Room Mate, Gidgealpa
Top bunk
Bottom bunk
His snore has guts
– The bed leaks
I wake to hear it fall,
on me
His piss,
He’s pissed
I don’t know what to do
I’m afraid
I’m hurt
I feel guilty for him
sorry for myself
At the same time …
He’s fifty-one, I’m twenty-two
No experience, me
He slept in piss for 2 years
The others next door laugh & talk
HIS SNORE HAS GUTS
His snore is all guts & no life
He lives out of a suitcase
Merchant Marine, Navy as well
No teeth, he chews
gummily
Complaining all the time
He’s a cook
Tattoos all over
Branded blazer of the Sea-farer’s Union
He turns, tosses, groans, fitful sleep
memory circuits spilling centuries
of cellular seed
Ken, Ken, y’cunt!!
Whassamatta!, hrrmph … snore
YA PISSED! YA PISSED ON ME
Hrrmph!
Top bunk bottom bunk
His snore has guts!
From The Friendly Street Poetry Reader
Peee!
Peee!
Haitch!
Dee!
that’s p h (4 balance)
de for doo ron ron
Phd (fud) for thought!!!
Yes, even a fantasy is a
physical act.
From Friendly Street No. 16
Freeze-framed From Fire (excerpt)
..weird memory of that footage of flash-flood
a poem long ago somewhere
describing flash-flood as happy puppy
drumbling, tongue-lolling round the bend
and this is earth
air and fire
water not present in time
flash-flood of memory- circuitbreak
1950. eyes of 1950
the Central Guest Home in Lincoln, now an empty block
where I met first Aussie friends
single men in single rooms
and down the corridor
I’m sleeping in bed with Mum and grandma and brother
and every morning slave-mother @ 7:30am
pushes roast beef, lamb, pork, chicken
into the oven and fires it up
Grandma washing sheets in the copper-laundry-copper
Mother takes taxi down Tasman Terrace, mustn’t walk
For fear of seaminess in the perception-grid
and here I am again
at Tunarama
by the silo-temples
the parade a little subdued
burden of recent reality- continuum
tossed-tuna-blood seducing white-pointer
in close, my now drifter-status
worn wearily, tearily
for those all around who had been here
when gardens of delight became terminal
sewers of piping flame flushed
at forest height, grassy knolls
and death, dealt out under the azure bright
What’s wrong with thinking poetry? What’s wrong with wanting words to be able
as blankets, as quelling waters from fullbelly aircraft
corrugated iron
burned white
gun-metal
grey ploughshares
long time gon big willy-willy up north
long time gon the sleepers wake
Field trip
sealed non-trippingly
on a tongue
not tied
but unknotted
and tired
wired
fired
funeral pyred.
From Friendly Street No. 30