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Michael Farrell

36 Exp.

(téte-à -texte with Gig Ryan’s poetry collection Pure And Applied*)

I wake up to work. My chin stuck to my chest stops the acid getting through.

So this is what I have the key to. You too if you’d look past the mask. I crashed through Woolworths like someone good at it.

Elegy for a woman stuck in a chair. It bored her. I shower in my admissions to serious problems. The man who won’t look up. Paper, scissors, rock by phone.

Shaking without an earthquake. Past decades of forced Proust. The locals are ticks.

I’m not short film phobic, it was a joke. Fooled (obsessed) by quotes.

           *

R.I.P. Response in prose. It’s my kind of health. Stable by dint of mash and gloop. The maintenance of shards by sharks.

           *

Pulping the punk lives, what happened in June that year? Prepare for a different kind of patient.

           *

She was getting bigger and quieter. She breathed too heavily to be a secretary. The arrangement was we wouldn’t see the stinging insects. In our crochet.

           *

Cop entertainment (poor). The dramatic portrayal of metal. Timely ripped.
My reading different, my breathing the same.

           *

At the moral daunt, the loam tundra. The purple sock became a lung. Ripe and appled, rid of you. You could’ve been thinking anything. Our Lady MC Beth A. Dogs ate me.

           *

The answer was sit down and he was one of the Apostles. The S dims on the Gundagai sign. Like a Wings song I liked, it’s the only therapy. Deal.

           *

The Hardy rap. The warmup. Looking younger, acting stupider. Four go looking for a winter wonderland. One finds the North Pole. The Brontes.

           *

A bee advised me of a debt and left. The twin towers house different groups: the arrrgh and isn’t that beautiful? A rope strung between bite and cure. I’m here. Worry.

           *

Ill, stifled. I couldn’t control her. The hierarchies sharpen. Everyone pretended to see-saw. Get that bitch online for comment. The nurse, uncomfortable on the ball, denied it till I was forced to notice. Domestic obsession: its thick aspect. They preferred moulds to new kinds of bread.

Her yes was the colour of blood. Little duchy with airs of a colonising power. The black-capped chemist. Today I learned ‘dance on your grave’ is an ironic expression, I grew leaves, Wagner; you learned nothing, grew nails. I was like a joke fly in an iceblock. Out of its drink.

           *

The hard-up love their tea — my fixing doggy aunt thinks I’m a bone. I ink in the crossword like a mechanism. Do I think I understand moss? What moss says? I gave myself ... half a biscuit ... half a toy. Don’t go, don’t stay, if that’s what they do. Satan bless. Untaxed, I recouped.

Last stop. By this stage my shoe shaped like an L. Palilaliac (normally earthy and grounded,) shrieking for Mars. Strengthened for terror by life as a statue, lidless eyes don’t miss a thing.

           *

An image in her head from warday. A post-nuclear restoration mentality.
Music falls on me like wet white ropes, that clear for massive mutant dear.
The queen’s there, her green lips leer from the weeds.

My humanity’s on pause. She makes me dark around the eyes. Thinning out, untooled. My tan shocks the office workers, the goth mongers, don’t let me breed, moans the rock star to the dock worker. She came back with a joke gun, joke alcohol, mad about the charade. The sprouts in the fridge are limp. The dog’s in the water like a sole survivor.

           *

One thing of me’s I’m two from god. Exotics, i.e. exotic had been done to them. A nude election by Degas, halt to his idealessness. Fifty years of shining gear.

           *

I stop that kind of dope. An allergy, my life in dumb-show. Our interrupting dance, our side-effects: consistency. Your i.d. crypt marks.

A drilling aesthetic, a noun-map. I flick to the vulnerable decline, her ego-state inventing a treaty. Condoms in a china dish. A snake chin.

Quiet betrayals amid the noise, a forcing out. The judge said no sugar.

You had your chance. Was it really mine? And my job to add the magic? In the frozen section getting political of a sudden. Go on, do.

Play out the pre-human repertoire. Getting that move out of my system.

Gulliver this and that. The couple in the next room are just a bad sex dream. ‘Please permit me,’ he says.

           *

I’m re-mothered. Mentioning Christ and the Devil in one sentence. The mortal sovereign of the exit. The artful rejoiner of wool ends (with horns). Verbal skills unnerve my basset. I missed church for this. (Equals deleted.)

           *

Amp and mop sacs. Hating coining, preferring drawing, withdrawing. This is the sick sheep reality: no taut bale! Do they notice? The anti-echo of feeling. What happened before the written. The acne-graph of interminable adolescence. I read the paper. Nothing.

           *

She wanted to "go under" again. Three years metallurgically bent. From shell and sting to frond. Feeding off past menace, like tropicos on cod.

Que sera.

           *

A cow. The infra showed murder after all. Sequins at the trial like a holiday. It’s hard keeping up with vice with cancer. America’s an ass: a comedy. I relied on literature’s symmetry to reduce my abnormality.

Enthusiasm leaves drugs unmoved. Stand by your Ken. The wren’s xmases came at once, it drank blood backwards. Even the tv had vd. You need glasses like Yoko needs widowhood. We had to stop the rats od’ing on collagen.

Sewn-up, shitheart.

           *

He left salt on the gym bench — her wounds weren’t there. I need to learn / can’t tolerate what. She chucked her too-slow too-fast bike. What choice? Hatchets are for damage, I ran into Jenny at the core.

           *

Easter rots into April. Staccato entered me ... pathology. The treed hiss. Cone it, the phones connected to my head: big leggy. Stress turns to urban ache, ok if I happen to be in care. Abiding bang and slush / proximity of aquatics, cinematics. Everybody’s pet needs shape.

Noone’s Lisa. She flowers on the Duchamp couch. Your dried concern. She hyperventilated ‘the louse’. A hard nun to break. A mad gem deathwatch — had it.

           *

Crow cuisine: a dole house. Kids like cucumbers, forked for, spat out. I yearned to run out on the turntable; I feared-desired the diamond’s stab.

We threw out the God thing, it was easier, we curled up our slime. I play pneumonia ping-pong in the battle of paedophiles.

French for rapids, you still got cut up. She began to see this as a real where. The fete relaxed a lot. Now I see your face in the towel without avoiding the washing-up. @ you @ me, go cheap.

He repented his easy hand. At the opera dying to come. My exs dim and break me, their skin unswept beneath the bed. Like a geranium, bright and unpleasant. I’m glad I didn’t marry the ambulance driver. What’s a life? A handful of spitballs on the other side of the wire. I learned more about presence than I forgot about aftermath. She feels and remembers what.

           *

We exhausted the panopticon. The bag of sweets kept me hidden, treasuring my right hand. The words hand. It was a good idea and kept the south-east beautiful. She had only been there in the summer. We circled her with cream cups a mirror empty of children. Pascal and Milton to go. Home-made pies like the ones at the wake, you were just a child a precocious stone.

           *

I call it noon. He said we’re at cross paths. There was no need to mention in the song ‘the gon’. Elegy for the complex, the brain dead, the browsing cows headful of ads ... The sky deteriorates for some people; she cared what the wind said.


____________
[*(téte-à -texte with Gig Elizabeth Ryan’s poetry collection Pure And Applied, Paperbark Press, Sydney, 1998.]


Michael Farrell lives in East St Kilda. He reads poetry for Meanjin magazine and is the Australian editor of slope magazine at http://www.slope.org/. His pamphlet ’living at the z’ was recently published by vagabond press. email address: limecha@hotmail.com



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