Smoke Encrypted Whispers

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by Samuel Wagan Watson


  a crowd of condemnation and little comfort

  finally a spectacle of his art

  the art in dying alone

  an external soul of tattered black cardboard

  picked up in the ruthless breeze of the city

  he dies like his ideas

  in a bundle on the sidewalk

  where the children find his writings in the gutter

  and laugh them off as discarded letters of love

  midnight’s plague

  with a head full

  of bad tunes

  and

  wanting to attack

  the cerebral cortex

  with a pair of scissors,

  cutting the black squares

  that keep appearing

  multiplying, mutilating

  in the room

  that never sees sunlight

  and

  a clock set to midnight

  repetitively

  thoughts incubate

  gestate

  pictures from

  an out-of-tune television screen

  rotate, ignite

  the sorry memories

  spread like midnight’s plague

  the constant visitation

  of places without phone numbers

  where the wrong moments

  have left their mark

  and an immune system frail,

  reminder notes manifest

  into death threats

  macabre melodies rise

  to the roof of the skull

  fall into the covers

  nose bleeding

  midnight’s plague

  taking another victim

  the mind infected

  with suggestions

  like

  fortune cookie disasters

  labelled

  the doctors probed

  while I persisted stamping my hooves

  on the cold floor of the locked ward

  “Mr Watson ... you don’t eat grass!”

  “Crap!” I flared.

  hooves tap, clop, tok, tap...

  “Molasses, salt tablets. Now!” I snarled.

  “Mr Watson ... why these antics?!”

  “Let me out of here ... I’m a winner ... I have a Cup to win!”

  “Mr Watson ... you’re not a race horse ... you’re a human being!”

  Oh yeah?

  all my life I’ve been under some kind of label—

  full blood?

  half blood...

  half breed!

  half caste—

  and even questioned about being

  a quadroon

  well

  with magnificent bloodlines like that

  I decided

  I must be a goddamned pedigree of some sort!

  for the wake and skeleton dance

  the dreamtime Dostoyevskys murmur of a recession in the spirit world

  they say,

  the night creatures are feeling the pinch

  of growing disbelief and western rationality

  that the apparitions of black dingos stalk the city night, hungry

  their ectoplasm on the sidewalk in a cocktail of vomit and swill

  waiting outside the drinking holes of the living

  preying on the dwindling souls fenced in by assimilation

  the dreamtime Dostoyevskys ponder

  as dark riders in the sky signal a movement

  for the wake and skeleton dance

  it’s payback time for the bureaucrats in black skins

  and the fratricide troopers before them

  with no room to move on a dead man’s bed

  is it all worth holding onto these memories

  amidst the blood-drenched sands?

  better to forget?

  the dreamtime Dostoyevskys feel the early winter

  chilled footsteps walk across their backs in the dark hours,

  the white man didn’t bring all the evil

  some of it was here already

  gestating

  laughing

  intoxicated

  untapped

  harassing the living

  welcoming the tallship leviathans of two centuries ago

  that crossed the line drawn in the sand by the Serpent

  spilling dark horses from their bowels

  and something called the Covenant,

  infecting the dreamtime with the ghosts of a million lost entities

  merely faces in the crowd at the festival of the dead,

  the wake is over

  and to the skeleton dance the bonemen smile

  open season on chaos theory

  and retirement eternal for the dreamtime Dostoyevsky

  the dingo lounge

  those of the brown-skin lycanthrope

  have merely become the forgotten offspring

  from the dark ages of the dreamtime

  the black man’s beliefs

  are being swallowed up and regurgitated in foreign lands for a

  dollar

  the night creatures sucked into a vacuum of the techronic abyss

  the shapeshifters skulk around the dingo lounge

  haunted by the screaming engines of the machines of

  consequence

  longevity just a whisper in the wind

  as their numbers dwindle

  and the dark hours are stolen by the monsters of new:

  drug addicts, paedophiles and killers

  the spirits have almost lost their foothold

  the children of the rainbow serpent have no use for demons

  scientific justification has rationalised their roles with prozac

  and institutionalisation

  the dreamtime can be resurrected anytime

  and found on the video store shelves

  while in the dingo lounge

  redundancy and health in death escalates

  the bonemen have performed their last dance

  and the shrieks of the black dingo go unheard in the night

  as the ferryman has already gone down with his ship

  and Morpheus in his arduous attempts to dream

  has taken to anti-depressants

  there comes no stormbird to deliver them to another side

  as they fall into the landscape of the shadowmead

  and the faded memories of the storytelling damned

  valley man

  He had rough hands

  street hands

  black hands

  hands

  that reached out

  and felt the dark places

  but

  feeling the dark places

  He would always return

  with something in his face

  his face that held abuse

  served in an irrational way by society

  the material society

  a society existent on the dark places

  the dark places

  places that could not harness him

  but only create temporary peace with him

  for so many moments

  He destroyed the dark places’ grasp

  and finally

  He danced up a wind

  and mocked the dark places

  until He laid silent,

  waiting...

  for when the brolga met his breath

  inviting his dance to join hers

  when,

  once again

  He felt the dance of the young

  cheap white-goods at the dreamtime sale

  if only the alloy-winged angels could perform better

  and lift Uluru; a site with grandeur

  the neolithic additive missing from that seventh wonder of the world expo,

  under the arms of a neon goddess, under the hammer in London,

  murderers turning trustees

  a possession from a death estate

  maybe flogged off to the sweet seduction of yen

  to sit in the halls of a Swiss bank

&
nbsp; or be paraded around Paris’ Left Bank

  where the natives believe

  that art breathed for the first time;

  culture, bohemian and bare and maybe brutal

  and how the critics neglect the Rubenesque roundness of a bora-ring

  unfolded to an academia of art

  yes, that pure soil in front of you

  the dealers in Manhattan lay back and vomit

  they’re the genius behind dot paintings and ochre hand prints

  rattling studios from the East Side to the Village

  and across the ass of designer jeans

  porcelain dolls from Soho wanting a part in it so bad

  as the same scene discards their shells upon the catwalks

  like in the land of the original Dreaming

  comatose totems litter the landscape

  bargains and half-truths simmer over authenticity

  copyright and copious character assassination on the menu

  sacred dances available out of the yellow pages

  and

  cheap white-goods at the Dreamtime sale!

  the mosquito room

  a melody on the edge

  of monotone madness

  rampant

  unstoppable

  uncompromising

  in the mosquito room

  it knows not an end

  out of respect for the thunder

  it does not pause

  for the seductive summer rains,

  millions of black, micro-winged demons

  playing violins at break-neck speed

  zipping through the air

  malicious

  flirtatious

  at home

  in the mosquito room

  mudflat

  dried up and cracked

  remnants

  of prehistoric reptile scales

  huge and menacing,

  a chocolate flesh

  that twists along the shores of the wetland

  —but waiting for the veil of the incoming tide

  is the monster

  content when cold and hungry for

  the mass that rolls with the current

  it never sleeps

  it starts

  it starts

  from the darkness of mangrove dreaming

  unable to surrender to time,

  later stalked in death,

  the stoic’s domain is the open marshland

  under a red sky looming

  where the arthritic bones refuse to bend

  broken in the blatant malice of the elements,

  and even then

  its dignity is only served

  by the chilling shrieks of stormbirds

  astride crumbling limbs

  whose space is a waiting graveyard

  and valuable a wooden tear

  where no mercy spills from the thousands

  of lush, green enveloping peers,

  so laden with life

  so unsparing

  that no two trees help one another

  amid the birth and dying cycle of this wetland

  if only it could speak

  and touch human ears

  someone may then appreciate

  the frozen insanity

  that accompanies

  the greying presence

  of a decaying mangrove tree

  1986

  he pays no heed to the thunder god

  yet he is wary and tired

  ’cause you see funny things out here

  as the heat gets you,

  twigs snapping behind him

  when suddenly in some places the breeze just stops!

  all his hair stands to attention

  this black man from a northern people

  whose world has nothing to do

  with the road ripping through

  the wetland

  but he is sensitive

  is conscious

  with dealings and bills

  and mouths to feed,

  a witness to the machines eating the tea-tree

  clawing the soil

  burning this patch of bush

  for someone else’s lust of bitumen and noise

  well, he just has to keep moving

  despite the dark shadows of ochre and skin

  that tempt the mind’s eye to ponder

  what was

  and never may be

  again

  boondall wetlands

  poem 9

  how do you know?

  that the mud doesn’t feel the pain

  of your weight upon its resting place

  how do you know?

  like the snake that rushes before your feet

  and you the only audience

  a gift only for your eyes

  from the old people

  maybe?

  how do you know?

  the tree that moves in the breeze

  its branches caressing your head

  maybe a touch of recognition?

  maybe?

  how do we know that this could be

  our final resting place?

  or sacred to someone else

  but how can you tell?

  is it voices or wind that pushes

  the afternoon tide?

  does your shadow talk to the land

  or is it just a shroud of light?

  are we asking the right questions?

  and can they only be answered here on the

  wetlands?

  are the answers here for our blindness

  or was blindness the only answer

  our ears were content with?

  once was a rifle range

  all that remains now is dirt

  always dirt

  where so many years ago

  adventurous young would fill it with lead

  and heat

  for the sovereign

  eyes fixed in the cross-hairs of victory

  on foreign soil

  and something called honour

  but this is also where

  on the muddy banks of the creek

  a father shared some final moments

  with his little boy

  and advised him to watch the mystical water

  to wait, and never shed a tear

  while his father travels away to fight the Boers

  in a land called Africa

  finally the man took his carbine rifle

  fired several shots into some distant mounds of

  earth

  the child’s frame jolting with every hideous blast

  until this father was content

  ready for the long haul

  trying to ignore the tears in his little boy’s eyes

  watch the tide my son

  and wait for me to return

  upon a distant tide I will be home

  but until then my son

  wait

  and watch the tide...

  the kabul manifest

  there is no stopping

  the brutal freight-train of pure muscle

  that manipulates billai dhagun

  the likes of kabul

  a wise old man

  the last of the great contortionists

  upon a dogmatic path

  where many have tried to cross

  to capture

  to thwart

  the shape-shifting

  shedding skin

  that comes with the immortality

  that is kabul

  unpredictable in his sudden appearance

  disrespectful to the laws of gravity

  yellow eyes the dominion

  and has kept the old one’s language

  his song of slither through the grass

  constantly dreaming without horizon or

  parameter

  uncompromising his force to the marsh

  loathing at human tramples

  waiting for the hunt at dusk

  free in billai dhagun

>   and honest to his foe

  endless in campaigns

  the almighty kabul...

  hotel bone

  the job

  B R Dionysius knocks on my window one morning

  flesh on glass seems to create its own separate taste

  upon the middle-eastern-mayhem blasting from a radio somewhere

  in the vicinity of this maze

  and I almost mistake the tapping for someone else;

  asking me to move my car again

  people being restless,

  restless, restless

  into the Ramadhan air

  and my dreamtime has little chance

  of getting me into that party

  but B R is present now

  to offer me an assignment,

  some cash and more cred.

  we sit in my mouse-trap kitchen, my boardinghouse atmosphere,

  nothing short of a Casbah

  as we gesture and negotiate the terms of a future poetry reading

  with the flair of African mercenaries

  over drinks out of tainted crystal

  it reminds me of the reason

  for why I came here in the first place

  and B R with his good vibes

  as always

  neglecting to comment on the ectoplasmic-urine of this stucco shell;

  this chasm for my reinvention

  taking it day by day

  and just accepting it,

  as a job.

  hotel bone

  the street resembles a neck

  from a wayward guitar

  with Hotel Bone sitting idle on a vein,

  wedged between two frets

  where the bad tunes can reach her

  these white stucco walls, I imagine, once carried a vision of pearl

  now a gourd for asylum seekers

  Iraqi, Indonesian, Sri Lankan

  and one crazy Aboriginal ... who lives with a typewriter

  but not with the brevity of a visa on my head; no,

  my longevity was guaranteed before I was born

 

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