the last time we met (I can say that now, again)...
still really a first time - for a while the last of many strings
trailing through a snow-surprised London - I noticed
your hair is long; you look like a brighter, better you...
only now I know sometimes, underneath,
we're both the same, more than we admit
it's been hard to extrapolate that for such a long -
my talents only stretching so far into intuition
before they fall off into cavities of imagined lovers, slick with...
there was a last time we met, and it seemed
we actually talked, and the world didn't burn and no one
made you take down any of your lovely walls...
the last time I enjoyed it
Monday, 29 June 2009
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
A small essay...
I do not generally write here as 'me' - the John you may see in the right hand corner of this page - something simple, an outline of a man;
Australian.
Living in London.
Theatre director,
playwright and poet
The reason I do today is...complicated...this is a public space, in the sense that I post things here voluntarily - I include them all as 'poetry' (a few I have been lucky to have published) but for the most part this is a select online record of something I've done since I was 15, a habit...writing 'poems' to deal with, record, enunciate and expand the world I live in and the feelings and emotions I have - often in the moment, often intensely or obliquely. More like capturing the sensation of something in words.
It's my default setting as a writer, not plays or prose really, something in between - a poem. Poetry, like Bukowski says;
...is what happens
when nothing else
can
It's come to my attention that there is, well, other attention paid here. From some dubious sources. I make no real effort to publicise this space, I like the beauty of the internet as somewhere to be publicly anonymous. I delight in the thought really that someone, somewhere is reading this, these things. It's about being read. And perhaps understood.
But I genuinely forget sometimes that, if you wanted to and were determined, it's possible to find this if you knew say my last blog's name or my surname even. Or if someone had given you this information. And it would be easy to read this, and confuse or assume that the things in here (the you's and she's and he's ) were meant as a record of the world as it is, not perhaps how I see or how it might or should or could be.
I'm not the most clear poet sometimes...
I think it was put in my head early on (it was high-school and then compounded in university) that 'good' poetry (the stuff we studied) was by necessity complicated - that it needed a professor or a book or a course to explain it. That that complexity or obtuseness made it 'literary' and not parochial.
I've come, of course to know this is not true and is in fact a dangerous pretension; study can of course reveal facets, great unlooked for gems in a poem, but it cannot substitute for the experience of reading (often out-loud) something again and again or perhaps just once. As T.S.Eliot said;
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
So in a funny way this is a post asking for...forgiveness? no, I don't regret the things I've written here - and a lot of them are real when they occur (often, unsurprisingly at 3am...) but maybe I'm asking for something more like compassion, I suppose and for those that would meddle in the lives of two people already struggling to live out and beyond each other, I'd say pretty much
fuck off.
Australian.
Living in London.
Theatre director,
playwright and poet
The reason I do today is...complicated...this is a public space, in the sense that I post things here voluntarily - I include them all as 'poetry' (a few I have been lucky to have published) but for the most part this is a select online record of something I've done since I was 15, a habit...writing 'poems' to deal with, record, enunciate and expand the world I live in and the feelings and emotions I have - often in the moment, often intensely or obliquely. More like capturing the sensation of something in words.
It's my default setting as a writer, not plays or prose really, something in between - a poem. Poetry, like Bukowski says;
...is what happens
when nothing else
can
It's come to my attention that there is, well, other attention paid here. From some dubious sources. I make no real effort to publicise this space, I like the beauty of the internet as somewhere to be publicly anonymous. I delight in the thought really that someone, somewhere is reading this, these things. It's about being read. And perhaps understood.
But I genuinely forget sometimes that, if you wanted to and were determined, it's possible to find this if you knew say my last blog's name or my surname even. Or if someone had given you this information. And it would be easy to read this, and confuse or assume that the things in here (the you's and she's and he's ) were meant as a record of the world as it is, not perhaps how I see or how it might or should or could be.
I'm not the most clear poet sometimes...
I think it was put in my head early on (it was high-school and then compounded in university) that 'good' poetry (the stuff we studied) was by necessity complicated - that it needed a professor or a book or a course to explain it. That that complexity or obtuseness made it 'literary' and not parochial.
I've come, of course to know this is not true and is in fact a dangerous pretension; study can of course reveal facets, great unlooked for gems in a poem, but it cannot substitute for the experience of reading (often out-loud) something again and again or perhaps just once. As T.S.Eliot said;
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
So in a funny way this is a post asking for...forgiveness? no, I don't regret the things I've written here - and a lot of them are real when they occur (often, unsurprisingly at 3am...) but maybe I'm asking for something more like compassion, I suppose and for those that would meddle in the lives of two people already struggling to live out and beyond each other, I'd say pretty much
fuck off.
Monday, 15 June 2009
nominative and objective
If you think all the you's are you you're wrong
If you think all the I's are unadulterated they're not
In the soft animal body of this poetry I'm hiding
everykind of longing and revelation
But now the lost Rosetta leaves pale & academic
scrabblings, and the sands are coming in
Heaven forbid we talk, that'd be...revealing
I've worked it out - you're afraid of a hole in the logic of
your absence?...or that all that's here on offer are recriminations &
mad demands for closure and truth - like they were
yours to give
I said I missed you yesterday, low and bouncing
but it was in the middle of a dance
floor and I (or the MDMA, you decide) seemed to feel
that dancing and that dj and that I were destined for higher
nitrates, a burst in the night
Don't believe the hype that there's a complete set of lives here, hidden -
under the bed is nothing more than a tent of doonas and the weird
round hope that I still could, if wanted, walk right round
and sit, nearer you
That was a you you, you see...
If you think all the I's are unadulterated they're not
In the soft animal body of this poetry I'm hiding
everykind of longing and revelation
But now the lost Rosetta leaves pale & academic
scrabblings, and the sands are coming in
Heaven forbid we talk, that'd be...revealing
I've worked it out - you're afraid of a hole in the logic of
your absence?...or that all that's here on offer are recriminations &
mad demands for closure and truth - like they were
yours to give
I said I missed you yesterday, low and bouncing
but it was in the middle of a dance
floor and I (or the MDMA, you decide) seemed to feel
that dancing and that dj and that I were destined for higher
nitrates, a burst in the night
Don't believe the hype that there's a complete set of lives here, hidden -
under the bed is nothing more than a tent of doonas and the weird
round hope that I still could, if wanted, walk right round
and sit, nearer you
That was a you you, you see...
Saturday, 13 June 2009
nobody's wife*
when you got...
I just couldn't
when you came back
she was no body's wife
one more thing
she sends her regards
time to get -
it was a good run
what can I tell you
my brother
today like no other
I guess that I miss you
I guess I forgive
you stood in the rain
soaked ribs splayed
(I still don't own an umbrella)
if you ever come by here
yes, well
the trouble
as I see it, there for
maybe I learnt when to get out
if you've a memory
of the set we created
that looked like the house
we shared once,
a tapered diorama
like a school urchin's
fruit-box, filled with
hanging packing-tape
planets with hasty rings
swinging and glittered
it wasn't
to scale
just to see if you're better
putting together
your own own again
I hear that you're building
a gin-bottle Babylon,
a kinda record to your
progress, scratchings
of triumph right?
a cigarette now
since you went away
you seem more you
than ever, it's gorgeous, I love it, another cocktail?
another locked park
meet every train at the station
you came home without living
treat me to a
flake of your life
and I'll get you cut out
by fire-men
tickets you don't use
stubbs and suggestions
maybe I learnt when to get out
from you
* after Leonard Cohen
I just couldn't
when you came back
she was no body's wife
one more thing
she sends her regards
time to get -
it was a good run
what can I tell you
my brother
today like no other
I guess that I miss you
I guess I forgive
you stood in the rain
soaked ribs splayed
(I still don't own an umbrella)
if you ever come by here
yes, well
the trouble
as I see it, there for
maybe I learnt when to get out
if you've a memory
of the set we created
that looked like the house
we shared once,
a tapered diorama
like a school urchin's
fruit-box, filled with
hanging packing-tape
planets with hasty rings
swinging and glittered
it wasn't
to scale
just to see if you're better
putting together
your own own again
I hear that you're building
a gin-bottle Babylon,
a kinda record to your
progress, scratchings
of triumph right?
a cigarette now
since you went away
you seem more you
than ever, it's gorgeous, I love it, another cocktail?
another locked park
meet every train at the station
you came home without living
treat me to a
flake of your life
and I'll get you cut out
by fire-men
tickets you don't use
stubbs and suggestions
maybe I learnt when to get out
from you
* after Leonard Cohen
Friday, 12 June 2009
The Crane Wife
I've lived alone before, and I can do it again
I know you're looking...
How was the premiere?
I can't feel my hands.
I know you're looking...
How was the premiere?
I can't feel my hands.
Sunday, 7 June 2009
it seems this time (3:05 and ripe) that we're not to blame
for a mingled note, a carotid decibel
like a drunk making follow-throughs on whispers,
a spittle homily to disgusted convocations.
heard that he heard about your glamour
and sought the dandy-fine couture of your hand in
slight and ill
how then to think that you, without your plans or
happy days, can't have thought this through...
when in this hour, fixated breathless on a drool-
stained pillow, alternating and aggravating the air-bubble in
my brain (posterior-fossa) - near the part where the cerebellum pokes
out into a spine - and thinking of his thin hands, his thick eyes
pouring and pouring
over you
and why, in this decorum, you didn't care enough to see
the arc of imposition - the fine way you fuck him
and the needles in my nerves that run the length of
the Finchley Rd and down, out to the pebbled sea
and Brighton's lost summers
where, if the fish & chip van doesn't come
we'll serve without
for a mingled note, a carotid decibel
like a drunk making follow-throughs on whispers,
a spittle homily to disgusted convocations.
heard that he heard about your glamour
and sought the dandy-fine couture of your hand in
slight and ill
how then to think that you, without your plans or
happy days, can't have thought this through...
when in this hour, fixated breathless on a drool-
stained pillow, alternating and aggravating the air-bubble in
my brain (posterior-fossa) - near the part where the cerebellum pokes
out into a spine - and thinking of his thin hands, his thick eyes
pouring and pouring
over you
and why, in this decorum, you didn't care enough to see
the arc of imposition - the fine way you fuck him
and the needles in my nerves that run the length of
the Finchley Rd and down, out to the pebbled sea
and Brighton's lost summers
where, if the fish & chip van doesn't come
we'll serve without
Thursday, 4 June 2009
help me bury
He remembers catching lizards in laundry baskets with a mother in a house where the
latches fall off and he is trapped (except for the side window) in the little glory of his room. then Sunday and there is a little
bundle, neat something mewing
sounds like a cat, he thinks, but this cat is pink and it seems to have no hair where there should be hair a strange cat, he thinks but obviously, it will leave.
the cat doesn't leave and instead grows, grows up and out and attached to his mother
all of the day
(and sometimes secretly at night too you see)
so he remembers sneaky one day to push the little thing out the door, roll it down the steps to the drive and down the dark gurgle-hole at the end out to the oysters
and the bay
and he remembers the bat swooping past his mum and her quick, high 'shit' the frizz of her hair then, the arc of the bat and his mother all grown up, pink sweater and
culottes and all and
he thinks there that that little world, his glory, was remarkably large
if you include the dead bats and the pigeons and the rat (half rat really) that time
that riddle the ground of the side-passage you'll have a good idea of the temptation
he remembers finding long and slender white - the knee bone of a hu - horse...horse..
because this acre held a gelding or two in the last rural tipping of the shire into
suburb.
and If you take all Sunday to come back, halfbound wheelchair and all and don't move
again for those three hot weeks, we'll all together drive sombre round - a man-mobile
of strength and worms and dirt and nothing but the tears we're holding back
I'm asking you to walk, again for the time and all, you reached past my face and cross-
snitched an ornamental tree upon my heart, thank you.
latches fall off and he is trapped (except for the side window) in the little glory of his room. then Sunday and there is a little
bundle, neat something mewing
sounds like a cat, he thinks, but this cat is pink and it seems to have no hair where there should be hair a strange cat, he thinks but obviously, it will leave.
the cat doesn't leave and instead grows, grows up and out and attached to his mother
all of the day
(and sometimes secretly at night too you see)
so he remembers sneaky one day to push the little thing out the door, roll it down the steps to the drive and down the dark gurgle-hole at the end out to the oysters
and the bay
and he remembers the bat swooping past his mum and her quick, high 'shit' the frizz of her hair then, the arc of the bat and his mother all grown up, pink sweater and
culottes and all and
he thinks there that that little world, his glory, was remarkably large
if you include the dead bats and the pigeons and the rat (half rat really) that time
that riddle the ground of the side-passage you'll have a good idea of the temptation
he remembers finding long and slender white - the knee bone of a hu - horse...horse..
because this acre held a gelding or two in the last rural tipping of the shire into
suburb.
and If you take all Sunday to come back, halfbound wheelchair and all and don't move
again for those three hot weeks, we'll all together drive sombre round - a man-mobile
of strength and worms and dirt and nothing but the tears we're holding back
I'm asking you to walk, again for the time and all, you reached past my face and cross-
snitched an ornamental tree upon my heart, thank you.
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