if you haven’t been lost
at the showground,
in the bush, in Westfield Plaza,
on an island

you may not know
the perpetual present
is exhausting,

way too many
concurrent points of view,

– something too free in aleatory –

and further,
a burden – a century
of hortatory Steinisms,
Yes, that’s how I read it –

famously, she says
‘a sentence is not emotional, a paragraph is’

the ‘difficult’ Stein at her best

‘Think carefully of nouns.
Vary and think very think very once
and once more of a noun a noun they like’

DRINKING STRAW — there’s your noun, mrs!
hope you like it

*

discussing Immaculate Conception
on the landline
&
Original Sin –
who knows what it is?

does an individual matter?
(immeasurable)

*

boys own rumbles by
on a rusted bicycle
ruining the dawn’s bleak dream,
the flattened one,
where you emerge from the lake
and wave, almost languidly

*

there’s the dribbling bronze boar
outside Sydney hospital,
its snout shiny from stroking

dwelling
on isolation (don’t dwell)
and other sad feelings (shouldn’t dwell)
like a detainee in this,
the inadequate body

red bumps
bigger than goosebumps –
but not exactly pimple size
more weals than whelks

who can understand the nurse
when she phones
with the laboratory test data?

*

No one ever here, no footpath crowd,
every knock of a hinge is creepy
crack of a floorboard,
rustle and gust

perhaps it’s revelatory,
or will be

can the past catch up with you

*

problem – how to begin the music,
harder than beginning a poem?

the ringtone
was the sound of that decade

if you just keep turning up
on time

eventually

might rain photons

*

that’d be good

*

you’re embarrassed
by my slurp
when I’m
guzzling spirulina
but
I’ve been to my personal best
and back —
I’m not worried

*

early intervention buys time,

how much is time these days?
(a cheap question)

*

if you see something
say something –

This is everything I could want
in a lifetime of products

*

pulling on another shirt
over two shirts
as weather
sets in

standing in the clothes
that you once wore

*

hours sitting in one spot

a rosella fell, lodged dead in the branches,
I took it down
and buried it behind the begonia

a new cicada began to chirr

*

I’ve been coasting,
a clown visiting a conservatorium,

time now for application

I want to reach the inhumans,
find the kind of poetry
that appeals to them,
to their original intelligence,
and then,
struck by enargia, Propriety Limited is us

*

Unable to afford
the G’Day Highway Motel,
I sleep in a car in its shadow

while

the town that makes
the world’s supply
of plastic drinking straws
is booming

*

the dendrite moves slowly
towards the synapse –
arrives two weeks later

WISHING YOU
A SPEEDY RECOVERY

the light here is so dim

*

an indestructible host organism
has the softest touch

strike another match, go start anew