I'm not a bird you catch and release.

Damien Jurado- Last Rights

All the hymns
I sing are
goodbye songs
for the sins
I've loved.

A poem and two newspaper articles that birthed it.

A Tree

This is where the city finishes.
This is where fences sink in dust
around the civic cemetery on the fringes.
These are the trees that pray
for the frustrated souls underneath.
This is where tombstones grin
like old men's teeth.
This is where old men sleep uninterrupted,
Where I built my pillar of sins.

This is where the city finishes,
The city where I fathered my children,
Sipped drinks with silly women teaching
girls to giggle, listened to fights,
practiced my spitting and steered
the little wife
down our Sunday drive in the evening.
As the sun sinks
She's a denim clad minx.

This is where the city finishes
and insects own the kitchen.
The wife listens to Country and Western
as I rinse the dishes
and watch her jeans
torn at the ankle, hitched
on the ripped fly wire screen.
Her hair is lank, her wrinkles
Open into eyes or a smile.

When will I leave the city
with my two pairs of boots
and her jewelry?

When will she leave,
riding shotgun
with the man who lights her cigarette?

When we undress for bed
I wear my body like a threat.

This is where the city finishes
by the cemetery where we interred
my father when he felt
that fifty years was sufficient.

This is where the city finishes
Where I wait by my father's plot
when desire keeps me up all night
and the wife stays out late.

This is where the city finishes,
Where I can't sleep for jealousy
And I offer my children as Christmas angels
to the cemetery trees.

Sydney Morning Herald
The Monthly

Fashion culture, about which I know nothing, fascinates my most unsociable moods. The models, nothing more than clotheshorses for the outfits they wear, symbolise a belief in art above humanity, perhaps the same belief that prompted Andy Warhol to say of a friend who committed suicide, "I wish he'd told me so I could have filmed it."

If only life were cut from such simple fabric.

Suicide- Andy Warhol

I always become jealous when my waitress takes orders from another table.

Patient as a farmer
Patient as a mathmetician
Patient as revenge
Patient as a convalescent
Patient as a tree
Patient as a prisoner
Patient as a sunken ship

a story about love and desperation

In the 19th Century, whiling away their quiet hours on 12 month voyages, whalers carved illustrations of the women they left behind into whale teeth and bones. The artwork, called scrimshaw, captures the leisure time of sailors away from home and families, who pursued their fortunes in the blood and fat of sperm whales.

Ships carried up to 36 men, sailing sometimes two years away from home, away from wives and children and lovers. Ships of men scoured the sea for signs of whales, men who at the sighting of a whale were lowered in small boats and gave chase with oarstrokes, judging where the whale would next surface they hove to, a harpooner prepared to throw his weapon into the animal's flank. Harpoons were attached by rope to the boats which were dragged after the whale as it bucked and dove and finally died. The whale was towed back to the ship, lifted by it's flukes, stripped of its blubber, and the blubber shoveled into kettles where it was melted down into oil. A sperm whale could deliver over 100 barrels of oil. Whale products were sold and the wealth divided amongst the crew. From the early 1700s until the 1850s whaling was a major industry; whale oil lubricated the machines that ushered in the Industrial Revolution.

Whaling ships carried weather beaten men watching the sea to war against an animal, to open it up, to unpack its harvest of oil which offered a glossy sheen to cosmetics, was used for face and hand creams and created the finest soap. Candles made from spermaceti from the sperm whale illuminated intimate dinners and neither smoked nor smelled. Baleen, tooth and bone were used in corset stays, in the hoops for skirts, hairbrushes and jewellery. Ambergris became perfume and love potions. The wild whale was transformed into delicate articles of femininity. Scrimshaw captured images of lost sweethearts and filled hours which held nothing else but the smell of whale flesh.

In beards and sweat, isolated, having seen no women since their last stop at port, men clung to sails for a sight of an animal to fight until it would forfeit its treasure of undergarments and ladies' scent.

The whale gives himself up, thrashing, to the power of desire.

"Geese are monogamous, whales are essentially unfaithful" -The World Council of Whalers. (http://www.worldwhalers.com/ A website that includes whale recipes).