Poetry makes nothing happen

When I am more alert, I will ask why I write.

'Why I Write' by Bronwyn Lea







And I will consider the poet's job.

It's the Poet's Job
It's the poet's job to remain forever outside
and forever ridiculed.
To alienate his family and friends,
to be petty and jealous and spiteful,
to fail miserably, show his soft underbelly and
grin like an idiot,
to be like Jesus Christ, Judas and the Buddha.
To chase his own tail,
avoid prizes, accolades and rewards
and never become celebrated.
Wild Billy Childish














And I will wonder what poetry does.

"You were silly like us; your gift survived us all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself, Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its own making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth."
From "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden



















But tonight, because I am not alert, but very sleepy, I will think about the wrong draft of an old story I gave to friend, a draft which collapses in on itself in the last section, and which I later tried to fix up. I think about Bronwyn Lea who took a poetry subject I studied at uni, and how disappointed I was at how cosmopolitan she looked, that she wore makeup and that she wore a Dolce&Gabbana belt, when I want people who call themselves poets to be plain, with no time for the frivolous. Tonight I will think about Wild Billy Childish who featured in Tracy Emin's work, "Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995," and with whom he shared gonorrhea and herpes.

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