Proximity: the poet Jackson. Get uncomfortably close.
Come to Perth Poetry Club, 2-4pm at The Moon cafe, 323 William Street Northbridge, this Saturday 26 September 2015, to hear Jackson launch Poets@KSP’s 8th anthology Thistledown.
With readings from
plus open mike.
Free entry; contribute according to your means (and buy the book if you can!).
This is the point from which I always leave
I lock my baggage into a box
to free me while I wait
The key is a number
A secret printed
on a slip of paper
My instrument won’t fit
I have to carry it
This is the point
Under the table my instrument
crouches in its sheath
The locos stand on the lines
bellowing their punk
A sound like yellow streaks
in smoky black
I loved you so much I wanted to unlock
the boxes in your head
and write your healing songs
It doesn’t happen like that
This is the point from which I always leave
I’ll turn my back on the lines
I’ll wrangle my instrument
unlocker my baggage
and put them
on a bus
I’ll sit beside a cellist from Chile
who produces trance and trip-hop
I’ll throw away
the secret slip
I listened well to be honest. So many cats lately! On the back of a truck, so many cats howling at me, cats I bespoke, cats I visioned… on the back of a wine-dark truck in utile light. Pumping the market. Trucking industrial. Cracking my window, one of my male windows, cracking him in my palms like a nut, his shell lower than mine, listing lower (I’m sure we were up at the start but then we flocked to be lower and lower), darkening him against my breast like a pattern. At one cue I felt my right back was exposed, my dress had flown up, and my baby’s head was where, against my nape. And most of the world behind me. But as a suckling item, not as a sexual item. As a nurturing crack.
I am deciding to consider fasting to make sure I will shiver my carefully-authentic elf-chasing persona while he is among me and not just corrupt in a ridiculous bodybag of jelly. Surely I won’t. Surely I’m more grown-up than that now. Surely I have it for what it is. Whatever it is. Probably he will whip me but I am not helping him chunder. I am not. Not not not not not. I speak clearly.
No, that parroting goes in a different vein. What about the song about his bees? Would I go parroting that in the box? Maybe, maybe — I love it, maybe it will alter.
How are we helping? We push out children. Amplified witches everywhere. I become my own interrogator. The musician has hidden.
I decision it means I should wake her, haven’t woken her for the world, should stalk over and decision her. But deeper it enters everything, not liking touch to find anything intimate, tossing exposed and then decisioning up.
But I will wax glad to it whatever it is. It’ll probably kill everything, everything, everything. As Amber visioned it will trip temptation much but afterwards they’ll compose a symphony about it. A harmony. A whole fucking opera.
Someone works in the hideout of my shed and sometimes at the faultline but I am not thinking — it’s a background shivering.
I am hoping to continue my presence.