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Brett Dionysius

© copyright Brett Dionysius 2004

poems from The Sprung Histories

(xi) Andre the Giant

Hulk proportioned, minus the green tinge, how does a mother feed ten
children in one? More than “stinking meat” to his fans –
big boned teenage boys parking car noses with milk can muscles, tuned
into Sat arvos & WWF match ups against Big John Stud; the pallid collapse
of dead flesh. Smoothed over asexual hideousness in obese Western boys.

As (you) wish?

A giant’s final poetry. Hidden behind the cheeses & wine at
the cave’s end, A Princess Bride. His lines ended in The Simpson’s
mockery, celebrity funerals we hardly knew him.

Wait a minute…has anybody got a peanut?

(xii) Vivian Bullwinkle

They who save lives can never understand how they are taken. Tide pull
of khaki men & rigid ammo belts so anti-cummerbund. Quick as dance
steps, counter-sprung floors of golden sand, death’s a stage trapdoor
for most, nurses, soldiers & salt coffins soak up jungle’s exhausted
heat. Stay dead by your sisters till the sun’s blood pressure drops.

We want (you) as a new recruit.

Live to tell the tale. Escape, be captured again, keep the secret inside
you in utero. Let history write you out, become someone’s footnote
in his or her thesis & pass.

Decline that Australian beach obsession.

(xiii) Pyrrhus

A womaniser of kingdoms, flitted from one engagement to another, draining
dowries like uncut wine in the post-Alexandrian classical age carve up.
Frenetic, pinball wizard with sword for hire, undiagnosed ADD child opened
negotiations for Greece Pty. Ltd. to become a Roman subsidiary. Tactical
dervish bewildered legions, phalanxes, wives, rules.

Have (you) had a pyrrhic victory?

A chaotic end was justified: some sideshow in Argos & a well-timed
roof tile thrown by the Argives’ best old woman. Hit the mark too,
ended his career as military magician.

Everyone’s ambition: become an adjective.

(xiv) Leni Reifenstahl

Susan Sontag dissed her. Took stock footage of the twentieth century’s
sculptured, athletic, Nazi iconography & documented eugenics think
tank – not a big fish as nutters go but someone had too break UFA’s
glass ceiling: detect professional jealousy? Leni, more googled? Bra ads,
new totalitarianism these days: vis a vis fascism from girls is okay?

Triumph of (you)r will.

Our culture’s body language still defers to Hitler. In photos &
essays he still dominates! Should have photographed the abominable snowman
instead; shot warm & fuzzy hues.

Alas, “Every woman adores a fascist”, sad, but true.

(xvii) Forty Seven Ronin

The house of Asano spilled its guts over an impromptu dais after its
true samurai spirit hacked at the protocol droid’s head. The shogunate
palace so…Jabba the Hutt’s smugglers lair diorama with action
figures & C3PO left in shiny bronze bits again. Pop culture’s
ritual suicide began in 18th century Kill Bill fashion. History folded
like hot steel.

What code do (you) follow?

Kira’s coal blackened head sat up as funeral bust on Asano’s
grave. A treasury of loyal hearts disembowelled snowflake bellies melting
over floors & performing arts turned on.

Cinema is so much BS (bushidõ).

(xviii) Donald Campbell

Bluebird pushed envelope of sixties’ plastic Beatles wig style
curvature to the limit. In pre – ‘extreme games’ age
of aggressive backyard hobbies & elbow grease, world marks broken
as sound barriers or peace treaties. Jets ruled in air & on water,
bombing & speed records tumbled in Asia, Australia, azure kingfishers
skimmed salt lakes path finding for glory.

(You) steer a boat through its arse.

He ended as blue heron; photo stills & airborne poetry. Cut the meniscus
of speed

& water on Lake Coniston & two years later they rehydrated his
body re: Sea Monkey.

Sixties lesson: don’t screw up your nose at anything.

————————————————–

Brett Dionysius

© copyright Brett Dionysius 2004

Brett Dionysius B. R. Dionysius directed the Queensland
Poetry Festival from 1997-2001 and is currently the editor of papertiger:
new world poetry #04. In 1998 he was awarded the Harri Jones Memorial
Prize for Poetry by the University of Newcastle. He has co-authored an
artists’ book, The Barflies’ Chorus (Lyre Bird Press, 1995)
and two solo collections of poetry, Fatherlands (Five Islands Press, 2000)
and Bacchanalia (Interactive Press, 2002). He won the ‘Best Unpublished
Poetry Manuscript – Queensland category’ in the IP Picks 2002
Awards for Bacchanalia, was short-listed in the 2002 Mary Gilmore Poetry
Prize for Fatherlands. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.

Ian McBryde

© Ian McBryde 2006

Vessel

“In our weariness, tears cannot find their way out of us”
- Andy Jackson

I am flesh wrapped around all things unwept, I am
salt water, brim-filled. No weary gulls any longer

land on me to rest, even briefly. This reservoir
has no outlet, no closing shore. An eternal twilight

greys the waves, awaiting the hush and solace
of nights that will never arrive. Bottomless, without

fish, the reservoir patiently awaits a current,
a cleansing tide, anything that can move its thick

and sluggish depth. The echo of invisible bells
ripple this surface, doubling themselves as they

sound out horizons that simply are not there.
There is no raft, no boat, no trusted rope.

And so I walk the dry world, liquid-skinned,
drowning in slow motion, just here, inside myself.

The Leaning Cedar
for Sheila Kathleen

Though flattened now
there are hills here even

more ancient than your grief.
They have subsided,

and until they rise again
they hold the cedar’s roots

deep in their thick skin.
The first time, you knew

she was listening.
Since then she has moved

slowly closer to you.
Her branches are trembling,

her troubled bark strains
to speak. Next time,

her features will be
there, right there, hidden

carefully in the brief
and subtle sweep of leaves.

Now the water calls my father

Now the water calls my father, the water
whispers to him as he sleeps, soaking up
his secrets. He knows that he is going

to be swept away up north to where his
beloved waits. He cannot see the beach
from here but in his ears the water waves

his name, and this last shore already
bears the imprints of his certain, steady
footsteps, even though he is yet to arrive.

—————————————–

Ian McBryde

© Ian McBryde 2006

Canadian-born Ian McBryde has been a long-term resident
of Australia. He is well published both nationally and overseas, and his
poetry has been translated into Japanese, Spanish, Greek, and French.
He has five mainstream collections published, as well as three chapbooks.
His fourth book Domain was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the
Year in 2005, and his fifth mainstream book of poetry, Slivers, a collection
of one-line poems, has just been published by Melbourne’s Flat Chat Press.
His third CD of spoken-word, entitled At Land’s End, is about to be released
byThe Still Company , which is an ongoing collusion with Melbourne musician
Greg Riddell. McBryde’s next collection, entitled The Adoption Order,
will be published by Five Islands Press in November of this year. Ian
McBryde is currently working on two new manuscripts and recording new
material.

Range finding

If only kind pity could
Choke my indolent spleen
Like old Donne here before me
Thought beyond experience
Here in twickenham garden
I contemplate the mandrakes
Yet wisdom commands me well
Be still, wider yet, open these eyes.

I still think of you my bowman
As I still think of England
The east pier in Brighton
Now a charcoal skeleton
Was it purified by fire
Attesting for posterity?
To whom then, but the living
Or to him that’s yet to come?

And still your question lingers
Impudent pink wee finger
To this I raise a second
Like archers did on Avignon
So you thus oppose a third
But mandible claw grasps not
Rather thumbing though unheard
My fibers, dust and greasy hair.

So war and paperwork ensue
And bowmen’s ranks swallow
Old targets art, thus I aim
By these fingers draw a smile
Still with strength enough to die
Then I might reconsider
Numb fingers in a quiver
Yet your hands were always bigger
Than mine.

Donne captains a ship of fools

Let me not knit my net too fine
Thus trap small fish or venal sin.
Neither casting in too deep
As to ensnare a leviathan.

But guided by shared impotence
Within the sea of what contains us.
To retrace love reconsidered
Then choose what there remains of.

If only memory could thus divine
The middle point of our lost night
With plumb and sextant plot the sky
Span, count, and wait, upcoming light.

Yet if instinct which haunts foresight
Should trace shadow before it falls
Then circumspect mind must navigate
Through the communion of lost fools.

So turned and prayed to permanence
Both cartographer and firstmate
One skyward eye was cast above
Its twin trimming to the winds fate.

Confessions of a gardener

I tell you then far from pride or zeal
Little hope is left for these ones

Tell me of the conceit of adulthood
So called, I now in the primavera of free license,

To old to be precocious, to young to be reproved
As traitor too the burden of authentic failure

What is considered health hitherto
Must end then there in sickness

Procession of years ever content
To lift ironies bar when outgrown of its uses

The course safeguarded from undue reverence
For the peat-pit of age an jaundiced obligation

But like hot house flowers super ceding growth
In the well set plots and unique privacy of humid air,

Yet never draw so broad a breath to circumscribe life
Thus prefigure death.

Postscription

The rumors not true, I had not raped mother Gia,
We consummated a shared breath in silence
And of the children? our illegitimate dreams
She spawned a ten acre spread
On the outskirts of suburbia.

Fuga Mundi

We’re counting the universe into being
Redheads, one by one, set in place
Its bare geometry lies before us

We’ve never seen this before
But it belongs to everybody
You could hear a pin drop

Phosphorus Kabbalah
Child plays dominos
Omnis Dominus

Counting up
Towards
One

Swings

I saw the Boy before they took him away
Dressed in cap and blazer on a Sunday arvo
They say this time he left without his satchel
Running along, deeper into the city of God

Past the gates, and that vast blackness beyond
Through the membrane, vibrating shibboleths
Shouts the danger-mouth, giving hero’s welcome.
Into the veins of the spirits of the most high

Seated up-rushing in his ray-gun gothic chariot
Knows there are many rooms in his father’s house
But two fleshy pillars in the middle of the temple
Two bony knees dangle into the air, the sky rolls.

Running skidoo, he’s too young for ascension time
Tender gum’s and seconds teeth smile secret promises.
Biting into vociferous ether, the pomegranates bleed.
Into irresistible graces and the perseverance of sinners.

—————————————————–

Michael Healey

© Michael Healey 2008, 2009

MTC Cronin

© MTC Cronin 2002

The Music’s Habit

Straight to begging – this was the music’s habit, so that the posture
of the listener was always one of giving or refusing to be persuaded.
Eventually I will turn it off – all the music – so that I might once again
locate the voice of chaos, not a voice of transport but at the least one
which does not tell me who I am. But there, again, the music, with someone
else’s face, forever requiring an introduction, wanting me to answer for
it so that I may name myself! Whenever I am quick enough I chop off its
fingers with a set of suitably blunt shears. (They once belonged to a
rare Italian tenor who took advantage of my mother’s fondness for stripping
among the Pandanus trees. I remember her hat and breasts, the sweetbriar
wire with which he tied her legs.) And when music bleeds it finally loses
direction. What, I ask it then, have we not sacrificed to

security and freedom.

The Likeness

Doomed. Proof. But not of its own. Wavering. Attempting. Caught in a
space of flight, both to-and-fro where the and hangs taut. Exodus. From
the one-and-only. Evidence. Nought without of. Effort. Calling the soul
to what the soul imagined: what could exist the same without it.

Facial Heart and
at the End an Examination of Emotion
and the False Metaphor of Economy

Gourd for the emotions. Always full, no matter how blank. Are there ever
(any?) degrees of blankness? The beat missed by the smile? A painting
of the heart revealing a face with eyes darting like tapping spoons and
a mouth taking flight on wings of impressed glass? An eternity of hollowness
humanizing itself, subconscious thoughts humped through the black of the
eyes? Look in the face for what might repair the wounded mind with whatever
is larger and more kind. Remove its crown. Go through the skin. The room
around the mind is inhabited by observances of the body. They pose. Delicate,
thin, tenuous, impalpable. Then crude, kicking, garish, like colours always
taking over others. Warm, perhaps, like an altar, or a cold pale enthusiasm.
Two faces together? So much anger that the moment becomes worthwhile;
the marvellous dark dragon flies over the face and unmasks the prison
and its thrashing inhabitants. So much desire that the viscera of the
tongue climbs to lick the dust from love; drags love out to find its lost
shoes of breath. Hear all that whistling through the tunnel of air that
reaches the brain. Word-signatures avoiding coffins, finding coffins,
sign the contract of the face, shine through layers of flesh! The moon
is out again. The lovers are in their wallets. Following yourself becomes
mandatory. What’s a corollary to skin?

Considering Trivialities

Confronted by definition, almost as if it could undo me, when definition,
truly, makes no claims for itself. Neither, judgement. Follow them back
through a kind of weaving that doesn’t belong to a spider, indeed a spider
wouldn’t own, and you may find the implications though luck is certainly
not crossing the bridge to find a better home if you understand them.
So, what is an unimportant detail and how do we make it stay that way
while we discuss it? I was standing on a road where three ways met when
I saw three men approaching along separate paths. Nice day, one of them
said at our point of convergence and we all nodded. Might rain later,
said another and we looked up at the sky. The weather is actually of great
consequence, said the third, although our remarks are brought from abroad
and don’t go to it. Hear, hear. Hear, hear. Do you think, I asked, that
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are all separate beings? and the
three swapped paths and went on their way. I stood where I had been standing,
waiting, sure that soon there would come more companions to discuss matters
of great import. The fine weather held although there was a vague worry
in my head concerning the possibility of any future conversationalists
taking advantage of my good nature.

Considering Ritual

Today I want to consider ritual. How I cut my bread and into how many
pieces. How ritual shouts as habit whispers. But each in the same language
where abundance finds categories and learns to share itself as if scarce.
(On certain quiet days in my brain I cut the toast whichever is the other
way I do it when I’m not thinking about it.) But forward with a hypothesis
that will keep changing its place. Each life is a ceremony performed in
ignorance by the one who lives it. Each act observes the gathered minutiae
of the world it draws into its becoming. This dynamism that is your handful
sacrifices death to the god of suicides. That god is a god for all of
us and does not inhabit volcanoes and churches. And as I was saying, how
I do certain things with teapots which are different to what you do with
them, the reluctance of certain hours to my particular actions, for example,
beer never before five in the afternoon. This may seem trivial, what I
eat and drink, but rituals are found anywhere and are somewhat like the
mind gathering swirling leaves while allowing them to swirl. Or they are
a bit like smoke that has cultivated its wild imagination or conceptual
threads that have become visible with all their attendant fragility and
gentle resistant intentions. And oh, as if there was anything with such
ulterior motives! The secrets we keep from ourselves! That might be enough
to say if Bertocci hadn’t said, ‘the wound calls for the knife and the
knife for the wound’.

Touché!

——–

MTC Cronin

© MTC Cronin 2002

MTC Cronin’s work first appeared in print in 1993
and since then she has had six books and one booklet of poetry published,
between them shortlisted for the Jessie Litchfield Award for Literature,
the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Age Poetry Book of
the Year, the Qld Premier’s Literary Awards, the Wesley Michel Wright
Prize for Poetry, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Adelaide Festival
Awards for Literature. Her most recent books are Talking to Neruda’s Questions
and Bestseller (Vagabond Press, 2001) and My Lover’s Back: 79 Love
Poems (UQP, 2002). An eighth collection, beautiful, unfinished ~ PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM
is forthcoming through Salt Publishing (Cambridge, UK) in 2003. Other
awards for her work include the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize for Poetry,
the Artsrush Poetry Prize and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship
for Poetry. After being employed for most of the decade of the nineties
in law (specializing in feminist jurisprudence), she has now begun teaching
writing at university level. Also, with Mireille Juchau (novelist, essayist
and playwright) and Caitlin Newton-Broad (youth theatre director), she
runs Muse on Wheels, a group which provides writing workshops in secondary
schools. She is currently working on her doctorate, Poetry and Law: Discourses
of the Social Heart, at the University of Technology.

© Justin Lowe 2002

Pompey Elliott

Mate, this town and I
we barely hear each other

where its inflexions go up
mine go down

I am like a bad idea
rusting by the river

sometimes a grey head
nods my way

but they are loose tillers in a storm
and my soft bones tell me don’t reach out

II

if I fall now
it will be from these deaf mountains

their morning side
a chessboard of ice and shadow

their people and I do not get on
where their inflexions rise mine fall

III

every night I dream of bridges
and curtains with gilded names muddled in the folds

and I wake up damp as the earth
with shrill Persephone scratching at my eyelids

and a curfew at the end of every cigarette

IV

oh! but I wish you could have seen me
when we held the centre of things

held it all tight as a secret, comrade

I had a poem in every fingertip then
and a nightingale in my throat

the worst thing I had ever done
was laugh at another man’s misfortune

but I guess that was enough
to land me here……

never ever forget it, mate
laughter is our surest touchstone

that we all hear whispers in the frozen ground

Deo Volente

One is on a book tour
complaining about hotel pillows
and the price of coffee in Darlinghurst

the other one has skipped town
dodging a bus load of creditors
and the endless cycle of lies and ulcers

one is fresh from a residency in Paris, or maybe Rome
on the third print run
of his eighth much-lauded book

he travels the world
with a young child and adoring wife
supplicating the converted

while the other one wakes up
in strange beds and loveless rooms
listening for footsteps in the hallway

this one borrows money to publish his work
and so the debts pile up
and the ranks of friends keep thinning

the other one answers the simple questions
while this one asks the impossible
the first to an audience of thousands

the second to an audience of one

Ezra Pound

My kind credit their house’s ruin
to the assiduity of commerce

our dead roll over us like clouds of knowing
neither solvent or insolvent

they merely observe the statutes
they will soon ply their trade under different names

in my childhood I read poetry to these venal spectres
until they stirred and yawned

then I stole away into the smoke
of that other hemisphere where gods make war

and I whistled songs there I never took to heart
and spoke a language I picked up in the gutter

because all gutters then were like rivers to me
and all languages like gutters

and my tongue had a feather’s cupidityJustin Lowe

© Justin Lowe 2002

© Robert Lort 2002

Sea-Sore Piss Swallowing

Instructions: shout out the words while masturbating.

I crawl secretly through your body
I taste inside your mouth
your teeth, your angry tongue
your alchemical saliva and smutty red blood
I cut-up along your denticulate subtangents
down deep inside your THROAT and factory GUTS
WHERE it has not yet been tasted

nous sommes tous Rimbaud

I spilt the SPEED inside your womb
I glued my saliva to your skin
I inject the WORD (is a wound) up your sleeve
I wander aimlessly through your wreckage of dreams
I trigger all these hedonic gasps (ejaculate floating in ash)
I nailed on your umbrella wings
and released you from my queasy palms
to taste much more than this bitter jouissance

as the Israeli TANKS were outside your window
you choked and swallowed in clouds of sparkles
I sunk down on my knees
down deep inside your breath
inside your fevered pulsing body
a prisoner inside your me(n)tal corpus

I was a new language torn from your intestines
coming, gasping in wantonness
shat from your weeping gizzards
purged like vomit onto the blackening floor
the words came burning and shaking
into this here dizzy swarthy light

nous sommes tous Rimbaud

this word has fingers inside your mouth
like bombs that explode in your teeth
from this blistered enfoldment of wretchedness
the word escapes your body, relinquished
projected in a stammering guttural glitch
that multiplies over all the surfaces dérangées
shivering and ravaged in it’s demented bliss

BUT you tried to make the WORD fall back onto you
to impinge on you, to taint your FLESH
to make you hollow again, real again
to make your body your own again
to be convinced of this SELF

nous sommes tous Rimbaud

your meek dog-eyes shiver in the black fog
Zarathustra’s delicate insect bones CRACK!
a rattling huddle wails from the fevered amplifier
a mangy cretin rubs his eyes in the WHITE LIGHT
broken flesh discarded into corners of dreams
NOTHING now can hold back your tears…

BUT you cannot swallow it again
you cannot swallow ME again
this word is nothing
naked and longing, but only desire
indefinable and shifting beyond ALL

your tongue sucks in vain at the molten floor
you cannot swallow, you’re hollow
your saliva stinks like glue
we are all bruised manganese

nous sommes tous Rimbaud

—————————————-

Robert Lort

© Robert Lort 2002

Adam Pettet

© copyright Adam Pettet 2004

‘A white dancing-girl went through their blood laughing‘ – Lucian
Blaga

TRIAL (The First)

dawn was dragging her wings among the tears

Old ways mixed into new metaphor,
old habits hiding ancient truth.

Beneath the blackened railway bridge
the watch trick broke my mind.
A dark coat letting in a breeze,
two broken fingers,
his hand a dirty bandage.
Glass eyes,
new tracks,
time breaking down squealing.

A dog barking, rabies ravaging a futile mind
a sigil burned in its forehead.

A crippled horse pulls a rickety wagon
as prostitutes flash their cunts
in lucid dreams.

Footsteps in the dark,
the pavement an empty grave.
a watch,
a trick?
two broken fingers and the dawn waking.

TRIAL (The Second)

cried in monotone

He arrived again in the night. Two fingers
tapping, his coat stinking of
viniger pockets full of orange
peel buiscits full of rind.

My eyes were opened, the laughter of a toothless gypsy
hoarde echoing in the darkness.

What warrior am I to write a history? Traces of warning, dark
trees, sheep bleeting in the mist.——————————-

Adam Pettet

© copyright Adam Pettet 2004