Smoke Encrypted Whispers

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Smoke Encrypted Whispers Page 6

by Samuel Wagan Watson


  in a realm of tungsten candle-light

  swollen men

  and consumed women

  we dance

  without regret

  telling our feet

  at every daybreak

  that they are

  without a doubt

  Aboriginal

  and not of ethnocentric natives

  who own the paved streets of Paris

  future primitive

  melted ore from the earth

  twisted

  shaped

  cooled

  into the vortex of the material coil

  to be born

  back onto the land

  the black afterbirth of the mother

  lubricating

  your veins

  and yet

  your senses will never stand to attention off your metal skin

  as you pass over the sacred places

  the fathers just couldn’t place in you

  a soul

  or find a copy of the Earth Mother’s,

  the optional extras can only carry you from here

  and save you, your identity

  hungry across the land

  chewing

  tearing

  screaming

  as the fathers continue to copulate

  and pour from the factories

  more

  and more

  of your siblings

  that are the new flesh of the earth:

  the reinvention of the wheel

  the Earth Mother’s lot, the vicious circle

  the night train from newcastle

  like being in the stomach of an alloy-coated python

  caught in the beard of a violent pepper storm

  this 15 hour journey to Brisbane

  and depleted I am

  there is the flowering of post-literary-performance syndrome

  fed on toxic hangover: the oratorio of itinerant blues

  herded onto the night train from Newcastle

  I am almost reborn,

  the three-year-old tonsilitis-suffering frame I once possessed

  waking alone in the sterile darkness of a hospital ward

  amongst a sea of crying children

  back again

  into the corridor of narcoleptic peddlers

  all making their escape

  eyes barely able to stray two feet from our own reflections

  prisoners of our own window-seats

  yet everyone taking the opportunity to reflect,

  becoming a 15 hour Narcissus

  we are at most and in solidarity

  dishevelled emissaries

  who smile a lavender facade

  into the stale air about us

  all aboard the night train from Newcastle

  sortie

  flying low now

  minimalist altitude maintained

  ’tis better to stay low on the night run

  with an attitude set on auto-pilot

  we stay on alert

  every retail-corner in this Australian landscape

  has a liquor store

  and thus,

  an undeterminable charge of electricity

  the kind of energy that snaps

  a person

  in two

  good and evil

  for better or worse

  the spirit of the suburbs is exposing its dependency for booze

  but

  the suburbs are far

  from asking for any help

  the finder’s fee

  it’s a dark little shoebox

  of some human conditions,

  the negative housing of thoughts, memory and pictures

  of that single moment

  that changed you

  forever,

  that finding of a body

  the refuse of an evil act

  milky dead eyes upon your living

  and what you inherited

  in that pool of blood and membrane

  never fading but swirling

  within midnight’s plague

  the unconscious rituals and lusting

  to hold that person

  you were before,

  before someone renovated the inside of your head

  so more dead bodies can be stored there,

  or just replications of that same body maybe

  one on top of the other

  a light bulb left gently swinging in the center of the room

  hanging

  playing that same early morning glow

  over and over

  the picture of a thousand dark words and sins

  a scene that money can’t buy,

  a finder’s fee that can’t be claimed

  skeletons in the trunk

  the lone riders can’t escape the tunnel vision

  cruising until the rubber subsides

  and the bitumen is

  no more

  this is an endless midnight run for the driver

  through the white of the eyes

  as the closet at home has become overcrowded

  and the skeletons are starting to appear

  in the trunk

  building a tar-scorching laureate of escapism

  reality balanced on the needle of the fuel gauge

  skeleton song to the black magic of the road,

  a catatonic shell of rogue impetus

  made slave to the demons of loneliness

  a spirit purged on the bitumen pantomimes ahead

  the thousand-yard stare

  for Loretta

  I remember Lou-Lou in a blue sarong

  and a tow-truck driver

  whose dirty jokes couldn’t go wrong,

  ’cause at the beginning of the journey

  there are no bad memories

  of roadside love

  but now, I’ve got the thousand-yard stare

  ’cause the breakdowns are just too frequent

  stuck out here

  on a fractured highway of angst

  there’s no more emergency phone calls,

  the dial-tone has gone cold,

  dead as the bitumen

  no longer can I pick from the tar

  inklings of love

  so now, I’ve got the thousand-yard stare

  down the endless road in my head

  that I have to walk back alone

  retinas burning

  flanked by a red, rabbit-jacked landscape

  while the crows swoop and pick

  I’m wanting to say sorry, for all those breakdowns

  I was just going blind

  and now, on my own

  it’s hard,

  finding it hard

  finding my way home

  king

  leaving Bris Vegas

  1am, Eastern Standard Time

  my butt 10 inches off the bitumen

  travelling at 100 klicks an hour

  feet up on the dash

  acting every bit like I think an immortal would

  maybe?

  for now though

  this is living,

  sun roof open

  jet-stream preening the cigarette composites off my white suede

  muse,

  Georgia’s in her own world

  by my side

  modelling a steering wheel

  and a white straw cowboy hat,

  she’s wiggling to the woofers

  this is living

  ejected from the smoke-infested nightclubs

  Kylie Minogue is taking us both home tonight

  so I should be so lucky!

  yet, all I can think about is the King;

  I THINK,

  THEREFORE I AM...

  heaven is framed in the sun roof,

  and as I look up and salute

  the stars wink back

  across Elvis’ rhinestone ceiling

  last exit to brisbane...

  Boundary St

  that forged blac
k scratch

  a vein from Southbank to West End

  with a tail swallowed by the chocolate river

  this is the line, the limit

  where the dark-skin were told—

  DO NOT CROSS!

  a fence raised to protect the colonial domiciles of angels and

  gadflies

  and even today, at rush hour

  that tar permanently keeps the scar alive

  and the dead languages buried

  to only escape in the bitumen heat-haze

  and fall upon deaf ears

  as this boundary continues to stay true

  to its makers

  denying the junkyard dingo

  the treasures of the city

  no access to Easy St

  fringe-dwelling in white-light static

  on the last exit to Brisbane.

  hollow squall

  Scarborough Marina, August 2001

  Twilight is for the communion of soil and water. For a brief moment the hemorrhaging skin of the bay shares no separation with the failing land. This dark monotone body is redundant of inner-detail, sheltered by a violet ceiling and blessed by the evening star. A lone witness to the silent transformation, I had no intention of paying homage to the panorama of ink and sky. There was a blacker pool in the wake. A vision of my own emptiness for which there is no horizon line. This was a special place once, but now, all that resides here is a black and white photograph. A single frame of an embraced couple before a listless tide. The man was convinced that love is forever, unlike the fading picture in my mind’s eye. As for the woman ... she set sail, to an ocean beyond, beyond the waves I tend.

  My heavy heart beats for you; a black rock at the bottom of the sea.

  smoke encrypted whispers

  new poems 2004

  warning:

  The smoke from some of the pages in this collection contains, on average:

  8 milligrams or less of tar—condensed smoke containing residue of life experience, including some agents that cause anxiety;

  0.8 milligrams or less of nicotine—a poisonous and addictive drug that stains the settings within, encrypting moments with a semi-permanent fixture of tungsten glow;

  10 milligrams or less of carbon monoxide—a deadly gas reducing the ability of blood to carry oxygen and a substance capable of inducing whispers that stutter across the conscience.

  smoke signals

  I remember construction cranes like herds of frozen praying-mantis, high on the steamy Bjelke-Petersen plateau above a brown snake-coiled river. It was from this view, at the age of 4, that I learnt to read the columns of Brisbane city. And from this view, I came to recognise the segregation of Smoke. Black smoke darkened the blue-collar suburbs, covering the workers in burnt-rubber cologne. Black smoke was saved for industrial accidents, or when a lower-income family had their fibro-lined house smothered in winter flames. But white smoke, white smoke plumed from chez-nouveau, white-collar fireplaces. White smoke belonged to European engines with a smooth choke. White smoke stayed behind the construction cranes where I imagined a life that would never depreciate. A place where children weren’t scared of the dark. Beyond the white smoke was where I thought I would discover the Lucky Country

  highrises dictate

  a crow punctuates the sky

  clouds await error

  tigerland

  for Graham Nunn

  ‘We didn’t win many games,

  but we never lost a fight!’

  Dad

  I was born in Tigerland, on the south-side of Brisbane. Saturday mornings smelt of hardware compost and the static of horse racing. As kids, we bought nails for the cubby-house, grifted lucky-dips and scoured through Trash & Treasure. Under the orange and black stripes of sunset, bouncing off Mt Gravatt, were the colours on the jersey of Easts Leagues Club. That growling big-cat patch that really meant something to us all. My Dad, my uncles, my cousins, my memories all wear that jersey at one time or another. Those colours paved our streets. And from those streets, I was inspired by my first ghosts as they rose from the bitumen like O-rings of smoke.

  play hide and go seek

  like colour within the petals

  of a midnight bloom

  scared of the dark

  I saw my first ghosts in Tigerland through halogen globes; Council buses projected spectral images onto my bedroom walls. I was often woken with static vision to see spirit-dances pepper my surroundings. Pneumatic hisses from the road outside, spitting through the darkness. Teeth-baring monsters; fangs that remained on the cogs working my mind, keeping me awake for years to come...

  Dracula, witches, Bigfoot and

  Bjelke-Petersen-police at my parents’

  backdoor.

  I covered my tracks with plastic army men but was only comfortable lying in the light on the cool floor of the backyard lawn, wondering who was a hero and who was a villain in the solar-flares of my consciousness. Who was I looking up to? In the light of day, they were probably the same dark horses who carried the eyes of my night...

  Every night prayers would be said

  Within the gauze of a little boy’s bed

  When, lights out, a plague of darkness did spread:

  The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost Keep us.

  The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost Protect us.

  The Father.

  The Son.

  The Holy Ghost, Amen.

  wecker road

  for Ross Clark

  The school nurse condemned me with her simple prognosis, ‘tree-trunk legs’, and they were heavy too, but ever inquisitive, I had them drag me down Wecker Road, that one unsealed road on the fringe of my childhood. It contained every urban legend conceivable: devil worshipping, hoons in cars, bodies in mangled wrecks, bunyips that swam in its creeks. Brown haze shadowed the sky from deliberately lit grass fires; explosions rumbled the eastern horizon from the nearby rifle range. We even uncovered broken and discarded tombstones underneath one of the high-voltage towers down there. That buzzing we’d feel in our teeth from the static charge after we’d stand there too long, frozen, as the cables sang wind-blow, while we pondered the unknown which stifles the world of adolescence ... that same buzzing reverberated in my nightmares.

  mysteriously

  moving the world around us

  an unknown power

  cribb island

  For a while, Dad worked in a ghost town. He’d take us there on weekends after the government moved an entire community. Empty building after empty building, like some big science-fiction filmset. Wandering through deserted houses we were the first Aboriginal people to analyse the remains of the first Europeans to be cleared from this soil. Streets strewn with all sorts of treasures; Armageddon with its apocalyptic merchandising. Earthmoving equipment droned in the distance, always closing in. And the birds: dark-wings scuttled from silent twisters of smouldering debris and detritus. Doorways whistling breezes, a cadence of toothless old skeletons that filtered the smoke encrypted whispers of this mass grave. I think of those whispers every time my plane lands on the unmarked tombstones of one of Brisbane’s least known burial grounds.

  on deserted streets

  forgotten newspapers dance,

  dust keeps its appeal

  capalaba

  At Capalaba down by the bay, we had a house on a lake. I hated the trees there. At twilight, twisted human faces peered at me from the bark of their trunks. An old uncle from Arnhem Land came to visit and taught us how to make spears from saplings. He passed on the riddles of fire, that the peak of the flame hardened the spearheads the best, and that the ghosts of time were all around us. Weeks after he left, a blaze engulfed the bush. Trees toppled in the middle of the night. I ran into Mum and Dad’s bed chased by the heavy groans of falling giants. Years later, one of my brothers saw that same house on Australia’s Most Wanted—about the unsolved murder of a woman in the kitchen. Mum and Dad could never explain why all those years ago we moved out of the hous
e at one in the morning ... And that’s why that old uncle from Arnhem Land would never sleep under our haunted roof.

  in all directions

  night speaks in the darkest tones;

  a little boy hides

  rip

  standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in the hieroglyphics of grubby little hands hanging pieces of antique chairs that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old couch, the old dining table that belonged in our first house, silent in this elephant’s graveyard of carved husks there are the spider-legs of a hotplate that fed the guests at our little boy’s Naming Ceremony when suddenly I realise, I’m caught! gazing over the past this ensemble of assorted relics she’s been busy under here making the sander scream the electric plane has been driving the kids nuts as she shaves the timber the skins of furniture from one of my lives golden curls of treated pine sit at the floor of the workbench I remember reading Robert Adamson’s poetry the day she called it quits over and over, I read the poems about a troubled boy and his blond mop of curls I look down and my own little boy has found a pile of shavings grabs a handful in his muffin-fist holds it at me falling through his grasp these curls, What are they Daddy?! They’re pieces of my brain, I tell him and he tosses his fist into the air particles swab us like pixie dust the afternoon sun steals through catches the golden flakes and my little boy’s toothy grin he wakes me before I drown in a tide of old regrets

 

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