New Poetry by Ashley Capes

august rain

plucking courage
from somewhere
she’s months into
this newest illness
still working still
somehow smiling,
everything passes
in grey sheets then
crumbles like yoyo
or a long landslide,
i’m awed holding a
tub of vicks at the
beside just giving
my brave face and
though it’s wearing
out, there isn’t any
thing else i have so
we make do with
that and settle into
sheets that smell so
much of eucalypt.


- Ashley Capes 2008

and yadayadaya

Which leads me to poetry as dirge, as plaint of a swinging gate, a whining dog, a town google finally takes off its maps.

Shakespeare. War. Religion. Radiohead. Love. THE TRAPPED. All that is dangerous and tender about our days.

We are, and will always be, dear readers, alive in dangerous times. We are no different to any other excepting the angle of the wind, the calibre of exception. The comfortable have for all eternity and will (at least for now) continue to spare a moment for the trapped.

Poets are the first to respond and the last to pronounce about this on-going crisis that is us. But that is just their method. They are, like journalists and infantrymen, prone to a breath-taking mortality. They stop to think, pronounce, die in the dreadful percentages of those who count.

We have those playing a two-handed game, however

turn to window turn
from tv & c
d player to col
our lifes short & on
lookers fickle read
what you fear true hear
an unknown sound one
holds the benchmark an
other chins with succ
ess theyve a whole oth
er raison detre
flatters something rac
ist precious unreal


- Michael Farrell "curtain as persons" from a raiders guide


It sounds like it means something because I built it up to dodge a bullet, which is what Michael Farrell's poetry does very successfully. I call it poetry only because that's how it came packaged via the name of a man I do not know but trust like the weatherman. Whether it is his judgment or mine that is finally askew is one of those best left to the weathermen of this great new medium. The blurb (and I am a magpie of poet's back yards) informs us that Farrell's new collection is a "raid on the inarticulate", but not as TS Eliot intended...The poems are composed through the application of principles familiar from contemporary music - sampling and remixing, repetition and substitution. Which, I gather, is supposed to legitimise this intellectual condescension passed off as a book. It is enough that we have digitalised that last bastion of spontaneity - rock and roll soul rap hip hop - but now we have to swallow these desperate grabs at street cred by a desperately over-rated writer. "Farrell's ear is as warm as an analog synthesiser" blurbs Aaron McCollough a little underwhelmingly, but at least his forms a sentence. Christ knows what the ubiquitous blurber Chris Wallace Crabbe was getting to or working away from when he was finally grabbed mumbling "...a tough little cookie".

Raise your standards, Giramondo.

The Garret

There was, back in December of last year, about the time I was lauding its crisp pages like an orphan at his first Christmas dinner, a debate opening up in POETRY regarding the merits of Ezra Pound's Cantos. A tired argument, you might say, and a tired old place to have it, but, well....I am blogging for much the same reason you are surfing.

In recent times I have gone back to Pound's Canto's to find out if I was correct in so thoroughly getting over my initial enthusiasm for them, or it.

So begins Clive James in his graffito of one of the great poetic exiles.

Fifty years ago, when the mad old amateur fascist was still alive and fulminating, I fell for the idea of his panscopic grab bag the way that I was then apt to fall for the idea of love.

Ah, dear old Clive, our very own Don Bradman of the reverse average, holding out until the maiden comes. Not so strange to your dear blogger, I suppose, as a man who so aspires, except that Clive seems to have fallen out of love with the mad visionary and in love with the ordinary when there has in fact been no surer, more steady time to do exactly the opposite.

Come let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.

One of those closed conceits so loved of drawing rooms before the big guns made litter of the drawing rooms and many of the people in them. I will let go that clunky first line, the hokey indicative. I assume Clive James emulated the same clunky grammar in his passionate commentary on the flawed but passionate man for much the same reason.

I have been disappointed by most of my heroes one way or another, but that is the point of heroes, or at least the way we have been re-inventing them since the Wars.

There is in Pound's Cantos as much to confound and disappoint as there is in any chat between the triumphant and their tired and beleaguered ancestors.


Who, who will be the next man to entrust his girl to a friend?
Love interferes with fidelities;
The gods have brought shame on their relatives;
Each man wants the pomegranate for himself...


I am not of Clive Jame's generation, so I can only blog at one remove about the desolation they soaked in around the dinner table (yes, there used to be such things, dear reader, even in my over-extended blog-time), but there seems to have been an air of acquisition in the generation following the last war that is almost Hellenic in its breadth and scope

...just as we can scrutinize the aging remains of our bodies in the mirror and decide that these loose remnants would not even be here to be looked at if we had not been strong and healthy when we were young, so we can look back to when we were wrong, and decide whether we were wrong as all that.

Indeed.

Youth and health have their virtues, as Clive James so readily doffs to the Hellenic in his Antipodean heart, but play can take your eye out...

Mascara

Mascara is an online journal seeking to promote poetry of excellence and originality. We are especially interested in the work of contemporary Australasian and Indigenous poets. Our criteria for selection are quality of image, language and innovation. The word ‘mascara’ entered the English language in 1890. It derives from Spanish, Arabic and French origins, its meaning evolving from the word mask, masquerade, to darken, to blacken. The Arabic word ‘maskhara’ means buffoon.

And there you have it, short but sweet. Another Australian poetry hopeful is launched on the web. It is over a year old now, and judging by the two issues so far, it has a long life ahead of it. Diane Fahey, Phil Hammial and my long-suffering neighbour Mark O'Flynn are just some of the talents so far published. The mag has a strong editorial team with a subtle focus on Australia's troubled relationship with Asia, that amorphous mass where most people live. The editors are open for submissions all year round of poetry, reviews and short essays. They even PAY! Yes, that's right people, this is a grown up editorial team with access to funding and a willingness to share it. Do yourselves and Australian writing a favour and check it out. Just click on the post heading. And no, I don't know who the pretty girl in the picture is.

Vale Mahmoud

Mahmoud Darwish, a poet of great tenderness and lyrical intensity, has died in the US at the age of 67. His work became a rallying cry for the Palestinian struggle, and although the poet scorned the tag "poet laureate", he was closely allied with the Communist party and later the PLO, one of many Arab liberation movements which it spawned. Darwish spent 26 of his 67 years in exile, first in Moscow, then Paris, then Cairo until finally settling back in Ramallah in 1996. This later period in his life proved to be perhaps his most productive, spawning six books including Unfortunately it was Paradise: Selected Poems in 2003.

About Darwish's work, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, "Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging...."

I Come From There

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....


- Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008)

Eternal Youth

The streets of Sydney are once again being blocked off. Last year it was for the secular end of hot air in the guise of the APEC summit, this time it's for the Catholic Church in all its atavistic glory. We are even getting our trickle of medieval milksops up here above the snow line, and I can't decide whether my teeth are clenched against the cold or the sanguine chatter of believers. I do not begrudge them their life choices, merely the imposition of them on the rest of us. What we have here is state-funded proselytizing courtesy of a New South Wales government still in thrall to the old DLP/Santamaria Catholic left. Like the church it is playing host to, it is decades behind public opinion and only retains power in the absence of any effective opposition. Apparently I can be cautioned, or perhaps even fined $5500, for remonstrating with a Catholic youth trying to sell me their wares. Indeed, so vague are the laws passed in the dead of night a few weeks back, that the police seem tongue-tied when trying to explain them to the general public. All I can suggest is that all we cemented agnostics with a tendency to flashes of anger in the face of the untried and the supine keep off the streets of dear old Sydney as much as possible for the next few weeks. I'm sure whatever is up there is looking down with an oily smirk on its lonely, indelible face.

New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

Cronos

He eats
of their flesh,
Cronos
devouring his young.
How he fears,
as he swallows it all,
flesh, blood, bone,
stone alike.
How he is undone
by his rapacity.
How he dooms
his fellow Titans.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008





Memento Mori

Three dead trees
against the eastern sky:

beyond us are death,
skeletons of rabbits,
and you cannot ever
return from whence
you must go.

Three magpies
in the burgeoning dawn,
in the carolling dawn,
on the frostbitten lawn,
and I’m back beyond
dead trees against the sky.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2008

New prose by Jen Craig

The decorative circle

Last week, she told me, as she was driving, she happened to listen to a radio feature on the life and work of Hildegard von Bingen – a twelfth century mystic who had so fascinated her during the nineteen eighties that she had bought a book of her illuminations and writings.

It was only as the actor read the line, My new song must float like a feather on the breath of god, that she realised, not only did she fail to recognise these words, but that she could not even recall actually reading the book she had bought and treasured through so many moves and changes of relationships. In fact, all that she remembered of it, right then in the car, was that the cover was a pale egg yolk yellow and, in the centre on the front, there was some kind of mandala, or at least decorative circle, which, now that she came to think about it properly, she said, was very likely the one thing that had attracted her to Hildegard von Bingen in the first place.


- Jen Craig 2008

Jen Craig’s short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. In 2007 she finished a MA in Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney, with the completion of her first novel, Since the Accident. Her blog of micro prose can be found at http://absurdenticements.blogspot.com/.

Xerxes

I am afraid I will have to rant now. I was taught to respect another’s wishes, until they began to mutter words like “faith”, and “no more”, then we were supposed to find a minister, or “minister”, I have always been hazy on matters as intimate as religion. Anyway, it’s too late now. I am Anglican and so barking mad by default. Either you are all too talented, too feckless, or too prudent to submit to me. Your choice, invisible one. This blog becomes either a bible or a history.


But you should know I tread this earth very lightly. I am a tall, fleshless thing, and my stamping up and down will not coax one boat further to the shore. Yours or any other. I may have given the impression that such is what I am looking for in poetry. For that I apologise. For being agnostic in most things that matter to our time, I do not. I am a poet. They shoot better than me for nothing.

Mark Dapin had an interesting little rant at the opening of his piece on the young writer Chloe Hooper in The Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend 28/29th June 2008). It is a rant couched by a wide shot of an elfin Chloe Hooper all little-girl-lost in her "small converted factory in North Fitzroy". It begins (and I only quote at all because its cry to the buried past lends it gravitas)

"Covens of Australians are jealous of Melbourne author Chloe Hooper. They hiss and they bitch and they spit and they mew (you can tell he's English, can't you), and by night they drink pinoit gris and howl at the moon. They think Hooper (meaning Chloe, first names in this country please, Max, the war is over- I think?) has had it all too easy. On the publishing-party canapes circuit, rumours spread like exotic turrine on very small crackers."

Well bugger me!

I mean the canapes and those nasty turin poor poor Mark defers to Pepys red-faced Albion and island of shoddy paperwork. From whence he fled and brung the bad taste here, ta very very.

He should be working for me, don't you think?

For we are still just a tiny island, miraculously white, and shorn of all sheep now, Mark. And yet, there's a story of incarceration, of a kid boxed in, of a child out of step with her time. And some bald prick with his arms crossed looking frightened as hell pretending he knows everything.

I'm sorry, I seem to be drifting between small, bloated men now. I was referring, just then, to Andrew Wylie, the old Testament god guy of all Antipodeans with a mss and an rss and no sense of good old bss.

And the ridiculous leap

No-one in the writing fraternity who cares about what they do ever wished Chloe Hooper anything other than "good luck". She made you young again, pilgrim. Didn't she? Unfold your arms, stop looking east. It is a dangerous occupation.

When there is a lack there is a tendency to fall about. That is history. All great cultures are prone to it. As are all great drunks.

New Poetry by Wayne H. W Wolfson

Rue Linnei

It is a hot day, the specifics I don’t know, never having mastered the metric conversion. The heat makes everyone crazy dumb. It is only after the sun goes down that some will attempt to recreate the day’s madness with drinks and different positions.

Christina does not cover up as she hangs some towels to dry. Leaning forward, the geraniums bow their heads at the touch of her skin.

I steal a glance, imagining the taste of salt and flowers on my tongue.

Despite the heat there is a breeze in the courtyard, caused perhaps by the tiny space between each building, a closeness which makes the sidewalk gasp for air. The green of the trees rustle.

It is like a secret, the sound of a quickly running tap or the metro as it glides to a stop.

Out front, everything remains still. I whistle some Django so she will know that I have gone and she can cover up.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008



Beethoven

They called me “Beethoven” because the thin walls could not hold back my music.

Although I think if it had been anything besides symphony they all would have complained, but to complain about symphony would almost seem an admission of ignorance. They may not get or even like it, but no one wanted to appear left behind by what they considered class and culture.

Originally they called me “Professor.” This made the old guy who rented the room across from mine with the grey, push broom moustache upset. I learned later he had been a teacher before forced retirement.

He never complained that I heard. Very quickly though, I was “Beethoven”.

The morning after the first heavy snowfall and he was gone. I decided to sleep in, the whispering of the cleaning women, I knew there would be nothing left to steal unless I ran in now. Ah, but the floor was cold and I needed a shave.

I did not worry, that room with its trick doorknob had a way of growing new lodgers.

I pull the covers up and roll over. Some of the staff enforced the no visitors rule. She would throw small pebbles at my window until I got up and helped her sneak in.

How long ago was that? When asked, who left who, which side was better to be on?

She told me where she would be, even made up a little song, borrowing a melody for it, so as to not forget.

Flat on my back, I stare straight up. The halls are quiet now. Her perfume haunted the cracked plaster sky above the bed.

I would like to stay in this wonderland, but lack of motion eventually makes me uneasy. Besides, she was out there somewhere, now within a song.


- Wayne H.W Wolfson 2008


One of Bluepepper's trusted regulars, Wayne has just returned from his yearly sabatical in Paris.

Calling all poets

It's been just over a year since I posted a general call-out, but I haven't forgotten my threat to start posting excerpts from my verse novel. I have two to threaten you with now, so poets and poetry lovers consider yourselves on notice. Just click on the "Bluepepper" tag in the top right hand corner and submit anything up to five poems, a 1000 word comment or review in the body of the email. NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. I have a very good turnover time, and that applies to most things I do. Probably why I haven't got a girlfriend.... The worse you will get is silence, as I won't comment on subs unless I can see some way of working with the author to make them more suitable for posting under the Bluepepper. There are no payments and thus no guidelines.

Magellenica now available

The sequel to Justin Lowe’s premier verse novel, The Great Big Show, told through the crooked eyes of Albermarle Darcy, DSO, a womanizing, cricket-loving, autodidact veteran of the trenches with a cast of nefarious characters haunting the piers and alleys of Balmain, 1924.

Purchase now in hardcover with handsome dust jacket.

Click on the post heading to get to the storefront.

Short fiction by Ashley Capes

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.)

Life after Egg

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.

Sturm und Drang

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

Shop talk

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.

New Poetry by Phillip A. Ellis

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.

New Poetry by Wayne H.W. Wolfson

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

New Poetry by Les Wicks

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.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

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