2017

Decomposite Autobiography
Wick-green skin-free I unpeel
Showering where green mould grows
I took one after sampling
Somebody else’s thought
you always feel better after
and mildew grew
mushrooms sprouted between my toes
and the hot rain
mosquitoes came,
I beat them bloody with mouth-pink papers
in the white room
painted green, a home forest
like the room I grew in
by my new brothers
wide mouths croaking music
long tongues
Lapping from a bottle where green mould grows
singing through the window with the sunlight
in the morning
after
where it goes
Through
everything singing, carving worlds, shearing limbs -
Sweet bright bite -
I think it’s meant to feel like shame
Though it’s all good and I’m all right,
I think they made me change my name -


This piece is built around the mental image of a green world. This conjured a swampy, humid atmosphere in my mind while putting together the poem. I was thinking about those myths where flowers and assorted growth sprouts from the footprints of a god or spirit, and imagined instead that revolting mould and fungus were growing everywhere. I tried to build an alternate world composed from fragments of my ordinary world and make greenery erupt all over the furniture of a mundane memory, alien growths in the familiar spaces/nooks of a house, of a mind. The internal sensory experience of this world degenerates in the latter part of the poem. This is accompanied by a change in layout on the page and a general loss of identity and sense of panic, but the rhyme scheme hardens up, indicating a sense of order and rhythm cohering in this strange new situation. Poets who have used colour as an important motif are Sylvia Plath in Ariel and Anne Carson; both have loaded the colour ‘red’ with meaning in their work, especially in Autobiography of Red, which helped me decide on a title. I also borrowed the use of a few dashes from Emily Dickinson, I like the urgency and incompleteness they convey. This is appropriate towards the end of the piece.
Frogs are also a key aspect of the poem. The ‘brothers’ are meant to be frog sprites, like the tiny elves from fairytales who pop up at night to mend clothes. The speaker takes a shower - but it’s someone else’s idea - and soon they even lose their name to the familiar yet bizarre frogs. The Frog Prince by Anne Sexton inspired these possibly metaphorical yet mysterious frog creatures coming “from the sky like rain”.
“Frog has a boil disease
And a bellyful of parasites.
He says Kiss me. Kiss me.
And the ground soils itself.”
There is some sense of revulsion in that poem towards the frogs. This is not overtly the case in my poem but this fragment could be taken as an accompanying image or coda.






Knowing
Love fails me all the time, that’s how I see – yes!
A delusion, more or less -
Ring that bell, sing dreams, I’ll come
Tongue hanging from my head
Still, ‘til the last gut-shot of lead
I’ll see love all over the place
My perseverance cannot know
Eye to eye nor face to face.

Emily Dickinson’s brief and rhythmic poems about abstract feelings and concepts utilising somewhat obscure and intangible imagery made me want to try something similar. Delusion, hope, and banal disappointment is contrasted with a sense of “love” that just won’t quit. Like Pavlov’s dog, at the proverbial bell-ring the speaker will respond instantly to a call of “love”, and feels agonised at his failure to comprehend reality as he feels it really is.
This poem is based on the Bible verse 1 Corinthians 13. I am interested in the idea of certain phrases, lyrics or “fragments” of verse or quotes or words sticking in your head and repeating themselves whenever they want, like samples in an Avalanches album or an ear-worm song. 1 Corinthians 13 is a pretty well known verse and it was recited regularly at my school assemblies so it has stuck in my head a bit. Despite this cliché-factor I felt compelled to play with it, partially due to my atheism; I was intrigued by the idea of messing with the text and changing the meaning. After all, it’s become part of my own internal monologue by virtue of its repetition throughout my life - I feel entitled to appropriate it for my own uses. At first glance I am denying the meaning of the original verse outright, but really the ‘love’ the speaker chases is not the love spoken of in the verse, as he feels it is constantly failing him, and thereby having not love, he is nothing.

Eurydice Asks Orpheus To Turn Around Now
Who needs the sun, my only one?
Some flowers in some gold-hazed field?
I just need to see your eyes
It doesn't matter that I've died
Turn around, music man, I see you've got your lyre in hand
So if you can, don't lie, but please do sit on
This grey shore, with sand so cool
We can swim in silver pools
I want your eyes, I'll have your skin
It’s how you know you're not nothing

I’ve got love all over the place, just turn around
Before you’re gone I really
Need to see your face
I can’t recall it seems like stone
Arranged all strange. An awful poem, so really a puzzle
Of fractured skin, if I group the nose and the lip with the chin
And find a flesh-like pattern to crave
I’ll love that rose of cheekbone blood
Just cave, cave in, dear cave, cave, cave



This is inspired by the Greek myth. Eurydice is killed, and her husband Orpheus journeys into the underworld to save her. He makes a deal with Hades and gets to have her back alive if he can walk out of the underworld without looking back at her ghost. He fails the test and Eurydice goes back to being dead. However, the myth in my poem is altered somewhat from how I would normally interpret it, as Eurydice wants to drag Orpheus back down with her into the world of the dead so she can feel a bit better presumably.
Reading Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson got me to think about the modernisation and irrational personalisation of Greek myth, and give new life to some fragments previously written that I liked for the rhymes but didn’t initially work by themselves. I had Arcade Fire’s Reflektor ringing in my head as I wrote it, and the album cover in mind – the figures from the story are portrayed as marble statues. This is more oblique, but 1 Corinthians 13 directly influenced me again here. “Love” is conflated with “seeing face to face”, something which Eurydice desperately feels she needs to do, which will save her somehow.













Styx, Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Cocytus, Seine
By a black sweet-scented river
There’s a strange and pale sky
White shadows cling and quiver
Buildings’ shadows hanging high

Against the strange and pale sky
Branches spear from black trees
Buildings’ windows hang pale light
It’s a quiet day in Paris

Leaves rustle, skeleton branches
Over milk-dark oily water
In a bleak hour in Paris
Two people kissing shiver








Lovers in Paris
Robert Dickerson
1996
Copperplate etching





This was initially drafted for the class exercise in the Ian Potter Gallery. I chose Lovers in Paris as an artwork to try writing a poem that used the technique ‘ekphrasis’ as its basis. My ultimate interpretation of the image differs substantially from my initial impression of it. It’s a nice picture which could be seen as a nice day out for the two lovers. However, I chose to emphasise the monochrome nature of the piece, drawing out an impression of a cold, bleak day, and foregrounded the anonymity and loneliness of the pale embracing figures. The limitations of the Malaysian pantun form meant that only a few images or lines could be used, but I decided there was room to switch around words and change the meanings throughout. As a result, I deviated from the limitations of the form by changing how I phrased each image. The river itself seemed to be the central part of the scene to me and I deliberated over how to portray it, originally calling it ‘chaotic’. Soon enough I realised this didn’t work and decided to introduce a faintly nauseating tone through making it ‘sweet’ and ‘milk-dark’. I repeated the conflation of the opposites of black and white elsewhere in the poem with ‘white shadows’, which helps the subjects of the piece to appear lost in a hostile environment within the poem. The poem is named after the rivers in the Greek underworld with a cheeky Seine tacked on the end.










Aesthetic automaton
Meet me by the garden gate.
There’s no flowers left but
It’s still a garden and
The gate’s all rust and noise but
We should meet there and
I know it’s time for church but
I don’t pray. And hey
I drove a long way
From a real garden with the sun on my back
And my feet in some puddles
Not too deep and not too dark.
Here my noisy breath makes everyone turn to look so
Let’s go get lost. I hear the gold birds
And the frogs singing in the bare garden
With the rain on your joints I’m
So sorry you’re skinless
Though I’m not responsible.
Don’t rust over
This poem is called ‘aesthetic automaton’ because it is a slightly petulant love poem addressed to a robot, which is set in the ‘aesthetic’ or classically romantic and melancholy surrounds of a church graveyard, with hazily lyrical mentions of gold birds and flowers. I borrowed the use of caesura from Anne Sexton’s Us:
“I was wrapped in black
Fur and white fur and
You undid me and then
You placed me in gold light”
Magnitude
When the world breathes out, bubbles float to the top
Whale shadows shudder under cold gold
Ice; I spy
Things that shouldn’t exist, like you
Well, what do you know? When the world breathes in, and holds
I reach at smiling frozen cracks. While seeing voices
It’s hard to understand April dirt underfoot
While ghost cities erupt from ashes
Of gold leaves cold on garden gravel
Well I know nothing.


This poem is in free verse and describes the inability to understand an incomprehensible and rapidly changing world, despite the senses remaining rooted in nature and home.








Halflight
Haze machine sets the stage
I should really go but no
I stay me and
You say “oh
You shouldn’t have!”
I can’t see well in this light
And I talk like I just don’t like:
“Oh! Hello
You’ve got a beautiful voice, and so many
I’d like to be one, and sincerely
thanks for what you said”
And you say something
Very important
But I can’t hear you. It’s the smoke.


This poem was built around the syllables “go”, “no” and the concept of a failed and slightly obscure dialogue in which the speaker wonders what their interlocutor really means when they say what they say.









Weeknight in Carlton by the river
Go to the corner of Elgin Street and Lygon Street where the bus fords the river, where the ghost goes to wait, and you might find me there too. The world stops at the corner of Elgin Street and Lygon Street where the ghost lives, by a line of yellow moons lying on the street reflected by the streetlights where the current is strongest, on the corner at the bus stop and the tram stop, where the ghost lives, where the world drops off, though there should be more earth turning over forever two weeks of steps is the end of it, and following that a waterfall and what’s over that only the ghost knows but I know where the ghost lives, though I don’t know what he knows though I know where the moon lights the water that shudders and the water that moves and I that move along the moonlit water. But if you asked me if I’d fall off the edge where the world stops then I must say you’d have to ask the ghost. Go to wait by the water and you might find him there too.


This began as an attempt to compose a prose poem, but soon became strongly influenced by Gertrude Stein’s libretto Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, in which excessive rhyming and repetition are paramount. I have a fondness for this because if I’m honest, I read too much Hemingway in high school, but I hope it’s turned out alright. Originally the poem was more place-specific, and spoke of a ritual grounded in concrete storefronts and activities, a theme which I might return to but which didn’t fit with the ‘ghost’ part of the poem. In ‘Decomposite Autobiography’ I used surreal descriptions of real and familiar places to create an alternate world inside the poem and I have done this again here.










The Ghost
Your long dark hair fell in curls on my shoulder
You played me like the horrible hymn You played me
Then in an instant inside of a star
I think You played then so well as anything.
I hoped You'd leave my fair new friend alone
But now I don’t care for Your hair’s so bright
Gold brushing my soul’s skin on godlike phones
Outside under stars I’ll listen for light
In warmth from burning up my paper kites
Hoping You’ll say: it’s okay, you’re all right




Themes recur in this poem of disconnection, pleading, delusion and romanticisation of all the above. This is an attempt at a Shakespearean sonnet, with 14 lines of ten syllables each, though it doesn’t quite fit the label ‘iambic pentameter’. The fictional ‘You’ is a ghost in the mind of the speaker who possesses the love-object of the poem, who is actually two or three separate people, indicated by the change in hair colour.







Click
This tale’s tall. Proof’s in the
writing on the wall
which tends to come before I fall
on my own pen (I’m lyrically crook)
so leap, just - don’t look.
Little tadpole, cook!


This poem sprang from playing with common figures of speech. My idea was that I’d use each line on a single cliché and twist it into another one so that the fragmented idioms flowed into one another. I was going for an oblique textual density. It came out with a nursery rhyme feel which isn’t surprising considering the last line is not only a reference to a cliché but the ‘little pot cook’ folktale. In this folktale if you tell a magic pot to cook, using the right combination of words, it will make endless amounts of porridge, causing mayhem. The ‘tadpole’ is a reference to the ‘frog slowly boiling in a pot of water’ idiom. I could have used ‘frog’ but I liked the way tadpole rhymed with ‘fall’ etcetera. Overall it is a piece of doggerel.
Playing with fragments of appropriated material is a method I have used in other poems.
The clichés I used were
Tall tales
Proof is in the pudding
The writing’s on the wall
Pride comes before a fall
Fall on your sword
The pen is mightier than the sword
By hook or by crook
Look before you leap
A frog boiling alive
Little pot, cook!




Works referenced
The Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, eds. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George, Virago Press, 1991
Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red, Vintage Contemporaries, 1999
Plath, Sylvia Ariel, Bloomsbury, 1968
The Holy Bible, The New Testament, various authors (any edition)
Reflektor, Arcade Fire, Merge Records, 2011



2018


Live
In bed, a curious feeling of change
Look to the jeans spilling from the drawer
Turn on the speaker it sings softly
Pass on the jacket, temperatureless
At the tram stop, pace
Watch the others all lined up waiting
A sign abandoned; LIVE LAUGH LOVE
It’s just the tram, a rattling dopamine click
It’s just the steps again, step up
Sit aside a man in a suit
Look down, drift away
It’s just the streets again, always and the
Graveyard slide
Watch the people down Elgin, longing
Stand and sway
Steps again, step down and walk
Fast past the people and choose your route
Leaf-lined corridor, again. Walk
Past windows




Years
That year that time
I madly dreamed I was a dog
And she died that year
Her marbling doe-dark eyes stopping
Your said your dog had been killed
You eschewed blood, so did I that year
Those love letters killed me
I stopped going to parks
I didn’t see her before she died that year
You weren’t worth it, I mean you weren’t a real –













Ruby's
A place you pay to chit chat
Drink bitter milk I can pay for, for I'm grown
Up by myself in my high chair by the window
Good playlist; steaming cheese slabs, olive bread
A rose in the tip-jar
And a tram out the window to take you to even better cafes
On Lygon street
And I’m grown-up and love Sunday mornings
Sedately. They bring me water
I have enough to eat and drink
For twenty dollars. My wealth on a plate
I drink and drink













Ghost
You are the purple in me
You are the orange of my heart
Sliced into quarters, sucked dry
You are a silver fish needling in my bloodstream
You are the white moon
And the yellow moon and
You are on my right as I walk up Lygon street
And I’m listening to
Your voice
Keep on living













End of the line
Today I wanted to go to the end of the train line somewhere with the air electric that way it can get, just to see the unfamiliar front gardens and greet the strange dogs and walk til midnight til the end of the line, walk through night, through sweet camellias, find what I’m looking for in the flowers. They’re awful that way – the flowers –




















Windowsill
I wait
I wait
I hunger
I thirst
You wait
You come
To show me
Your words
I yearn I yearn
Always to see
That silhouette
Your silhouette
By a windowsill
Tall dark friend
It’s not easy in here







The Universe
Like Hamlet in the bush
I saw you on stage
But it’s not a universal story
Still, those universal powers
Move us
I saw you on stage
It happens all the time
At the riverside
Between reality and dreaming
Where the stage ages
Into awful mystery and
You keep walking away
Into the kitchen
And I into the backyard after
Nothing at all
On the riverside, dreaming
Moving into another year
Not right
We talk but it’s
Awful in the wrong moonlight
Awful with the missing objects
Awful, my impossible blood
Talking moving walking loving
If I could stop I would stop

















Changes

1.
Things have been changing this whole time
Not just you but the rules
Have been buckling under your feet
It’s alive
Something good’s gotta come
It just does
My toes twitch
Bad things happen
Good things go
It’s all downhill from here, my girl…

2.
Things changed
I didn’t even notice because
I thought I could control myself
And I just went with it
And now the universe is
Electrofragile
Stigmatic
Heretic
Stratified deified nullified
Out of control

3.
Life should always be
Easy and fun
I am a good person
I have a simple heart
You are so beautiful
I am a good person
You are so beautiful
Thank you for everything
You are so beautiful
Good things will happen













Signs and wonders
I will paint my nails a catastrophic blue
Wear apocalyptic black, shirt and jeans and jacket too
I remembered lying on your ribcage, how I felt so safe yet 
How I got it wrong, how everything just aches
The problem is you know me and you’ve got me made
So I don’t know what to do
These years, these seams of life I rue






















Howling
Let me live but don’t you leave
Let’s just talk just let me breathe
Let me love but don’t you say
In this city I must stay
All around me cold and bright
It feels like drowning in night
Howl black and blue
Call out to the light
It won’t say the truth
Tell it you’re right
Tell it you’re sorry
Tell it you’re mad
Tell it you’re starving
You’re low and you’re sad
Just tell it everything
Tell it your name
Tell it your number and all those deep
Shames you keep locked in your
Slumbering mind
Return to that time
You felt less than alive



Rising Water
Look it’s your medicine
Coming up through the plug hole
Lapping your ankles
Coating your cranium with electromagnetic ease
Splitting the world
And us
Into them
And you
And water on the rise
Was this something good?
Hide from unlife
Retreat into reality
Drink too much coffee
We all will be received in -
Hallelujah









True Love Waits
Computer screens and
Stunted dreams
Of friendship shrivelling away
In the wintertime of our
Disorganisation
I hate it, I love it, I hate it, I need it
160milligrams
You won’t listen, you don’t listen
I’m drowning in my pill water















Psychotic Episode
Always on the edge
Of a breakthrough
Of death
Sanity
Worth, heat, corrosion
True sublime
Unacceptability
















Shake
O God, was Elijah taken up bodily –
My knees –
Into Heaven as I am now
Shaking in place
A shrinking animal cry, a window in the heart-
My feet my feet –



















Personal Apocalypse
This is the way
Everything stops looking
Like it should
I’m endarkened
And I am so fucking sorry
For all that waiting
And all that walking
And all that hoping
And all that talking
And all those times
You said thanks for coming
Thanks for being here
I said thanks for the music
In the pink light of this
Horrorshow story
Thanks for everything