by John Clarke
Or words to that effect,
He fulminated briefly,
Said that what he wanted chiefly
Was to do the thing for which
He’d asked the people to elect him.
But John put the card to sleep,
Establishing his fame,
And great was the rejoicing
Of the folk who thought the same,
But we’re left with the position
That in keeping with tradition
It’s the rich to which the pleasure
And the poor to whom the blame.
OBVIOUSNESS
Rob Rob Bobbity Bobbity James Lee Hawke M.P.
Took great care of his image because he was quick to see
That if you are photographed standing with blokes
Whose boats do well on the sea,
Millions of voters will fail to notice
The blokes will be charging a fee.
Sigrid Sassoon
Profoundly affected by her experience of war, Sigrid exposed its horrors and expressed undisguised contempt for those politicians who stayed home, doing nothing to stop it.
THE PRIME MINISTER
‘Good morning, good morning,’ the PM lied,
As he paused on the doorstep and turned to the press.
He was saddened, he said, that some children had died,
In his rocket attacks, which were such a success.
‘It’s hard to avoid,’ he told Lawsie and Jones,
As they both went out ‘live’ on their satellite phones,
‘…if people build schools in our targeting zones.’
Kahlihliji Bran
Kahlihliji was a migrant to Australia, settling in Sydney from Lebanon. He had studied sculpture under Rodin but at that time nobody in Australia had heard of either Rodin or sculpture. Kahlihliji became a visionary.
THE HALF-YEARLY PROPHET
And a Punter came forth, which was not unusual, and said
Speak to us of Race 5 at Randwick.
And he answered and said:
Goodness me, is that the time?
People of Moron, I say to you, Wisdom is not in others. It is in ourselves. We are not others. Other people are. We are us. And yet they are not Them. They are merely an Us which does not include anyone here. Any questions so far?
The world is a seamless cloth. Take shelter in it but do not expect it to fit.
Love and Understanding are but winds that bear the spirit.
Love may be given but cannot be taken.
Understanding can be neither given nor taken but is the string in the bow of Life.
We are not Us either, incidentally, I should make this clear. Just a small one thanks.
Everything is its own opposite.
Paradox is that which is not paradoxical.
Only the living know death. Only the dead are living.
Only the lonely, dum dum dum dumdedoowah, know the way I feel tonight. Jameson’s if they’ve got it.
A cow has many windows, but only one rudder.
Reason is a tool. Try to remember where you left it.
If you are rich and you would give, give not your money.
The poor know nought of money. Give them of yourself.
A smile, a pat on the head, something of that order.
And he beckoned to the pilot.
I must take rest for a time, he said, possibly on Venus.
And he was gone.
Noeleen Sitwell
Member of an illustrious and very artistic family, the result of a classical education and careful inbreeding. Her brother Wheelbarrow Sitwell was a cartoonist for many years with the Albury & District Gazette and her other brother, Otherbrother Sitwell, was the drama critic for Turf Digest for almost half a century and later wrote books about everything he could remember.
STILL RAINING
Still raining I’m afraid.
Sky full of dark foreboding. Look at that sky.
No joy there I’m afraid. We’ll have to postpone the pennant again.
I’m sorry but what can I do?
Terrible weather for bowls.
I can’t remember a time when it was so bad.
Even if it breaks you know you’ll only get a few ends in
Before it pisses down again.
Have you got a raffle ticket?
Oh come on you’d better buy one, it’s for the club.
You’ll never win it if you haven’t got a ticket.
It’s the Bible. Yes we’ve got one too
But you can’t have too many Bibles.
William Esther Williams
Williams was a doctor whose interest in Imagist poetry helped him greatly in his work. Very interested in nature, especially, like Marianne More, in the pantheistic resonance of great big animals.
THE CARNIVAL
Why is it that every year
On remote coastlines
Labour leaders
Beach themselves?
Whole schools of them,
Apparently healthy Labour leaders
Thousands of miles off course and stranded,
Spume drifting from their tragic holes.
Why do they do it?
Is it not knowing where they are going?
Or is it guilt over where they have been?
There is no more futile prospect in nature
Than ordinary folk with flippers and buckets
Working urgently in the deepness of the shore
To turn the stricken Labour leaders around
Before nightfall.
Pinko Brooke
Pinko Brooke, whose origins are uncertain, had no formal education and began working as a drover at eleven. He was typical of a generation of young men who went away to World War I; Brookie, like so many others, did not come home. He was killed in the attack on Nieppe Forest in August 1915, two days after writing ‘The Soldier’.
THE SOLDIER
If I should die think only this of me
That there’s a little bit of Ballarat in Belgium
And some Bowral and some Nowra and a fair degree of Cowra
And perhaps a dash of in behind the back of Wendouree.
Alain Frost
Frost, three-time winner of the Zitpuller Prize, holds a venerable position in Australian letters, partly because of his great age. He was at one time the oldest white male poet writing in English. Sadly, eighty-six years later, he died.
THE TRACK LESS THRASHED
Two tracks leading nowhere in the bush
Miles from anywhere, I rolled the window
Down and had a look up the first one,
Considered the position briefly and
Said I preferred the other one. My father
Looked up from his form guide and asked me why,
I said because it’s not this one. You talk
To him, mother, he said, I can’t deal
With him, the boy’s a bloody idiot.
There’s no need for language, said my mother.
While the matter was discussed I climbed
A very large redgum out over the river
And in a sense I never quite came down.
The great thing about being up a tree
Is that you’re not going along a track.
Ezekiel Mad
Ezekiel came from Bathurst, as quickly as possible. He introduced everyone to everyone else, rewrote poems for people he met on trains, invented new movements in art, music and literature and then lost the lot gambling on the result of World War II.
CANTO MCXVXIV
Mr Pyrex, Mr Ichabod Pyrex, fourth male progeny
Of prominent grazier stock, they rich and elegant
In slaughter, is to be married, there being
A robust, enduring, hairy fear of the alternative,
Which does not occur in nature if, as in the current case,
The culling is done sufficiently often.
Upon finding himself at a point of lacuna in his odys
sey
He recently partook of a novel, littorally,
On the Aegean, which he noted was bottomless.
Point of interest here being that Marcus Antonius
Elected to conduct a land battle at Atrium,
On something that was bottomless.
And being as he was from the peopled Republic of Americky
And his team badly needing a Homer at the top of the 20th,
He perfected the transmuting of self-pity into modernism
Through the fascist miracle of editing,
And with sensation and insight on first and second
He blasted the difference out of the park,
To clinch the World Series for the Paris Bluebells.
It is logically impossible to imagine being dead
Since nothing is beyond the power of the mind,
Even the tense is present continuous,
The case, which is imperative, doesn’t matter,
And the mood, which is unconditional, all depends.
Reports of my life have been greatly exaggerated.
Testes, one, two, testes, testes,
Hello, this is Muzzo calling,
Do you read me? Do you read me?
Does anyone read me? Does anyone read?
Does anyone do anything anymore?
Sometimes I think this might all be a mistake but if I stop now
I could look responsible for my own actions
And there goes my defence.
I could have been a contender, I had it all,
Every shot in the book, and footwork,
There wasn’t anyone could touch me, in my day,
I was good, I was very good,
And where did it get me!
Handmaiden to the stars, midwife to genius,
C’mon! For Chrissake! You cannot be serious!
You are the pits of the entire world!
Code violation Mr Mad. Deuce.
That’s the trouble, always the deuce.
Always the goddam deuce.
Some of my best friends are Penalty Mr Mad.
Time wasting. 30/40.
That Wyndham Lewis, when he first came to me
He couldn’t paint his own name, and that little Beach,
The woman in the bookshop. Joyce was it? I just forget the name.
And Ford the only man among them. But that Eliot,
I’ll tell you what, say what you like about him,
He made the trains run on time.
Mr Laughlin, Mr Jemmie Laughlin, of Laughlin and Laughlin,
Scion of the family, they rich in irony and adept
At sliding down mountains, is most devoutly to be thanked,
I am the mad Carew now. I am Ben Gunn in a wicker cage,
And I am Lear. But am I, as Hamlet my task,
The fool? Or am I only the king?
T. S. (Tabby Serious) Eliot
Tabby Serious Eliot was born in Mallacoota but went to school and university in Melbourne, qualifying as a surveyor in 1915. Among his other works is Old Ponce’s Book of Practical Webbers.
THE ACCOUNTING CAT
Liquidity’s a mystery; it’s very rarely seen,
It strikes and then is gone again, its getaway is clean,
And despite forensic evidence and great deductive flair,
The conclusion’s inescapable, Liquidity’s not there!
Liquidity, Liquidity, there’s nothing like Liquidity,
Its presence gives you confidence, its absence is timidity,
You own perhaps a property, you own perhaps a share,
But once you’ve lost your credit card, Liquidity’s not there!
Your understated opulence inheres in what you wear,
But in the end you face the fact, Liquidity’s not there!
Liquidity’s a nifty term, it’s business talk for cash,
It’s money not tied up in things or hoovered in the crash,
Investments may return amounts of staggering obscenity,
The vastness of your holdings may explain your great serenity.
In publishing, to take the case of either of the Fabers,
A warehouse full of Larkin and The Bumper Book of Neighbours,
Is very well, and when they sell, will satisfy the editors,
But not much use, in real terms, when dealing with the creditors.
Liquidity, Liquidity, there’s nothing like Liquidity,
The glint of actual ducats brings respect and dipthelidity,
It’s likely to self-immolate on contact with the air,
Say ‘Raffle’ in a crowded room; Liquidity’s not there!
In the conduct of a company (proprietary limited),
There’s always a suspicion that the system’s maladministered,
In proper corporate planning you allow a little spare,
But when you need the wherewithal, Liquidity’s not there!
Liquidity, Liquidity, there’s nothing like Liquidity,
In purely economic terms it constitutes validity,
I wish I had a pound for every credit millionaire,
Who completely failed to register, LIQUIDITY WASN’T THERE!
When reputations tumble and the search is on for clues,
(I might mention humpo-bumpo, I might mention drinkie-poos)
There’s a suspect who can prove he was in Lima at the time,
They can’t catch him, he’s the brilliant Scarlet Pimpernel of crime!
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ARTHUR PERPEND
Let us go then, you and I,
While there’s still time to read and classify,
Measuring the margins on the little fey barometer
That marks the calibrations of our talk.
In the room the women come and go
Despite what I read in the papers.
Old is what I seem increasingly to be,
Tobacco-tranced in time I watch the sea,
It was a dark and stormy old pyjama cord
That lashed me to my dream of others moored,
There followed soft a moment put on hold
With a wind without a rug against the cold
And someone, call it someone, up on an elbow,
For argument’s sake, might say,
‘You have missed the point,
You have completely missed the point.’
In the room the women come and go
But not, perhaps regrettably, with me.
Marianne More
Born near Broken Hill, Marianne More has always had a feeling for the expanse and majesty of Australia and the natural world. She went to school in Adelaide.
THE MAJESTY OF GREAT BIG ANIMALS
The majesty of bison as they roam,
Is awesome, in the North, in spring, I’ve seen,
The majesty of lizards, and observed,
The majesty of easy climbing birds,
Whose majesty is manifest in groups.
The trees are in their awesome beauty now,
Majestic kangaroos abound in scores,
And groups of birds lift lazily and wheel,
Like lazy groups of wheeling birds aloft,
Especially near a river, did you ever
Just consider, the majesty of rivers?
Morris Clarke
Morris is concerned with the language, which is a good thing since he’s a poet. His autobiography Round the Church and Back chronicles his early life in Dimboola and Warracknabeal.
THE MARINER’S DAUGHTER
When fire is bestirred
And the men begin rowing
The word is her aspect
Is singing itself
There is calm in her stance
With the dark of the land
Running under the boat
In its furrows of moving
When sail finds the air
Like a house on a hillside
She is warmth in the wool
And the flight of the curlew
Like whisper of nightfa
ll
Or sky in a lake
And O she is the band
At a dancehall
Dorothy Parkinson
Writer of bittersweet reviews and short stories. Member of the famous Alqongwoin ‘Drunks’ group.
THE STORY SO FAR
Poland works nicely,
Chad’s going well,
Burma’s precisely
Successful as hell,
Haiti is lovely,
This time of year,
Sudan is just darling,
Thank God for Zaire,
Chile’s a dish,
Brazil is a dream,
South Africa’s bliss,
And Iran is a scream.
Go lease a car,
Go purchase a suit,
Everything’s ducky,
And I’m King Canute.
b. b. hummings
b.b. drove an ambulance in World War I and was mistakenly imprisoned by the French. He never fully recovered and returned to Australia in some confusion. Tragically, he did not know he wrote poetry. He thought it was ‘just a lot of nonsense’.
74
this bit
foll
owe
db
y
this bit
and
then
this bit
over here
seasons change and leaves go up or down
coolman;unmanuncool
(nothing)
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