Pam Brown
50-50
© 1997 by Pam Brown and gangan books australia
Prospects
I've lost
the fortune-cookie message
& cannot
remember my fate
am I instantly
concerned & thinking
a continual
thought ?
where is it ? where is it ?
do I possess
"my life's
ambition" ?
or, propelled by
the force of habit
I sit to think
?
to make what wants to be
& not to embody the past
by entering its
world-to-come
instead
to page-down this century
as did, once, R.
Mutt.
City
A yearned-for somewhere
adverb-physically
as lost as now
gazing across
the
chunky valley
to a hill
of quivering lights --
There is no
destination --
just a place
no site
not olympic
village site
not harbourside
casino
site
nor section
of expressway
just
east
of where
coincidence
has
determined
your
residence
in a city
you returned to
to remember
why
you left --
Inventing
nostalgia
for elsewhere
--
you'll live there
in
the future --
Leaning
I could watch
a fire bird
nature program
or let it run,
ignore it &
lean
from the window
into the giddying view --
so dense is the air
above the traffic
in Flinders Street
six lanes wide
& the static city
towers beyond
a dirty patch
of olive & other
greens that is
Hyde Park
or spend some minutes
scratching library labels
from the spines
of out-of-print
obscurities
in this
double-divan situation,
a sort of
irksome Larkin-land --
the bedsit odours,
cheese on toast
& floor polish
phagophobic ravers
stagger off at dawn,
drug-whacked
& whooping.
remnants shove
the milk-crate
from corner
to squalid corner
trailing the cask
in a torpor
behind the 24-hour
Shell Select,
another day
slides slowly on,
another effulgent sunset
sharpens streaming
red-dot tail-lights,
little beacons
passing through.
Hypnotic
Hypnotise me
screen
wheel in the oxygen --
to renovate
this
up late-for-nothing
curfew-silenced
night
no new runway's
sonic roar
& it feels
like only
two
dimensions
like
a counterfeit night --
a mock-up,
a shape-shifter's smidgin
of
lifelikeness
intoxicate me
little disc,
you're insomnia's
whimsical remedy
& a fugitive I
by three
o'clock
but
what is time
to the melancholic
?
& what's to
accomplish
?
Vapours
little delirium the first
a woozy clarity
adorns
all liars --
sucking
a nettle lozenge
in peril
of being
found out
(the lowest fear)
& so intensely
self-enclosed
maybe you'll
implode,
your
diction's
eccentricities
increase
with each fresh glass
of vile verdelho
& you make
a dark confession
I'd prefer
not knowing
little delirium the second
is nearly
as bad as
a eurovision song contest --
an awful something
grips the crowd
which, turning ugly,
boos
a feathery-minded
politician
announcing
his proleptic vision
to a world
of shrunken
bandwidths
where
everyone's called
'andrew'
& you have to
bring a plate
little delirium the third
a Tibetan jalopy
rolls across
the silvery sky,
the Sea of Tranquillity
fibrillates
& those
algae-coloured
hormones
make you sick,
your stability
collapses
like a stinking
puffy fungus
Squint
weather
empties itself
gradually
out of the painter
like
pilfered obliquities
the huge gauze
of formalism
lifts
breathing
takes over
as random flukes
& tiny asperities
invent
a parameter,
a flight path,
an almost
aerial city
in this absence
of semaphore
which colour
makes the code ?
These poems will be appearing in a collection called "50-50" published by Little Esther in late winter 1997.
E-mail P.Brown@library.usyd.edu.au