other side of the fence

Index
not to mention the dog

Alibi

Shortcut

night life

The Rabbit-Proof Fence

Two Cupboards

Bar Code

The Watchers

Soldiers Not Dancing

witness

Ravens

bed

Village Nativity

Picking Friends

Home, 2pm Thursday    

feathers

Serelemar Bay

Seahole

Fire Wood

Affairs of the Heart

another budgie



home


John (aka 'Jack') Bird, who holds the copyright, authorises everybody to copy and plagiarise these poems.
If, as he hopes, you enjoy them then please tell him; if not, please leave him his delusions.


not to mention the dog
                          after reading Hirata Toshiko

after you left
I excised and auctioned off
all empty rooms ~
your white cat (real cat) and I
now live guilt-free in a bedsit

to spite you
I spray-painted everything
virgin white
even our sagging four-poster ~
cat hysterical, got trampled on

dicovered him yesterday
demeowed and flattened out
vet fluffed him up
admitted he’d been your lover
dyed cat matt black for free ~

I remeasure bed (real bed)
on seed catalogue days ringed
for your menses ~
any change will prove prima facie
you're converting bed to a rack

sold a mould
of the imprint your body left
on bed (still real)
to a sex therapist who makes
one-sided blow-up dolls ~

that cat seed
you planted last spring
came up marmalade ~
turned a nice profit in kittens
we sold to tourists as tiger cubs

row on row
of smirking pussycat faces
following the sun
like synchronised pollyannas ~
corps de ballet stem-tail turns

electronic sweeps
of our bedsit have proven
feline urine
is effective bunyip repellent ~
your cat’s tenure is open-ended

me and cat and bed
(all authentic) are totally over it
we don't hate you
just suspect you were never real ~
our room’s too small for rebirthing



poetry index



Alibi

Afterwoods he cradles her body,
rests his head on her chest.
Her legs secure him there,
Heels in the small of his back.

He waits while the lust ebbs,
Becomes an incoming wave of love,
Love as real as that scatter of islands and
Those cockleshells out on the bay.

When he senses her fading he grabs at her –
Too late! she’s already gone... instantly elsewhere
An act of absence. She’s done it before,
Her body left, as if surety for her return,
Her remains entrusted to his care.
The responsibility almost overwhelms him.

He tries to resettle on her body, on his coat,
On this their ledge on Serelemar Cliff. Perhaps
She’s gone on ahead to preview their tomorrow.
Her eyes, open but empty, admit nothing.
Perhaps she’s hard-wired with some secret
Switch she’s thrown to STANDBY.

He examines her remains with forensic care:
Heartbeat, respiration, muscle tone... all normal.
In this offshore breeze her flesh seems odourless.
Aha! where is that dragonfly tattoo
He noticed while undressing her. When, if,
She returns he’ll check her thigh for that.

His head rises, falls with her breathing.
Breasts and skyline move in and out of focus.
He must anchor her until she reanimates.



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Shortcut

Your world has shrunk to this back lane,
asphalt dark as day-old blood,
a far street light to steer you home.
One third along, you long to look back.
Nemesis favours the flick knife.

A dead leaf rasps in a concrete gutter,
you push deeper through brittle silence.
In fear-soaked spaces between steps
you listen
remembering what you did to him,
not knowing he was one of them.
A glint of steel, there to the left –
no, only an old coke bottle.

You're between paling fences –
one slits moonlight,
the other chops up your shadow.
Will they somewhere ahead meet up,
make this lane a dead-end.

Backyards witness private obscenities,
foul things are buried here, never deep enough.
Miasma fogs the lane, sticks
walls of your lungs together, you gag
on a smell like your mother's stewed cabbage.

You risk a glance behind — still clear, or
have they skirted ahead? Dry lips.
Face tight as a knife grip. Unbidden,
your legs start to run.



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night life


this box is called
      bedroom       not
sleeproom       as in diningroom
only the bed is guaranteed

not a skerrick of light and night just...
isn’t happening
it’s a black hole bloated to indolence
      with sucked-up sound —
to get it started I stir its soupiness
with my index finger

it takes time to subdue the inertia
of a dead-in-the–water world
get it spinning like a centrifuge
      to make our cartesian co-ordinates
            accelerate squarely away
                  from the top-left corner where walls and ceiling usually meet
                        above my chest of drawers

and that corner itself is racing through space
don’t you know…
      time elongates itself
and we ride in the comet tail of our hurtling world
      while stellar winds scream at the gods

but not for the woman asleep in my bed
      her slice of night’s too thin
            to accommodate a cyclotron
her hair doesn’t flare as it would
            if washed in Stellarcare
the body inside her nightie isn’t nymph-luminous
            as it would be with Lunarglow Cream

she lays there       an affront to my physics
doggedly sucking in air       breathing it out dirtied
      a gas converter
            bartering oxygen concentrations
            with niggardly night

this temptation to poke her
to yell
      those neutrinos are bombarding our box again
      wake up you dozy cow
      and hang on
            for the ride of your life


poetry index





The Rabbit-Proof Fence

I arrive at the derelict fence, immediately
Feel I’m intruding, as if in a gutted cathedral.

The fence runs gunbarrel-straight north-south,
Defying desolation, splitting the world in half.

Away to my left an ochre outcrop is screaming.
My watery body shrivels before the sun’s thirst.

To the south a sand drift has bridged the fence,
Its rabbit-proof netting burrowed underground.

In a conical sandpit trap beside my left boot
Sickle jaws of an antlion pull an insect under.

Fence posts, bleached grey, step down and away
To hazy horizons. No hint of their green heritage.

Spasmodically, the antlion tosses up sand
Resetting pit walls to their angle of repose.

Ancient scrubland stretches west and east as if
seeking distant oceans. This is Martu country.

I conjure black stick figures. They shimmer-dance.
Disjointed bodies. Juddering spears point at me.

The withdrawing sun sucks up colours, elongates
fence shadows. The desert is draining westward.

A soft breeze hisses through spinifex stubble.
Taut fence wires release music of the spheres.

The antlion has gone and I should return to camp
But I linger on, tippling wilderness.



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Two Cupboards


The wooden cupboard on the left
held rations of love in white sheets
some thin as Irish linen handkerchiefs,

others in snowy slabs
thick as triple-folded double-damask tablecloths,
and all sizes in between.

The identical cupboard on the right
held guilt in one-size-fits-all sinpacks
bound in animal skins, black as bible covers.

Each day before opening one or the other
Mother sort guidance through prayer and the Word.
The same brass key fitted both locks.

Tom never carped at Judgements
to wrap him in lovecloth or strap him
under a sinpack that drove him to his knees.

Mother loved Tom, asked God to keep him free
from temptation at tuck shops and toilet blocks,
from wickedness leaked by bedroom walls.

Tom loved Mother but she died anyway,
went to join God, left the cupboards and key
to her Tom. Those cupboards became his cross.

They followed him into each home and hotel,
every marriage and miscarriage,
into every brothel and barrack block.

Each night the doors swung open,
stuff got out. Neither shrink nor priest
could wedge those cupboards shut.

On a whim Tom hung a sinpack
high in his mulberry tree. He ate its fruit
bitter-red, before it could ripen to black.

He gave his dog a chenille love-quilt
but the wily mongrel chose bare boards
to shiver his dreams away.

Somewhere along the lithium highway
Tom abandoned the cupboards, left them there,
beside the A4, face-to-face, banging doors

like wooden angel wings, while love and guilt
spilled out and neutralised each other,
and Tom searched heaven for Mother.



poetry index



Bar Code


My wife was over in biscuits &
I was somewhere in juices &
this tin without a label rumbled by
sort of tiredly shiny but clean
except for glue marks that proved
it once was something.
The floor wasn't sloped
yet it kept on rolling on, real slow-like,
as if searching for its shelf
or having a bit of a wander.
I had to run to keep up
as it passed below each row;
finished in fruit and veges
where it clearly didn't belong.
I hefted, smelled and shook it:
kind of an alien non-smell, suspiciously unsloshy,
about the weight of a hand grenade,
but bare as a monkey's bum in a shop where
everything's branded, sorted, shelved,
confessed to the world in small print.
I offered the checkout money
but it seems the system couldn't
price an uncoded mystery
so I stole it,
your Honour.


2nd FreeXpresSion 2000 Literary Competition
Published FreeXpresSion, 2000 Magazine


poetry index



The Watchers


He's out there, watching me, like always,
tripping between our several points of view.
I wonder if we've now symbiotic twins
or have we settled for a half-life each.

When young I tried to pin him down by naming:
Conscience, God... various dead things,
but he was undeterred by recognition,
titles slid off his head like holy water.

Some see-saw days, a mirror plane our fulcrum,
he'd play at counterpoise and so prescribe
limits on our ecstacy and angst –
the sum of our emotions always zero.

I'm his life's research project. But I'll laugh last –
my consciousness has fouled his experiments,
he'll never know what he might have been
if he hadn't been watching me.



poetry index






Soldiers not dancing


I’m sorting old photographs
of unlikely warriors. Their boyish grins
beg recognition I can’t muster. I add
their faces to the heap I’ll later burn.

Now this snap doesn’t belong
–my daughters dancing like sprites
in a rock pool on a Sydney beach–
it was sent to me in Vietnam.

They’re high-stepping over clear water,
wet legs silvered by native sunlight;
their bathers aren't camouflage green.
None of the soldiers were dancing.

The girls escaped silver nitrate fix
and flowered into motherhood.
As I strike the match my heart chars
with the smell of a monk’s immolation.


Highly Comm. Wannabee Poetry Competition, 1999
Highly Comm.FreeXpresSion 2000 Literary Comp, 2000
Highly Commended Forest FAW Literary Comp, 2000


poetry index






witness
                               
after viewing an exhibit by Ken Unsworth, Art Gallery of NSW, 1998



[a room deep in a state institution]
          one wooden straight-backed chair:
                empty
                floating at eye level
                every surface fiercely burning
                black smoke bleeding from the fire
                endlessly...
          another wooden straight-backed chair:
                empty
                not burning
                facing the burning chair
                pinned to the floor by spotlights
                endlessly...


[doorway to the state institution room]
          from a sanctuary of shadows:
                i watch one chair witnessing
                an other chair
                burning...



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Ravens


Beyond my bedroom window
wings folding on wings rasp
like undertakers' arms
in synthetic sleeves.

This is the fourth night
and my misguided mate
proffers broth and potions
instead of incantations
or a shotgun defence.

First fuzz of dawn confirms
four silhouetted sentinels,
the carrion watch, on a dead
branch of the hoop pine.
She says they're only birds
and that is where they live.
I tremble at such innocence,
but I'm too weak to wield
the weighty sword of reason.

Their cark... cark...
summons rheumy night
into their eyepits.
A fluttering of feathers –
I cling to my bedclothes.
They settle under their cloaks
for one more day
in the game.



poetry index






Bed

sitting with Bed
    chin on chest
    head scooped out
        still hurting bad
too tired to climb
    out of pain

twenty six red pills
    got two by twos
    when nurse maud
    not checking my swallows
hard to remember
    the master plan
        where pills are hid
            how many
                is enough

worst bit's leaving Bed
    can’t stand dead without Bed
Bed is for curling ups
    in sweet little-deaths
        blanket over head
        and no thinking    oh no
ah Bed

just Bed
    and mum

love mum
    of course
dad dead
    can't love him
mum's got pension
    won't worry long
        as her friends don't know
        and there's no mess
do reds cause chucking up
    hard to think of everything

too tired now
    tomorrow maybe
        soon for sure



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Village Nativity


This year Jesus is black
in our village plaza nativity scene.
Maybe He’s been tanning for years
and I haven’t noticed.

Mary is still white (there are limits)
and borderline anorexic with Barbie hips
that deny easy delivery. Her focus
is stage right and high over my head.

Three Osama-bin-Laden look-alikes
seem to have taken the crib hostage;
they frown and glare out at us infidels –
well, only me at this early hour.

No plaza security evident. And only
a two-foot picket fence to restrain them.
It’s painted a warm suburban green, and
the “Keep Out” sign faces my way.

Away to the left rear there’s this old Joe,
off-white, about twice Mary’s age.
He seems superfluous to the scene. Perhaps
it’s his job to teach the sheep to kneel.

The manger-manager has a nice eye
for a mortice joint, but he’s gone and forgotten
the angels, not even a fallen one in the straw.
I hate it when they leave the angels out.



poetry index



Picking Friends


The vintner's nubile daughter,
rises from our mattress
in the winery’s loft, says:
This harvest had to end
but we can still be friends
.

Friends! how bland a label.
From among our loving sheets
I watched her silhouette
against a dawn already teasing
this last day of picking.

Today she will decant our love
leave me bitter dregs
wretched lees of friendship,
stale sediment of passion.

And how will she put down
our love, long in the tasting,
yet to mature from ferment?
With sniff-spitting ritual,
and a proprietary label:
Vintage 04-robust young pretender?

How can I toast you as friend,
remembering that curve
from your neck to mouth,
that bouquet of fruity sex
the full-bodied bloom ...
Please, anything but friend.



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Home, 2pm Thursday
                    after reading Hirata Toshiko


it’s 2pm on a thursday
in autumn and has been so
for months
dark forces have purloined
earth’s angular velocity

it’s crazy like
some deity hit PAUSE
like we’re spinning
at X radians per second
then — whiplash

shamans claim
it’s a sign of something or other
christians explain
it’s a pagan advertising stunt
but I suspect it was you

at first folk resented
the freeze on heavenly bodies
now we’ve adapted
distracted by heady prospects
of an endless football season

life goes on
we’re never really late or early
but without saturdays
we’re unconfessed so we all
try to be good

spare a thought
for roosters & sunsets & tides
dairy cows
a fall that never does
dead rose-heads hanging on...



poetry index






feathers

in landscape format uncle eric’s painting had a three-duck flight descending at 30 degrees to the horizontal and targetting a church in the suggested village in the lower right corner of his composition but after uncle eric died mother being churchified cropped the village from his painting then rotated it to portrait format so the ducks started at the base of a cloud column on the left and ascended at 60 degrees to the horizontal in a traditional and an altogether uplifting iconography

an aberrant feather
has sprouted from the duck
last of three
in the eider triad slanting
up a sky-blue canvas

a flight pinion
on the duck’s dexter side
is growing out
of canvas and frame...
it's reached the dining table

where gauche guests
having dined on our finest fare
make jest
of duck-decor paintings,
titter into damask napkins

they do not see
the extant avian creature give
a first tentative twitch
my significant other
says it’s about to flap

Oh Great Duck
how you wrack our feature wall
go lurching into freedom
spurning oil, canvas and snobs,
lumbering on one mighty wing

To those who sniggered
when we gave wall space
to a triad of ducks:
reflect on your hubris burden,
on the fragile nest of your mind



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Serelemar Bay


Our ferry at the mainland wharf
is wooden and old as my maiden aunt.
A woman – straw hat, red sarong – sprouts
from a patch of plastic shopping bags
that I help carry on board.

We sit, a rickety table between us,
her provisions at our feet, while the ferry
fusses free, slides out into the Bay,
today ironed flat, starched with sunshine.
Her face is adrift in blue shadow.

A diesel throbs. Vibrations surge
through the boat’s frame, into my bones,
unerringly find my resonant crotch.
I see her blush; she feels it too.
She looks to starboard, I to port –
toy islands sport evergreen tutus
hemmed by oyster-stippled rock.

A vein in her neck is pulsing.
We are seized, synced to each other
and the pistons pounding down below.
Skewered to our seats, we can’t get off
at any stop, not Green Isle, not Lesbos
or Eratoville. We are doomed to sail
forever a tremble short of ecstasy.

Endless chaste coitus – it’s morphing
into something... weird, like... love?
for a mate one metre, a world away?
This dear, accidental lock-step lover,
this woman, this siren singing our song...


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Seahole


I float naked
in this seahole I’ve created
and re-occupy at whim.

How heroic to belong
to a primeval source,
part of the vastness.

My native land drifts
over there in its own seahole,
gives up its grit.

Was this hole here, waiting,
before I entered it, a fluid cast
with glass-slipper fit?

Does ocean have memory,
keep a liquid diary of drowned
ships, sailors, lovers?

I ponder my body:
mainly water, yet I cannot
merge with the sea.

Is there an amnion here
that separates us, manifests otherness
in mother-sea’s body?

Sea is like huge love where I
flounder safely before returning
to the coddling mould.

When you went I sensed the hole
your body left in air, the little silences
your voice once filled.

Right now, do you float close by
some foreign shore and gently stir
the fluid ties between us?



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Fire Wood


Speak truth, are you dead? If not
Why this barren disguise ere
Autumn has slowed your sap?

The old ones say a tree
Beaten with flat of an axe
Flowers, fruits, throws its seed
But I can't wait a season.
My woodpile's spent,
Winter comes on whitely and
I must know right now,
If you be dead or dying.

Over there, gross progeny
Of my father's father's enemies
Bate us with the hated flag,
Chant liturgies to unnatural gods,
Bear their hatchets boastfully
As if they already know.

My axe is readied for a first strike.
Proud people sing old glory songs,
Shiver in their skins, look to me.
Wretched tree, bear witness now –
Green wood or burning wood?


Highly Commended, 2001 Peace Bell Poetry Prize


poetry index






Affairs of the Heart

1. Arrhythmia

I am aware
of self as machine
palpable firing of heart
everywhere except
top dead centre.

Love and beauty shrink
to fit that piece of my mind
not monitoring heart’s
stubborn stutters.

I can accept
being out of step with the world
but my heart’s not really in it.


2. Angiogram

I float over ripples
made by a poem
somebody’s dropped
in the lake of my mind.

Moonwalker nurses burst in
spilling mechanical banter,
wheel me off to the theatre
of faltering hearts.

I float on Valium
while my translucent torso hosts
the big screen dream about a worm
and a heart-shaped squid
that squirts black dye about.


3. The Angioplasty Team

are gardeners taking kinks
out of a bloody garden hose

butchers untwisting
a string of beef sausages

boys fixing
bike tube punctures.

They are comedians
with a lifeline of corny jokes.


poetry index






Another Budgie

When his image in the cheval glass
became cadaver-with-budgie
the man took this as a sign
he'd outlived himself.

He took care of his budgie
then walked to the beach
where gossiping wavelets
teased the ebb tide.
He was knee-deep
when he took a last look back
and was surprised to see
his footprints in sand.
There could be no doubt
he'd really been here
just moments ago.

He walked home
turned on the gas
which lit first time
so he put on the kettle
made tea or coffee
checked the classifieds
for another budgie.



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