New Poetry by Tug Dumbly

Bad Economics of a Haunting  

I lived a year away from home at a school
and have relived every day in that place,
every bastard, and every boy whose face 
I’ve torn through tracing paper and missed
ever since, like that girl once glimpsed
on the Jersey Ferry in Citizen Kane.
                 
And I have relived every sadist’s forehand
smash of the cane through cotton jim-jams
to leave your arse a railway switch-yard
of black tracks, joining up with the tracks
of adjacent arses in the shower block,
which now, I’m ashamed to say, conjures

nothing so much as a death camp.
And still I hear the spider purr of that
woodwork master burring the name of his
favourite boy as he bends into him behind the
humming lathe; see still the kindly Reverend's
adam’s apple wobble under his dog collar

and his face sorrowing to a Pieta
as he says this is going to hurt him more,
before whipping me like crimson Christ  
after Wind in the Willows in his English class.
But my heart hurt more; this a betrayal
by one I’d loved best.

It wasn’t Dickens. Beyond the scatter  
of beatings and fist fights that year is mostly
minuteness and mundanity, the threaded beads
of small human exchange, of banter, joke,
jibe and mock; and kindness too, I’ll concede. 
I re-see every weather, every melting bar 

of Sunday heat, every icicle under a tap 
in a frost. Odd details, like the foul margarine 
that congealed on bread like a cracked sheet 
of frozen piss. All this I see again. Every which way 
I’ve relived the year in that place for more hours 
than ever I was there. And just why mystifies.

Like an amphetamine affair that implodes
in a week, then moves in to live a lifetime;
like those bad debt drug buddies and fucks
on the run, spectre flatmates and mulched friends 
greyly lurking round the landing, eternally 
crashed in the housing tower of your head.

Such uneconomical hauntings these
old familiars, such wearisome spirits,  
most dramatic duds, not horrorful, sorrowful 
or gleanable for meaning, but like a pub bore 
with nothing to say, saying it all again and again,
or a fat lollipop lady wearily rerouting 

your brain into the same backstreet maze,
or a Tom-Tom's termagant nag telling you
to take some deadend turnoff back there 
it wanted you to take … Something inside 
must like you forking through these scraps, toying with  
this food you can’t scrape from the plate.


- Tug Dumbly 2019

Tug Dumbly is one of Australia's foremost performance poets. His collection, Son Songs, was recently released through Flying Islands Press.