surfboard

the spreadsheet confirms the harbour’s

out of reach, formulae checking formulae

you encounter, then reflect. imagine

a bay built out of bookcases, washed up

down the south coast, bedraggled &

marsupial, cracking tinnies & rejecting

doctrine. it sounds like a plan if you put it

like that. milestones, timelines, now smoke

yourself silly & dribble on the cheque –

they’ve seen it all before. imagine the

snapshot less taken. all that crap you

remember. out on the patio tiny frogs

are camping. surfboard. wilderness society.

you woke up & could touchtype? no shit?

another conversation transmitted to posterity.

of course you were hoping for altered states,

or something less conditional. right.

reprising your contingencies. surfboard.

bookcases. the spreadsheet confirms.

franchisee, revisited

where the heart beats backwards, incredulous,

your music box replays its greatest hit &

all those beautiful lawyers we used to see on tv

book their time against the media

revolution, hoping their blogs are admissible.

not guilt-free, your honour, but now featuring

less carcinogens & 100% cartoon bad guys,

like china without the backing of the IOC.

now they’ve seen the bright lights, how you

gonna keep ‘em down on the server farm?

after the marriage dissolves into advertorial

you drive for days through deserted towns,

shoji tattered in the wind. i figure it’s

kind of pre-post-apocalyptic. either way,

it’s clearly not us. no way we could share

a car for that long without starting a family.

statistical extrapolation

bronchial fucker, your approximate talents

page the laceration squad, chip chip

chipping. where the heart is an apple

worms rejoice, no place, no signal,

check appetites & wantings, all joy & familiarities.

under the runbook the leather boots keep walking –

was there a dance? a pitcher of bourbon?

undoubtedly. this is how you build a theory &

later, awake from it. right? it’s that or

piss yourself, sometimes both. several

stories down, a wig rides the ginza line,

asleep & drooling slightly. wipe the baby

off your suit, numbnuts. fair dinkum,

you call that troubleshooting?

you only need process when no one has answers.

everbeige

eyes flick past the sleeping child blankets can’t contain,

fearless & impervious to cold. a thousand hondas

turn left simultaneously where strictures & blockage

describe the self / this model craves nicotine

& the kind of sausage they don’t sell here,

your tracksuit pants a gesture to athleticism

the body fails to follow, choking on its cocktail

frankfurt. all night the conversation traces

circles, outliving your disappointments.

once & future kink, mouth full of consequences.

otherwise you ash your ciggie, ebisu

department store letdown, even after shopping

in theory & beers lined up endlessly,

a bit like melbourne without the footie.

hypertrophy

a word to the wise left you breathing, stunned

& localised, the settings controlled, no, contrived

to achieve exactly this, the spaces flooded like muscle

or memory, once accessed, never settled, the ongoing

negotiations & blue sky revisionism your heart

collates, then collates again. his visage, ravaged?

if you say so. & what’s to stop you? a faint sense

of impropriety? here in anachronismland the rides

only stop for accidents, a flexible approach to

maintenance. time to don your other hat? & you do,

spraying language. several broken dictionaries,

drinking heavily. 9:25 am in the franchise centre, but

capital won’t wait for the late shift. babies return you

to the corporeal & you fight it privately. don’t mope –

homeopath to the stars might not fit on your business

card, lost in the aether somewhere near yamate dori, but

there’s time enough for regret, to act the buffoon. almost

everything’s optional & you tick over, presuperannuated,

postrelevant, arms full of consumer credit. to market,

to market, you are a fat pig.

overthinking/unaustralian

i seen it coming, no, years ago maybe

there were indicators you ignored, hastening

towards this current inertia, almost weightless,

that was probably it, heightened, you must be

joking, i figure the fugue becomes the tempest

your allies recognise as sleet, fringes barely

ruffled. a prescription for uselessness, litany

of obstructionism & the pointless

lashing, that’s what you meant, temper,

trying out the parochial suit again, red-faced

& weeping, so futile, lame as europe with your

petty racism, everyone knows it’s frustrating,

everyone’s reading the same news feeds,

not the kids though, they’re chewing happily

through their percentage of GDP, unaware of

how your failures are being brought to bear.

a bear? where? that’s not exactly the way the plan

unfolds, but close enough. a giant lamington

constructed by migrants, there’s not really any bears,

sorry, but later we visit the zoo & disturb a koala,

then sketch the markets’ voodoo oscillations. daddy’s

going to work now, it’s what’s expected, no point

complaining about hip-hop grammar, shopping is

entertainment & the world derives from there.

frankenpoem

not myrrh, or the gasping doctor laboriously

climbing the stairs in the hospital, that is, castle,

or the legion of furies that powers the heart’s

ambitious nostalgia, colliding with sydney harbour

& some sort of outback theme park you didn’t

live in as a child. there’s no point railing against

the passage of time or your addled concepts of

permanence, now the wish is the historical phantasm

your host family celebrates every evening,

wondering if you got lost at the office again,

just reheat the appetisers & everything’s apples,

awash with paint & the fumes from the sewer.

in venice, a tourist ponders the magnificent

pigeons, annoyed by the way the buildings distract

you from the fancy at hand. meanwhile, tokyo,

intransigent & edumacated, stage fright means

nothing at mister donut, slap a particle in front

of a random verb & look relieved at what arrives

in response to your order then return

to the question of the poem you left flapping

on an ecologically dubious tray, pleading

for a sushi chef to put us out of its expensive misery.

instructional poem

rabbits sleep warm in bed but mice watch the stars

through a darkened window as penguins caper

in the antarctic – you know kangaroos live in australia

& zoos, right skip? four fingers plus a thumb

give you an advantage over most other animals

(you won’t see a dog peeling oranges, for instance,

& every house will have at least an elephant &

a giraffe or two, but challenge them to cutlery & you’ll

eat their lunch.) never bite or scratch your friends

or stay up after nine o’clock, that’s asking for ghosts

to take you away, which is handy for halloween but

annoying for most of the rest of the year, & if we leave

the house by eight we can get to daycare on time.

later comes work & those songs your dad

can’t sing, except the frogger one which turns out

to be about a cat, & the moon isn’t really vanishing

it’s just a phase it’s going through bilbies were never

that good at astronomy.

msogynist

tired, ineffectual, the firm profits despite

your casual lacerations, frustrating the personal assistants

charged with facilitating the greater glory.

outside, like a camera trick or a game played

with real money, vertigo tickles your middle ear,

compartmentalised as any ocean liner, rms

pedantic for instance, reconfiguring the heart

& the bicycle of the heart then arbitrarily changing shoes.

how come the fucking microfascists & white supremacists

are the only people getting things done? them & very

best cold transport, you study the vedas & buy

an expensive ford – the indices burst with gladness

& bestow a leaf motif, carefully matching your

socks with the kanji for clueless, lifting weights

for hours amid the effortless scorn of the fit & the thin

fax machine anthem

i.

cute truck no the monsters drop breakbeats

on the regional shilling – teeth, reef,

breathtaking automatic transmission.

ii.

hiya sportsfans! irrashaimasae!

the relative distribution of virtues gives your

sorry arse something to mimic, if poorly.

iii.

st-st-static, right lazy? fish-mouthed cops

beat you senseless & mime explosions.

iv.

return of the indolent victory parade

corporate history reeks of, you sip

coffee & study formaldehyde.

v.

hopelessly out of date, does australia

continually greet the horizon? tritely

processional, girt by sea?

the specifications

vindictive background & cut from the obvious

parties though obvious to whom the specifications

languish beside your banal voyeurism, latex

headaches covet your kilometres, all swept up

like a cheesy windbreaker. was the ginger protector

a dream? your face is less noir, more adolescent dark,

each pout more studied than the last, someone writes

a checklist to assist but you fail the internet quiz

& grow pigtails, misreading the local fauna

versus death metal history lesson, tom waits fronting

slayer could be next summer’s can’t miss moment,

otherwise take some time to fiddle with your underwear,

tripping over guitar lessons or mostly pendulous,

you & all that expertise, dangling, window cleaning

initialism

from under clouds, knowledge

unconcernedly emerges, blinking,

cross-eyed, tapping at the frantic

keyboard clowns begin to dress,

year-end sales we collect

on the ginza line, department of

uselessness always happy to see us.

fancy a trip to the hollywood hills?

unless things change it’ll never happen so

cancel your speculation, the

king of crabs sidles up the beach,

young lovers pale against his claws.

only your vibrant stare prevents this.

ulysses, your ship is sinking.

let your fine taste lead you on

now poetry is easy & your face

bears its own relationship to the traditional

markers of pastoral via landscape, he sees

the handball court arranged before him

& if the tennis ball looks momentarily familiar

there’s only a tiny pause before synapses fire

regardless & a slap on the back of his head

renders the score-line irretrievably moot.

so in time you inhabit those teenage memories

& prove the lacanians right, albeit freely

avowing any potential dummy spittage –

it’s an each way bet & you cover your bases

the way some people cover their arse, one eye

on the corporate prize & a chair full of mediocrity,

gabbling away via email & if your every whim

isn’t instantly met you can always call the helpdesk

buoyed by reams of political scandal you can’t begin

to patronise, helicopters career through the

shinjuku skyline, personal medivacs or whatever

passes for eyes in the sky, japanese analogues

of no-talent crosses backed up all the way

to bankstown where you wished upon a star

& dropped a twenty on the pokies, ignoring children’s

stories that make your scalp crawl, full of petulant

moralism & deux ex machina recycled by robots,

just as the whole country wavers in the glare of

what foreigners imagine as approximately

right & a spotlight launched from shinjuku park

tower glances off the metropolitan building

& blinds some pompous twit, forty floors up,

legs shaking like clockwork

superego assault squad

intuiting the shambles you resist & embrace

in your novelty t-shirt, faceless & chronic, values

inherited like an argument the night drags

incessantly through health warnings &

irritable jowl syndrome, monkeyboy or token

intellectual, the effect’s essentially the same,

idiocy floating on a sea figured as the summer’s

inane longing for another stretch of water, somewhere

inland, perhaps a mountain lake full of

itemised tremors & reflected bears, tourists wearing

intricate badges to denote the other.

in this scene no fingers are pointed, we know

it’s happening in real time, hot soup, a bread roll –

i can’t sleep in cowboy boots / shibuya full of ghosts

here ya go

after the list is partially completed & perfect

in the transparency a hundred thousand transistors

work hard to simulate, your gaze impacts the

faux-traditional wall cladding & somehow bends,

like a landscape seen from the shinkansen,

staring back with a child’s face. it’s almost a relief

to be this self-absorbed, knowledge embedded

in the gap between the smoking carriage & film of you

falling down some stairs, juggling a baby with unlikely

grace – you trade a pictogram of grief for a few days

with a bung leg / it’s as difficult to think with your knee

stuck in the freezer as not, & what’s left of the brewery

after you remove the machinery is mostly art

(the souvenir shop is always by the exit, near the café.)

faking the impulse confuses the nerves but the head

is half-expecting this reheated strategy & the eyelids

send encrypted packets to the waiter your teenaged self

once dreamed about, knocking about the strand

& wondering if baristas bought their own t-shirts

or had them laid on, hot & cold running walkmen

pounding out the rhythm a treadmill aspires to,

your headphones full of aphorisms.

statement on meguro poetics (errata)

reflex or reflux you package cramps &

delete registry keys like crazy, giant krusty doll

the neighbours circle warily as if we all weren’t

practising our english here. put an infinite

number of monkeys in front of an infinite number

of ATMs & someone’s bound to order a banana dacquiri.

don’t fret– the souvenir glass is yours to keep

& after hana pokes a finger in your eye you can

watch the sunrise & pretend it’s a hangover,

easy listening from here to ikebukero or spend

a year with your head stuck up your arse,

the effect is similar only your motives vary.

teenagers dressed like accountants who asked

their department heads for fashion advice chug

genki drinks at the combini, tokyo filled

with as many zombies as your colour supplement

philosophy suggests & you smoke at the franchise

where every day is indistinguishable, serial

numbers changed to coopt the gullible & now

as you travel try to be cute but not gauche

or failing that, diverting – your heart glistens

in the spring rain & remember the neck

is a swivel, not a hinge.