5. Corruption Is Glorified Mateship
Its Bastille Day in Sydney. The weird man in the moon falls to the night basket. Stars roll out another lottery and unemployment raises dust over the land. Tout est perdu fors lhonneur. Among thieves. Running with images I whirl out the rainbow. Spring flutters as the National flag to salute the pilot whales herding one more disastrous landing. Waves roll head-to-head round the plate of The Great South Land. Which way to Wynyard, calls the currawong. Helicopters line up like magi over Bankstown. When you look up, that old full moon makes you feel like a cowpoke, dont it?
6. Inner City Camping Blues
under a dusty-hulled moon out of an empty Hollywood lot placed there in the out-take of twilight. The bus families have arrived in convoy. Stolidly parked nearby in protest at two suburban parks up for auction in a depressed market. A couple of pitched tents and an Information Stand of press clippings. Kids play in a refuse pit between tossed aside railway sleepers. Slung about the Council Chambers fairy lights all a twinkle since the last bi-election a year back; not much in this, not even a picnic.
Tarts & Takeaways
is what hes into, he said & thats fine by me (William street in winter and pissing down is the pits) standing around in doorways waiting for some totally wasted guy excuse me! its a trick is what it is to slap his dumb meat between my thighs. Hey, Im Jasmine though I dont feel like one. Mostly bored. On each hip Ive got this tattoo, says Allan kind of smudgy & out of focus because its real old. The main man. A jerk off really in someone elses life. A lifer. Summers shit, more noise and especially groups. For hours or however long it takes & I do Spanish & French, but Im better at French. Sometimes not much happens. Idle as a lizard pointing brickwork on hot buildings, someone said. I read in this magazine once, (I meet all sorts) and this guy says, nor can I say I love you but a gentle calligraphy informs your brow. What a whacker! I know shit from clay, he just reckoned he could get away with saying nothing. Dickhead! Guys are like that with money like its some fucking secret.
Who Killed Brett Whiteley
Actually, it was Lloyd Rees killed off Brett Whiteley who couldnt live the promise of old age, the calm terror of it. Thats what Rees meant in his letter to Brett: carry the torch forward and something about being a warrior for Art. Brett, in fact, was skittled by a high powered mix of narcissism & clown. Forget what he had to, or couldnt leave behind & anything to do with High Seriousness. He got caught up in latitudes of sex where the Olgas loomed round as buttocks. Brett became his own myth when he died, and effectively slammed the door on the 60s. Maybe some other seascape, like Thera, suggestive of broken altars; looking down into the cratered harbour he might have seen beneath the lapis lazuli waters, an ivory scimitar held in the gaze of Portunus, perfectly preserved, snapped in two.
Sugarbag Carpenter
Them days all you needed was a blunt saw & an axe thrown in a