January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Agnes Vong Lai Ieng is a postgraduate student at the University of Macau, currently completing a thesis on Macao poetry. In 2006 Vong had three original poems (as well as some translations) in The Drunken Boat’s Chinese supplement. Vong was the assistant editor and a contributing poet for The University of Macau Poets’ Jubilee Anthology and a translator for a selection of Yao Feng’s poems in his recently published Faraway Song. She has just finished a collaborative project with Christopher Kelen on translations, variations and responses to the poetry of Xin Qiji. The resulting book, Spring Wind Brings the Fireworks – is in press with VAC in Chicago and expected to appear in the coming months. Vong’s own book of Macao poems is currently in preparation.
ying yang hotel
a mixture of water and milk
so the Chinese say
it sprang from a fragrant, milky bath
a white towel wrapped her black body
heat sucked up the water
sweating, gasping
a local paper, with compliments
women from afar
in red and black
smiled sweetly at his Rolex
under the blazing sun
half-naked men covered in mud
scaling bamboo, to and fro
sweating, gasping
falling
lover of fairy tales
evening light
a valley of shadows
secrets between my footsteps and
the tangled bushes
a twig from the first branch
for the ash girl
a red apple
for the snowy white girl
a magic door
for the nosy girl
at the end of the valley
my grandmother’s grave
the composer
incense for Buddha
the only order in this pig sty
drink makes blur of reality
sickness of the heart
light burns brighter
the mountain turning grey
my final symphony
a prayer
my orchestra
carried away by a sparrow
and delivered to Buddha
burning incense for me
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in Malta, emigrated to Australia at fifteen, Charles D’Anastasi has had poems published in various publications, anthologies, and on line poetry journals including malleable jangle, wandering dog(UK), Going Down Swinging, and Divan. In 2006 The Melbourne Poets Union published his chapbook The unreliable harbour (Union Poets Series).
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the man in pierre bonnard’s ‘the open window’
he comes home after the monochrome of another day to believe in bonnard’s ‘the open window’ the room vermillion splashed rouged heads straight for the open window stretches a hand in the cool air reaches for the stillness of the trees he comes home to a system of beauty considers himself gripped by the bay in the sky he comes home to the open window some kind of moment quiverings scheming in his head he comes home convinced this is not only bonnard’s room rubs his face in the burning walls he comes home all things midnight a much descended staircase he comes home to the windowsill works the slowness of the hour almost invisible half-man half-bird knows it’s there doesn’t know how it stirs just feels it like the fire in his throat he comes home to the open arms of the window the smell of pine inhales the moment flies past the comfort of the window’s ledge
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January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cath Vidler edits Snorkel (http://www.snorkel.org.au) a literary magazine specialising in creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders. Her poems have most recently appeared in Turbine, Trout, Otoliths and Nthposition. Her first chapbook, Cloud Theory, is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (http://www.puncherandwattmann.com).
Five Collaborations with the Google Poetry Robot
1. It’s late
It’s late. I buy DIY bonsai potato home shrines. I wish to see The World on the Internet. I might Cheat if the original painting is not framed by titles like Falcon 4 etc. My favorite food is still more secure than Windows! I hope to spend 2 nights at the Apple Store online or at any site based on Xoops 1. I dream that one day all volcanoes on Earth are shrunk to epigrams that inspire wonder and provoke a buildup of Alternatives.
2. The first person.
The first person is a relative of mine. I think this is FUNNY. My mom Calls me Brenna but my friend Leonard has recently quit using names because he thinks they are flimsy firewalls.
3. Lists.
Lists. I work at Burger King Corporation. Bill Gates was Once Arrested for switching Policies on the Use of Knowledge. I love my Mac because when I’m hungry it says Here you Are and gives me a Link to a story about a Different Kind of Blue. Menus. You never get tired of reading Commercialized Lists. I like to eat ‘Cultured’ items but Vows to stop rubbish-dumping at Multistorey buildings are exempt from nutrition.
4. See you later Alligator
See you later Alligator. It’s still too early to commit. My cat is going into Opposition because many districts base their curriculum on areas of Special Expertise. I hope you have time to Think ahead. My favorite Word often changes depending on current errors. Adios. I enjoy Flying low over farmland in South Georgia and its associated Enterprises in India including Sinde. I learn Greek phrases and indications of Geographical origin. Thank you again for having me in your Language.
5. Winter in my Garden
Winter in my Garden is asleep and twitching softly. I saw deserted trenches and the difficult Path. I want One Of Those Days when the blank page fills up with Boeing and applicable privacy Laws are better defined. Why do I Have to make my avatar look like the second most Popular recipe from kelloggs? I never Promised to fix the roof while there’s a galaxy to grow. I might See the Boom shadow falling on the Cedars.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Keri Glastonbury is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She completed a Doctorate in Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney, in 2005. Her thesis, titled ‘Shut up nobody wants to hear your poems!’, staged a friendly title bout between painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen, two male grunge auteurs of her generation. She has published two books of poetry, Hygienic Lily (Five Islands Press, 1999) and super-regional (Vagabond, 2001) and has an unpublished manuscript ‘Grit Salute’ (2004). She is an editor of the small publishing company, Local Consumption Publications (www.localconsumption.com) who are this year releasing the title Strawberry Hills Forever by Vanessa Berry.
hygenic italy
‘but are you social nexus or cultural interstice?
that’s the type of question the tour guides
won’t answer’
Ted Nielsen, ‘Pax Romana’. ( effusive:
you’d like to be differently enculturated, though in the end
there’s a charm in being in relation to yourself, irrespective
like age, that won’t excuse anyone—& yet, tonight
you fell in love with her impeccable rendition of rebellion
so braced, like a sleek carriage with a hybrid accent
acquired abroad. you, all the while, way too verbal
is it really freeform? even the american was grounded, smoothly
modulated, listening to your mental garbage cleansing—as the
roman sky turned cobalt blue against the mustard church
you’re surrounded by new exteriors & too many saints
as suddenly all your tropes seem so maligned—being gentle with
yourself to coax the high down
what a lot of english you can sprout
( hygienic italy:
pigeons and satellite dishes occupy the event horizon
across vast condominium rooftops
perhaps fluttering anti-angels leave the basilica
for the smashed terracotta hill of testaccio
or form emergent, from the grunge and gravitas
but are they, even ala
laurie anderson, luce iragary, jorie graham
your ideal intermediatries?
at a point where art & money cleave together
or apart, a plaque on the wall tries to unite
in new ideas and faith in talent
heralding all our smug alterities (eg: poems)
a situated intelligence
which leaves you to gesticulate on the streets
the mastery of repeating language acquisition
something else you always yawned at, until now
a sonorous cipher, you wish—along with a fiat cinque cento
for hooting around
( bella figura:
the driver in pigtails and furs tries ardently
to elicit more than physiognomy’s silent science
the movement of the car naturalising the city streets
to a point of cathexis that never arrives
trouncing your fledgling accretion process
your fringe mown in an attempt at suburban sharp
& more like, a member of hush. you sense
you’re surrounded by voracious readers & translators
not afraid to overshoot the mark.. so, it’s preferable
to internal monologues, or the self-deprecations
of the ‘performative’ you’re used to
or cowering in the face of the high femme
once summer breaks out the mini-skirts
followed by a joke about trains full
of perfumed boys playing pocket billiards
( 3rd rate hotel:
a sandy rain, born devotional
roughs a sirocco sky like stone wash
while you’re breaking the settee
of arts council fantasy you believe it
when she says rome’s been spoilt
post the 60s but let’s not get glib
there’s always memory studies
and expatriate experts even angels
have right wings as if a counter-reformation
on traffic infringements might start
a spate of double-parking in perth
her sister-in-law as howler monkey
so it bothers us, like passive smoking
the botticelli’s so blanchett
& woo, i’m feeling so bohemian like you
( justified & ancient:
a slumped angel
headstone and gramsci’s grave
find you among the conifers
& a posthumous library
weighted by voluminous spines
& a short shelf-life
a shift to the affective level
getting your attention
like heavy handed art house
reading old books
has you surprised to learn
the dog ‘shat’ in the tucker box
though for the most part
you remain disengaged as a cabby
on imperial administrative interests
driving home the episteme
( carravagio:
a rapid summer downpour, street’s full of motorini
horns and sirens, while you’re buffeted along
plateau upon plateau—jargon relative
as rabbiting on, whatever else concomitant with that
one day molar, next molecular—illuminated manuscript
or subcontracted signwriter, THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT
in 500 point georgia bold—a question of flow
god is a vector monster, remaining beneath, above
& within the product—or just shot through
your spiritual highs make you reach for the love addiction guide
as you will the lines closer together, into a thrumming scaffolding
no grumpy bastard could use to translate or reproduce
later, rain sprinkling in through the roof’s natural shower rose
wandering home from the family palazzo, the etonian accent
of the prince roller-skating round the ballroom
the squeamish pope in red ‘too real’—& st john the baptist
in nomenclature only, a wry tuft of adolescent pubic hair
soft, as upholstered walls in genovese velvets
( brava:
infused by gradients of atmosphere, as the city’s spring
makes the laundromat cheery and deferred purchasing
limns the shopfronts, a threshold away from murano glass
and your exquisite ambivalence. the street’s pock marks
the pique arousals. poor pride, as well as prada
street vendors assuming you’re nordic, demure, pure
& full of forgetting in the self-image quiz show
things just playing out, remnants of the
feminine, adjusting your antenna—to appreciate
bras and leather goods in the windows
wondrously—& no magazines have colonised
the space you are in. you won’t enter the stores
and cultural discretion will thrive on these glimpses
the body there, but you’re not in the driver’s seat
perhaps you thought it was the passenger side
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hsien Min Toh has published two collections of poetry, Iambus (1994) and The Enclosure of Love (2001). His work has also been published in periodicals such as Acumen, Atlanta Review, the London Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is also the founding editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (www.qlrs.com).
Snake Wine
Not until my second last morning did I break
beyond Pasteur Street to Ben Thanh market,
whose exterior did not hint at the dimensions
of its accepting harvests, and the way I got there
was by braving the Saigon traffic on a pillion seat,
darting in between and around swarms of scooters
and taxis trying to make it through the same junctions
all together, while the wind of my helpless movement
blew the scent of the woman in front of me,
with tickling wisps of her hair, at me; but this is not
about her, or how she would start with lightly humoured
petulance whenever I strode into her room. Rather,
after twenty minutes of flicking our fingers through
handmade chopsticks with accompanying ivory rests
and miniature dolls selling the fantasy of a Vietnam
subtly curved in áo dài, we came across rows and rows
of violin-case-shaped bottles filled with yellow wine
and a baby king cobra each, glassy eyed, stiff-tongued,
fangs visible as with intent, its patterned grey hood
enriched by a deep orange dot of Chinese wolfsberry.
I wondered if this could be an appropriate gift for you;
you hatched in the Year of the Snake, and you had the bite
of a woman. We assume these coils are dead,
but I remembered the news report on the Thai bachelor
who had uncorked a bottle only for the cobra
to spring out from organic hibernation to bury those fangs
deep into his knuckles, and I thought that you would
surely never taste the liquor if I told you that story,
which would mean it could rest on your bedside ledge
as a permanently dreamcatching souvenir of me.
Lemons
When life gives me lemons, I make lemonade.
As a boy, I detested the taste of lemons,
that sharp sourness captured in a grimace,
but recently I have had so much citrus fruit
that I’ve adjusted to the attack of the acid.
The other day I found myself biting into
lemon wedges for the juice, as though
they were orange slices. It made me think
how during our university days we bought
bags of lemons from Sainsbury’s because
they were cheap. I squeezed yellow halves
till my hands tingled for an hour, while you
turned a heap of sugar into syrup. No matter
what we felt about that white snowdrift of guilt,
we knew through trying that there was a point
at which a virtuous loss of sweetness
turned to an uncomfortable biting of tongues,
and if we were to let doubt cool all morning
in the fridge we would have the poor choice
of hot syrup or watering down painfully
squeezed lemonade. We hadn’t learnt, though,
that the same applies to unheaped denials,
that belief sustains the unspoken like a wound,
and that even if the nice thing about lemons
is that unlike blood oranges they don’t stain
no matter how careless you are with them,
their invisible ink shows when you try
suspected surfaces with heat. I suppose
you can’t compare lemons and oranges,
but if you know the only red nettings to end up
in my fruit compartment hold Valencia oranges,
you’ll understand my surprise, with the wedges,
to have discovered aftertaste, the lingering
in the mouth of a peculiarly silky sweetness
that is inestimable relief after the assault.
Trench Digging
When our boots hit the beach at Punggol, it was two to a trench
for all except the sick list, but then there was a command post
to be dug in, and so it was like coming on to score an own-goal
when one was supposed to have been on the bench,
because it seemed the sick list could come in handy.
All day we chipped at the sand. Letting our pride sting us
into motion, ten of us yoked our bad backs and asthma attacks
to the land. “C’mon there, give us a hand,” we poked out
at the drivers, more from the duty of making their lazy cigarettes
carry an incremental tithe in guilt, as the leftenants were away
poring over their maps, in the shade of a tembusu tree.
Oh, yes, 2LT Lee came around every now and then,
fresh as a temperate daisy, to show us how we could dig
faster than we could, but when his walkie-talkie charged the air
with static it seemed he had to be elsewhere. It was still us,
after all, who chopped the beach with changkuls, filled
three thousand sandbags, clanged iron pickets into resisting sand
with the monkey ram as though we were ringing the time,
and lined the walls with corrugated iron sheets to hold out
the slow, treacherous crumble. An hour after dusk, the final
sandbag in place, we squinted at the low prow and the crossbeams
of what we had built, and wished that we could shoot at it.
Then the leftenants moved in. Set up their signal sets
and the portable radio receiving 98.7FM. As for us,
we moped about the tonners, between the chilly night
and the stifle under canvas, the pebbles and the deep blue sea.
It seems the CO came round and was rather pleased.
One month on, our leftenants wore fresh bars on their epaulettes.
We knew what we had done, and though we didn’t care
about the trench I didn’t dare say that was good enough,
and what anger this could rouse would not be scattered
like phosphorous-tipped bullets into the invading sea.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark O’Flynn has published two collections of poems The Too Bright Sun, and The Good Oil with Five Islands Press. A third is forthcoming in 2007. Eleanor & Eve, his seventh play, was produced at Railway Street Theatre in Sydney in 2003. His novel, Grassdogs, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife, two children and one dog.
Japanese Student
[Language is the house of being – Heidegger]
In the house of doing
the origami crane
or is it a seagull
becomes the residue
which we praise to the limits
of our clumsy grammar.
Pause to collect
all our thoughts about cranes.
We mime abstractions
and screwy semantics,
a tiny trout in its beak.
A paper crane is a door
that stays open too long
on a lake of amputated reflections.
The phrase book a tennis ball between us.
Hilarity is the difference
between pig and fig.
We are learning much.
What she thinks
is etched on her face
like an atrocity,
a sundered morpheme.
Fear has no gender
but its bare bones
and the inability to speak.
We make cruel signs of soothing.
In the house of bumbling
the syllables of my cooking
are the unspoken stuff of nightmares.
Her attitude to lizards tells us apart.
We swap no worries, and good tucker
and konichiwa but this is not enough.
In silence we cannot be silent.
Tears have no culture
beyond the distance
of a loveless boy
with a trout for a heart
who does not understand
the word kindness.
Language is mute
in the house of drowning
where she is lowered into the water
bonsai sprouting in her mouth
tongue’s words pecked
alive from her gills
by an origami crane.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nathan Curnow has recently toured Australia and New Zealand with his first book of poetry No Other Life But This (Five Islands Press). With assistance from the Australia Council he is writing a second collection of poetry based on his experiences staying at ten haunted sites around the country.
Paris dreams
Paris dreams,
draped in satin, her smooth legs
as long as her guest lists. She dreams
and when she does, Paris dreams of Paris
or of Empire unravelling like an asp
beneath the lid. New York, Las Vegas,
London, Tokyo, Hollywood: five parties,
her twenty-first as it struck across the globe.
Wardrobe: current. Wardrobe: currency.
Victims are the boys she knew, the young boys
she’ll know tomorrow. On your knees, Hilton.
His commands are just for fun. She plays the ho,
fingered for a finger to wrap him around.
Dreaming ‘Cleopatra’, Paris wakes in tears,
mistakes the hotel air conditioning for a hiss
inside her jewellery box. Dolce, Sebastian and Prince
lick her face, sensing a shift in zeitgeist as Paris
cries for nothing.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ivy Ireland is currently studying an M. Phil in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Ivy has a penchant for mysticism, cosmology and cabaret performance. In 2006, Ivy worked as a co-cordinator for “The National Young Writer’s Festival”, and has performed her poetry at various events including ” This Is Not Art” and “The Peats Ridge Festival” . Currently, Ivy is a co-director of the performance troupe, “The Lovelorn Living Party”. She is one of the Australian Young Poets Fellows 2007.
Wheel
‘For you yourself have created the karma that binds you. You are helpless in its power.
And you will do the very thing which your ignorance seeks to avoid.’ − Bhagavad Gita
1. MULADHARA
Off working for peanuts,
off the books,
off in some country where I was not allowed,
I fell down two flights of stairs
on my base chakra.
I did not see a doctor,
I knew better.
Six months later,
back on a slab in my rightful place,
dissection discovered
I had fractured my coccyx.
That type of thing never heals.
The root:
The grinding bone:
The tail that was:
I began the enquiry:
Injuries to the base chakra,
emotional or physical,
create uncertainty,
birth a wanderlust.
Back in that cold country,
lying prone on my solar plexus,
embalmed in numbing spray Laura’s ma stole
from the Falls Rd hospital,
I planned my escape–
Root cracked and numb,
no personal loophole in spacetime,
no tail to curl around the branches
of my family tree,
no train to wind around my lover as he twitched,
uneasy,
beside my blocked Kundalini.
Him: you’ll be alright,
you don’t need it,
we haven’t had tails for thousands off years,
at least.
Me: we nurse ghosts of all that has come before;
My tail will keep you awake at night
when I am gone.
2. SVADHISTHANA
One red blood rush.
It is correct to say the
sex
chakra contains the obvious pulleys and levers,
our basic understanding of the cycles:
Low heat rising.
The demand.
Whatever comes next.
It is also correct to say it contains all the dead:
The threads are sung back into our bodies,
we fuse them through only to gush them out again.
3. MANIPURA
Sol and Luna got married in my guts.
First flurry was fear,
then undying love,
then temperate flow like the guru said.
For followers of Kali,
union of irreconcilable opposites is All −
wine and illicit sex at night,
yoga and fasting in the morning.
I’m afraid of things that dissipate categories,
that are The Ultimate Aim.
Still, when you caused it,
something snapped in there, like the
corners of my mouth spanning outwards
in cuts.
4. ANAHUNTA
“gone, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, oh what an awakening”
– Heart Sutra
don’t for a second think this one’s going to be about St Valentine or this or that fat goblin with a bow or even you
and me or this and that kissing some such under the waterfall or any other veiled reality the Buddhists tell me I
don’t understand or really participate in nor do I wish to
when I felt the invitation unfold from yours I wanted to hide but instead I wrote back
there is debate over the true colour of the heart chakra some say green of all colours it is compassionate green they
say others say rose pink which makes more sense to me though what would I know and anyway I hate rose pink
does that mean I hate hearts my own heart
that’s melodramatic and ridiculous how could I hate my own heart
in yoga meditation she tells me to pluck the twelve-petalled flower she says it’s gold residing there at the pump site
and send it to some significant one but I get scared that if I do that I won’t have any core to go home to when
it gets too rough out here on the sea of televisions so
I keep it for myself then feel selfish then decide to give it out to everyman
there are actually seven heart centres according to this or that holy text my friend Reuben says he’s got heart
centres in his heels they all represent a different love isn’t there a first principle in all this excess I want the right
doctrine to represent everything I want to feel it feel it for all and sundry no differentiation I want it to be atomic
that which can not be broken down
why does it always end up here at integers
5. VISHUDDA
I had a Inanna icon once,
believed in it,
for she is the oldest and the first.
Once, I held her up to my ear,
so she might say ancient things
my bleating throat could not.
She, too, refused to speak.
I got ill,
laryngitis in all this quiet,
moved house or country.
Somewhere in between,
Inanna fell out of the box.
I had thought she was impervious.
They say if you ask and mean it,
she will appear in the sky, the Great Goddess,
bless you with a boon. Perhaps say something.
There is sky blue where all I can’t say I wish for
There is the non-verbal stored elsewhere
There is the silence held dear haunting blood later
When they adjust a throat chakra,
they whirl the 16 petals to the left to let the emotions out.
The patient might start muttering things uncontrollably.
the first thing I mutter is Science where my bones are kept
the second thing I mutter is God where the disguise is kept
the third thing hints at Unity since I am now impervious
6. ANJA
there is a superstring
replacing the unbreakable
electron with something that
could be snapped
if we desire it
little threads of sea
connecting the
Oh Svaha
topography of my body
to its instigator and
back
through the firegate to
O Agni You
7. SAHASRARA
honey around the outside
inside white
white
like staring at fractals until your brain bursts
sahasrara is the channel vessel
inner lotus of 12 petals
outside honey flower has 960
what’s the meaning of this angel ladder?
why 960?
reclining in a quiet grey bubble
the pineal gland remembers.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jan Owen’s fifth book Timedancing was published by Five Islands Press in 2002. Her Collected Poems is forthcoming with John Leonard Press.
Listening to Bartok
From a distance, this half breath,
played in hesitation as by a child
tasting tomorrow’s saddest rhyme,
is ‘almost’ posing for ‘enough’.
The girl has learnt how want
elides get: this shuddery slow kiss
over her skin’s moist silk ambivalence.
She casts off doubt like a classic gown
for music’s shift. No moon.
Thyme and oregano crushed as in a book
exhale a double scent like irony
which guarantees nothing,
warning too soon the game is spent.
Lemon verbena is taking their weight,
ants trekking his arm, grit prickling her back.
From the starry overleap of night
only Saturn leans down.
The lines of a face arise within
and travel for a lifetime:
dry riverbeds, cliffs, endless dunes,
valleys of pomegranates and figs.
Swansdown is bringing them home
with ylang-ylang, almonds and apricot wine,
horizon playing horizon out
like a skipping game till extravagance
spills its hoard, all cost deferred.
Must a promise back away from its own mirage?
Dark is no antidote.
The lame night-watchman lurching by
has stroked her thigh three times.
Above: the Horse-head Nebula stretched out easy,
130 million light-years, nose to throat.
He slaps the sweat of his neck,
the tiny intimate bite of an ant,
and the borrowed music slips back into its den.
But the gist of shimmer’s payload
is grist in the mill, Shrove Tuesday:
such small eternities – C sharp, G minor,
quarter notes from the oud.
And the least tlink of a pebble
will swear time’s round.
Left hand plays a sombre tune.
The kernels float in their syrupy wine
like ancient embryos. Or dark souls levitating.
Deliciously bitter, and all they knew of love.
Walking Alone
At night in the jacaranda suburbs,
over the wavy pavers
faking Escher under their purple season,
I pass a lit white wall where shadow and I
make a transient couple. If I say to him
Pattern is also obsession at bay,
he’ll reply: Your habits recrossing
their own predictable paths
are neither a soothing of edge nor a safety net.
I rent upstairs on a street of anti-doubt,
valiantly wrought iron gates, orderly borders,
twin lions and urns. Symmetry rules.
Between the spill of lamps,
crisp footstep-clicks are company
when shadow is cancelled out.
Darkness, like divinity, casts none,
but welcomes in the light:
Damayanta seeking Nala
concealed in the circle of gods
all bearing his face and form
knew him in the blink of an eye
by sweat and dust, and by the shadow he cast.
I meet no camouflaged gods,
but these spent bugles of jacaranda
come from that fading place where gratitude
chooses mortal being over heaven.
Only shadow knows your secret shapes.
To own it well is trust’s defence,
denying it makes massacre:
at best, your unlearnt life is on the line;
at worst, quiet queues are musicked
into the death cathedrals.
And here, for destination, are the roses’
memory scent, four hundred names
gilding the stone arch to the park.
The same two cannons flank the lawn
as when my brother and I played
war on the slippery-dip barrels −
Ack-ack-boom, you’re dead. My turn!
Over the road, the Christmas pine’s decked out,
and St Augustine’s battlements
flash red and green, the season’s spiritual traffic lights.
The cypress mopoke tolls his lugubrious name.
Turning back, I pass three men and a bottle
knocking off work at an outside table.
Further down, on the floor of a closed café,
someone is huddled between two chairs.
Then fashions, skimpy in orange and blue,
the Fairy Boutique and the quilt shop,
antique and liquor store,
Videoland lit up, Mitre 10 dimmed down.
And here’s my street
with its stepping-stones of yellow light.
Past twenty-four’s magnolia
in full flower like a roost of souls,
to the last dark stretch where shadow and I must part,
slipping back easily into our warm shared night.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gwee Li Sui teaches literature at the National University of Singapore. His graphic novel Myth of the Stone (1993) was published to critical silence; it is out of print today and its publisher has since wound up.Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998), his volume of humorous poems, was not meant to be published; it was privately circulated before a selection was bravely issued under the same name.
Last Death in Iraq
9 April 2003
Of course, collectively,
It made perfect sense.
The day is glowing,
People cheering,
The old is no more.
So the last man to die
In Saddam’s Iraq
Finds himself thinking
One day like
The men in the
White House
Like the Christians
Like I do
The morning I pick up
My pen to write
Against a war that is
Already over.
[Untitled]
Confucius! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
Thy folks have need of thee! They have become
All bureaucrats: pens, forms, letters, tiresome
Ping-pong matters − O how our old men cower
To one corner and wet their Eisenhower
Trousers! Are we no more than this feared sum?
Then raise again thy cane and beat us mum;
Teach us good sense, manners not to overpower!
For thou alone art most qualified and smart:
Thou art the poster boy of this strange age
That sees in paperwork a privilege.
So mock us: in the name of Ancient China,
Save us from more red tape and its counterpart—
Even more circulars blowing its tuba!
The Blinding Truth
Christmas 2004
What I cannot see I cannot see—
Cannot see intelligence in nature, the tree in the bird,
The pattern in the yellow an angsana forms,
The fact that something else thinks in this moment I scruple,
How the world thinks and how I think I think as I watch you think,
The colour of my own brown pupil in yours,
The practice of our faith, a fixing in words,
The shape of each day to be speared through the dark.
When you beam and talk of rooms besieged by many corners,
I cannot find the verbal house in the labyrinth you call home;
And entrepreneurs are not my heroes, nor progress progressive.
When you deem global evil a poor shadow, the trick of subtle good,
I imagine how, on an old bed ten minutes away, the night
Is not the ticking of a grand clock which tallies for dawn.
Your hung Christ brings Sunday peace, mine hysteric living;
Yours knows property prices and backs instinctive wars,
Mine flies into the corridors of discussion where nothing is owned,
Where all weapons shall be beaten into the humanities.
The moving sun, your happy miracle of the same, is still your star:
I cannot see how such occurrences should describe religion at all,
Why I cannot see black, brown, yellow, a tree, a bird, stupid nature—
All else a perilous rupture that connects.
Oedipus Simplex
Who’s the idiot who says
if you meet Buddha on the road
kill him?
If you meet Buddha on the road
leave him alone,
don’t kill anyone,
and don’t listen to stupid advice.