Look here Dad ... I’m playing with your memories!
smoke water
for Mum
Sitting with a colleague in a bar, she turns to me, sort of puzzled, ‘You don’t say much sometimes ... I never know what you’re thinking.’ After World War II, my Grandpop didn’t say much either. When Mum was a little girl, she said he would come home, silent and black, after a day in the smoldering sugar-cane fields. A resonance of sweet smoke followed him. He only ever talked to me about fishing. After dinner, we’d sit on the front steps of the old house where he’d roll a smoke, and then, only then, he’d really come to life. I was amazed by his old body, constant bloody cuts from labouring in a brick-works, and yet his mind was always elsewhere. I’d like to think his thoughts stayed on the water, quietly tending his line. And that was the greatest gift my Grandpop would ever leave me ... his gift of silence.
fish swallow mirrors
cloud water reflections,
the past drowns in grey
author’s notes #1
Childhood anxieties would eventually help me realise the power of imagination.
For a better part of my life I was terrified of the dark. A black, stagnant pool that I named ‘Midnight’s Plague’ smothered me at bedtime and paved the way for many hideous characters, which I met nightly when I tempted to cross the bridge of my mind.
To counter these fiends, I built machines in little boxes—fantastic contraptions that I made from the components of old televisions, radios and motorised toys.
For years I rigged these gadgets, hoping to snare the whispers of my demons as they crawled out from under the bed, drawn to the warm, uneven breath from my tonsillitis-ridden throat.
The chance encounter of hearing these whispers was what I feared most.
But, as chance encounters happen, it was ultimately the construction of a poem that enabled me to finally capture a whisper. One breath, deep inside of me, always within my possession.
darkroom
I had to grow up someday ... so I moved to Boundary Street, West End, in the last residence on the old bitumen line. I’m in a forgotten hotel that’s croaking grey, like a decaying plantation in Indochina. Now I live on the brown river, this is my outpost on the dark snake. And at 31 I may not speak the rhetoric of ghosts, but here, I can understand the tongues of mangroves, or what mangroves there are left ... not enough of them to cleanse the brown waters of the darkroom in my head, developing countless images of everything I see. Rain falls on my first night here, so I have wine and a cigar on the balcony in praise of my dark water muse and toast the matrix of her ephemeral dot paintings.
Small brown whirpools spin,
away from the dock,
reminds me of the Mundagurri
that creature that haunted every waterhole
in our childhood;
when our parents weren’t watching us
fisherman islands
It was where my brother caught the tiger’s skin, shoved his entire arm down this hole and pulled out the abandoned mojo of a venomous snake. Fisherman Islands on the gape of the brown river, land reclaimed from the sea. This place was a construct of dirt, sewerage works and shipping terminals, scarecrows of smokestacks. Void of life ... void of soul. The deadest soil you could ever walk upon. No substance. No song. But we explored the shoreline anyway, turning up the jetsam of Brisbane, listening to the mystic whispers from the mouth of the river. Slowly, fishermen waltzed on the pipes of the dredging-lines, their forms a distorted mirage in the midday heat. Maybe they too were props? Cardboard cut-outs on this man-made archipelago. Artificial land with its artificial spirits, and the luck that floated here, with nothing to guide it.
the anglers are poised
like hungry cranes on the tide,
fish lift their spirits
paper trails to midnight
One day, you try to get up ... ’cause your own darkness tides at your feet. I’ve had high-water lines at my ankles, the dreams of cement shoes, and when I’m stuck, I can’t move. Dreams leave their spawn in the mixed-up sheets, but she’ll come home one day to change them, and unexpectedly she came home, telling me to get up, ’cause I hadn’t been moving. While the sun is free, she said, ‘Move!’ Marking my way, a spent cigarette on Boundary Street ... and how a snail trail can reveal a glint of silver, burning the retinas of your mind’s eye blind when you write for days, on the paper trails to midnight
the butterfly’s wings
a lifetime to fold the seams
of a day and night
author’s notes #2
All good wordsmiths get ‘the thousand-yard stare’. That’s when you’re looking beyond the page. Some writers never cross beyond the second or third dimension of a page. After a while, writing on a ‘rack’ is like reaching into yourself and arranging the words on the inside of your ribcage ... you’re looking out ... visualising the rack and how those words translate to the reader, how those words feel on you. You’re always looking out, in and beyond.
The ribcage offers some choice ‘wire’ for the word. But if you’re going to use the ribcage as a rack, don’t use permanent ink, and what I mean by ‘permanent’ is overloading your rack with the dark ink that stains for life. I started making my own rules about writing and devising my own nomenclature: a ‘rack’ is a page, a ‘wire’ is a blank line. A ‘hump’ is a full-stop.
After words are yanked from the pool in my head, I hang them out on the ‘wire’ to dry, and then after the sun goes down, I throw them on the ‘rack’ and stretch them out a bit.
ghosts of boundary street
New year’s day, 2003. The sun was loud, but as bland as yesterday, last year, 2002AD. In the early postmeridian hours, the temperature took advantage of the deserted streets, spirit-dancing inches above the bitumen, a seductive helix that undulated on the horizon, like an exotic dancer, you can look ... but you can’t touch! And the breeze was curt, as scarce as traffic on this public holiday. Houses side by side vibrated ever so gently. The lizard rhythms of lounging bodies behind screen doors, lethargic organic masses that slither, physically and emotionally depleted in the lull of celebrations. The siesta of new year’s day ... the only moment on the Australian social calendar when every citizen is almost equal; hungover we are united! Trekking down Boundary Street, West End, Brisbane, the residue of Moet on my forehead, the cinder of last year’s resolutions in my scalp. I needed coffee to pull me up as the bitumen pulled me down. One litre of milk was going to cost me 10% extra for wisdom: a public holiday surcharge worth the returns of a frown. When suddenly my ears popped! A lone shark hooked the rise in front of me, tearing through the glutinous skin of Dreamtime and Earth, scattering the wings of those haze-angels with a high-octane Beowulf growl. Veering past me, I did not wave, because none of the passengers wore a face—expressionless. Just white linoleum wrapped from foreheads to jowls. I stared down into the puddle in the gutter. It was decorated with a petrol-based rainbow. My reflection was disappointing. I hadn’t changed since last year. But if I’d stayed long enough, my reflection might vary. Oil takes longer to evaporate. The litter in the street ruffled briefly in the car’s wake. There was a saunter of hooves from synthetic leviathans. A cool vent of air stroked my ankles as the car disappeared into a solar flare on the next rise. The silt of silence resettled.
empty coffee cups
blown across the gutter
song of city ghosts
dog tired tune
Maroon tentacles languished upon a surface pledged for human trampling. Veneer walls held up ceiling that was originally pearl before the tincture of cigarettes invaded it. A window hampered by vintage blinds was reinforced with a lifeless drape of lace curtain. Natural light was prohibited, but traffic and insect noise presented itself to the room at unregulated intervals. For what should have been a sterile environment, it lay strewn with the bric-a-brac of a forgotten fashion. A gang of string instruments, rudely piled against a wall, necks sprained and bellies bloated. Grey s
oot-caked frets smiled dog-teeth ivory. And as sleeping giants are portrayed, a grossly inflated antique television was the most formidable furnishing of the room. It wept an odour of electrocuted dust through aged vacuum technology. He was placed in the opposing corner: the Proprietor. An old man of tubes, frail body commissioned by synthetic vines. The ruins of a cursed temple outwitted by a jungle of life-support equipment. The rhythmic portions of his machine-aided breath sang in unison to the cricket-beat of the excluded dusk air.
broken guitar string
falling upon the floor
makes little music
when I crossed the ditch...
my arrival in Aotearoa, Wellington, New Zealand: I checked into a room at Booklovers B&B, positioned in the hills above a turquoise harbour. A cable-car rattled past and the world shook, and then a radio spluttered, ‘the second Gulf War has begun...’
Nothing could have prepared me for the marae. Amongst a group of visitors waiting some distance from a great hall of wood carvings, wondering all the time what the Maori elders would do with me. Large pines towered in the hills around us and poles carved in respected totems studded the landscape, sentinels of an old, quiet spirit. A young woman emerged from the marae calling, wailing, and as a group our footsteps automatically carried on her haunting cry, reeling us in ... te hongi, te haka and the elders, all waiting to meet us, ‘We knew your spirits were out there ... we’ve known that you’ve always been out there. Welcome home.’
On my first reading in a Wellington bar, I was caught in a reef of wordplay. Some words jagged, some soft; this poetry of allsorts. And as I floated a multitude of coloured smiles played with me. Smiles like schools of small, beautiful fish. This bartender, with a grin as wide as a semi-trailer, kept me stocked on a good Australian red—‘Your money’s no good here, Bro!’
author’s notes #3
I remember one of my first jobs. I was published in a magazine with a bunch of established writers, most of them with several novels under their belt, whilst I had a handful of unpublished poems. As contributors to this certain issue, we were all invited to read at an official launch. I’d only read once before, in a small art gallery on the Gold Coast, and there I was, amongst a group of writers with their short stories and articles, about to perform in my first literary cabaret. I had only one poem in the magazine. I had one shot. The stage lights were bright, like I was shooting straight into the sun. I picked my target. He was the biggest, most obnoxious-looking punter in the audience; a man who sipped his Chardonnay with the air of someone well-read and cultured. Each writer before me had read with spirit and arrogance. I breathed easy, and squeezed the poem out gently. I had this punter’s blank face in my cross-hairs and as the poem hit its conclusion, his complexion exploded in sheer appreciation. Applause followed. I hit my target. One message, one story, one stanza.
the dust company
It was labelled a ‘meteorological anomaly’, a dust cloud red banking the southeast Queensland sky; afternoon a crimson dusk. Inspecting Boundary Street, the air lathered rouge, the view distorted beyond the tunnel’s arch of Dornoch Terrace. While in the house, the television showed similar dust storms: American artillery barrages in the hills of Afghanistan. Presented with the cobble stones and rustic mortar around Boundary Street’s bridge, I am also drawn elsewhere, my mind inspired by Victorian architecture and Jack the Ripper’s dark paved streets shrouded in mist. Through filters of red dust, I imagine his fog-tainted whispers, ‘Catch me if you can?!’ But this is not London, this is far from Afghanistan ... though red dust fills the air that is occupied by Osama Bin Laden’s phantom and George Bush Jnr has got everybody by the tongue.
our world is clouded,
the dust smiles evenly,
who is friend or foe?
from boundary street, west end, to the berlin wall, east germany
0.1
In East Berlin, I lost my fear of the dark, as easily as someone who might lose their passport or a shade of identity that has defined them for so long. I did not hear any whispers here. I met Nick Cave’s stick-insect babies fingering the grey palette of the streets; every shade of grey was alive! The kill-zones were left bare, these blocks of dirt where the landmines had been removed like an unfinished pock-marked canvas of Western Desert dot-paintings. Boundary Street, West End, was our Berlin Wall, lavish signs depicting the redundancy of ghosts.
0.2
Concrete sentinels stand to attention on both sides of Karl Marx Allee. The old headquarters of these secrets and those secrets, reminding me of the midden-mounds back home, shell upon shell, where the great chiefs once feasted, discarding the charges of their hunger. In East Berlin, I began to renovate my Dreamtime, stripping the veneer of my engine room and all the skins of my past. A journalist welcomed me home(?) ‘If you have one drop of German blood, you are ALL German!’ And it was as casual and as sure as being black, like I’d never left the placebo of Boundary Street.
0.3
From Boundary Street, West End, to the Berlin Wall, East Germany, entropy caught me. Now, the atmosphere of Communist ‘curfews’ are lost, especially when you step into an American-franchise 24-hour service station with 30 gas pumps and microwave tacos. I wanted to taste so much more! Walls and boundaries are the blemishes of our history and the flavour is generic. We are all given band-aids to place over the wounds of our ancestors; used band-aids will be the bookmarks of my history. I was looking for something in Berlin, but a colleague told me I should just relax and have another drink before I go. I’m not going to find it. ‘When the Communists left, they took the barb-wire, they took the missiles, they took the tanks. And the ghosts of our loved ones they had killed.’
snapshots
On Boundary Street, the police painted the outline of a homeless man’s body on the pavement where it stayed until it was overpowered by the shadow of a stylish townhouse complex
On a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall, children’s paintings cover a sacred place where artists once risked their lives to paint poetic gestures of defiance
Fireworks shoot from retired gun-nests in celebration of an infamous bridge and its macabre role during the Cold War
During a street festival, a group of Aboriginal adults and children welcome strangers to their country, dancing barefoot on the black tarmac of Boundary Street, where only 40 years ago their ancestors would have been shot at.
aunty grey smoke
On a dank afternoon, an old tribal woman, shrouded in society’s skin, raised a heavy head and shook the silt in Brunswick Street Mall. She peppered a weary audience with a volley of hard moans. Peak-hour traffic was forced into a saunter of whispers. Joe Public don’t know how to relate to tribal people, and now there was one weaving a dreaming-throat at them, almost alien in this occupied land. Sitting in a bar with my eyes closed, I pictured a cloud of red earth spiralling from pursed, deep-purple lips. With my eyes closed, I actually noticed the sudden cackle of crows. Dark birds gathering above, whining along in the grey-cloud drizzle, mimics to the haunting chant of an old tribal woman. ‘Smoke?’ she asked the audience, ‘You got a smoke for me?’ breaking into a howl that fed a low rhythmic pulse. Her eyes swept the domain, and I’m sure, right then, she cursed us all.
curses touch the sky
higher than any car horn
bad moon arising
author’s notes—conclusion
My bedroom back at my parents’ house is a cemetery for virtual-reality pets. Laptop, palm-top, mini-disc recording equipment, cameras, guitars—all these things that I thought years ago would help me to write ... but no, when you’re in the field all you need is a reliable pen, plenty of notepads and a good dictionary. Maybe I’m still rigging those gadgets trying to catch some whispers?
Travelling around the place, experiencing the darkness of different hemispheres, I lost my fear of night. Living on the Brisbane River, I can attest that it has its own sirens, like those in the old Greek classics, and their songs at night helped me write and s
howed me that night can’t sit still on the tide.
Living back in Tigerland, the only whispers I hear in the night are on the breath of my little boy when he mumbles to the spirits that playfully encroach upon his dreamtime.
When we smoke the houses that our loved ones have lived in, and say ‘Yenandi’ in the old tongue, we’re not evicting them from this plain, but in the smoke, we’re ensuring their whispers continue the journey beyond ... beyond this secular world.
revolver
From my balcony I can read a strong poem that the moon has pasted on the river. Everything is quiet. Now and then, a wave breaks the message, temporarily changing the font from bold to italics. The moon in its crescent appearance is the precision blade of a Shaolin warrior. I’m concerned that if I gaze too long, I may carelessly jag my retinas on its razor points, pierced globes adding vitreous humor into this serious stretch of river. A mullet leaps from the water and reconstructs the moon’s message; it is now the sound of one silver hand clapping. Above, an anonymous comet breaches the sky a small eternity, but shooting stars don’t have the recoil of a poem executed in the lull of moon fire.
oval mirror lights
seduction on night-water,
flagrant moon kisses
First published 2004 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Smoke Encrypted Whispers Page 7