eve
gunpowder-blue, walls shelter the bed, milk-sheets and a zippo click, as the cigarette glows.
a jessica-rabbit-gown on the floorboards, caramel wrappers congealing in his pockets
and her shampoo dragging lilac through the window, streetlights steady blonde beneath the black-eye-sky.
is this really what you want?
he spins the lighter on the sill, lilac smoke bleeding from his lips.
she pulls the sheet across her breasts, milky hands and clean nails.
don’t pretend you’re the one being hurt.
this isn’t a play, sweetheart.
he rubs lipstick from his neck and glances at her gown, remembering how very soft it felt.
she leans against the bed-head, blonde hair wrapping her throat in gentle fingers, eyes flat as boards.
god, you’re a prick. haven’t you had enough?
he stares out the window, exhales.
she wraps the sheets round her feet.
- Ashley Capes 2008
Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002 and is working on an pdf magazine holland1945. He is currently studying Arts and Education
at Monash and 'sings' for his band kingfit. His first collection of poetry
is 'pollen and the storm' (2008.)
We're very pleased to announced that our new* pdf magazine holland1945 is open for subs, we're closing at midnight on May 31st and would love to hear from you or your writers. We're looking for text and image this time so please feel free to submit in either or both realms. A quick note: we won't be taking short stories and our images will be published in a horizontal format - but for full guidelines and contact info visit the site by clicking on the post heading.
Talk as you see it and then as the other one sees it and then as you both picture it. Strangers aching to touch each other on this wildly spinning ball. 1945 when my parents cured the world of war for the second time, and poetry. X. 1968 when my "godparents" did the very same thing. X. Yours too, I'm sure, obliquely.
I have other sires, other grudges, but the one always balances out the other.
War war war, even here on this placid blue mountain.
Is it that my country plays cricket and sleeps strange hours?
Or is it the enduring terror of that dark spinning ball in the besieged of us all answering to the whispers of Fluellen, expert on all matters bar the vicissitudes of mass grieving
Know the glove?
I know the glove is a glove.
He was barking at his betters after a hard-won victory. I love Fluellen, the nerd in us all there in the trenches rasping to all and sundry how to both survive and appreciate the young Harrys of this bleak spinning ball.
Fluellen is the hard-bitten, butter-mouthed Welsh geek of Shakespeare's Henry V, down there in the trenches before the walls of Harfleur with Pistol and co as they bang out how to do their best by the lions in their hearts. God is blinded by the smoke, an utterance. The drama does not pale. For He wanders amongst them in a pillaged cloak on the eve of battle, haunched amongst the Fluellens as they talk the sleep and chill out of their frightened bones. Even if you've never heard of Shakespeare, that sentiment is gospel.
The young king Harry has rubbed shoulders with these men before, not as a prince, not as a man of fate as such, but as a fugitive from his destiny, in other words in a pub.
It is there he finds his poetry, there the Bard drags him down by the hair and drags him up again. The boy does not become a man by being drunk. That is left to the heroes, beyond which humanity has passed well and truly. What young Harry meets in his dissolute youth is Falstaff, of course, the still beating heart of his father's legacy. A man no boy can quite believe because he is so generous and clumsy, like the wind, but
By my troth
....The King has killed his heart
Meaning the boy, of course, come good and with a heart as big and beating hard but a little less black than old Flastaff's, he leaves his conscience to die in the upstairs room of a pub in Dover. Harry would swallow that, and the hanging later, but Shakespeare wasn't interested in ghosts, at least not in that play. He was interested in young Harry, the balls he had or hadn't, and what dead wood you must set adrift to be young Harry or young anyone. Not a bad question as we coast into the autumn years of the age of celebrity. What does it mean to have actually achieved something in the eyes of your peers?
Remember, the ground will always be breaking, the sky will always be opening.....
* Portrait by Suzie Bower
My email address has changed. I have enjoyed an entire 24 hours without any spam. Click on the submissions tab to update and get those insidious robots working again!
By the way, the poems published yesterday at Retort magazine are from my verse novel Magellenica, written in the voice of Albermarle Darcy, DSO as he lived and breathed in 1924 in Balmain, NSW, Australia. I am not in the habit of employing racial epithets in my poetry.
The Dream of Meaning
Be the girl who's her coat,
the guy who's his car,
the wife who's her washing machine,
the man who's his tie and promotion,
the grandpa who's his rocking chair,
the grandma who's her cooling apple pie
on the window sill,
and that elusively hollow dream,
that masculine and powerful dream,
that warm and limiting dream,
that bread-winning dream,
that retired dream,
that comforting, homely dream,
may be saccharine enough to choke upon.
- Phillip A. Ellis 2008
Phillip A. Ellis is a poet and scholar living on the eastern coast of Australia. His first concordance, of the poetry of Donald Wandrei, is due for publication by Hippocampus Press, and he has a free e-chapbook of poetry, Morning Light downloadable from http://www.geocities.com/phillipellis01/broadsheets.html and he has another chapbook, Bitter Honey, available for purchase from ebooksonthe.net as well. He will be studying English at Honours level through the University of New England, Armidale, over 2008 and 2009.
Hearts and Onions
The alley was narrow. Two neighbors had agreed to stretch a rope, window to window.
It is late. Everyone is asleep, eating or hungry. From the rope now hangs a solitary shirt. Dead breeze, with the last of its strength, this torso waves the way out of the city.
No one ever looks up though. He is still now. No escape is possible, not even his own.
The last set, the bassist is half awake and the skin man seems anxious. After this, what? I feel compelled to take my time. Horn in hand I stretch out. Three small vignettes, Schubert playing the blues. The last note a stifled sob. People file out, the night air, hungry beast licking with heavy tongue.
Summer is like the illusion of the promised land, and that things are going to be better.
Libby will still be up.
I knew her neighbor. He called me “Schubert, the sad one”. I think he purposely waited to hear my footsteps on the stairs, to come out and meet me. I did not care, we are all inherently lonely.
Before anything else, I would have to wait while he took his watch out. It was not a pocket one, it had just lost its band.
He would look at the watch in his palm, squint, look up as in prayer, and depending upon the time say:
“Good morning” or “Good afternoon”.
She let me in wearing an old housecoat I hate.
She always thought tea would make me healthier. The cups from my previous visit where still on the counter. After two days the sugary dregs at the bottom had hardened.
All further prophecies now frozen within this dark hued amber crystal landscape.
All bets are off, you will have to find out for yourself.
Being too tired to try to magic trick pop them in my mouth unseen, I went into the bathroom and popped some pills.
She put a record on and shut out the lights.
The scent of orange blossoms, dilated pupils, I had never noticed before the intricate patterns tapped out on the high-hats.
I opened my eyes. Her silhouette framed in the dirty blue of a midnight window.
The stars were fish which ran through her hands, who pulls at these long fingered dreams?
She came to bed.
“Take a shower, you smell of smoke.”
“You, of cheap airport cologne some of your customers wear.”
“We could take one together.”
I don’t answer, but roll over.
“Should I set the alarm or let nature takes its course?”
- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008
Water Song
Somewhere, in the dark, she hides her secret wishes.
Again, the boy-girl thing.
Come on in, the water’s fine, for the Sharks.
Her blues.
A treacherous kiss finds my lips.
Where are we?
According to the informant, caught.
Dancing, wrapped around each other like good poetry.
Where are we?
In between rounds, putting her blues in motion on the dance floor, hiding from all tomorrows.
- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008
Episodic Gratification
Kill the cat.
Your name is not enough.
Trust your hands.
Kill the cat. Make It.
Don't let prayers have all the brightest stars, roll your lips.
Your choice one-day one-day.
The secret is layers, one cannot endure…
good life is an accretion of layers.
By the time you have attained
spouses, mortgages, power or esteem
there will be nothing exposed to the certainties of cold winter.
And you'll have killed the cat
which had no name
maybe once sleek
preposterously proud in its little menace.
Worse then, ginger dimmed
scars and missing teeth
but still a tomcat howl
to rake a sleeping night.
He had no humans of his own
but his kind all know the predictable call for food.
Geoffrey allowed. The approach, the grab
then throttle. A vicious, short-term fight -
scratches before a death.
This man dropped the orange, empty carapace -
it lands like exhausted breath (which it no longer had).
He could almost see refugee fleas as they packed for diaspora.
That empty ball of bone
buried in a #4 blade plot of lawn.
Next day had a paper-cut wind
his own belief in comfort
warmed the Sunday hands.
We know this choice. The end.
He becomes the intended comet
of primary happiness.
Grass grew brighter.
Everything important wins.
Each page
in the Gehennic biographies -
more food, more garbage
sleep at the edge of charms.
Thieves, chains and Hugo Boss
strange children home from school
becoming just like daddy
and the wife is toning thighs
in rooms full of energy.
- Les Wicks 2008
Kurraga City Council
The lords of local politics fly spotlit under lamps.
A desk can bluster them lazily above crowds,
stinking contrails above the craning lumpen necks
of almost-concerned citizens.
Expertise is rusted on
our mouths are angry nests as waves
corrode beneath untended sun.
There's a 1940s lemon slumber in the halls
as lesser grades sick lankly over tea.
Pyramids of waste
cacophonous hymns
cracked roads like mousetraps
with chasms at the verge.
Art projects primped then launched in a
municipal wine to an audience of three -
ossuary of the new.
Pensioners get bussed to parks
where they're mugged then rushed to hospital.
Like People's Liberation Army troops at harvest time
blue uniformed Rangers march out to reap fines from those
whose junk-pump cars go everywhere
"for the ride".
Each civic plan has kernels for the next
while good intentions seep like limescale
in a great impotent bowl.
Envy no one this choice
when they one-day raise their hand;
Australian suburban jihadis
on an asthmatic campaign.
Me too, complaint becomes habit
then every day is caught up
whining into nitre.
Overheated phones placate iconoclastic codgers,
complaints are passed up into space
until no one rings and no one answers.
There's just the fart-oomph of spent words
folding all the air.
- Les Wicks 2008
Bondi poet Les Wicks appeared in the March issue of America's Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, one of hundreds of publications that feature his work.
as mud dries
what draws you to empty
spaces, where
echoes cross arms
and dive off rocks,
never to be heard again?
alone is just five letters
pulled together by a snapshot,
when otherwise they wouldn’t
know each other at all
but between them something
happens to make
going back possible
the way you can take words
like lead, until one syllable
breaks your knees,
and still you go back for more, sneaking
the way you find seconds
between jet engines
and a cool change,
even when running.
- Ashley Capes 2008
ashoka
whatever hands may wash
we will steal and muffle with boxes,
rachel’s blue rose on the wall
armies
of cups, crippled toothpaste
and the
peter pan complex
only the body moves
and thoughts stick
between
sills and taps that drip.
- Ashley Capes 2008
Ashley co-founded Egg(Poetry) in 2002 and is working on an pdf
magazine holland1945. He is currently studying Arts and Education
at Monash and 'sings' for his band kingfit. His first collection of poetry
is 'pollen and the storm' (2008.) ashleyandbrooke@bigpond.com
The Teachings of the Buddha
when the others have left
a man wakes from his
stupor finding himself
in the middle of the kingdom
of bhutan in an old hotel room
with a plain brown wardrobe
half a cup of cold darjeeling tea
a piece of plain toast and the
Teachings of Buddha at his side
through the curtains orange and
yellow prayer-flags billow upwards
across the whispering thimpu river
regular white geometry
of bhutanese houses climbing steep
slopes with the cedars and the
dzhong on a distant mountain
against blue
he wonders at his place in the
world and the book
falls open to
When a man is in a house and opens his eyes he will first notice the interior of the room and only later will he see the view outside the windows. In like manner we can not have the eye notice external things before there is recognition by the eyes of the things in the house.
And from a white fog
nothingness begins to take
shape
- rob walker 2008
rob walker is an Adelaide poet currently residing in Himeji, on the coast road between Kobe and Okayama on the Japanese island of Honshu.
It will always have its detractors, of course, as anyone who has suddenly come into money will, and anyway, detractors are to any institution what air is to a whale. But Chicago’s Poetry Foundation is at least putting some of that money where its 96 year-old mouth is.
In its annual newsletter just arrived on my desk, Foundation President John Barr states
Recently we counted up… and were surprised to find that our partners number more than 40 different national and local academic and cultural institutions. The collective effect of all the Foundations activities in 2007……was to place the poems in front of 10 million people.
On top of this there is Poetry’s ongoing commitment to awards. Now, you may share some of my scepticism about awards (look no further than the winner of this year’s Archibald in Sydney), but at least Poetry is going some way to unclogging the funnel and allowing some real and lasting talent to slip through. There is also Poetry Foundation’s initiative American Life in Poetry, in the words of John Barr, a syndicated weekly column of poems selected by former poet laureate, Ted Kooser and published by the Foundation with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. That column now reaches more than four million newspaper readers each week, and the program is being expanded to offer a free poetry syndication service to newspapers (you hear that, SMH?!!) featuring book reviews, op-eds, and articles on poets and poetry. In addition to continuing a series of broadcasts on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer......
As you may have intuited by the dots, I could go on, but all this vibrancy and optimism is making me dizzy. I am a native, after all, of that hoarse whisper south of the line where our only poetic “institution” is a bloated avatar for all the good we inherited, whose skewed pronouncements on those less fortunate than himself speak volumes for his clinical condition and not much else, and whose output seems to yellow and blister at each fresh reading. Had I a fraction of his money (this is a man, need I remind you, who could afford to return an enormous government grant, in essence buying copy to air his pithy grievances), then I assure you I would be doing my utmost to explore ways of salvaging what remains of this island’s proud literary heritage. Let’s face it, Poetry are drawing up the blueprints.
It behoves none of us to draw too many parallels between Americans and Antipodeans. They are a programmatic race infused with an energy alien to us. They are only ever looking in one direction (the Iran-Iraq war is, after all, ancient history to those whose parents’ taxes largely subsidized its prosecution and the eternal “liberation” of 2 million souls), while we are forever in two minds. In fact, just this morning I was struck on reading Don Bradman’s classic “A Farewell to Cricket” that he refers to heading off to the “New World” when setting sail from Sydney for his tour of North America as though leaving the “Old World” behind. Only the pedant in me was struck by it.
The great Don’s Dominion-esque approbations aside, institutions such as The Poetry Foundation enrich us all, Antipodean or American, poet or passing stranger. Did I mention their decades-old “Open Door Policy”? It was enshrined thus by founder Harriet Moore in 1912
The Open Door Policy will be the policy of this magazine – may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.
Though an institution with plenty of money (it is in the process of building its own headquarters, for God’s sake, in downtown Chicago!), Poetry has never really forsaken its modernist roots, ie that vibrant, exploratory, oftentimes reckless spirit so characteristic of the first two decades of the twentieth century, workshop of that thundering rollercoaster on which was conceived this island’s all-too-partisan equivalents. “it is a strange bird/this world/whose habit is/to fight itself/whose left wing/and right wing/tear themselves/bitterly apart”. So said Michael Dransfield, back when our “institutions” were still young. But someone needs to tell these dons of the dilatory that the old bird is dead. That the wings weren’t clipped but blasted clear out of a September sky. Someone needs to tell these grand old cocks to either shit or get out of the nest and give this chick some room to hatch.
