of lovely golden eggs, her face bathed in unholy apricot.

‘I love you Jack,’ she says. ‘I love you Jack, I love you Jack.’

* * *

Jill never mentions The Butcher.  Jack is a trustworthy soul and suspects nothing.  The Butcher is not coming back; he’s afraid of falling beans.  Jill will not go into town, she has become a vegetarian.  She’s put on a healthy layer of fat.  She sits in the chicken run and waits for another one to be laid.  Each new egg is carefully wrapped in cloth and buried under the caravan with the other ones.

Jack saves the seeds from the giant bean.  He swaps one for a cow and plants the rest in the garden.  Beans are a good crop before corn.  Jack is hunting around for giant corn seeds.  He talks to every old man he meets on the road.  All Jill does is eat beans and look at her magic golden eggs.

* * *

Jill digs up her secret treasure trove of magic golden eggs but the rain has got to them and they are rotten.  They smell like a packet of matches.  She crouches in the coop, whispering encouragement to the magic chicken: ‘Lay.’ she says.   ‘Lay you fucker.  Lay.’

* * *

–>Tree of Man, is art contributed by Miles Allinson.

Light Heart Girl (Miles Allinson)

30 Jul

Solutions – Derek Motion

30 Jul

* * *

A few weeks ago Overland awarded the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets to Derek Motion, for his poem ‘Forest Hill.’ That’s somewhere near Wagga Wagga. The poet went to primary school there. Now, Derek Motion has appeared all over the place, both online and print, but there’s something about ‘Forest Hill’ that made me want to ask him a question.

* * *

Alec Patric: A writer may have one essential Idea behind every story, poem or novel. It’s as though there’s one great problem in our lives and we’re endlessly searching for ways to understand it–> and all that we write are solutions that vary in degrees of success. I’d like you to entertain that idea and ask yourself whether you’ve found any ideas coming back around through your work.

Derek Motion: A writer may have one essential Idea behind a work. Sure. If he / she had one before writing though, it’s usually not the idea that will present in the finished work. So it makes sense to observe what emerges in your work, solutions or further complications. Writing as a means to discover things I suppose, rather than to articulate a pre-existing story, something you’ve moulded and fired in your head, a veritable pitch for a movie producer.

Although it’s been years since I read the book, and my exact memory of the book is fading, I find myself endlessly drawn to referencing Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. If you haven’t read it, I’ll give away the ending for you: there’s a split narrative, one strand seemingly happening in ‘real life’, and one that unfolds within the protagonist’s head, in his inner consciousness, where he is a captive. The narrator of the inner-consciousness tale has had his shadow taken from him. In the end a possible escape route is found (a way to get out of your own head perhaps, where the artist would be accused of spending too much time) but the protagonist backs out, leaves his shadow to that kind of practical stuff, saying in the end his hope is that he may discover the key to his own creation.

It’s a stunning rejection of the more normal human concerns. I need to figure things out, here inside my own head, rather than pursue food, shelter, sex, career, page-turner narratives…

You know what I’ve found continually resurfacing in my work? A similar concern with myself. This notion that perhaps I can fix things by writing. For instance, from ‘forest hill’: ‘all the reasons you would eye people, then look down…’ [I've developed a way of reading this where I eye the audience when I read the first line, then look down for the second. I like to think of this as 'drama'.] but seriously, I’ve always been a pretty insular person, and always still had a dire need to connect with other people. Accordingly as a younger person I did overthink even the simplest of friendship gestures, tried to work through personal interaction like it’s some game of chess. I guess that makes me a tad autistic, but neverthless charming, extremely high-functioning…

I’m still sorting through that sort of self centred stuff continually. Like it or not. But as a corollary, I have found that my poetry often emerges directed at certain childhood memories. Certain objects or instances feel like talismans, with the story behind the magical potency blurred. (There’s a toy tractor I found in a compost heap when I lived in Melbourne, age 5; there’s a burnt out log that lay on a dirt track at Forest hill, age 7). These things are perhaps tokens of change. Why do they remain and influence the way I represent imagery in my work? I don’t know. But something suggests to me that early childhood is a site of final formation, where you become who you are now. Puberty does nothing – it’s the societal yardstick that fucks you up at that age… And imprints of key moments remain in the form of images. Writing is a way of recapturing the imagery, recontextualising the events. So perhaps if I’m forced to draw something out of all of this.

I think personality is found in poetry. I look for it locally, and try to ‘solve’ myself. There’s something generally applicable too – people work like this. We all want to talk about our experiences. We’re passively theorising, making stabs at solving the boring old existence riddle. This is what people will maybe get from reading my work. They may connect. But only sometimes. (Interestingly Bantick recently labelled my poem ‘forest hill’, ‘an abortive attempt at self indulgence’. Really. I thought I had nailed the self indulgent aspect.)

I drove into a pool of sunlight recently in Tasmania, after having gone 50ks or so in icy fog. The change was so dramatic it made it feel like (to me) it was a sunny afternoon in NSW in the 1980′s. These moments come to us sometimes – I guess in the 80s there was nothing to stop me lingering in the sun. Playing with the elements. This sort of thing recurs in my work. Or I hope it does.

Then again, having said all of this, there is never too much that is clear in the solutions. The portions of wisdom resulting from a poem are rare. But that repeated failure is valuable, personally. Donald Hall said in a recent article that ‘If our goal in life is to remain content, no ambition is sensible…’ And he’s right. Writing experimental poems, with an uncertain end, an end that may or may not lead you towards new ventures, this sort of activity may or may not help you solve things. It is sometimes rewarding, often unsettling. But there’s always something to do. And that’s important.

War on Cheese (Warwick Sprawson)

29 Jul

The Federal Government will launch a pre-emptive strike against the highly addictive drug, cheese, to suppress its use in Australia, with the launch of its 19 million-dollar campaign ‘Freeze Cheese: It’s not Cool Fool.’

Cheese is a solid drug sourced from the milk of cows, goats and other mammals. Cheese is made by curdling milk, using a combination of rennet (an enzyme obtained from the stomach lining of calves) and acidification. Its use has grown in recent years; national data indicating the supply and use of cheese grew threefold between 2004 and 2006, a rise attributed to illicit importation and the growth in illegal local labs known as ‘dairies’. In low or moderate doses cheese can cause a loss of inhibition and greatly elevated mood and sense of well-being, a state known to users as being ‘greated’.  Those taking larger doses can experience mental confusion and agitation, paranoia, erratic behaviour and nightmares – known as being ‘grated’.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard launched the campaign on the steps of parliament house yesterday, wearing a black ‘Freeze Cheese’ baseball cap. Ms Gillard said that the Government’s new action on cheese would include confronting advertisements detailing the horror of cheese. ‘We must not let cheese take hold in Australia. Australians need to know the ugly reality of drugs like cheese. Cheese ruins lives and we need to educate our young people to make the right decisions in social situations.’

In the first four months of this year customs seized 112 tonnes of cheese, compared to only 54 over the same period last year. Customs Chief Executive Officer Johnathan Pilkner said that shipments are commonly disguised inside office equipment such as chairs, desks and computers. Other smuggling techniques can be more creative. ‘In Adelaide last year they found a 2.5 meter copy of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ carved completely from high-quality Gouda. It was only discovered when an alert officer noticed several mice determinedly trying to chew through the layer encasing the cheese.’

One of the main problems that authorities have is that the drug is used in private settings such as dinner parties, where a cheese platter – a board with a selection of illegal cheeses – is often passed around. This cocktail of cheeses is particularly dangerous to users, as the effects of cheese can compound one another, leading to unpredictable results. Within entertainment circles there is speculation that certain ‘tired and emotional’ celebrities aren’t in need of a good lie down but have a cheese platter problem, leading to incoherence, vacuity and a loss of dancing ability.

Recent seizures indicate that cheeses are getting more potent. In 2004 processed cheese – a cheap, mild, smooth melting form of the drug ­– accounted for up to 80% of the 86 arrests made for possession of cheese. In 2006 arrests were up 50%, but less than half of these involved this milder form of the drug. Senior Sergeant Jack Flaygun, head of the Anti-Cheese Taskforce, said cheese boards are starting to contain new, more powerful forms. ‘Recently we found a worrying new type called Gorgonzola. It has distinctive blue veins of penicillium mould. Our lab indicates this cheese is 25 times as strong as the processed form. This is a clear threat to the community. There was also a recent case involving a potent form called Roquefort where the police had to don protective suits and breathing apparatus to safely handle and dispose of the cheese. A growing subculture of cheese users, who call themselves “blue-liners”, are experimenting with these dangerously toxic forms.’

Such potent cheeses are thought to be produced off-shore, most likely in the notorious ‘Cheese Triangle’ of France, Italy and Switzerland. Imports from these countries will soon face more stringent customs checks under reforms currently before parliament, including searches by the new customs sniffer rat teams, shortly to become a regular feature of Australia’s ports in their tight-fitting red uniforms and gold piping.

Statistics recently released by the Minister of Police indicate that cheese hotspots are clustered in the more affluent suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, where the use of fondue sets and cheese platters still persists. Ms Gillard promised that the new campaign would fund treatment centres in Toorak and Woollahra to help drug users into health care. The centres will be staffed by medical personnel and outreach workers, providing users with screenings for infections, general health examinations, lactose intolerance and mental health advice.

‘New laws have also come into effect making it an offence to possess a cheese board, fondue set, cheese knife or certain types of crackers without lawful reason, meaning that people will face up to five years in prison, a fine of about $60,000 or both,’ Ms Gillard said. ‘We are coming after the dealers and manufacturers too. The government will introduce new regulations to ban the possession of more than 10 cows or 25 goats.’

A spokesperson from the Cheese Abuse Survivors Group also spoke at yesterday’s launch. ‘Cheese can destroy your life,’ Rodney Bagley told the small crowd. ‘You think you can control it, just have a little on a cracker or a sprinkle on pasta, but before you know it you are addicted. All you can think about is cheese. Your whole world is cheese.’

Recent studies conducted by Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Centre have shown cheese to be even more dangerous than previously thought. While it was known that cheese is produced with casein, which, when digested by humans, breaks down into the opiate casomorphine – the source of the ‘high’ cheese provides users – new research from Turning Point has linked casomorphine directly to severe behaviour disorders, autism, poor complexion, rhyming ‘jive’ talk and chronic sleeplessness. The report concluded that cheese was costing Australia over $1.2 billion per year in lost productivity, and more than $2 billion a year when other factors such as health costs and cleaning bills were factored in.

Rodney Bagley, a cheese-addiction survivor, welcomed the new campaign, ‘Cheese is a disease; it’s not a sneeze or a breeze. The key is not just to wheeze ‘freeze’, but to succeed in bringing the disease to its knees.’

Hell’s Band (Mark William Jackson)

29 Jul

Tom Waits’ bleeding knuckles

painting the piano keys,

Keith Richard slits a finger

soloing over the Devil’s symphony,

Bukowski stands at the mic

calling everyone up to fight,

the MC dressed in leather

promises one hell of a night

on drums Keith Moon is vomiting

while John Bonham waits his turn,

through trumpet Miles is jonesing

waiting for his shit to burn.

demon Beasts of Bourbon

piss elixir into your throat,

the barman spews intoxicant venom

through the wicked teeth of a goat,

The bar room’s fucked up crowded,

the bar maids are filthy mean,

but give me a smokin’ dirt house

to any sterile ku klux clean.

War by Candlelight – Mark William Jackson

29 Jul

I seem to have already established a pattern with these interviews. A bit of a preamble and introduction, and then the interview. And so we should begin–> Mark William Jackson is an emerging writer from Sydney–> But I’ve always thought the word ‘emerging’ is pathetically passive when applied to writers. Something that ‘emerges’ seems to imply a gentle and inevitable shift from one state of being to a higher plane of existence. Do we ever actually emerge in this way? I bought an intriguing collection of stories just yesterday by a writer called Daniel Alarcon called War by Candlelight. I haven’t read enough of the collection to know what Alarcon means by the title, but for me it’s the perfect expression for what the process feels like to ‘emerging’ writers, like myself and Mark William Jackson.

* * *

Alec Patric: What makes all this worthwhile? What do we really hope to achieve? Is there perhaps an inborn hunger, dumb and brutal, that simply wants to grow and devour every bit of life, and poetry is just one way of doing this?

Mark William Jackson: You make poetry sound so appealing! I guess firstly I’d have to dispense with the concept that poetry is a conscious decision that we make, Leonard Cohen said ‘poetry is not an occupation, it is a verdict.’ Anyone who writes at length does so because they have to, because if they don’t they suffer some sort of internal decay. When I think about what makes all this worthwhile I have to think about what I would do if I wasn’t doing this. Poetry helps contain my addictive personality. I can take a bad memory, spew in onto a blank piece of paper, break it, enjamb it, manipulate it into what I want it to be. At the end of the process I own what threatened to control me. I don’t think its presence could grow and devour every bit of life but I fear its absence would. If I go any period of time without writing I am at pains to function in other aspects of my life.

Poetry also creates its own euphoria. The act of searching for the word, or the line that perfectly encapsulates a moment. When it’s found it calls for a post-coital cigarette and afterglow reflection.

What do we hope to achieve? For me, personally, if I was my only reader, as I was for the first twenty years that I scribbled attempts at poetry with no direction, then I would be satisfied. I still look back with a certain fondness on the teen angst riddled doggerel that I used to (and still do) write. But of course this sounds like defeatist, self-deprecating crap. More to the point I hope that people can read my poetry and it will in some way help them conquer the ubiquitous metrophobia that society seems to suffer as a consequence of a poor poetry curriculum within the school system. People outside of the poetry world have the impression that poetry is either strict form; Shakespearean couplets and Wordsworth rambling on about daffodils (fucking daffodils!) or deliberately obscure – obscure for obscurity’s sake.  I don’t want people to have to read every line four or five times trying to decipher what I’m trying to say. Poetry should punch into your head, or break out like your drunken father – as a reader I like poems that are short and sharp, within a few lines you receive a migraine clarity; as a writer the poems should come out fighting, Bukowski style, screaming about the whores of life and the dead men walking, they should break out because they can’t be contained.

I hope that people can read my poems and receive a flash of realisation in their minds, something that makes them think, or helps them remember. I like to craft homophonic lines, lines with dual meanings – a reader can choose to take in the first reading and feel satisfied or return for a second reading and hopefully it will echo with other meanings for them. The opposite of obscure, instead of struggling for one meaning I hope that my poems can convey multiple meanings to different readers.

Heroisch (Mark William Jackson)

28 Jul

In the dim fluorescent cubicle,
amid the urine smell
and graffitied penises
she spoke,
“did you know
heroin was legal,
it was developed
by Felix Hoffman
for Bayer Pharmaceuticals
as a cough suppressant,
it was sold over
the counter as
19th turned to 20th.”

His eyes rolled
into the back of his head,
and, in agreement,
he nodded.

Drunkest Man in the Room (Luke May)

28 Jul
She hunches over and tugs the skivvy from her stomach, but the fabric is wet and sticks with a thwack. Stepping inside she remembers how it always rains on her birthday. Pulling a sweater around her, she runs her hand through her hair to dry it out. People look, and she can’t escape the feline sensation of moving toward the bar. With swift delicacy she pauses to hear the soft croons from the band-room and knows that’s where he’ll be.

Stealing a corner and jamming herself between a cigarette machine and the bar, she finds a stool and welcomes the thick voices around her. Candles flit their shadows across the carpet, but then rise through the plumes of smoke folding into the room’s hemisphere. They create a wall that doesn’t quite float but hangs above their heads. ‘It’s a long way from the ceiling’ is what he always said. Especially when he refused to leave. He once informed her that it held the acoustics in, keeping barroom conversations in flux, as if a room of strangers had nowhere else to go or nothing else to do. But it was an exquisite trick the way she loved him then; even though she had always thought it were, he the magician, and she, the damned bunny rabbit. It was probably because she didn’t drink.

Fumbling for her wallet, she tosses her fringe and edges a man aside, demanding a glass of red. Running the tips of her fingers around the glass she considers it, until her belly is warm and willing. She can’t remember the last time they had sex. He said it filled him with remorse, and that without ambition nothing would come to fruition. He liked to rhyme like that, for no apparent reason. She told him it confused her, both the abstinence and rhyme, and that even the flimsiest of couplets would not save her from sinking with an empty stomach. She takes a sip.

‘So, we’ll stay childless then?’

He had nodded. ‘Yep.’

Not having children didn’t bother her. It was his reluctance to make the decision with any conviction that riled her. Yet while he babbled on in what he perceived as poetic sadness, she stood aside, spuriously lauding his mental unseemliness.

Outside a red bus screeches, its lights dim and vacant through the window. She clenches her toes, wary of how steep the turn will be at the roundabout. Who in hell wants to go home alone she thinks. Even after she had followed him to the city, and to this one after that, there were still no rhymes in her bag to help her run, from the relentless recounting of stories a-thousand-times-told, about poets and post offices, and him stumbling, forgetting the names of streets, women and old men.

Clutching her drink, she gulps it down wondering if there’s a fortune to be told in the dregs, or whether it’s not just a matter of having your palm read. But the band has finished and he is suddenly there, sliding from the doorway and along the wall. She watches him in falsetto, with fingers on imaginary frets playing improper scales and past songs to the tune of papers in his fists; balled-up poems written in a ghoulish scrawl – his capitals hardly anything his friends can comprehend. They are words he didn’t write, but by people she reviled and who he once admonished, but then found the currency of verse in the deep clasp of a hand, who in turn would get the next shout.

She stoops on the stool unready to reveal herself, hidden from his glance behind the bar’s oaken barricade and army of bottles and taps. The window reflects her waning portrait, timid in disbelief. Here she is again, the ice queen of her dreams standing on the lake desperately seeking spring. Instead, she’s caught by the foreboding winds that crack on the surface of her face.

Fighting him had always compelled her not to drink. It was the dew on his skin that bore the immediate portents, his sweaty grin and cork-eyed pugilism, the scuffed knee and freight train sleep that always plagued the nights once the sex had ended and brought her to the point of defeat. But all were gathered in her battle to persevere while he sung about the world-wearisome and argued with his parents on idealism. Picking him from the sticky floors of his renditions and drainpipe spout was a business even the poor musician did not understand. And so she snapped, falling beneath the ice, and fucked the boy on drums. In the freezing clarity of sober abandon, she knew he couldn’t know.

Rubbing her sleeve on the window as the water streams silently outside, she sees the bus gone and a reflection motioning for another drink. Looking deep into the glass she can only see her outline and her gouged out eyes. Another? She shudders, standing quickly to avoid the vague plum she imagines between her thighs.

Caught in the undertow she’s pulled toward the counter where she spies him traversing the back-bar. With arms raised for the word orchestra, he lets the unheard notes splash in the amber as he moves within the detritus of his subterranean style-brokers. She sees the usual hangers-on and those still in their leathers, drinking stoically with their hand at the hip. They guffaw and cry. He cajoles again while they swallow his verbosity and din. She wants to slip between the bar and the foot-rung into a broken hiss of water, leaving her feet knocking the last ledge of ice.

With a bristling jaw he pulls his jacket cuffs and rumpled cloth askew, its collar rubbing the tendrils around his neck. Veins run like rivets down his cheek, scraggy from cheap whiskey and former acne. Unashamed and a raconteur at heart, his arms swing a tale for his friends, roping in any loose rouseabouts. Struggling for momentum and subject to a few hiccups and clouts, he continues the saga clutching the bar with pebbly knees jolting in and out. They giggle at his monstrosity and nod her way, passively bemoaning the interruption and perhaps foreseeing a joust. With a smile too wide he can’t downplay his surprise. Running doggishly toward her, she now sees the rungs of disguise to where his fears and ambitions have deserted him, lying supine in what she sees as her own empty gut.

‘Hey strong stones.’ He gasps.

‘You mean strong bones?’ She counters solemnly.

‘No no. Stones stones.’

‘I think you mean stoned stoned.’

He shirks at his indignity and whispers Happy Birthday in her ear. Eyeing the congealed stout in the crevasse of his mouth she detects the wine stains on his teeth; yellows and reds mingle with the clouded colour of sweat and piss on his shirt. Tugging at his shirttails he attempts the pose of a respectable lout. But it’s an awkward fit, and no more sartorial than an eel’s best coat. Nevertheless he leans in to whisper, or kiss.

‘No love. Love. Love is strong stones.’

And with a great throat of laughter he holds her and starts to sing his case of bellicose blues. But before he can thwart her she tells him she’s leaving. And they stare sidelong at each other until she thinks she sees a stark earnestness creep in. He drops her a crumpled poem on the bar, but she turns quickly holding her belly, and her dirty unborn secret flushes away as she scuttles for the bus up the street.

The Kite (Pierz Newton-John)

27 Jul

There is a church that stands on High Street that will always signify disaster. When Adam has grown up, he will dream of it again in times of sorrow or abandonment: a lonely spire, tapering into the pale light of Autumn. His grandmother, who would drop him off at his father’s flat on the weekends, taught him the word: steeple. The sound of it made him dizzy — steep, steep, steeple — and he began to notice them across the Brueghel landscapes of the city, rising up out of the far places where dreams go. At its very peak, where the building tapered to nothing, there was a metal rooster, always swinging to face the wind. He worried vaguely for the man who had to put it there. In nightmares he saw him fall.

They walked across a park to get to his father’s flat, kicking and shuffling through the fallen leaves, a chill wind in the bare branches. It was a small dark flat, full of stale air from the blow heaters. Adam breathed in the smell of pipe tobacco and wool as his father pulled his face into the folds of his jumper. His father had found a lizard on a trip to the outback and brought it home to keep in a fish tank with eucalyptus cuttings, sand, light and heat from an electric lamp: a little cube of desert trapped under glass.

Adam has a photograph from early that year, or perhaps the year before – at any rate his parents are still together in it. People do not look as he remembers them. He never ceases to be surprised at the way everyone looks. There is the dog, the beagle that would have to be taken away. There is his mother, crouching next to it, her hair dark and straggling – her black eyes betraying the malignant depression that is devouring her. And his father standing behind her with his pipe and his look of an English gentleman: saturnine and thin-wristed. The black and white image is oversaturated with unhappiness. There is Adam and his brother James. Can you believe they looked like that? That seventies hair. Those tracksuits! They are so little, and already you can make out the eddy of distress in James’s eye. Later, it will become a tempest that will just about kill him.

Adam’s father traps insects for the lizard. He crouches in front of the tank, face pale in the fluorescent light. It is a strange, exquisite creature, covered in tiny rhinoceros horns, in thorns. It is as rare as a unicorn, his father says. It lifts its head, as if drawn up by an invisible set of pullies, and its eyes, which are small and black as caviar, blink mechanically. The unicorns were all washed away in the flood, according to the Irish song on his record player. Whenever he plays it, they feel the tragedy. They want to cry for the poor, foolish unicorns as they are floated away. His father feeds the lizard flies and fusses with the light, the element, trying to make a perfect desert for his lizard inside its glass cube, inside his flat with its unpacked boxes all over the floor. Autumn glare, cold in the windows.

And then they go fly kites, his father standing at the edge of the oval as Adam runs. The kite behind him flips on its string, nosedives into the mud. Next time he holds the kite and his father runs, Adam throws it up, and the kite does two little loops then a bigger one, and then in an instant leaps into the blue. It weaves high above them, the string in his father’s hand taut and thrumming, as if it were a fish fighting him up there. Can I Dad, can I? Ooh, can I? Adam leaps up again and again, trying to grab his father’s hand. But his father doesn’t notice him. He’s up there with the kite at the end of that long, vanishing curve. He lets the line reel out higher and higher until the kite is just a tiny eye fluttering its lids in the wind. Then the string runs out. Why must the string always run out? Adam wants the kite to go so high it will dip its wings into the sky itself. Then when they bring it down, he will feel the mystery of its flight thrill through his hands when he touches it, like electricity.

His father holds his arms up, for the last inch of altitude. Then at last he bends to place the reel in Adam’s hands. Don’t let go, he says. But the kite is so heavy, so hungry for height. He feels vertigo in his fingers, the same quake he feels at the top of the tower in the park. Afraid not of falling but of his power to step over the edge. Even at three – especially at three – you can know this. The kite feels heavy as a whale trying to dive. But he holds on, the string singing in his fingers.

He won’t forget the nights his parents used to fight. When the silence in them exploded, and Adam had to hold himself together because the holders themselves were breaking. Her screaming and his cold, inaudible murmurs, and then she’d take the car and drive, and Adam would run to the window to watch the headlights swing out of the driveway. Not crying, because fright had shocked him empty. She had gone and might never return. The house lights blazed on although the house itself was empty without her. All his toys on the floor and the lights blazing and nobody home. His father a ghost, a chill in his office. In dreams he would return and wander that empty house, cold to the bone, one bright empty room after another, and in the windows, a darkness absolute and terrifying.

A trial separation. Heavy, adult, dead words. She spent her days in bed, the curtains drawn, and Adam kept away from her room at the end of the house, as if from a forbidden cave. She went to hospital, no one told him why, but he felt the dread in his belly at night. He saw her leaning on a broom and weeping in the kitchen. She never noticed him standing there. He knew he was to blame, but didn’t know how he should change.

The lizard died. Adam and James came to visit one day, and the fishtank was dark and empty. James wanted to bury it, so they did: They held a ceremony standing in the tiny courtyard where they made a grave under a miniature lemon tree. With characteristic precision, their father sculpted a tiny, perfect cross. It was winter by then and blustery even in the courtyard, and they shivered in their duffle coats, James’s brow furrowed in earnest sorrow as their father ‘said a few words.’

Later they went to fly the kite. As Adam held the string, an enormous, complicated thought rose in him like a great balloon. His hands opened and the kite flew away. It raced away over the houses, it went higher and higher. His father roared. How the sky was full of tears! How the world was full of roaring! And the kite flew away over the Brueghel landscape of the city, whirling upwards until it had vanished in the clouds.

stamped flat stamped (Ashley Capes)

27 Jul

in my office between classes

I rage at flat things: the sea,

the land, the hard, flat dollar coin

and all its friends,

the road too short by far

and my feet, fingernails and thumbs

sleeping, none of them wings,

I rage at the flat things

until my voice is stamped flat

stamped like the stamp of a soldier’s liberating

boot; I rage until all my dreams are flat

I rage so quietly that animals come close

I rage so well that people congratulate me

I rage so far that distant mummies wake in

their class cabinets, I rage at the rainbow slinky

for no other reason, than that it is on my desk,

I rage so that you notice and go away

I rage at flat things like the paper kipple

growing over me, I rage at words I cannot fix

I rage so deep that Hades lets Persephone go back

for more flowers and I rage so much that

it flattens my soul, now like a leaf

as it turns in the breeze,

and no-one left to chase it.

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