Tuesday poem: These greatest hits
May 7, 2012
These greatest hits
unfurling themselves beige flags
four four drumming
and I download white noise
to erase familiar grate
P.S. Cottier
So you’re out shopping, right? And out of each shop comes a different appalling noise, threatening to strangle you. You feel like running away and hiding. In the supermarket they have a pretend radio station broadcasting ads for the entire stock of that wondrous supermarket źbetween ultra-insipid whiter than beige music, scraping away at your ear-strings, subtle as an un-oiled trolley. The same over-enthusiastic voice extolling the wonders of detergent until you wonder if this is in fact hell, and the unseen she who is spruiking is in fact a cleaner, brighter Mephistopheles. Or proper commercial radio entertains you in the shop of your choosing, which in Canberra includes advertisements for brothels, sorry, Gentlemen’s Clubs… And you’re just trying to buy yourself some cosmetics…And you don’t want to be impaling yourself on thoughts of patriarchy, just finding exactly the right shade of lipstick.
And again and again it’s Flashdance or Elton John or Sheena Easton or chiselled Flame Trees, punctuated by McDonalds or Hungry Jacks or the local roof repair man who does his own ads (‘Call and ask for ME!’) and really shouldn’t. You try and tell yourself that it could be worse, that it could be Christmas with Rudolf and the long-horn gang, banging at your ears in American accents, but that’s only a theoretical worse; for the moment this is as bad as it gets. So you duck into the chemist (avoiding the vapid waft of Fleetwood Mac sprayed like a cheap perfume) and buy earplugs.
And when you get home you try and find white noise to download, but at least, at least, it occurs to you that with your iPod in, people won’t think you’re odd, even if you’re listening to nothing at all, not a single half-chewed byte, but just your own thoughts and the muffled beating of your calmer heart.
*
For poetic people with (hopefully) less rant, click on this feather:
Sorry to disappoint
March 15, 2012
These are the search terms used by people to access this blog on 15th March (today, as of about 9.30 p.m.):
the cappuccino kid
japan mangoes
clancy of the overflow
tortoises’ picnic
australian beach girls nude
i believe poems
*
That’s almost a poem in itself.
Tuesday poem: Its’ a beautifull thing
March 5, 2012
Its’ a beautifull
thing to see proper grammar like what beerded Oxford dons’ would write but in the stile of Australia, all sun-bronzed and layed-back and life-savery. I love to see apostrophes’ swimming like little pods’ of dolphins’, near sees’ of expectation points and colons’ semi-twisted like lickety-licorishes’, all hang on; lets’ go and sea. Expectation marks are natures little wake up calls never use one when seven is possible!!! Or three. If you are unsure, its’ a good rule of thumbs’ to use apostrophes’. They pinch the reader, little crabby claws’ at the end of words’ to wake him up. Or her two. Spellings’ important, but apostrophes’ maketh the prose zing; unzip it’s full potenshal almost a Brazilian wax all nice and neat and proprietry like Auntie Sadies’ famous unsean special scones’ with cream.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this for the ACT Writers Centre magazine ACTWrite, for a special edition on editing and grammar. So successful was my effort that the Centre was approached by a person who teaches editing at the Canberra Insitute of Technology for use in her course as an example of something that really needs editing. Of course I gave permission to use it, with the proviso that students be told that I am in fact literate.
Honestly, I am. Im a Docter of Filosofy.
It is so hard to write that badly. I notice that I still spelt Australia correctly. And grammar. And cream. Sigh.
Now, for properly punctuated poems of awl sorts’, please click on this feather:
Tuesday poem: Storming teacups
January 16, 2012
Storming Teacups
I sit with friends outside the café, cup in hand, and fix the world’s problems. I am the cappuccino kid, frothing with anger. I am the peppermint tea with honey, busybeeing everywhere.
I start to collect china as others gather books. My coffee cups speak volumes. I have a small expresso cup, decorated with Aboriginal designs. Is this how I visualise Aboriginal issues? A storm in a coffee cup, a far-off cyclone in Darwin? A Town Called Redfern, where blood has stained the concrete, as there isn’t much wattle around? I sip, and cradle the fragile, storming cup, enjoying my bitter short black. My frown replicates the lines on the cup, as does my smile.
I have a larger, more solid cup which boasts a kangaroo and emu rampant, and the words “Commonwealth Parliament”, proud as any bumper sticker. This capacious cup and saucer was Made in England. It says so on the base. This is a cup for Indian tea, a cup for colonial sipping. I wear a long white dress, a hat to shade my skin and I practise swooning. The cup, however well made, seems to be cracking around the sides, and a small cleft runs from the word Made past the emu. Surely my firm cup will not break, my crest shatter? I delicately place the cup back on the saucer, and the fault-line is hidden.
I have an old cup which says “Buy Nicaraguan Coffee”. Now that things have changed again south of the biggest border, which coffee should I buy? Perhaps the one that tastes the best. A favourite cup of mine is the one that states “Freedom for Women: Women for Freedom”. The tea-lady pours her liquid into this cup, but somehow she doesn’t look particularly free. Her tea makes me insatiable, and the phrase “dry as a witch’s tit” is conjured up from the steam, cloyingly.
But who would smash a cup? They are useful. They are decorative. I stroke my china pets, these devices for drawing boundaries between air, liquid and table. My extrovert cups hold in our conversation, delineate the possible from the flowing surge of ideas. We sit, cups in hand, painting new worlds like flowers on porcelain. I put out my little finger to hook the fishy thoughts which fly from the cup, through the air, challenging our demarcations.
*
This work (prose-poem? creative non-fiction?) was written way back in the Old Days of 1993, and published in Blast magazine. This brings back so many memories, not least of one of the friends mentioned in the first paragraph, Lindsay Croft, a young Aboriginal man killed in a car accident in the United States while visiting Native American reservations, about a year after I wrote this piece. This gives the work a far more bitter taste, for me, than it would otherwise have.
For excellent poetry fixes, go to the Tuesday poem site. They’re be everything from expresso to latte, I can assure you.
11.22.63 by Stephen King
November 17, 2011
Here’s a link to my review of 11.22.63 by Stephen King, a time-travel novel about trying to prevent the Kennedy assassination. The review was just published in Eureka Street. Today, President Obama has been in Canberra, and fortunately, that visit by a US President to the South seems to have gone a lot more smoothly. I travelled back from Melbourne to Canberra today, and we taxied quite close to Air Force One. Amazing to see a plane treated like a celebrity!
When you witness the level of security that necessarily goes with a visit from the US President, it makes you very glad to be living in a less important country, globally speaking.
