CREATIVE MELANCHOLIA

He stepped back from his creation and allowed himself a phantasmagorical moment: fire-flash success, homecoming parades, applause, back-slaps, pretty girl hugs and you the MAN high fives.

She looked over the creation with that quizzical look, said it was nice, and asked him to remember to pick up milk on his way home from work.

They said nothing, regarding the creation, as they tossed it aside and generated their standard rejection slip.

He lugged his creation up the well worn steps to the attic, added it to his crowded menagerie, and wondered what might come of it all after he was gone.

EROS DELIVERS

THE CYCLOPES

APHRODITE

HUNGRY CRONUS

NARCISSUS

LEDA

DIVINE APPETITE

Cronus overthrew his old man, Uranus, so was forever nervous of his own offspring.

His power lead him to eat his kids. A little trickery and lucky Zeus escaped.

THE CYCLOPES

Those one eyed freaks learnt their skills underground;

prisoners who Daddy never loved;

resentment fuelled the fire of those blacksmiths.

DIVINE OFFSPRING

No one to date but the first born son: Gaia gets it on with Uranus.

There followed the ego-centric Titans and some mighty ugly monsters.

Uranus locked the scandal undergound.

APHRODITE'S ORIGINS

Cronus castrated his old man, Uranus, just to make mother Gaia happy.

His old wedding tackle fell into the sea.

Aphrodite rose from twisted love and violence.

LEDA

Zeus, the master craftsman in the art of subterfuge, feathered over his divinity.

Olympus thrives on all our secrets and, gods knew, Leda liked a little swan.

A live feather boa and a surprise entry; when gods come, it can be a beastly business.

SISYPHUS

As soon as he got it up, it was back down again;

the ultimate dilemma for a control freak.

If only he'd been kinder to those who crossed his borders.

Back up that hill you go, King Sisyphus.

ZEUS

Zeus.

Migraines.

End of story.

IF YOU'RE GOD THEN EAT YOUR BREAKFAST

Here's the thing they don't tell you about divinity when you're training: it's essentially a juggling act, right? You've gotta keep the whole lot propelled into continual existence. So nimble hands and keep your wits about you. Right?

I knew one god, dropped an entire planet, the whole thing just smashed to pieces; five major civilizations scattered like broken eggs on the cosmic floor.

Of course he was embarrassed. It wasn't as bad as being knocked off by your mortal underlings but still. I said to him, "Franky, you've made a right fucking mess of things there, haven't you?" And you know what he said to me?

"Sorry Barry. I was in such a rush this morning, I didn't have time for breakfast so me head was a bit dizzy when I clocked on for work."

So lesson one: if you're intending on making a success of this divinity business then make sure you get some breakfast into you. Right?

HIS OWN PRIVATE EDEN

Little big man’s built another nest: torn fashion magazines, yoghurt and a pair of musty socks.

Yesterday he waltzed into a crowded food court: hands waving alleluia in the sky; pants down around his ankles; privates dancing carefree in the breeze.

Little big man doesn’t subscribe to wearing underwear.

He’s in his own private Eden. Lucky bastard.

BROKEN MORNING

The sidewalks were covered with glass but the trains were still innocently efficient.

Stars were simply objects in the sky. Old women stitched nothing more than patches.

Nothing would return to what it was. Brute night was gone but grace had long departed.

HABIBTI

She was not a cat. She just had long hair. He found strands on the bed, or on the couch, after she'd left. She laughed when he said the cat’s visited me again.

They met once a month in secret. She was afraid of honour killings. He was afraid of losing her.

He called her Habibti despite the colour of his skin. She called him Baby despite her far younger years. They made love and watched DVDs. They ate chocolate.

And then she caught a bus, and then a train, back across the city to where she lived.

She never talked about their future. He never talked about her silence.

END POINT

The surprising thing about his discovery was that he was not surprised.

He already knew his life had followed a certain trajectory. And he knew this had always been his nature but he had never been so alone, in the skin of his predicament, as he was on that morning. 

Even the cold surface of the mirror failed to recognise him.

He shook his hand, in front of his face, hoping that movement might translate into visibility. 

It didn’t. 

He opened the bathroom cabinet, took out shaving foam, and covered his face.

The foam became a cloud of indeterminate shape and meaning suspended in mid-air.

He clawed the foam off his face, took up the canister and threw it at the mirror. Shards fell into the sink and he slumped to the floor and started sobbing. 

It was winter and the tiles were cold and nothing could be heard but the dripping tap. There was a scent of shaving foam in the air and a broken mirror that would be easily replaced.

RETIREMENT OF AN EXPLORER

It was quite a thing to be home,
with the wind rapping promises
at window panes, and his mind
full of sails and horizons and
the great life that was stammered
through departure to return.
He had written books, as though
words could mirror oceans,
and his maps of foreign shores
were universally acclaimed.
But all he saw were lines 
and notations that were soundings
of mere measurable depths
and easy claimed domains.
And he knew it as deceipt made
to entertain those dreamers who
consumed adventure stories in
their safe and cosy rooms. But
beyond all publications, and those
warmly greeted speeches, was
the all he couldn't utter and the
distance that remained.

COMPOSITION

My old fat typewriter
held, in its belly, a silver
spindled chorus line
of letters. On late nights,
when everything felt lost
in that certain dark
of neatly ordered suburbs,
my fingers worked and
words were high kicked
onto pages. There was
hope in that midnight sound
and hope in the black
pressed pattern of the poems
and hope that I folded
neatly into daylight
and sent to the immense
and foreign world.

1960'S DECONSTRUCTED DAFFODIL

Unconvinced by solid regularity,
my lonely cloud breaks up, rains
down on golden daffodils; their
paisley spinning petals tongue
my mind; so trippy happy pretty
pretty cool; everything constructed
- meaningless: the way you walk
and talk and act so wired; why
not just unplug your robot mind;
meaning comes when ego just
lets go; take off your noose tie
and expand your life; feel the way
the air is breathing you; my fingers
peace like branches in a tree,
settle your bird frame, come,
land on me; everything is merging
into one; everything is heavy
as a cloud; everything is rising
like the sun; our mind blissed
life shines gold as daffodils.

HOWLIN' WOLF

Six foot six and bull muscle
fierce: the stage is barely big enough
for that man, who looms over
the mike like the genesis angel
over water. He peers out, takes
a measure of the room, brings
the harp up to his lips to start
the murmuring:

Something coming
right out of the night,
the sound his Mamma
labelled Devil's Music.

He stretches lungs and sounds
out a long dark yowl; soul trouble
shaken down, low as thunder;
all that lonely never left behind,
homeless boy now singing
in a man: oh don't you hear
me crying.

CROSSING OVER

I had an intimation of this loss
when I was a schoolboy
catching ferries, and I would
watch the crewman coil
the rope that had secured us:
solid shore adrift and all
that churning thrust from
engines firing just below
the deck; pushed out beyond
to drift and turn and make
our river crossing.

We were a murmuring island
wrapt in mist, estranged
from shoreline certainties,
and Charon's presence was
a broken bridge, skeletal
in the white air. The river
kept no memory: our
trail dissolved in all that
moving deep and we lost
sight of every place we'd been;
shrouded by our journey.

SONGLINE

Sometimes, at night,
the Belgrave Lilydale line
sang a dark commuting lullaby;

soft metal murmuring
from Box Hill to Laburnum,
amplifying through the cemetery,
looking to be heard;

awake in the sleeping house,
not naming the consolation I felt,
my first taste of the blues:

the ordinary music of departure.

ENGAGING DARK MATTER

Why should conservatives be
the stalwarts of mythology?
Who gave them the right to choose
who plays the boogeyman?
And who says liberal should be
so insipidly reasonable?
So much spin, no imagination,
no visionary plan.

Straight jacket facades
and not a whisper of a gargoyle;
girdlocked existence with
no dark alleys to escape;
market projections and
scientific extrapolations;
who carves the monster
waiting at our gate?

COLONIAL ASPIRATION

We make our almost motherland
in the image of what we've known;
we drive all the foreign to the edge of our sight,
plant roses and make ourselves home.

We build our almost motherland
with smooth arches and cobblestones
and hope that its strength will give us our worth
at this crumbling edge of the world.

WATCHORN'S EMPORIUM 1845

For a time, at least in her mind,
she slips beyond the tyranny of place,
her fingers trace over elegant satins;
she inspects fine shoes and parasols,
children's beaver hats and Valentia boots,
Cheshire cheese and Westphalia hams
and currents and candied peels
and she dreams of a world far away.

THE COMPANY MAN 1828

The Royal Chartered Company arrives;
the despot of the North takes up his residence.
If they kill my sheep, I swear to Christ, they'll die.
Nomenclature still holds that memory:
Slaughter Hill, Suicide Bay, Cape Grim.

HOBART 1818

The crowd roars at the scent of sport and profit;
manic eyes and taut faces are desperate for a win.
A voice screams, "Show some fucking balls, get into it!"
He's answered by the opposition's jeers.
Ticket of leave men stand beside their former gaolers
but now their hate is focused on the scene.
Then someone grabs the skinnier combatant, 
yanks his head back and doses him with rum.
"My money's on a clean kill you black bastard
so take that blade and give your brother some."
Then the skinny man is shoved towards the other
and the crowd cheers as the knife is driven home. 

______________________________________________________________

That most shameful, cruel, and barbarous custom of encouraging the Black people to murder or mangle one another for the sport of the learned, the polite, and the refined Europeans: for the amusement and gratification of those who are denominated Christians, has, for some time, required a more effectual prohibition than the Letter of the Law. Last Sunday afternoon, on my way from Church homewards, I was much grieved and distressed, to hear and to see that the public peace of the Town, and the holy rest of the Sabbath, were most impiously violated by the blows and cries of the Blacks, excited to uproar and outrage by the Whites who take pleasure in the sufferings of their fellow men, and, who will propose and give a reward, that the unoffending may be slain, or injured, merely to gratify or indulge the diabolical passions of a base mind, yea "their feet are swift to shed" or to cause to be shed, the "innocent blood".  

The Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, Saturday 26 December 1818