Catching a bus offsets the cost of addiction. The Australian Stands at the front yet belongs at the back. Things Can be learned from browsing the fronts of books, but There’s no free ride when it comes to Reading Entering a bus in the middle’s Like an operation and causes rage from the Jonahs inside Trying to escape. Being nervous like a word expecting to Be edited, finding that it’s shifted place. No one takes Logic that seriously; they take breaks and find themselves Refreshed and to some extent alive. When translating we consider The age of each word and the relative respect due Yet a bus may come at any Time and even on arriving refuse to go Further or in the right direction. At the end of The night’s service, most passengers have been shifted around and The stops are empty, except for those who don’t want To go anywhere. They are the full-stops The ones insisting on shelter. In the line-up There’s one maroon coat or the drabness is relieved By a scarf printed with tulips. When did they arrive? Will we see them again? Perhaps in a much larger Space, where the scarf will appear like a foreign Word or note of light and not as it does
Now, a fireplace
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The Blue Wheelbarrow
I wake and I take my waking pillow & cover it with warm milk. Things Are not as they Are Black chickens are popping on the piano lid Again; Canto V Dorothy says dragging On the chords. Years of widening Undies, Canto LXXI drones Olga. Anything, anything Under a bridge can be a giraffe A blue wheelbarrow can become a platypus, barking At a viper In the night. The viper too cold To respond. Some people make images, others swallow them In the background – though life is not A stage. When we read we put our hat Under the pew and reach for Its felt when done. Our hand is bitten, glazed A blue chicken. Things are – perhaps In reverse. Canto minus I snaps Mary. The foreheads Of the National Front. The ideograms Of purification. The nougat scene. There is a way Of saying that may result in laying A boy runs around, or boys, scared Of talk, weather, tools, shit Aesthetics, music, stories of paternity. It’s not that I disagree, it’s that I don’t find It meaningful. I didn’t want to open up because Of the smell, which became an Analogy that you found in a dream, but I found in A hymn, being the beneficiary of so much holiness I mean so much finger. I am A sick biscuit, tracing the expressions of windows In the aftermath of friends mating In the ashes. The blue wheelbarrow decides … Everything is As they were and are. The War Of 1812. The Coniston Massacre. Honour the method that Allows It’s not what I’ve seen that counts: emu wrenches Off spinifex like they were chewing firecrackers
Giraffe pulls screaming wheelbarrow around the yard or rain
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Things Known Vaguely Come Into View
I heard a sound like a wombat gnawing At Songs of Central Australia but was only A light hail falling On Ned Kelly’s helmet. My wife drives by in An Yves Klein Red HD Holden, while I make do with a photocopy of A secondhand pushie because I have nowhere to go I’m at the Disco of the Finzi-Continis because I work in the music industry and I like to boogie All night long. The night’s theme is ‘Dance On Mussolini’s Grave’. Scott Walker and Marc Almond dance to the left of a reproduction Of the original AA battery. The perfected now looks like failure & the unfinished a success. Look At this dress made with an iron and A bale of hay: it is the father & the mother in one. When you come here You must say ‘Measure for Measure’ or ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ Or you will never be invited into an Elizabethan home. You will live and die Among hedgehogs and wild boar, with your own reflection in A fountain for human company and a plant as A postcard pal. When the medium is corrupt Everyone pays for it, sometimes at A discount. Gifts tend to make you forget this Everyone tells you where the real Is, that the beautiful is where the tarantula lives Even if they’re not home, because of the increase In lightning, pollution and right-wing popularity. After A large dinner You may walk down the flagstones thinking of Thredbo & Jindabyne and bushfires A celibate Hare Krishna devotee wears orange Yet milk direct from the Virgin is blue. It Is not enough to take A bus to the park, you must find A storybook object such as a green apple Or yellow riding-hood. I will be there gazing At ‘Father’s Playing Their Sons’ Guitars in A Garage’ by Jeffrey Smart, with a jealous look On my face that I learned from Isabelle Huppert’s fingernails ‘Upside Down’ is playing & flies come. My fan not Only keeps me cool but rubs anchovies Into the wounds and they fall to the floor Onto political cartoons from the Balmain Morning Herald depicting Robin Hood playing basketball with his own pumpkin. Pumpkins Are the symbol Of moral strength, though many things pose as them Including those with frost In their handbags: they claim to keep their relics From decomposing. But vines climb up
& down Time like baroque scribble: green means stone’s alive
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© Michael Farrell
Michael Farrell has published five books: ode ode (Salt Publishing), BREAK ME OUCH (3 Deep), a raiders guide (Giramondo), open sesame (Giramondo) and most recently ‘Cocky’s Joy‘ (Giramondo 2015); ‘Writing Australian Unsettlement‘ is out later this year (2015) from Palgrave.
He coedited ‘Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets‘, published by Puncher & Wattmann in late 2009. Recently he cowrote ‘Waste the Alphabet‘ the Dick Diver single. His short story ‘Making Love (To A Man) was published in Overland in 2012. He has recently completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne on experimental poetics in the nineteenth century.
