Glen Murdoch

Glen Murdoch has been involved with Friendly Street Poets for some 25 years and held various committee positions. He was also co-editor of Fluorescent Voices Friendly Street Poets No. 21. He has, in the past, been involved in co-ordinating a number of performance venues e.g. Red Hot Writers at the Fringe Festival, Nutz at Boltz and Open Mike at the Fringe Festival. He then ‘took leave’ from the performance field and became Consultant Editor to the poetry and poetics magazine SideWaLK. He is published in magazines/journals around Australia.

Doesn’t Matter

(Coorong, South Australia)

dead wind blows
over    earth
scarred    remains
white bones
twisted ant ridden    branches
old posts reminders of past still got wire and
hole
only don’t fence in anything anymore
 
salt water pan blast
one footprint crunch     old bleached blackfella
skull
retrace step
blinded white eyes scorch    pupils
teeth grate    salt
heat hit like hammer on head
turn around
lost
fall down for joke
maybe don’t get up –
doesn’t matter.
 
From Friendly Street Poetry Reader 19

I am the Bomb

I am the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki:
I am the Deepening Air/the Volcanic Typhoon that followed The
    Thrust
I am the Sucking Reaches of Voided Pockets of Split Frauded Atoms
    scurrying in the Wake
I am the waves that heralded the ripples that were heard around the
    world
I am the Gigantic Eye that froze open in horror/wonder as the Cowboy
    Plunder raised whoopee hat on his mercurial black Harley
    Davidson descent
I am the bricks and mortar that rained Absolute Hell on the people
    below
I am the Heart of a Nation pumping yellow blood for Christsake
I am the endogenous disease mankind has been waiting for
I am the cure all cancer for every panacea
I am the loud shout of every unheard word since The Beginning of
    Time
I am His Master’s Voice in Monotone – my hand down my throat
    feeling in the darkness for a soul, and finding nothing but dank
    air; fingers probing crushed velvet hanging on meathooks
I am the Tomb of the Unknown soldier looking backwards down the
    barrel of a gun
I am Tarzan looking for Jane and finding her cooking Cheetah on a
    spit
I am the Stranger in the Night eating my own shadow, and Frank
    thinks it’s funny
I am dripping wet flesh On Heat
I am the canned sardines that John West rejected
I am Tutankamen’s Tomb but somebody has been here
I am the Archangel Gabriel lit with neon lights exploding
I am every grain of wheat blackened in Ash Wednesday’s fire
I am Christmas but there won’t be any New Year
I am the thought you had before you thought
I am every Mother’s blue eyed son and am Radiant
I am The Voice that echoed ‘Fuck You…Jesus Christ!’
I am your worst nightmares come to fruition
I am the Solar System in Total Eclipse of the Nuclear Minute
I am the Operator without a Ticket
I am the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner Lost on a Sea of Ignited Petrol
I am the Creature from the Black Lagoon blinded with Universal Light
    after being photographed by God (Blake is dead)
I am the enemy sleeping within
I am the newly discovered antibiotic ‘Neon’
I am what had to be done
I am the Evolution of the Species
I am the Ghost of the Beagle with Darwin stark mad exposing his
    genitals on the leeward side
I am the Thudded Impact that Bruised the Bowels of Mother Earth
I am Johnny Come Marching Home Again only you don’t recognise
    me
I am Existential Fantasy thriving on Dry Ice Lit Licking Winds
I am the clue to Superman’s real identity only Lois is sucking him off
    with her Kryptonite Mouth and can’t speak right now
I am Christ resurrected and brought back to earth with a copy of
    Susan Jeffer’s book – Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway – as THE
    Bible and instructions from Dad on what could be done over Lent
I am the Dream of the Immortals at the Command on the Cartwheel
    of Human Expense
I am the rock group ‘Limited Edition’ making Billy Thorpe and the
    Aztecs sound like Marilyn giving Pillow Talk
I am the Young American listening to ‘i heard the news today, oh boy’
I am 3960655 Clipsal Safety Switch Co. ring if you have an emergency
I am steaming noodles dripping down Louis Armstrong’s legs – snail
    trailing red flesh
I am the bleached whale’s blubber stomach extending beyond reach
    and bursting forth all manner of rotted flesh and smell/filth
I am The Catapult that got Lost on a Ferry
I am the driven snow that makes people happy and kills them in an
    instant
I am the Ancient Guns of Pericles breathing
I am warmed marmalade oozing down Japanese gutters in Sleeves of
    Impossibility
I am the Creole’s bladder in a Hurricane
I am Heroin in a Hurry
I am Mickey Mantle’s lost glove thrown between Bombardier and
    Pilot somewhere over the Sea of Japan
I am The Great Mushroom Cloud that Sitting Bull had a vision of
I am everybody’s face who dreaded what they already knew
 
From Friendly Street No. 20

Hopper Afternoon

(after Julian A. Zytnik’s “I take my coat”)

It was a Hopper afternoon
a kind of pastl
turquoise haze streakd
Van Gogh yellow-blood splatterd
red-crazed mercury rolld-glass
piercing-eyd afternoon
a kind of Denis th Menace
Chainsaw Massacre masquara
Alice Cooper afternoon a kind of
EE Cummings moon winchd
n pullyd back into place afternoon twistin
gutrrd alleywaytime shouldering a James Dean
jus lit cigaret smouldering
raincoat collar shitty neon night wastd
afternoon a cockroach kind of helium
Kafkaesque thay dnt built doorwys lyke
thay used to afternoon
a daubd kind of Eliot masking palette furrowd
brow of internal chaos external deep
philosophical – pipe crackd wife afternoon
thrown across the Ezra Pound asylum-emblazoned
stratosphere under HIS instructions
that shaped the afternoon (of the
Wasteland)
im Hippity
Hop for I love t hop fr im a kangaroo
but thay put me n a cage (fr eagles) nw I lives n the zoo
Hippity Hop Boing Boing Plippity plop
Boing Boing

From Friendly Street No. 26