Table of Contents
Title Page
smoke encrypted whispers
acknowledgments
of muse, meandering and midnight
a prelude
magnesium girl
after 2a.m.
back seat driver
on the river
waiting for the good man
raindrops fall in vain
chloe in the window box
the postman’s privilege
musing: the graveyard shift
new farm is closed
white stucco dreaming
the crooked men
brown water looting
jetty nights
carefree
deadman’s mouth harp
a verse for the cheated
the fatal garden
radio thick blood
midnight’s boxer
surgery music
a bent neck black and flustered feather mallee
the gloom swans
a black bird of my mind
fly-fishing in woolloongabba
shout-me-a-wine requiem
crust
the writer’s suitcase
midnight’s plague
labelled
for the wake and skeleton dance
the dingo lounge
valley man
cheap white-goods at the dreamtime sale
the mosquito room
mudflat
it starts
1986
boondall wetlands
poem 9
once was a rifle range
the kabul manifest
hotel bone
the job
hotel bone
when dogs gamble
the late shift erupts
bone yard, south brisbane
itinerant blues
cold storage
the dusk sessions
kangaroo crossing
what more
we’re not truckin’ around
nil by mouth
the golden skin of cowgirls
floodlight sonatas
abandoned factories
scenes from a getaway car
night racing
3a.m. escape
pre-flight
95 cents a litre
deo optimo maximo
gasoline
literary festival bump-out
itinerant blue
products of mexico
gas tank sonnets
sunday
the last bullfighter
back road
sultry gridlock musings
brunswick st blues
ambulance chaser
talking to the airplanes
three-legged dogs
fire
the night house
jaded olympic moments
without regret
future primitive
the night train from newcastle
sortie
the finder’s fee
skeletons in the trunk
the thousand-yard stare
king
last exit to brisbane...
hollow squall
smoke encrypted whispers
warning:
smoke signals
tigerland
scared of the dark
wecker road
cribb island
capalaba
rip
smoke water
author’s notes #1
darkroom
fisherman islands
paper trails to midnight
author’s notes #2
ghosts of boundary street
dog tired tune
when I crossed the ditch...
author’s notes #3
the dust company
from boundary street, west end, to the berlin wall, east germany
snapshots
aunty grey smoke
author’s notes—conclusion
revolver
Copyright
smoke encrypted whispers
Samuel Wagan Watson, born 1972, is of Bundjalung, BirriGubba, German, Scottish and Irish descent. He lives in his childhood domain of Brisbane, but still feels the lure from time to time of his teenage stomping grounds of the Sunshine Coast. He has worked as a door-to-door salesman, a public relations officer, fraud investigator, graphic artist, law clerk, film technician, actor, and arts bureaucrat.
His first collection of poetry of muse, meandering and midnight won the 1999 David Unaipon prize for unpublished Indigenous writers. In 2001, he published a collection of ‘road poems’ titled itinerant blues and a chapbook ‘hotel bone’ for Vagabond Press. He is also the co-author of the award-winning website, ‘blackfellas, whitefellas, wetlands’. In 2003 Samuel toured throughout Australia, New Zealand and Berlin.
acknowledgments
Several of the poems in the new section, ‘Smoke Encrypted Whispers’, appeared in Heat and Southerly.
of muse, meandering and midnight
a prelude
dropping a knife
on one’s foot
is nothing like
dropping tequila
on one’s tongue
yet
her floral dress
begged me to...
whereas the night
well,
it just stayed outside
magnesium girl
I was kissing the girl
with magnesium breath,
all over me
her burning hot magnesium
ahh to touch
the boundaries of delight
and pain
for you only hurt those you can love
when lust becomes a mercenary
for the weak hearted of humanity
the magnesium breath
inviting me to her bowl of splinters
nothing but the frozen tears of her last love
picked up in the rain
and our relationship,
a shrouded threesome,
death always being
that silent partner
oh that magnesium girl
with the strawberry hair
how my black flesh and rye once lingered
to be one with you
my magnesium girl
after 2a.m.
I wept along with the night
two
black
hideous dimensions—
myself and 3a.m.
releasing a crystal tide of bottled insanity
while the shadows mocked
our embrace
and from then on
I knew that forever
night
would be my mistress
back seat driver
love me
oh back seat driver
love you
into a state darkest under covers
and wilful damage of day
entice me
oh back seat driver
to the dove of peace
maybe your bulldog tomorrow?
with any luck from yesterday
save me
oh back seat driver
from the bitterness
of phobia waste
and packages of human frost
kill me
oh back seat driver
for an older audience at dawn
and with my blood taken
make a name for me
nothing else matters...
on the river
it was a drive through the sleeping industrial giants
and thirty minutes before a flight
along Brisbane’s vein of union disputes
to a seclu
ded spot on the river’s edge
with its cold sea breezes and dead things,
we kissed
and said goodbye
discovering that we both had feelings for deserted factories
and abandoned mechanical bits
and for each other
thirty minutes before a flight
and two writers can’t find the words
to ease the tearing of departure
serenaded by a blow-torch on a rusting iron hulk upon the water
grey smoke billowing from the old power station
the landscape studded with electric fences and weeds
her and I at home amongst it all
we kissed
and said goodbye
waiting for the good man
we kissed goodbye at the terminal
and upon seeing you for the last time
I felt the good man leaving,
the good man that existed in the hotel room
the good man that loved you across the table, linen and fine wines
the good man that appreciated your perfume
and ran his fingers gently through your hair
catching in his rings as for you he listened
for the laughter while resting in your breasts
I felt the good man leaving
as if I couldn’t convince him that I’d changed
that you had made a difference
and that I could breathe easy in the darkenss of early morning
I felt the good man leaving
and now
I’ll be missing both of you
raindrops fall in vain
for Rebecca Edwards
raindrops fall in vain
and abuse
the kindness of my soul
I hear them landing outside,
an audience to a short-lived affair
continuum of vertigo, a song
soothing,
yet, absolute
a spiral dance to an unwelcoming ground
where they are of little regard
but slaves and remedy to dry spirits
that one can envy such courage to fall
in the open
and share their end
alone
chloe in the window box
in the darkness
it’s increasingly difficult to find the corkscrew
and Chloe in the window box
with that bottle of pinot noir
or the memory of her
that left six months ago
and light no longer shining through
her window
where as a sentimental act
we clasped and watched the stormbirds
that no longer cross the shoreline
Neptune no longer taunting
peering through his transparent keyhole
no more 2am’s
cut out of the darkness with a corkscrew
and as time stretches on
a distorted picture of Chloe,
an empty bottle of pinot noir
the postman’s privilege
most typewriters spit out
that exact decibel
like the coughing silencer
of an assassin’s weapon
or the sound of the postman’s bike
through the walls of my boardinghouse room
through the walls
the postman is my assassin
blah, blah, blaaaaah, blaaaaah, blaaaaaaah
the maddest allegro to haunt me,
I dare not look out
I am a ghost of my own doing
waiting
for the knock-backs from editors
for the “we’d like to pass your work on to the senior
literary editor
before we make a decision”
for the debt collectors
and finally
the letter that says,
“please come home”
musing: the graveyard shift
for Sarah
as I enter a writers’ graveyard shift
sheltered by a desk lamp
a lover is nesting within the covers
breathing softly
paper and pen on the window ledge
third floor
overlooking the river,
dark wet stretching leather
red buoys flicker
on/off
signal thoughts to the writer
on graveyard shift
looking for inspiration
in poorly lit boats shuttling past
the crew all strangers to me
as I am almost a stranger to the person in my bed
promises made as solid as the murkiness before us
where sharks hide amongst it all
vicious, devouring, still-life anecdotes
the ideal machine of consequence
and still, still
with all this darkness
no inspiration
a day of sweet caressing,
the best of my thoughts
whispers in the linen
across her body
into her eyes
chases away the dark creations
filled with something that felt like love a long, long time ago
hands left shaking
unable to paint,
a dark portrait of self
new farm is closed
the ex-muse is on her way home for good
to the walls of stale inspiration
her little boy in tow
while a lone figure of the shadows he has cast
stands in the doorway of an upstairs balcony, waiting
rain falls of this morning
cleanse the streets of the valley
water upon arduous attempts to dream
this rain is his last witness
as the car is packed
typewriter and clothes await the still room across town
yet, his smell will linger for some time in the halls
and it has been quiet
and there will be nothing good to come
of his presence here
and there is no love poem preserve,
goodbye magnesium girl
the debate has faded
with the feelings of eternity
drowned in the misguidings of gringos and dingos
the typewriter waits, a patient mistress
he says goodbye finally to the emptiness
darkness ever and always faithful
but in the surrendering there is solace
and the last parody in this passing is conducted
he locks the door and hangs a sign out-front
NEW FARM IS CLOSED
white stucco dreaming
sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind
is early childhood and black humour
white stucco dreaming
and a black labrador
an orange and black panel-van
called the ‘black banana’
with twenty blackfellas hanging out the back
blasting through the white stucco umbilical
of a working class tribe
front yards studded with old black tyres
that became mutant swans overnight
attacked with a cane knife and a bad white paint job
white stucco dreaming
and snakes that morphed into nylon hoses at the terror
of Mum’s scorn
snakes whose cool venom we sprayed onto the white stucco,
temporarily blushing it pink
amid an atmosphere of Saturday morning grass cuttings
and flirtatious melodies of ice-cream trucks
that echoed through little black minds
and sent the labrador insane
chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraud
laid across white stucco
and mud cakes on the camp stove
that just made Dad see black
and the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets,
peering into our white stucco cocoon
wishing they were with us
the crooked men
my Dad straightened out the crooked men
in the old laundry shed
above the fishing gear and jars of nuts and bolts
where on a rack
their naked, twisted forms did hang
from the neck
body hair like pine-needles
restrained by welded g-clamps
and steel-trap teeth
hydraulic arms and pullies
and a shiny drip-tray on the floor
to catch the expelled, blackened hate
sometimes eight sometimes ten
the crooked men
with faces like prunes
tattoos and scars
and tongues that could no longer work
but engulfed by obscenities
as they leaked night and day
in that old laundry shed
and they were not grateful
or ungrateful
the crooked men
nor were they in debt to my father
and his amazing rack
in these days when their hate
would trickle through my backyard haven
drowning the smells of Saturday afternoon
and freshly cut grass
and the yap of the labrador
and innocence lost
to the crooked men
brown water looting
hardly stopping to think
that adults can hurt you
we’d wander the mudflats alone—
brown water looting
make-shift fishing poles
and mosquito song
for hours and hours
wandering
away from our parents
away,
looking for where the feral pigs slept
or where swamp wallabies crash through
and us, never thinking
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