Neil Paech is an occasional fruit-picker and English teacher. He has had a long association with Friendly Street poets, having been first published in a Friendly Street reader in 1979, publishing his first collection, The Bitumen Rhino (1986) with Friendly Street, co-edited the No. 14 Friendly St. Poetry Reader (1990) and anthologised in Tuesday Night Live (1993). He has published several further collections of poetry including k is for keeper a is for t.v. (1994).
The Bitumen Rhino
the rhinoceros snorts
and snow falls like dandruff
inside my head
i have a haircut
on the inside out/
and shove shave myself clear back
to the balding bone
to clear enough space
to breathe white frost and catch it
before it hits the ground with a thud
with a spade
i dig the white roots of my hair up
and out of my burrowing brain
white worms for fishing myself up and over
i shake off the clods of thought
and watch them crackle and burn
into a hazy white smoke
white ash
a tourist
i take my head in my hands
and roll it around in my fingers for the feel
of the putty of dream
shake myself up
and tip myself over
to watch the snowing ash fall through my breathing/
i create swirls in a silent movie of wind
and i believe again in the con
of the slow motion grab
and i own the horizon i see over
and corners are straight lines
easily unravelled unbent
while upside down
i am in hunger
with touch
i wolf myself down
From Friendly Street No. 9 and Tuesday Night Live
Ann
when i’m away from her for just one day
i climb down into that day like a black hole
and pull its gravity up over my head
and slowly sink into myself
i lose all my edges
and start to eat myself
i start at my bowels
and move up through my stomach to my head
which i suck out like an oyster in bone
until all that’s left is my mouth
until even that goes
and that’s only the first day. the second
doesn’t bear thinking about
From Friendly Street No. 12 and Tuesday Night Live
zoo: bats/the flying foxes
they hang there
like upside down socks
stuffed with feet
and when they approach too close to each other’s geometries of space
they scream blue murder
like a riot of cats
their heads are doglike
they are dog-gods
that brokenly manipulate their way along the wire on the roof
like pieces of suspicious victoriana
cloaked and shuffling figures shambling their way
through the dusk
on bent sticks
jack-the-rippers
like umbrellas they unfurl and furl
their fog thoughts
they are an architecture of skin
and bone
and fur is an afterthought
as they occasionally drop
to the eucalyptus branches
and shiver and shake as they clumber along
under the cover of dead leaves
upside
down
everything is the wrong way up
except themselves
they have their own perspective
on the moral order of things
by nature
they are apocolytes of the dark
and they shit on you
From Friendly Street No. 16