Blinding Sunlight

Battlelines

2012-01-27T15:43:00.004+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

you moved from this coast to another
just like changing shirts

and you could break the back of
any single thing that
might make the
most innocent mistake of
deciding to love you

you, my shell-breaker pliers
you, my salt-mouthed gypsy
who finds no solace
in the lines of any palm

our battlelines are shown
in their secret betrayal
on the arches of our foreheads

we've been spending so much money
the dollars are pouring out
like grain from broken silo

and we have hardly
anything left to give

Kicking off again

2012-01-21T11:50:00.000+11:00

I am resurrecting this "poem of the week" project I did for a couple of years a few years ago.

The plan is to post at least one "finished" poem each week. We'll see how long it lasts.

The first new one is below, 'The Silent Treatment'

The Silent Treatment

2012-01-20T13:47:00.000+11:00

I see the world through
salt-coated glasses
that crystalised film of our
southerly-busted days
the yellow mornings you said you loved me
the afternoons I knocked you back

The things that go on between you and I
should not be publicly revealed
nor should they be privately discussed
in any form

I need an embargo on
my heart strings being plucked
I need a moratorium on
the silent treatment
you give me in the car when
you think you know it all and
I used an evidence-based argument
to prove you don't

The world still finds itself turning
the rusted axis deep through the core
somehow still grinds through its gears

We use footnotes to explain our actions
the index to find our dreams

To be whoever it is you want me to be
is a damn sight harder
than it seems.

2008-04-02T16:50:00.002+11:00

Apologies for no recent updates ... i have taken a break from regular postings but may one day return. Stay tuned. And go to www.blindingsunlight.com for latest news
- Adam

Cracking but true

2008-01-10T23:38:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

i will wash a sleeping tablet down
with a large glass of beer –
that will get a cheer from
my liver or at least my kidneys
or miscellaneous other organs
that flush inside my blood

i will break open one of these days
and maybe it will be in poland,
maybe i will crack in cracow,
fall apart,
my face gone red,
sprawled on a bed,
looking for my dream
which is lost between the
mattress and the wall

(this is from my chapped-lip days –
you could boil an egg on my top lip –

and what is that girl doing right now,
she with straight teeth and freckled nose?)

x-ray my heart,
open it up for full examination,
make that phone call to the specific radiologist
and let her know my heart is
lying on the table patiently, ready.

i need to detox,
i need to gather stock and either
find my pure path again or
jump right out the window
when do i tail off these anti-depressants anyway?

is the great coast home of my imagination
just something i have imagined?
life is passing.
when will i have children?

i have no hinge to even undo,
i have no ground from which to lose touch with,
i'm eating bad food but at least
i have stopped biting my nails

but i am drinking a lot of beer
but where is honey barbara?
the woman in the trees?

i find these silly paths to follow,
these stupid people to try to be.
if you be yourself
then is whatever else follows true?

"Six"

2008-01-03T15:24:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

After a night spent cleaning pots
at the Duckpond Cafe,
her hair smells of cauliflower.
It's a childhood smell like wet dog,
station wagon holidays and
sand around the ankles.

Suddenly she is six again,
there is cricket on TV.
The taste of oleander is in her mouth
and is her first remembered mistake.

Suddenly again, she is in school,
her first short-socked day with plaits.
The teacher smells of biscuits and
leans to ask her name and age.
"Rebecca" she says, and bites her lip
and looks around the room.
She's five-years-old but can count to ten
and likes the sound of seven.

"And how old are you Rebecca?" the teacher says
and Rebecca says: "Seven"

She's moved up a class
and can't keep up and is
shortest in the form.
She leaves in Year 10 and
hits the drink and
soon her first kid is born.
She gets a job working nights
at the Duckpond Cafe.
She's a kitchen hand and
the work is okay
but she often recalls that
stupid day
when she bumped up her age,
rose a year up to seven...

What would've only panned out
if only she'd just said "six".

Beware

2007-12-27T11:55:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©
beware of cars with hats behind the back seat

beware of girls with hip-length hair

beware of days with still still mornings

beware of funk bands

beware of those who are silent on politics

beware of journalists

beware of 'team players'

beware of the westerly

beware of nylon shower curtains that stick to your shins

beware of those who don't leave messages on answering machines

beware of moths

beware of "Ciao"

beware of endings

beware of full stops (.)

In trouble

2007-12-20T11:52:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

my mother stood on the

corner of the street

in an aqua blue dressing gown

and all the way

from the gate of the park

you knew her face

held a dressing down

Baggage

2007-12-13T11:48:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

i'm bringing my baggage with me

this new epoch has traces of the old

i'm bringing my baggage with me

it's backpack-sized

it doesn't fold.

Sky has been filled

2007-12-06T11:40:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

The buildings are buildings
but what was in their place
before they were buildings?

Sky has been filled and
the birds remain confused
about flight paths obstructed.

Beach track

2007-11-29T11:33:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©
we will find the track
that leads to the beach -
past the campground
and the concrete block that's locked
and no-one's checked to see what's inside,
ever, in the history of this decade.

past broken bits of broken things.
old scraps of clothes and bits of bitou bush,
parts of cars that could never have
made this journey, surely:
so how did they get here?

we will keep walking and keep thinking
about that and then about something else.

2007-11-22T16:24:00.000+11:00

Mel

For Mel Ford

By Adam Gibson ©

and she was up the front for every gig
and she knew all the words to every song

and she sat there watching and she sang along
and she wore her heart on her sleeve

and gave us something to believe
we were getting it right and touching a heart

and that was a start from which we could build
and I've lost something now that she won't be there

sipping a beer and swaying on her chair
after trudging across town in pain to bear

and the lost things we spoke about
and the happiness she felt

the result of our song
and I knew all along

her heart there reaching
but I never knew how hard nor for how long

and all I can say now is what I can't tell
but bloody hell, this poem's for you now

and we'll miss fucken miss you Mel.

2007-11-15T16:52:00.000+11:00

The Vikings at Dundrum Bay, Northern Ireland

By Adam Gibson ©

the tide floods this bay which local
history believes saw the deaths of

1200 Vikings in the misty howl of legend as
seabirds tear the sky apart outside the full

windows and the sound you hear, they say,
across the bay is not the wind or the far away

sound of breaking waves but it's the Viking longships
running aground on shoal beaches and the whistle of

wind is the screams of drowning men
so I sleep with earplugs rammed in tight against the night

as I don't want to hear them, don't want to hear a thing,
and as morning light arrives long past the beginning of day,

I know that the screams and shouts I heard in dreams
have not been heard for hundreds of years or more.

2007-11-08T16:59:00.000+11:00

Space invaders

By Adam Gibson ©

i have the personal space
the size of the universe
and there's nothing worse
than the satellites
that fire randomly (on purpose)
into my constellation
(to my consternation)

2007-11-01T17:13:00.000+11:00

a few rough edges

By Adam Gibson ©

i have an ache in the hip
that just won't quit
a throb in my thigh
that bears down thick

there is a scar on my heart
that can't be smoothed
a thud in my blood
that hasn't moved

i have a stab in my ear
that's pierced my drum
a crick in my neck
that twists undone

there is a burn on my skin
that blisters pink
a buzz in my cortex
that kills me to think

i've a break in my bones
that cannot be cast
a heart that is sealed
against all past.

2007-10-25T10:05:00.000+10:00

wondering why i keep moving

By Adam Gibson ©

while my country is at war
in the summer of this year
i battle it out in my head

for i need loving lessons
and kissing connections
and i need world ignition

and oily sex and
i need tasting sessions on body;

i need night skies
and lifetimes on orange light nights
on the north coast
when all is enclosed
with bliss of TV and pizza

but such a night as that one
will never happen again
because i have disappeared,
gotten lost in small movements
and the need to always
be somewhere else
when i am dying
just to stay still
for long enough
to find stillness

and make the space in me
silent enough to sleep

2007-10-18T11:00:00.000+10:00

Hanoi, first night

By Adam Gibson ©

single headlinghts weave
to the square root of
a million lives,

unbelievable circles
screaming with traffic horns,
a flow of two-wheeled astonishment
which works in a torrent

glinting with handlebars and
jet-black hair
past smoking incense shrines
and boiling pots;

squatted cacophonies of
lives lived by the side of the road
and on the back
of a Honda scooter.

2007-10-11T13:48:00.000+10:00

Hotter weather tomorrow

By Adam Gibson ©

and Wynyard and its echoes of Asia,
and an older Australia of dusty shops
and milk shakes and rice puddings
in city cafeterias when Sydney
seemed so much more mysterious
but now all is easily revealed
and we kissed trying not to be seen
but aware of dozens of eyes
across those gritty tiled floors
and she disappeared towards the platforms
and the metal tracks
lying like horizontal scaffolding
to the suburbs to the west
while i ran up the arcade and
hit George St at pace
with five minutes to catch the Rose Bay ferry
and i tore down Bridge St
onto Pitt,
under the Cahill Expressway
like a lick-lipped bowling ball
scattering the miscelleneous meanderers
and made the ticket gate at 5.49pm,
one minute to spare,
and i landed onboard:
soon after; the cusp of moon
hangs like a fingernail
in the orange blueness of the sky to the
west-sou'-west and the nor'-easter wind
has a bit of bite to it and they are predicting
hotter weather tomorrow
as my face is blasted by crazy salt
and i lick my lips and taste
her lips still there.

2007-10-04T15:03:00.000+10:00

Replicas

[Saigon, 30/9/07]

By Adam Gibson ©

it's saigon
and you can buy
a replica of anything here;
a watch
a shirt
a watered-down bottle of beer.
fake flowers
imitation cologne
and any type of ex-US army gear.
and yet when we walked
around the tunnels of Cu Chi
we were walking
the Real Thing,
at least to a degree
because while the trees
may have regrown
after the Agent Orange
and the bodies cleared after
the B52 bombings,
it is impossible to believe
that this ragged earth
holds the history that it does,
hence we tell ourselves
it is a theme park replica,
a trumped up tourist trap,
but we know deep down
that otherwise is true.

2007-09-27T15:02:00.000+10:00

Visiting the drought country

By Adam Gibson ©

He wanted to touch the country more firmly
so from his home on the smooth warmth of the coast
he'd moved through the steppe country in his motor car,
passing from the sandstone shelf into the dark soil land and
up and beyond the ranges to where the road signs were falling down
and the rivers under the bridges were showing only faint trickles.

There were abandoned homesteads dotted here and there;
he was alone now and if he wanted food
he'd have to fetch it from the boot and same went for petrol,
stored in two casks strapped to the back bumper bar.

Early on he pulled out a pen and jotted this:
'Homesteads lie where they've
fallen down under spindly trees.
A sky streaked orange and
the rivers drying'.

And soon the rivers dried out completely
and his throat sucked on the dwindling water supply he'd brought.
his arms were tired from the heavy wheel.
Thirsty. Another dry river.

Another abandoned homestead.

Another bare tree.

He slept under the car.

He checked his map by the firelight of a clutch of twigs and,
with three Aborigines who wandered to his motor car
when he stopped one afternoon, he ate a meal of wallaby.

Ashes rose to the air and he fell back where he sat
after the four of them had drunk his only bottle of whiskey
and looked backwards at the ranges he'd crossed back in the far distance.

He wrote: 'The Aboriginals are long-limbed
and muscular and smell of smoke
and despite the harshness of the land
are in tip-top physical condition'.

After weighing the differences in his body:

'One longs for such muscular arms actually'.

As for more abstract views, he noted the way the land
had a sense of once being full of people and hope.
But it was now as if, after the initial shock,
the land had regained its composure and fought back.
it had won a battle it never even thought it would have to fight.

The land had said:

'Throw no water at them then,
throw mystery nights,
throw sun to burn the hair on the arms off.
that will win the cause outright in the end.'

On the fifth afternoon he wrote:
'The clouds you notice come in layers out from the west.
It's as if there is a giant machine over the back of the horizon
which is pumping them out but not putting a drop of moisture in them'.

2007-09-20T11:38:00.000+10:00

The Product of War

By Adam Gibson ©

these rooms lit in the suburbs

where Jessie used to say

we would never live

but now do.

we have moved, stretched,

been to yoga,

we have made decisions involving

cancer and cars,

bought suits from department stores

and dresses from factory outlets.

Jessie, speaking of plans

to have the dog vaccinated, says,

'i just want her to be safe',

and we pause,

look into each other's eye,

and i realise that such a comment

is the product of loss,

it's the product of complacency

and ultimately

the product of war,

fought far enough away

for us to not hear

the bullets and the bombs

but the product of war,

nonetheless.

2007-09-13T11:06:00.000+10:00

That storm treated Leichhardt poorly

By Adam Gibson ©

that storm treated Leichhardt poorly,
its wind unkind to wires and trees:
the splintering crash at 7am
(while watching the news of tv about the storm)

- the sound of wood splitting is silver droplets,
it is an onion being bitten,
it is a world sliding out of control
with no thought for you,
none at all,
not a cracker.

Thomas called the State Emergency Service
but due to the current state of emergency
they were too busy to provide any service.

so the tree leaned over and kept leaning,
leant so far as to be reaching in against
the recently-installed rangehead in the kitchen,
the freckled bark and the small terrified trails
of darting ants so exotic from so close, now inside,
a whole universe previously in existence
only three metres away for the past 30 years
suddenly now available in microscopic detail

that storm treated Leichhardt poorly.

2007-09-06T14:28:00.000+10:00

She's crying for her country

By Adam Gibson ©

from the six-seat mail plane
she is gently lowered to tarmac,
two of us gripping under her arms
at the heartbreakingly soft flesh,
her eyes milky,
pure sky blue,
exactly as the world above which
she can't see but only sense.

Peter Tinker (pictured right)

is holding her other arm
and he says something in her ear
then she immediately raises
her soft brown face
to feel the sun on it
and starts a low burbling cry
but a smile is moving across her face
at the same time.

what's happened? i ask Peter,
he laughs, it's okay, he says, it's fine;
she's home after four months in hospital,
he says she's crying for the land under her feet,
he says she's crying for the spinifex,
crying for the big dog that lives at well 33,
crying for the dreaming man laying down at Bungabinni
after he tried to catch one of the seven sisters,
crying for the women's ground there,
she's crying for Kunawarratji and
for the bush tomato and the bush turkey,
crying for the fires over Dora Lake and the salt pans
and crying for the hills that tell all the stories.

we ease her over to a waiting
commodore station wagon
where, sitting in the back seat alone,
she now begins laughing loudly -
she's unable to walk or see
but she's giggling her head off
and at the same time still
she's crying for her country
she's crying for her country.

Ode to a cup of tea

2007-08-30T15:04:00.000+10:00

By Adam Gibson ©

you save me and
bathe me
ground me in history with
memories of
grandma and grandpa's flat,
the sit-down time
upon return from any trip,
the link to something bigger,
the quench of home
and the days of mum and dad
and everynights
and everymornings.

the putting of the kettle on,
the frantic burble towards boiling,
the scooping of the tea into the pot,
the piping sizzle of the water being poured in,
the specific time it takes for the tea to draw
giving the pot a 'trip up the river'
- an urging swirl - if time is tight,
then the pouring from teapot to pre-milked cup,
the measuring towards the correct tone of tan
for the particular drinker.

my love of tea
will not be diminished by the advances
of the PR Officers of flat whites
or the lieutenants of lattes,
it will not be denigrated by the
urgers of orange juice
or the freshly-squeezed boosters
of something-or-others.

when deaths have accrued
and lovers have decided
they are in love no more,
when cars have been crashed
and houses bought or children born,
the Lan Choo and the Liptons,
the Madurah and the Dilmah
will be there for ready relief,
rescue in time of rescuing,
there to bathe you
or to save you,
whatever the case may be.

Revolution

2007-08-23T14:44:00.000+10:00

[Written: Sydney, 15/11/94 and 22/8/07]By Adam Gibson ©

when i was a teenager i believed that
i was younger than people who were
actually my own age or even younger
and on the day i turned 18
i can remember a specific moment:

i was driving my mum's
blue Pulsar hatchback
down William Street, Sydney.

i was stopped at a red light
minding my own business
when a car-load of girls
pulled up in the next lane.

they looked at me
and I looked at them
and then suddenly two of them
in unison shouted "woo-hoo!" at me

i interpreted the sound to mean
they approved of me in some respect,
that they maybe thought I was cute.

then they disappeared off into the traffic
and off into the subsequent years

but i remember thinking,
"i'm 18, i'm a man,
the world is mine to be had
and so are girls."

it was both a revelation and a revolution,
one from which I am still wearing the scars,
and indeed fighting the battles,
to this day

First language

2007-08-16T14:39:00.000+10:00

[Dateline: Well 36, Canning Stock Route,
Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia,
11.05am, 6/08/07]By Adam Gibson ©

as the women spoke in language behind me

their words rolled in a lithe burble of

vowels and consonants,

a song of itself of

everyday

conversation,

i was sentimental for

that time before it had even passed

and then it did quickly pass and it was all over.

A desert fire

2007-08-09T14:46:00.000+10:00

[Dateline: Kunawarratji, Well 33, Canning Stock Route,
Western Desert, Western Australia, 11.02pm, 7/08/07]By Adam Gibson ©

one of the old boys lit a fire
- no-one's quite sure why -
and now it's taken off,
burning like buggery
across the night sky
with a funereal glow,
tearing through the spinifex
and the red sand country
east of Kunawarratji.

one of the old boys lit a fire
- i was told his name but
have now forgotten it -
and Troopies and utes
have been dispatched
to check the progress,
to gauge the wind and
the chances of a
change of a direction.

dogs are barking in the 11pm dark,
i can hear the sound of
a distant generator
- one of the old boys lit a fire:
it was Roley Williams but
no-one's quite sure why
he lit it.

2007-08-02T09:11:00.000+10:00

Roadkilled

[Dateline: Well 36, Canning Stock Route,
Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia,
4.26pm, 2/08/07]

By Adam Gibson ©

the crunch of
sinew and bone and flesh
as we smashed that bullock
with the cold hammer of bullbar
and legs and ribs and head
thumped under the wheels
on my side;
that last flash of life
to live with me now forever
as i,
now forever complicit in murder,
live on.

Concurrent

[Dateline: Well 36, Canning Stock Route,
Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia,
4.21pm, 2/08/07]

By Adam Gibson ©

dead clumpfs of long grass,
creme yellow,
wheat pink,
leans over to
touch red sand
with burgundy shades
of dark orange and
scrapes its head in the sand,
pushed by wind in
specific grid arc but
disturbed by nothing else
for as long as
it and time
exist
concurrently

2007-07-26T18:35:00.000+10:00

A disco in the bush

[Dateline: Parnngurr,

9.38pm, 22/07/07]

By Adam Gibson ©

There's a big mob

gathered in from

Punmu and Jigalong,

east from Warakurna,

over from Kunawarratji and

up from Parnpajinya,

here for the funeral,

having arrived in battered cars

that you can't believe

survived that road,

in dust-sprayed Toyotas

that now sit like emperors

in the hot late-July sun.

The red dirt is rusted,

no shade beneath the trees with

all the lower branches

ripped off for firewood and

dogs fight amongst each other

as the service is conducted

on the red flat earth

in the centre of things.

Then night falls

and the kids emerge,

creeping out

to the sound of music

pumping from DJ decks

in the community hall,

the new supply shop operator

spinning the tracks

while torches are flashed

in the dusty darkness and

dozens of faces line the walls.

The brave ones occasionally

dart out to

show their best moves

- American hip-hop,

busts of rap and breakdance -

and then dart back again

when the attention

turns to them too much.

The sound is of shouting and

the hum above the music of

massed laughter,

squeals of smiles and

the slap of bare feet

hitting bare floor

in a joyful syncopation

that is rarely reported on the

evening news of the world

or in the telegraphs which herald

the important things you need to know.

Then, on the dot of 9pm,

the DJ plays his final song

and wraps it up with little fanfare,

the kids,

without a single grumble,

file out in a rush,

disappearing in a dancing mob

towards their houses and camps

by the fires of 44 gallon drums

beneath a sky in which

the Milky Way shines

with bright buzzing light.

2007-07-19T12:35:00.000+10:00

Mixing with the miners

[Dateline: Newman, Western Australia, 10.48am, 18/07/07]

By Adam Gibson ©

goatees galore,
keys are hitched
from belts
as jeans ride
up over the
top of boots
and bulky jackets
holding beefy torsos
squeeze into plane seats
with blokey jokes about
this prick did this
and
then this prick did that
and,
as the plane
pierces the Perth air to prepare
to head up to the
mining boomtowns
of the great nor'wsst,
where 200 million tonnes
of iron ore will be
pushed offshore this year,
i feel un-beefy and un-blokey,
trying to blend in
with the scene
and fingering
my non-existent beard,
wishing to god that
i'd considered
growing one

2007-07-12T21:21:00.000+10:00

Spoken to like that

By Adam Gibson ©

you told me that you loved me
- what in heaven's name have i done
to be spoken to like that?

i have kissed you and i have missed you,
i have wined and dined you,
i have touched my finger
to your sleeping mouth
i have helped your parents move house
i have been to endless family christmas dinners
i have visited foreign churches and
hidden with the sinners

you told me that you loved me
- after all that i have done for you.

Pre-show at the Lido

By Adam Gibson ©

Ushered into the 100 euro cheap seats,
a champagne cork is popped and
we face the Lido stage with a
Japanese tour group in tracksuits to our right
and a Korean ensemble with
loud demands to our left
as waiters who are waiting to be actors
(or vice-versa)
hover nearby with a French masculinity which says
you will be tipping me and
you will be tipping me only
and a louche ensemble of old-hand musos
peels smoothly through a set of soft-edged favourites
to warm up this showbiz cattle-class,
the horded assembly of people like me
ticking off their holiday dreams and now
waiting patiently
for the bloody show to begin

2007-07-05T13:43:00.000+10:00

A walk in Devil's Wood
The Somme, November 11, 2006

By Adam Gibson ©

In Devil's Wood
the dark green pines
reveal blackness
where glimpses of ghosts
leave their shadows and
where no birds
fly from branch to branch
and the wind in my ears
brings the deathly hum of
total silence as
the trenches remain like
scars on the face
that will never heal,
like gouges on the spirit
that you can't believe are real,
winding alone now,
uncontested,
through the trees which
have grown from scratch since
the obliteration of every stump in 1916,
and the damp ground
soaks over my shoes,
and the damp ground on which
2232 men fell dead
in the blink of an eye.
during the Battle of Bazentin Ridge.

As I turn towards the war memorial,
I feel the wind chill through every pore,
and hear the silence of this funeral ground
and see thousands of names
stare down at me from the wall.

2007-06-28T11:28:00.000+10:00

Oblivion is always somewhere else

[Dateline: Tronheim, Norway, 18/12/2007]

By Adam Gibson ©

I'll need a cup of tea by at least 3pm
And I'll need to get back to bed
Not long after that to sleep through
The fading midday horizon light,
To doze through the
Dusk linked directly to dawn

And then I will rise in the early evening
And wonder what to do with myself
And attempt to drink myself to a
Version of oblivion
But not quite make it because
Oblivion is always
Somewhere else
Oblivion is always
Somewhere else

2007-06-22T16:40:00.000+10:00

Here is a special presentation of a video clip I made for our band Modern Giant's song 'The Band's Broken Up', written by yours truly and me also on spoken word duties...

2007-06-21T12:23:00.000+10:00

The building of the breakwall

By Adam Gibson ©

the breakwall was built back at the beginning of the decade,
concrete blocks were bulldozed down the beach beside
the rivermouth starting on the low end of a full-moon tide
of the summer solstice and the whole town ate sandwiches
on blankets as Kenny King pushed the levers of the bulldozer
and the air filled with the blue smoke and the fumes
and the men all gathered to oversee the operation
with the concern of fathers awaiting a birth, all eager to be of any assistance
but betrayed in their efforts by their lack of any specific knowledge
about the necessary procedures: just because men know about boats
doesn't mean they know about breakwall construction and so
while they fussed and commented, Kenny King just got on with the job
and he did it his way regardless and so it was done, the breakwall built,
back at the beginning of the decade.

2007-06-14T16:26:00.000+10:00

A view from Tokyo

By Adam Gibson ©

Narita Airport, Tokyo, again,
waiting for my plane,
but going the
other way
this time,
not to the fields of
teenage dreams of Europe
but home to Australia (always home)
and the nights of Bondi
near television and
the bar heater
near
my bed
and rooms,
the image of which
i have carried with me
every second of every day,
lodged in my blood, as
i moved across the
unholy mess of
Europe;
the crushed
underfoot streets and
the stained train station platforms
and toilet cubicles and takeaway shops,
where people lie at a ground zero of the spirit,
having flooded over the borders from
Poland and the Ukraine, from
miscellaneous Africa
and the Middle East,
seeking refuge
and finding it
selling "Marl-barr-o"
on the footpath outside the Metro
at Barbes-Rochechouart
or battling for seats
on a bus up to
Amsterdam,
dead-eyed and
staring right through me,
because we all don't exist anyway,
and spitting on the streets,
littering with impunity,
stealing from me
if they can
(and they could),
solid (de)fences of the spirit
therefore being erected at points
where the other boundaries once stood,
closing up shop on humanness,
while every shop from
Las Ramblas in
Barcelona
to Castle Court
shopping mall in Belfast,
from the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin
to the backstreets of Basel,
Krakow to Antwerp,
is selling the same
urban combat
attire,
appropriate
correct battle wear;
t-shirts in hues of khaki and brown,
faded splashes of mis-spelt Stateside,
generican American ficticious baseball teams,
documents of summer camps that never happened,
marathon races that have never been run,
vintage shirts all of the same vintage;
straight out of China and lining
the matt-black and metallic-
fitted hip shops of the
Conmuela in Cadiz
or those in
the streets around
the back back of Dam Square
or the intimidating parlours of the
Marias or in the streets running down
from Rue de Sevres down to Montparnasse:
the same jackets, the same shirts, the same scarves,
the same slashes of strategically anarchic paint
slashing across the shoulders, the same
authentic rips in the same jeans,
the same quest for a truth
that no-one else has
either, thus
the search
onwards
and the need to find
any way possible to find it
and i recall a mad dusk drive
through rainy Paris streets towards
the airport way out at Beauvais, the grey
afternoon, everything cold and shadowed,
the graffiti in pidgin English hip-hop also wet
and lonely on the garbage bins and the smashed
bus stops and the no-mans-land gaps between
shops that don't even open at all anymore

and it occurs to me that the Old World
of Europe, trodden on for so long,
is tired and getting more tired,
France fraying at the edges,
England broken down,
Spain drying up,
the land
is all busted

and no-one can
be bothered fixing it;
the walls are just falling down,
everything is spilling out,
and as i move towards
hometown i wonder
where i myself
will finally
wash
up.

2007-06-07T15:01:00.000+10:00

The sunset of our lives

By Adam Gibson ©

"Moving west into the sunset

became the sunset of our lives"

that's a line

by Midnight Oil,

and I have carried it with me

for ready usage

upon the occasion of

every sunset I have ever seen

at every place I've ever been

around the world.

From Cadiz in southern Spain,

with Morocco across the straight,

burning in the haze,

from Trondheim, Norway,

the brief orange day,

declining from 12.08pm onward,

into the ice afternoon,

from a beach in Vanuatu,

upon which I fell on the news

of my dad's death,

unresolved still,

a pill in a glass of water

that just won't dissolve.

That line a little automatic pearl

triggered in my head and which

springs to my lips at

the sight of any sun

heading to any western horizon;

from the Abrohlos Motel in Geraldton,

Western Australia,

the silver ships out on the silver sea,

to the memory of us and me,

the 45 degree day in Alice Springs,

the rain-soaked glow west of

Hermansburg,

the antenna evenings of Bondi,

going cold in the westerly winds to

Emu Plains and the

houses of Shalvey and St Clair,

the graffiti train stations of Stanmore

and what's more,

the shadowed houses on stilts

under the escarpment of Bulli

and the shadowed streets of

Stanwell Park and Coledale,

these places from which I have dreamt

many different dreams,

all traced by the same line and the same song,

transcribing into a grand total

which I can call

the sunset of our lives.

2007-05-31T12:58:00.000+10:00

Two-week locals

By Adam Gibson ©

the great coalface of fuckwits
at the Bondi Hotel,
mining for a glint of diamond
or hint of gold
amidst the grindstone shouldering of
beer we go
beer we go
beer we go
beauty being in the eye of
the beerholder and
the two week locals scan the crowd
for a familiar face from
the brothel of a hostel they stay in
30 to a single room
(not counting the cockroaches)
and existing on one single
two-minute noodle
every three days and
driving Western Australia registered
mid-80s Ford Falcons or Hi-Ace vans
that someone somewhere has taken to with
a can of spraypaint and the artistic flair
of a year 10 boy’s school art class
under the influence of way too much tie-dye,
a massive bag of hydro and the song
"No Woman No Cry"
as done by Ben Johnson or Jack Harper
or Ziggy, Twiggy or Wiggy Marley
and remixed by a wicked dj
who lives in a three-by-four concrete bunker
somewhere in Brighton and only emerges
to buy or sell Es to or from
eager teenagers who can’t stop moving and
who one day soon will be heading off to Australia,
four-year-old Lonely Planet in pack,
to live off the smell of an oily back
and to get more sunburnt
than it is humanly possible to get sunburnt
and to urinate on every flat and non-flat surface
in the entire suburb
just because they can
just because this is their time
just beer of course in hand
just beer-handed of course
just going with the flow of beer
just beer here glorious beer
just beer we go beer we go beer we go
and beer ego and no dollop
of an inkling
of a skerrick
of a glimmer
of a hint
of a thought
that they are just another in a long long line
of wankers and dickheads and scumbags and arseholes
who just all form together as one mighty structure,
one staked up vista,
a great coalface of fuckwits
descending like a plague of locusts
and with the same
two-week lifespan

2007-05-24T19:10:00.000+10:00

Freaking in

By Adam Gibson ©

i have freaked out then
freaked back in again.
i have come full circle with
some parts of me worse for wear,
ragged, run down or flapping in the air
but the important thing is
i have freaked out and come
freaking back in again

i call it full circle
i call it an awful cycle
i call it the bad years
i call it all sorts of things
including "when i was freaking out".

i am only ever two heartbeats away from a panic attack
but that’s fine with me because it’s better than one.

a million sirens across the valley flatblocks of bondi,
somebody dead in the bondi hotel or
hit by a car on campbell pde.

there is so much noise and it has framed
every day of my visit out to freak
and my tentative return from there.

i have freaked out and freaked thankfully back in again

and the soundtrack has been the
rev of the 380 bus outside my window
and the strains of tyres around the bends of the corner,
plus a thousand screamed drunks
skidding against their heads in conversation
leaving the rsl or golf club.

all those people moving and unknowingly
being part of my aweless journey,
my trickling limp towards freaking out and
my limping,
occasionally triumphant,
occasionally non-existent
return from that shadowed place.

i have freaked out but i have now
freaked back in again.

2007-05-17T13:24:00.000+10:00

Scorched earth

By Adam Gibson ©

up through madrid and beyond
and i'd guess there hasn't been
a drop of rain for twenty years
but i could be wrong
yet you'd concur if you saw these fields
of arid rocks and everything
scrubby and khaki and
for four hours i haven't seen a soul
for hundreds of bone dry kilometres.
they invented the term "rolling fields"
for this country but they omitted the lushness
inherent in the construction of the meaning
in this case,
stunted trees,
each grain of dirt desecrated
by all the footsteps of the invaders
from the moors to the romans
to the celts, to the australians and the eceteras,
and so my history goes astray,
from hill to peak,
from church to fort,
toeprints crumbling rock into ridges and
gullies damned into throat-parched valleys
hinting at me through tinted glass that
all history has had it,
all the past is finished,
show's over as the hillside to the right
lies quietly scorched by a fire burning now
but one that which will
never ever be recorded
in history

2007-05-10T17:37:00.000+10:00

Not getting enough wake

By Adam Gibson ©

my wake just hasn’t been good lately,
i’m just not get enough wake these days it seems.

my wake has been very disturbed,
it’s been all over the shop.

there have been so many disruptions
throughout each day.

i’ve been sleeping in the middle of my wake, for starters,
and then i’ve been grabbing wake
at the most inappropriate times.

someone recommended meditation
to help me improve my wake
but i found i fell asleep in every class.

i tried yoga and discovered that i became very flexible,
learnt the intricacies of the menstrual cycles of
the 12 girls in my class and could order a mean indian dish,
but that my wake didn’t improve in any noticeable fashion.

lately, in a further move to improve my wake
i’ve been self-medicating with alcohol.

this has had some affect.

my wake appears to be lighter and more relaxed,
i am day-dreaming like a crazy man,
but i’ve been warned by some killjoy
that alcohol is a depressant and while
i feel that my wake is pretty good,
i’ve been told the wake i am getting is actually
not

good quality wake.

2007-05-03T19:55:00.000+10:00

24 hours in Barcelona (with a backache), 2002

By Adam Gibson ©

abducted by a barceloneta,
i walked every backstreet:
the cobblestone street prostitutes,
the black dim square
and the pimps,
and i drunk beer in a sawdust floor bar
with dusty bottles on the roof and
had at least one
(possibly two)
panic attacks and
i drunk tea in the hot night and
slept on a mattress,
paralysed by backache,
and woke with
mad street conversations
directly outside the window
behind 1pm shuttered shutters and
i staggered out into the bright day and
ate tortilla in a café and
i just watched her mouth move
as she ordered and
we entered the subway
and caught endless trains and
i found myself in her new apartment
watching from a high tower as
a storm broke
and heads popped out
from a dozen windows to haul in the washing
and later we rode for a long time towards the coast
where i saw the Mediterranean for the first time,
glimpsed down cobblestone streets to the water,
hot and humid and,
dying with the backache,
i swam in that ancient sea for the first time
and later we had seafood tapas
and thought it might kill me
and i got a dose of what i thought was food poisoning
and i vomited in the train station toilet and
got asked for money by a boy
who said he was a romanian refugee
with five brothers
and got asked for money by a girl
who in sydney would be a cool indie chick
but in barcelona was rattling a milkshake container
thudding with coins and
had ghastly black sores on her face,
one right in the middle of her forehead,
and I kissed my barceloneta goodbye
with a broken heart already
and waited for a cab to whisk me away
after a strange argument
about something i still can’t ascertain
and had a half hour conversation,
full of thrilled scared excitement,
with cabbie who couldn’t speak a word of english
while i spoke no word of spanish
and i caused a stir in burger king
when i bought a coke for 10 euros
and somehow i found the right train
back to where i was staying,
unable to breath in one lung and
bent over with excruciated back and
sweating every drop of moisture out of my body and
my heart fractured into a million fragments,
dispersing at that point inside of me,
and my back wrenching me
toward a flat surface,
any flat surface,
asap.

Christmas Day in Paris, 2006

2007-04-26T13:37:00.000+10:00

By Adam Gibson ©

i went to meet sam and mick
somewhere near st michel
where they said they'd found a restaurant.
it was called le something-or-other and
it was off a street i was familiar with
so i headed out from my flat near place d'italie
in the grey late morning.

it was christmas day 2006 and
the day was cold but not as cold as it could've been
and i found the restaurant with little drama
and upon entering was quickly directed to the back
where i found sam and mick sitting at a table,
a bottle of wine half-drunk already
and half a basket of bread already gone too.

we ordered our meals from a waiter with
longish blonde hair and blue eyes and
an air about him which suggested
he knew the secrets of paris far better
than we could ever hope to.

we ate our way through several courses and
drank several more bottles of red wine
and there wasn't much more to be done than
to order another bottle …
and so we did,
celebrating christmas day
away from all sense of home in paris –
three willingly homeless men
all wondering why
we weren't at home.

2007-04-19T18:59:00.000+10:00

Alight

By Adam Gibson ©

love's candle licks the glass
of the candle-holder
with a soft sharp flame
that bites the hand that lights it

...

2007-04-12T21:52:00.000+10:00

Amsterdam, 10 years, two months ago

By Adam Gibson ©

exactly
ten years and
two months ago
i gripped a bunk bed
in an amsterdam hostel,
not far from where i sit right now,
anxiety attacking my head
hysterical on some dope,
a bad kenyan blend
that spelt the end
of my psyche as
i had known
it until
then,
and
a new
beginning,
full of endings,
had started to begin.
the next few years saw
my father die and saw me go
through a purgatory that brought me
face-to-face with the endlessness of the
middle of the night, the feeling of certainty
that i would soon die too, the searching for peace
that would allow me to sleep, the breaking of a
heart that broke and ruined mine to break.
those were days of lost 3am mornings,
evenings when static electricity
zapped in the dry and clear
winter air, the haze gone
all the way to the
Blue Mountains
and the
tv aerials
silhouetted
to the west in
perfect crisp purity,
straight and jagged lines
calling out for their desperate
connection to some bigger picture
that would turn lives and days
onward and carve out a
meaning from the
cold nights
somehow.
and my own aerials
were searching for such
connection too because winter
down under on side of the world
- denigrated by the online majority
because it falls at the wrong time of year,
according to the scraping masses of the northern
hemisphere, who believe they own july and august
exclusively and who laugh at our quaint freezing and
strange christmases in the sun – came in and i
shivered more than i'd ever shivered in
Europe, living in Karpy's flat on
Brighton Boulevard near the

bar heater, cricket on tv
beaming from England

or elsewhere and the

Roosters still doing

as badly in
the footy
as ever.
the parallels
with now are many –
same love delusions,
same writing aspirations,
same lack of money, same fact
that tonight i am gripping the bed
with a spinning head and the same fact
that the roosters are doing just as badly
as ever upon my likely return to place of home.

2007-04-12T21:10:00.000+10:00

Man in suit, doing a piss, Antwerp, 8/4/2007, 8.28pm

By Adam Gibson ©

the end of the world is closer here
as a man in grubby suit,
drunk and swaying from nearby pub,
staggers towards the gap
between two parked cars.

thinking he's hidden from view,
he unzips his fly and,
wobbling with booze and concentration,
unleashes a spluttering stream
- like a hose with a kink in it somewhere -
of sheer, shuddering and clear relief
which lasts a good five minutes,
onto the car in front
as jetstreams carve white paths
above in the european sky
and buildings stained with grime and graffiti teeter,
old and forgotten and over

he sways and dribbles,
burps in his throat,
one hand somehow holding a cigarette
which occasionally goes to his mouth
and which occasionally serves as glowing tip
above his head in the murky light
as he pats his askew combover in place
in the reflection of the rear window
of the car he is pissing on.

behind the tinted glass one-way windows of our bus,
meanwhile,
me and 30 others watch
in a comic and horrified suspense
as he finally tucks his old fella back snugly into his trousers
and looks around, content that no-one has caught him in action.

2007-04-12T04:49:00.000+10:00

By Adam Gibson ©

Crop dusting

crop
dusting

there are secrets
held by the sad cropduster
who sleeps with his head in his hands
because of all the things he's done and dusted
and the tired and tested men fall from the branches
of their family trees with the energy of a leaf
falling from above on a still night
with no wind and no dew
on the ground and
no-one around
to hear or
make
a
sound
underneath
a sky that once was
torn with the screams
of crops being dusted
towards their own oblivion

2007-04-05T06:49:00.000+10:00

the night we went swimming

By Adam Gibson ©

and we agree that 'Nightswimming' by REM
is the greatest song ever written
even though you lost your Grandma's ring
on the night we went swimming in 1997
and maybe it is still down there on the Bondi sand somewhere,
though I doubt it;
a lot of feet have trod that specific spot
since that specific time,
bulldozers have bulldozed the beach back and forth,
sand cleaners have ran their grated teeth to and fro,
metal detective elderly men have fossicked and found everything
there is to be found of value (and otherwise) there.

I'd say that ring is long since pawned,
appeared briefly in the window of the Money Lent stores
on Oxford Street, Bondi Junction,
or cashed in at a Cash Convertors somewhere,
and now it sits on someone else's finger,

far from the water,
and even further from
the night we went swimming
and lost it,
the both of us.

2007-04-05T06:44:00.000+10:00

those nights

and i remember doing nothing on the night
Grant McClennan died
and i remember doing nothing on the night
Joe Strummer died
and i remember doing nothing on the night
Bobby Limb died
and i remember doing nothing on the night
Stuart Speed died
and i remember doing nothing on the night
Jack Neary died
and i remember doing nothing on the night
Tim Mackay died
and i remember doing nothing on the night
Billy Thorpe died...

2007-03-29T00:27:00.000+10:00

I don't know how to high-five

By Adam Gibson ©

People are paying $300 for jeans
That look like they cost five dollars
They're getting their hair done so that it will
Look like it hasn't been done
They're greeting on the street
With elaborate handshakes that take
Longer than the conversation
They will shortly have
But I'm busily missing the boat
I'm in all sorts of strife
I've got a secret I must confess:
I don't know how high-five
I miss the mark
I take a self-conscious air swing
I've forgotten to Americanise
Thus I am left behind
I'm wearing T-shirts from the 1980s
Not because they're hip
But because they're all I've got
And I have a pair of board shorts ready
For the return of the polka dot
But all this means nothing
My life remains a lie
I'll come unstuck badly
I don't know how to high-five

2007-03-22T05:29:00.000+11:00

the great silence of Australia

By Adam Gibson ©

on through Broadway
appearing beneath the bright lights
of George Street
flashing towards Parramatta Road,
my brother and I are heading west.

and if you keep on going,
you will end up there –
Perth, the Indian Ocean,
the great plains of nothing,
the silent nights of Australia,
the great silence,
the great emptiness

you versus the landscape,
and how you can leave it all behind,
and you need to be tough and able to fight,
and I am neither,
and should begin my training.

the desert nights
and the boogiemen in the ghost fires,
the featherfoots Gabe told me about,
who walk among sleeping bodies

and the truck drivers who sleep upright
in cabin seats,
the burble of CB radios
bubbling the air with static hiss

and long winding quietness
unravelling into spirit homes
against the tree-lined river beds

of the great silence of Australia

2007-03-15T02:54:00.000+11:00

a summer ride taken

By Adam Gibson ©

devastating the photo albums
with blonde shoulders
in the yellow southern light
of European summer
against bare mountains
rocking into gullies
and great peaks,
caught smiling,
and the primary colours
of her cheekbones
and her hair flopping
straight down;
she is dot-pointing dreams now,
she is now ticking off intentions,
and, between us,
there will surely be
a summer ride taken
when summer comes
back again,
back again
to the right side of our world

2007-03-15T02:49:00.000+11:00

At the end of my roads

By Adam Gibson ©

there's always a sandy path
leading to a press-button open air shower
and there's always a car with a surfboard in it ready for use
at the end of my roads

2007-03-15T02:46:00.000+11:00

Love in the time of Magnums

By Adam Gibson ©

when Magnum ice-creams were first introduced,
we first started seeing each other:

a drive to the Royal National Park,
a picture of her with blue eyes in my red hat,
a return to her flat that late sunny afternoon,
sitting on her bed with my hand on her leg,
the noise from the kids from the school next door
and bright light through the plane trees,
sun at some points on the wooden beams,
the wooden door frames and dark wood windowsills.

I (secretly) vowed that I would kiss her forever right then
and I can't remember how
the days just fell into nights,
nor can I recall the point when
things hit a different beat
and as we got closer
I got further away.

And there was Bali involved
and the South Coast,
sad cow seen on roadside,
and then eventually shipwrecked in London,
desolate kissing that left both of us in tears,
horrible Heathrow scenes.

In short, it's taken more than a decade
of slowly winding back revisionism on my behalf
to feel the need to reveal that
I have forgotten none of that
and that I still,
to this day,
eat a Magnum
on every occasion
I can.

Driving to Montreal

2007-03-08T06:11:00.000+11:00

By Adam Gibson ©

we drove to Montreal

in the spring of 1995

and on that drive

frost-mist held the trees still

while the sky could not be faulted

for its unbroken purity of low grey;

we were so young and it

seems so long ago

but it feels like last week too

and we didn't feel young at the time.

and the whole trip was organised,

petrol stops and meals pre-planned,

and the three of us drove,

me in the backseat,

up through Canada

while winter wasn't so much breaking

as seeping away into muddy brown

and lost watches and coins and cars and money

were appearing from the melting snow

all soggy and white and not-quite-right.

big North American cars allow big North American people

the big North American luxuries of spreading wide,

splaying their rumps and shanks across a vast expanse.

an alternative benefit is the person in the back passenger seat

can grasp the hand of the person in the front passenger seat

without the driver having a clue.

and so on we drove like that,

a betrayal so sweet you

could hardly criticise it,

could you?

2007-03-01T03:58:00.000+11:00

Cadiz, Spain, February 27, 2007

By Adam Gibson ©

the threatening thud of
adolescent shoe
on air-busting football
in ancient echo streets and
the moped buzz of
buzz-cut hair-cut and
the perfumed packages of
tight jeans and
mouths lip-served with
chewing gum smacks
and cigarette casualness:

all this is pressed down
under the long shadows from
the sun across from africa
under the high blue light
blasting the yellow rooftops
and the smell of the atlantic and
gibraltar rocking just to the south-east
as I toss and yearn
in these nights of humid cold
and freezing warmth.

2007-02-22T22:04:00.000+11:00

What time is it there?

By Adam Gibson ©

dusk in a cold phone booth of

cigarettes and call girl cards

and the steam from my breath

is the ghost of words that

i have spoken

but no one's heard

what time is it there

what time is it where you are

i am scratching off a PIN code or

i am following instructions or

going ahead and reversing my charges

and getting a hometown operator

and not altering my accent a jot

and i know the light outside where she is

and she has no idea what

she means to me

at that moment

what time is it there?

what time is it where you are?

a specific combination of numbers

conjures a specific combination of

consonants and vowels

which coalesce into sound

which organises into a voice

that i can see a mouth speaking

and the expression of face

it's creating

what time is there?

what time is it where you are?

a dangling thread across the world

a missed stitch and loose link

a thin tightrope of hopes and hands:

we don't even know how it happens

and don't want to try to comprehend it...

are there ants in heaven?

when did time begin?

how is it that i can

hear my mum's cat Freddie

playing with the phone cord

12,000km away through the phone

and how is that that can devastate me

and buoy me

in exactly equal degrees?

what time is it there?

what time is it where you are?

2007-02-15T01:18:00.000+11:00

Gaelic football match, Newcastle, County Down

By Adam Gibson ©

pale skinny legs

spindle-armed and tough-faced

on the terrace i watched

the County Down vs County Kildare

Gaelic Football match

beneath the snow-flecked imposition

of Slieve Donard

and the thud of the ground

the thud of boot on ball

knobbly knee on knobbly knee

in the freezing rain

which soaks the face

of the grey-faced man

in front of me but he

doesn't wipe off a drop

and nobody speaks

because the local team

ain't travelling too hot

the Reds and Blacks

versus

the White and Blacks

and everyone knows each other

and the bloke next to me

has a brother in Melbourne (of course)

and he wants to know all about me

he has pale blue eyes

and hairs on his nose

2007-02-08T23:55:00.000+11:00

over Dundrum Bay

up to the Mourne Mountains

across Belfast

the girls with straightened hair

and bare legs in school uniforms

in zero degrees

don't worry

the men with scars on their faces

and close cropped hair

don't worry

it's snowing in the North

they have unboarded

the formerly boarded up shops

the have fixed the smashed glass

single lane roads are dusted with white

the radio announcers speak in

a lilt that sounds like

everything they say is a joke

a hot chocolate in a bus terminal

the bus has broken down on the road

to Newcastle

the Seafare fish shop

is doing a roaring trade

a frozen woman on a corner

asks me for a penny

or a quid

i pretend i don't hear her

and i feel bad about it

it's snowing in the North

it's white

and things are broken

but they're still green

underneath

and starting to grow

readying for Spring

2007-02-01T09:38:00.000+11:00

lured and landed by a pair of blue eyes

that flashed angles and sparks in the

hard light of the southern hemisphere,

that brought their frozen stillness to

a country town with nine pubs,

a cannery,

two football teams,

an Olympic Pool (closed for repairs)

and an inexorable slide to decay,

he was a goner before he'd even come.

Two years in a flash,

one finishing uni,

the other bar shifts at the RSL,

they did it together,

her accent becoming more like his,

yeah-ehs instead if just yahs,

and she learnt how to pour proper beers

the proper way,

she joined the netball team cos it was

just like handball from home

and all their life panned out ahead,

up there in the northern seas.

they tell us that there might be snow tonight,
there is talk, she says, of a storm
coming in from the North Sea
and he, with eyes that blink slowly,
eyes that say, okay, I will believe you tonight,
moves a glass to his lips and
hears the kids flighting over control of the DVD
while at exactly the same time
he wonders if he will miss that noise.

2007-01-25T00:10:00.000+11:00

someone i know

By Adam Gibson ©

she blows smoke rings like Leonard Cohen
she always wants her photo taken but
never wants to take one
she has a suit with wide lapels that
she calls her "devastation suit"
she plays guitar left-handed and she
stabs herself until she bleeds with
uncooked spaghetti

she has run a half-marathon
broken her collarbone (twice)
can tie both a neck-tie and a bow-tie
and doesn't ever want to have children
she calls them "ferrets"

she likes to suggest she's noisy at sex
but doesn't say it directly
she flinches whenever she hears
the flint of a cigarette lighter
she doesn't know how to work
dvd players
she draws pictures of footprints
and she collects shells and small pieces of glass

she has candles in her bathroom she has never lit
she gets nauseous at the thought of eggs
she can't drive a car and doesn't want to learn
she believes in nightdresses (not pyjamas)
she talks in her sleep about political matters and falling
and she doesn't own a cat because she says they are
"too needy"
but she stops to pat every one she sees

2007-01-18T20:12:00.000+11:00

The legendary Mr Pearson

By Adam Gibson ©

the absolute sausage sizzle expert,
Mr Pearson's toes enthralled a generation
of kids by the sandside suburbs
who watched their curled and scurried form
scratching from salt water
to cold sand
to concrete
and back again

Mr Pearson,
always in t-shirt,
always in shorts,
frying the onions in the
North Bondi Surf Club garage,
beneath the old squash court,
the sausages sizzling,
someone's mum manning
the tomato sauce distribution

Mr Pearson is
carrying some old surfboards somewhere,
he is mending something,
he is roping off an area on the sand
for the Nippers to gather:
anything suggesting inactivity, well,
he wouldn't hear of it

Mr Pearson,
an old Australian person who
will never return:
non-ironic
non-knowing,
everything faded through use
not fashion,
nothing contrived,
salt mornings when no-one else
could be bothered,
not there to be seen or not seen,
just there

toes cragged and ragged,
a walk which suggested a limp but
no limp to actually pinpoint,
on the beach promenade and
down to the sand

no children,
no wife ever spotted.
the type of childless man who
could be,
and often is,
forgotten,
passed over in the annals:

but no ...
the absolute sausage sizzle expert,
Mr Pearson's toes enthralled a generation
of kids by the sandside suburbs
and he remains

remembered.

2007-01-11T23:54:00.000+11:00

prague

By Adam Gibson ©

i'd like to consider myself more like
Franz Ferdinand (the band)
than
Franz Kafka (the man)
but standing in Prague's Old Town square
i feel more like the latter
and he was a grim dark soul
who has been dead for
more than 70 years;

and that's the point ...

i am death warmed up,
a walking zombie,
my chest glued by flu
and my blood cells
staging a raging party
with fever for festivities
and delirium for drugs.

cool, hip and young like the band?
i am kidding myself.
cool i cannot be in such a state,
my hips are aching with a deep dull ache
and, furthermore, i am not young anymore
by any stretch of my lack of imagination

there's a clock tower here
where on the hour
little figures clatter out
for an ancient ritual
in front of which
torrents of tourists
gather to shower
the tick-tocking fellows
with flashes of appreciation and
give some meaning to their
otherwise directionless touring

and middle-aged men
with big bellies and bigger wallets
parade their pretty girls on their arms
with furtive looks
which reveal they are
eager to be seen with an attractive catch
but equally keen,
in jaw-jut stride and Viagra pride,
to not be thought
to have paid for the privilege

and the tourist shops
all stock the same things:
little witches on strings
(batteries not included),
authentic Praha fridge magnets
(made in China),
'Genuine Bohemia Crystal'
(100 percent Russian glass)
and souvenir t-shirts
reading: 'I Czeched Out Prague'.

meanwhile,
in the Kafka Bookshop,
the premises on which
the bloke himself
apparently
spent at least a night
(the specifics now lost in
the lack of need for such specifics)
the woman behind the counter
watches me with my hollow cheeks,
sweating forehead
and turberculosis wheeze,
and even buying a Kafka biography
doesn't make her pleased,

so i retreat back to the freezing square,
make eye-contact with
a supermodel straight from the Siberian steppes
on the arm of a bloke old enough to be
someone far older than her and wearing
a grey suede jacket
and i stumble on back
to find a sickbed uncomfortable enough
to lie in for a
day or two
at least.

2007-01-04T00:12:00.000+11:00

bits of bliss

By Adam Gibson ©

who finds the right paths to Protestor Falls?
beds of bracken, smart alec birds,
the slick rocks and sliding trails,
cold-pressed minutes in the shadow of big boulders
and the trees here which if they could talk,
would be talking trees...

who finds them?
the road far below,
our parked car.

the corduroy bush begins with black bark,
moves through green and
calls unanswered when called.

teenage dreams
teem into the action of the near stars
as night comes on.

2006-12-28T00:27:00.000+11:00

the Gauloise Girls

By Adam Gibson ©

the cat-eyed slinkies of Rue de Sevres
the knife-butter flick-lips of the Sorbonne bike tracks
and Algerian ash eyes of flashing Metros and the
shock-tongue devil-mouth whispers of feline hisses
of Montparnassssse
and the brutal banlieue eyelashes of Pigalle and Clichy
where the air is gathered in neon
and the shocked outsiders of the au pair perennials of
Motte-Picquet and the Seventh and up in Montmartre
with its painted cheeks and Paris-straight-flop-hair
reaching just above shoulder and tied in
loose careful/careless elastic by the cigarette hands of
the Gauloise Girls in early morning black coffee cafe repose
who take on the day without showers and wear stockings
perfumed with tiger patterns for the whole
day and the night which lies ahead.

2006-12-28T00:17:00.000+11:00

by speeding life

By Adam Gibson ©

i'm wearing my heart on my sleeve
but i'm wearing a singlet

i'm playing things by ear
but i might be going deaf

i've got one eye on the prize
but it's a booby prize

i'm playing the field
but the ground is closed for renovations

i'm waiting for my time to come
but it's past my bedtime

i'm painting the town red
but i've painted myself into a corner

i've got the end in sight
but i haven't begun

i'm looking out for number one
but i can't find it anywhere

i'm sowing my wild oats
but the crop could fail

it's a two-horse race
but i'm a doubtful starter

my cup has been runneth over
by speeding life

it takes two to tango
but i've got two left feet
/

2006-12-25T05:25:00.000+11:00

Le Deauville Flyer

a cafe favoured by people
with bad hair and limps,
with scars on their hands
and pants which are
a little too short
or a little too long and
suits which are frayed at the cuffs
not quite enough to notice on first glance,
Le Deauville Flyer
is the only cafe in Paris
where i feel wholly comfortable.

the cab drivers and the
various soaks of Rue de Sevres,
the laundry workers and
the labourers,
gather for the races shown live
from some mystery racetrack somewhere
and they don't want to be noticed
as much as i don't want to be noticed
and we share complicit silence
as they blow their wages
over cigarettes and coffee
and rough red wine
and i sit alone looking out at the
rainy scuttling street of
perfumed shoppers and
shitting dogs
and the cat-eyed slinky girls
of Montparnasse passing on bicycles
in red cheeks and berets and
devastating disinterest in
anything at all

there is the taxi driver who parks on the footpath,
here is the reedy man with the unsteady gait and
hands that shake
who doesn't work there
but still sometimes brings me my coffee
and likes to pretend he's the doorman:

if Bukowski were alive,
he'd like Le Deauville Flyer.

he'd like its sense of genuine purpose
for it's the only cafe in town
that provides a community service;
the winning and the losing,
the smokes and the soaks,
the coffee that keeps you awake for weeks
and no food avaiable
and ciggie butts stubbed into
the hard tiled floor
and Laurent the owner smoking out of the doorway
with his ciggie held in his palm between
forefinger and thumb
and who knows that i will only ever have
a cafe au lait (like no one else does)
or a glass of red (like everyone does)

and the stylish missiles
heading for the boutiques of St Germain de Pres
enquiring with quick eyes about
the viability of this cafe for a visit
but quickly averting eyes
and walking on
after seeing the blaring TV screens
and the haunted looks of
the patrons and
the air of desperation which hangs like a neon light
above the entrance.

Le Deauville Flyer:
my favourite cafe in the
captial of France.

2006-12-14T00:13:00.000+11:00

North in Norway

By Adam Gibson

Just below the Arctic,
I have circles under my eyes
and the sun here is a pale hint
which breaches like a whale
for a brief slow-motion arc
on the horizon,
disappearing quicker than it takes
for me to finish my tea
and to dash my vows
to make it out to see the day
for however long it lasts.

2006-12-14T00:02:00.000+11:00

The Champions Bar
(1997)

By Adam Gibson

The Champions Bar is still
hard Bondi.

It hasn't succumbed to marble walls
And varnished floors,
There's still Maoris
and brawls among the pool balls,

chalkboard initials and
beer pulled from clean pipes
into unchilled glasses.

A hard Bondi of
weeds growing in footpath cracks,
of thongs and sinewed sunburnt backs.

A hard Bondi
of heroin and deals and
pregnant girlfriends and
groundfloor flats with
dumped loungechairs
out the front.

Men who've been away,
men who've never been anywhere,
tattooed blokes with teeth missing,

rakish girls in
black Southern Comfort t-shirts.
Winny Reds,
bourbon and Cokes,
shaved heads/long hair,

no two-shot rule,
no fouls on the black:
the challenger pays for the game
and flicks for the break.

Intimidation is just as important as skill
- and this mob are good at both,
their tattoos are on their necks and are for life

Meanwhile the suburban hustlers who
play Tom Cruise and bring their own cues
stick quietly to the other bars out front.

2006-12-07T00:04:00.000+11:00

the doc

By Adam Gibson

the doc was a shuffle of grey trouser-legs
and it was a soft-shoe shuffle of a man
who knew how to come home late at night
and whom women liked to hug
he wasn't a doc of any specific training
but that mattered not, i was told,
because he was still called 'the doc'
and that was that, full stop.
he had the smile of a bloke who
knew he was still young despite
what everyone tried to tell him and
though his heart was running out of puff
he wouldn't hear it,
not for a minute.
he sat at the side table at the
writer's workshop in broken hill
for each session and
he'd slip his latest writing my way
to be read aloud.
he'd been building towards these moments,
via barossa red and jack kerouac and a
distant connection to the sydney push of the '50s,
clive james, et al, for years
and he was one of those characters
who knew about both grapes and cricket
and could give you the teachings of marx
in five-minute précis.
when it neared time for me to leave
he kept asking to share a bottle of wine or two,
even though his wife had taken me aside
and warned me that's what he would do:
he shouldn't drink, she said,
it would be the death of him.
but he caught me off guard and
we found ourselves at the pub
and it was there the doc,
after two bottles of a smooth red,
pulled three books from his coat and said,
"here, take these."
three 1960s editions of kerouac novels
"take them," he said,
"they've done all they can for me,

but I think you're gonna need 'em."

2006-11-30T11:29:00.000+11:00

i do this

i trip on footpath cracks, not a real trip,
just the one where the bottom of your foot
hits and scuffs

i walk into people when i turn corners
i mis-time the psplck when i kiss
someone on the cheek

i count out the wrong change
in crowded supermarkets

i try to open locked pub doors,
everyone inside looking,
mouths near beers

i leave blobs of conditioner
in the tops of my ears

i get pimples
at the most inappropriate times

i often answer "how are you?"
when people ask "how are you?"

my face goes red when i drink red wine

i never know when girl
is interested in me
it takes long chats
and a phone call or 40

i have ghostly dreams in which
i am walking down the street
with my fly emphatically undone

i been known to walk dog poo
through a neighbour's house

i copy people's dancing styles
on the odd occasions i dance

when i blow my nose
little bits of tissue sometimes remain above my mouth

when people ask me about a movie
i should have seen but haven't
i often say i have seen it
then when they go into a story about
a certain scene
i nod knowingly but am frantically hoping
they're not making it all up to catch me out

i say very inappropriate things
at work drinks get-togethers

i've bought endless items from shops
simply because the assistant was cute

i've come very close to losing my
speedos in the surf (several times)

i've tried to put a condom on backwards

i've written extensive notes for myself
when i've spoken to a girl on the phone to the first time

i got my baggage searched one day
at sydney airport
the pockmarked officer smirking
at my rainbow patterned underpants
which came in a 12-pack
which mum had bought me for christmas
the year before

i do that
i do all that and more

and will probably continue to do so
forever.

2006-11-23T00:02:00.001+11:00

an ancient sense

By Adam Gibson ©

10 years ago a storm from siberia
(that's what the tv news said)
came over to france while I was here
and brought to me an ancient sense of europe,
darker worlds and places,
brutal lives by fireside and hearth,
smoke through cold air,
machinery and bullets,
flesh and mud,

the secrets of gilded drawing room and
shadowed passageway,
barbed wire and bombs,
the blood which flows between
the rivers of countries,
the lock-step march of nations,
battalions silent in their graves.

europe, now i can't decide
if you mean nothing at all to me,
or something else altogether.

2006-11-23T00:02:00.000+11:00

conversion

By Adam Gibson ©

in Fremantle Cash Converters
we convert our scraps of life into
further bits and pieces;
birthday presents long since unremembered
become 20 dollar bills,
while items held upon the shelves of years
fall into our pockets,
happily converted;

all the effort and love
and labour and life,
all the innocence and warm thought,
the goodness and hope and happiness and belief,
is reduced to a crooked sticker
slapped on the side,
a handwritten note so barren of heart
yet so assured in its own belief

honest home furnishings,
silent mobile phones
(like lost children)
and CD players that are four years out of date,
their "features" long since exposed as gimmicky equalisers
with an overusage of chrome paint, LED lights and
sub-woofers that have lost their bark.

2006-11-23T00:01:00.000+11:00

Paris Fire Brigade vs Paris Police

In central Paris the other day I was in the middle of one of the strangest situations I've ever witnessed. Now, strikes and protests are a dime a dozen on Parisian streets and it seems a week isn't complete without a good ol' civic uprising. It might even be written into the constitution somewhere. Students storm the barricades as a integral component of their undergrad degrees, farmers have a trip to Paris to upset the city-folk etched into their calendars and racial minorities just love the feel of a police baton on the back of their collective heads.

C'est la vie in Paris, it seems.

But I was genuinely surprised on Tuesday when, upon noticing a bit of a brouhaha emanating from the end of the long street on which I was walking, I decided to check out the cause of the commotion. It turned out not to be a bunch of students protesting that they can't access MySpace on the uni computers, nor was it the usual rag-tag bunch of leather-jacket-wearing vegetarians, neo Nazis and miscellaneous fight-seeking thugs arking up against globalisation and smashing the window of Starbucks (after getting a coffee first, of course.)

No siree. This was a protest of a difference and I couldn't work it out at first. I saw loads of police, I saw loads of firemen. I couldn't see who was protesting. Then I realised … hang on a sec: the firemen were the ones protesting. And they were making a fair bloody fist of it.

This was no vaguely orderly march through the streets, chanting union slogans and perving on the office girls, as I imagine would happen in Australia. Nope, this was pretty much a full-scale riot. The air was filled with smoke from dozens of red flares which were adding a surreal glow to proceedings, there were riot police charging everywhere, there were pitched fist fights between the fireys and the cops ... and amazingly, there were scores of things set alight.

Yep, who the hell do you call to put out a fire that has been started by the city's firemen? Forget the chicken and egg question; that would bamboozle both Edward de Bono and Alain de Botton.

It was truly violent and although the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warns Aussies to steer clear of "civic disturbances" when overseas, this was just too good to leave, and the often dormant journo in me couldn't resist getting closer and watching the action.

Take a look at some press coverage of the action http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,450113,00.html

To me it was just unbelievable to see police and firefighters going at it. It seemed totally incongruous, something that went against some fundamental idea of "rightness" in my head. I mean, I know, in Australia at least, firefighters and police have markedly different types of people in their ranks, but by and large they work together and I suppose you could say that they are peas from virtually the same pod.

Just one of the many fundamental cultural differences between the two countries I suppose. Oh and there's possibly another. I'm not sure whether you would see Aussie firefighters employing the good ol' "brown eye" as an means of protest, but have a look at the photos on that link. But then again, maybe these blokes have more in common with Aussies after all.

Next thing you know, they might even attempt the legendary "Dance of the Flaming A*#hole" …

2006-11-23T00:00:00.000+11:00

Still Kids

By Adam Gibson ©

My friend ___* works in corporate law with millions of dollars riding on judgements that she's dealing with and clients that ring her late at night and on weekends. She has a salary with a figure you'd laugh at if I told you and yet she looks at me with scared and bright eyes, leans in and confesses with a nervous smile that "I keep waiting for them to realise that I'm a little girl and I don't really know what I'm doing."

I worked for newspapers for eight years, for magazines of some form for four more, and for other news and internet media for a further eight. I've had front page stories, won the National Youth Media Award, had Australia Council writing grants, interviewed Bono and walked in the footsteps of Ivan Milat, among many other things.

And yet, in meetings when high-fives and applause were exchanged, I'd have one eye out the window, day-dreaming of a chocolate Paddle Pop, whether the surf was going to be alright that evening and how I could write my name (if given the chance) in the dust on top of the screen projector.

Isn't there a point where we become adults? Isn't there a point where we become the whole person we're supposedly meant to be?

My friend ___* has told me that even the most intimidating people were little children once and more often than not that little kid is not as far away from the surface as many would lead you to believe.

It's both comforting and disconcerting to think that millions of people are sitting out there right now, wondering if or when somebody is going to call their bluff and try to steal their lunch money away from them.

* Names deleted

2006-11-16T02:38:00.000+11:00

.
My future ex-girlfriend

By Adam Gibson

(With debt owed to
Glenn Platt for the title)

i'm pleased to meet you
i like the way your hair is cut

in these days of evil presidents
my hospitality extends to you –

my future ex-girlfriend
my future ex-girlfriend

the scrabble games we'll play
the rabble of the world
the dog that we will buy
the drugs that we will try
the christmas cards we will send
the gigs that we will see
this summer never ends

there's innocent me and disappointing me:
my hospitality extends, to you

my future ex-girlfriend
my future ex-girlfriend

2006-11-16T02:37:00.000+11:00

A fidgety choir of local kids, led by a woman who appears to be their school teacher, are gathered on a stage in the packed town hall of the tiny French town of Villers-Bretonneux. A 20-piece band, plus seemingly the entire town, are in panned out in front of them.

After running through various numbers, including an eight-minute mournful solo turn by the teacher herself (who looks like a cross between Patsy Biscoe, Shane Gould and Karen Carpenter) on guitar and vocals, a bagpipe player announces his arrival by tripping through a side door, whacking the top of his bagpipes on the doorframe and then nearly falling over, all while peeling off a succession of notes that I'd be kind to label a "tune".

Welcome to an Armistice Day commemoration in the heart of the Somme region, north of Paris; a home-spun event that would later provide me with one of the most profound experiences of my life.

***

Looking for a meaningful way to celebrate November 11, the date World War I officially ended, I have gone to the Somme in the hope of finding some semblance of occasion to mark the end of hostilities which decimated the area from 1916 to 1918. And I have chosen Villers-Bretonneux as my first stop because I know it's a town with a strong connection to Australia after the Aussie troops recaptured the town from the Germans in 1918, thus turning the tide of the German advance on Amiens and towards Paris.

I'd heard that the main street is called Rue de Melbourne, that the town symbol is a green and gold kangaroo and that the local school is called Victoria School, with "N'oubliez pas les Australiennes" ("Never forget the Australians") written above the blackboards in the classrooms. All up, it seems a pretty good place for this little Aussie to be on such a day.

***

With the crowd appropriately stilled, and our man on the bagpipes still doggedly ploughing on, a local dignitary ascends the stage and launches into a passionate distillation of what the day means to the town.

My rough translation is that "La Premiere Guerre Mondial" (French for the First World War) had a big impact on the town and is something that, 90 years on from the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, should be appropriately recognised. He makes specific mention of "les Australiennes" and talks of how they took the town with great bravery.

On such an occasion as this, therefore, one would expect at least a few other Australians to be present. This was an Australian victory against many odds and is an event that I at least had been aware of for several years. But no, there are apparently no other Aussies here: I am Australia's sole representative…

It's not that I am hoping for a repetition of what I feel is the jingoistic circus that Anzac Day at Gallipoli has become (another notch on the backpacker belt … run with the bulls in Pamplona, hit Oktoberfest in Munich, do The Church in London, grow a goatee and get your belly-button pierced), but some modest representation, I thought, would have been present. But, nope, not a cracker today.

***

Australians do of course regularly visit the town. There's a small but wonderful museum housed in the attic of the school with much of the history of battle for the town and the general Australian involvement on the Western Front documented.

With a theatrically Gallic shrug of the shoulders and a thoughtful rub of his beard, President of the Franco-Australian Association of Villers-Bretonneux, Jean-Pierre Thierry, tells me increasing numbers of Australians are coming to the town, visiting the museum and seeing the place where the Australian legacy is so great.

"We mostly get two types of people," Jean-Pierre tells me. "The first are people making a pilgrimage because a member of their family was involved in the war. They have come to honour someone who was lost in the battle or who fought, a grandfather or something. The others are school groups … many many school groups are coming through now and it is brilliant."

Most visitors also take in the giant, windswept monument to the Australian forces about two kilometres out of town. When I later visit there I find it a stark and spooky place. Entirely alone, I walk up a 500 metre hill bordered on two sides by row after row of white gravestones, many of them simply marked "A soldier of the Great War, known unto God", while others have heartbreaking detail such as "Here lies Private P. Smith, 23, only son of Mr and Mrs J. Smith, Sydney".

***

The dignitary gent finally finishes up his speech and signs off by announcing two triumphant words: "Waltzing Matilda". And before you can say "who is strangling that cat", the bagpipe player launches into an interpretation of the national Australian song which, let's face it, should be the national anthem, regardless of its actual words.

To his credit, the bagpipe player doesn't let talent, nor any lack thereof, stop him being a focal point of the town's big day. Mais non, monsieur. On he plays till the (bitter) end.

And just as I and everyone else are about to clap him for effort, at the very least, suddenly the band sparks to life and begin their own version of the song. This is a version of several movements, it seems. You can't get too much of a good thing, I say, but you also apparently can't get too much of 'Waltzing Matilda' today.

Bracing myself for more aural torture, I am therefore pleasantly surprised when the band bounces back from their own dodgy start, the two little blokes on the trumpet and clarinet busting out of the blocks two bars too early, and all actually coalescing into a cohesive and hearty whole.

But as the first verse looms I am prepared for anything as the choir, who have hitherto shown more interest in pinching and tickling each other, are readied for their role. I watch as the music teacher begins rushing around like a head mechanic getting set for a Formula One car to arrive in the pits during a race. She is waving her finger, shooshing a couple of skylarkers and checking that the one and only microphone is switched on. Anything might happen here, I think, and this might be worth the price of the free admission.

***

Australia provided the greatest military contributions of all the British dominions which sent forces to the Great War. There were 331,000 Australian volunteers (out of a population of 4,875,00) with 16,000 killed and a further 42,500 wounded.

Think about those figures for a minute. And most of them were men aged between 17 and 35. Truly a whole generation lost, and I wonder about the actual impact of that on day-to-day life in Australia after the war. It's a story I for one haven't really heard told.

***

I have these figures, plus images from the museum of smiling diggers in the trenches, durries hanging from the corners of their creased mouths, in my mind as I warily listen to the band and choir prepare to bring 'Waltzing Matilda' to lift-off.

But I needn't have worried. I shouldn't have doubted the kids of this little town with their ill-matched clothes and gawky pale faces. I even shouldn't have doubted the little chap in the choir's front row who decided it would be a good day to bust out his camouflage army pants.

Nope, with a frantic wave of the teacher's hand, the kids eagerly lean into the iconic Aussie tune with full confidence and the result is absolutely note perfect. They are a group of little angels, singing as one. They are clearly enjoying themselves as the crowd tap their feet and mouth their own version of the words.

And here I am, the only Aussie in a tiny hall on the other side of the world and these kids are singing a song every Australian knows. I'm the last person on earth to believe in glib nationalism, but I feel a wave of tingles wash over me, my eyes beginning to water and I feel more affected than an almost any other time of in my life. I'm both proud and excited and it's a moment, obviously, I won't easily forget.

The bagpipe player, however, might not last as long in memory.

2006-11-16T01:00:00.000+11:00

Eve of Armistice Day, The Somme

By Adam Gibson ©

it's night in Amiens and to the east
i feel that physically, the Somme River Valley,
over my shoulder, behind my bed and the hotel wall

i'm less than 25km from the old Western Front
where thousands were killed in three years
in trenches scratched from chalky limestone
and bogged in freezing mud from the knee down

and i feel there's figures still waiting in those fields,
i know it tonight,
silently waiting for the 88th anniversary
of when the guns fell silent evermore in that war
and they thought forever because nothing then could surpass
the dying of such a time and place

the heater is ticking over its concerns to me
in its old-fashioned way of paint-coated decades
and i wonder, looking around, if this hotel room,
with its floor which slopes to the east and
a noticeable lean you can see from the street,
was here when this town had closed down
to all but a few gendarmes and hardy few

the other terrified residents having fled the German push,
fully expected, definitely coming,
right through the front, right through this town,
right onto Paris.

i turn off the light to go to sleep but
five minutes later
am scrambling for the switch again
as i hear and feel footsteps suddenly entering my room.

i shout but there's no one there:
with the light on,
i see there's no one there.

2006-11-16T00:00:00.000+11:00

The shark

By Adam Gibson ©

(for Gabe)

in 1980 when my sister was 19
she found an old car
with the keys in the ignition
near the bank of the estuary
and she was 19 too
when she left here altogether and
never came back

in the winter of 1984
an east coast low pressure system
destroyed the fleet in their moorings,
smashed the jetty and
flattened half the town in a hail storm
which the weather bureau somehow
forgot to mention might happen

the beaches either side of the inlet
disappeared in one day
and the rocks of the breakwater
became cliffs overnight

that night she called from somewhere
down the coast,
said a woebegone shark
had been washed into
her local swimming pool
at the height of the storm

"get a blanket," i said,
"and pick it up like that."

on the news that night
i saw her and a blue-eyed man
holding the edges of a
dark and wet blanket and
hauling out a small shark
as it gasped for air
before being thrown back in the sea
and swimming away very quickly

2006-11-09T09:29:00.000+11:00

The fire in the Ghost Train at Luna Park

By Adam Gibson ©

the turnstile of Luna Park
a wonderland time to bust
back then on the spinner
we scramble to get to
the middle and hold our possie
as it flings us off into the
middle of the distance
and we slide akimboed
by the magic force
and off we go into rich-smelling pad bags
torn at the corners
and older than us and the
sound all echoing off
the walls and the mirrors
and the sunlight is coming in off the harbour
and screams are falling down
with hessian sacks
wrapped around them
on the Giant Slide
and there is the smell of smoke
and of metal and cigarette butts
and cigarette hands
and cigarette mouths
and cold metal and glass
and nylon tracksuit pants
and the squeak of shoes
and the whirr -clatter
of the Big Dipper
sheering past
and before anything even happened
we knew the
ghost train was haunted
and when it did catch fire
we were shocked
but on another level
certainly not surprised

2006-11-09T08:14:00.000+11:00

the sugarcane harvester 2001

By Adam Gibson ©

there's sugarcane fields
which i remember
from my travels in
the early years of
the 21st century,
my station wagon
roughly-parked
amid the cane furrows
and me hitching a ride
in the cabin of a harvester,
doing several laps of a brown field
the decimating blades
frightening with speed and
blinding flashes and
the terrible

whoompf-whoompf
whoompf-whoompf

of the cane stalks
being smashed into
20cm
billets and flung
warp-speed into the
container and
the trash shredded
and smashed into the
trash basket's grill.

when i jumped down off the machine
and said thank you to the driver,
i stood at eye level
to those blades

and i knew exactly
what they could do to me.

2006-11-02T01:54:00.000+11:00

deconstructing my own writing
(and making vows
about it that i won't keep for very long)

By Adam Gibson ©

no more sentimental poems
about past times and fond remembrance
of quiet occasions by beachside
or roadside;

no more fuzzy romances about
fishing towns and
surfing towns and
milkshake mid-mornings
or pebblecrete paths under barefeet
or weeds working their way through footpath cracks
or vegetarian meal stories of cafes long since closed.

no, no more indeterminate mentions of
"the coastal night"
and boy meets girl meets boy meets her cute friend,
no more accounts of the drives of their lives
and name-checking of towns that sound enigmatic
and full of marvel
but in real life are scenes of smashed bottles
and quarrels about roundabouts and
crowded visits to the only doctor in town worth his/her salt.

no more vague hints of rhyme deliberately sprinkled in
from time to time
to tap out a beat, one that keeps the eye moving forward
and the mind as well.

no more repetition of lines
no more repetition of lines
and no more linking lines with "and"
and no more linking lines with "and"

and using short lines
and then following them with long ones about regrets that are rusting in the
metaphoric car doors of our psyche
and no more use of the collective "our" when we mean "we" when i mean "i"
nor accounts of romantic flash meetings that are
characterised more by their loss than their gain.

no more liberal sprinkling of foreign locales
for a wider flavour,
contrasting port macquarie with paris
or san sebastian with sydnenham
just to prove that "we" have been to both.
no more sudden changes of tack
which take the poem off into a sudden new direction:

sails that billow from ship's masts and
the pile of discarded coathangers I saw which looked like
the shipwrecks of 1000 toy aluminium boats, in london,
which reminds me of the featherbed of bondi,
which i shall not mention again either,
nor the pacific highway, ditto,
scratched from the template.

no more bits that
feel like
the quiet after a storm:
where the lines shorten
go quietly,
broken
into segments
so you naturally
speak them
slower.

then a line break for a breath,
then a repeated (in part) line,
then that again as the momentum builds,
then a slight turn now which cranks up the tension,
then further and further onward to some point of something that sounds like a

crescendo

one that just sits and hangs there in open space
followed by the soft landing of a familiar soft-word sentence like this.

no more the sense that the whole thing could end there
but doesn't, but continues on,
as the riffing begins to pick up pace again
and i resume talking and i vow not to mention midnight oil again,
nor say how the lines
"i look out and see those lines and lines of swell and smile /
coolangatta what's the matter"
changed my life,
and no mention of the fact that i listen to the oils almost every day
or that 'wedding cake island'
i believe is the only piece of music i have ever heard
that is completely flawless,
and here is where i will avoid going off
onto other tangents about music
and its influence on me
and touch on the type of song that gets me,
one with a sense of place and/or time,
such as 'been coming here for years' by
weddings parties anything,
where they sing "behind the sanddunes off the road/
we built a tea-tree dynasty/
a fibro shack by a camping ground/
the fishing rod his trinity"…

all this will be avoided in future and now,
as i search for a way to wrap this up,
i will bring it in close,
maybe repeat a line or two
maybe repeat a line or two
consider my options

and suddenly invert
the whole thing
and vow
(in short lines)
to break every vow i have
hereby made,

and finish the whole thing off
with a question
hanging in the air
about
the meaning
of

it all.

2006-11-02T00:58:00.000+11:00

full circle
(my father on his first visit to paris, 1948)

By Adam Gibson

Bobby drinks two tart glasses of rough red
in a small room near the place de clichy

i know the place, i say,
i stayed near there too!
he can't believe it.

in the spray of memory
he walks out on that first day,
onto the champs élysée

me too, i say, i've been there,
were you heading to the arc de triomphe?
yes, he says,
up there ahead,
"the big gate".

a long northern twilight
the milk sun fading
across the atlantic and
he strolls along the champs élysée,
stops, thinks:
"i can't believe i'm here".

just what i said,
just how i felt.

at the arc de triomphe
he crosses and lands of the roundabout,
traffic relentless even in 1948 –
my own father,
watching cars go past,
unable to cross,
and me
exactly 20 years from birth.

with electric eyes
i would later stand
on that roundabout too
with no idea
he had been there.

smells in his nose,
eyes wide,
a tram driver he met,
the woman who showed him his room,
it's exact cost.

he finishes the red and slides to bed,
wakes the next day to the tight paris light,
a hangover which, he said, lasted for three days
ringing in his head.

me too I would say if i could:
and thus I have made
a full circle.

2006-10-26T19:31:00.000+10:00

Signals

kids throw leaves on the vent
bringing hot air from the metro station far below;
the leaves (not the kids)
dart up in urgent spirals while nearby
a girl with dyed-blonde hair wearing leather jacket
sits smoking a cigarette and talking on her mobile
as her adolescent doberman with bandaged leg
strains at the leash around her feet to
chase the jack russell that just did
a shit bigger than it
on the footpath next to the phone booth
and nobody arched an eyebrow.

so they reckon this is paris?
it's 6.21pm on an october evening
and the sun is glowing on a single chimney 100m high
to the north towards the window-seat sex shops of pigalle.
how did i find myself here?
not in front of this café where i sit drinking crisp beer,
but in paris itself in this month, this year, this second?

something will happen and then something else will happen.
i will drink this beer, i will eat these chips,
i will call you tomorrow or the next day or the next,
we will meet for coffee or lunch,
we will make plans that neither of us will keep,
we will raise our eyebrows at the actions of strangers
and imagine what our children will look like,
we will catch buses and recommend each other books,
we will argue over menus and rescue each other from hangovers,
we will find ourselves in places we feel lost;
and then there's the louvre and north coast beaches
and then there's canada and trains in the night
and there's bands in london and food poisoning on koh samui,
sunday afternoons at watsons bay while our only era exists,
or clovelly for fish and chips and
the western desert of my imagination
and we will see renaissance clouds in natural habitat
and watch the sky fade to baby's room pink and blue on chimney above.

the kids playing on the metro grill have upped proverbial stumps
(and oh how i'd love to start a game of cricket in this square!)
they've done their pantomime play of urchins for the day
and tourists walk by and look at us "regulars" in insolent repose.
yeah, 'this is paris', i'd say,
and 'so this is a version of living', i say in a text message to a friend
that i doubt will get through
to the other end.

Paris lessons

Lessons I have learned so far in Paris:
If a street looks like a one-way street
It's a two-way street.
If a street looks like a two-way street
It's best avoided altogether.

If you are walking on the footpath
Resist every inclination in your soul
To pass people on the left-hand side:
Chaos will ensure otherwise.

Don't buy the sandwich with ricotta
Thinking it's brie and
Expect to not feel nauseous afterwards
Or to have a bowel movement for a week.

Don't confess your English skills
Or that you're Australian when you hear
Three Australian women comment favourably
Amongst themselves about you.

Don't stare at the man who is the spitting image
Of footballer Willie Mason
But is carrying a baguette and
Wearing a jaunty waistcoat.

If you see five police vans
Racing towards some apparent incident,
Rest assured, there will be no incident and
Become aware of the fact that they just might be
The same five police vans every day just doing laps of the city
As a tourist service.

Realise that blokes wearing berets
Are not being ironic and try not the laugh at them.

Don't strike up a conversation with a woman
In a café by genuinely asking her
What the name of the street is
While sitting under a sign saying it's name.

Avoid eye contact with
Men with tattoos on their necks
(good advice for all around the world, in fact)

(to be updated as necessary)

2006-10-19T21:43:00.000+10:00

.
Lost in transaction

By Adam Gibson

on my first ever night in tokyo
i'm not so much lost in translation
as i am lost in transaction,
the 'American hamburger sandwich'
i just ate, i realise uneasily after the fact,
costing me over forty Australian dollars
and now sitting precariously in my belly,
possibly preparing for immediate escape;
ouch.

while i have a yen for different places
it seems the Yen isn't so keen on me
and while i was never good at maths
i never pretended or aspired to be,
however currency rates i was never bad at
but this exchange has got the better of me

and Tokyo from this hotel window
looks to me across the night
like Botany in Sydney, or Alexandria:
orange lights of industrial estates,
wharehouses and
white light-commercial vehicles lurking,
planes landing low overhead with
screaming fuselage and metal-fatigued wing.

in a city of 12 million people
i can see no human soul
and only feel a dull buzz from the night
that indicates people exist out there
so while i am lured on one level by
the prospect of exploration
i pass up on the possibility
and head down to the empty hotel bar
only to find Scarlett Johannson
has instead opted to stay in her room.

2006-10-12T12:42:00.000+10:00

busily appreciating sydney

By Adam Gibson

of keen eye,
you believe in tree and sky
and headland fringed with white,
cat curled on warm footpath
with a smile on its face under awning
and the texture of old australian wood
on old australian ferry
across to milson's point,
mcmahon's point
then balmain east.

the white light just after sunset
and an atomic blast of bushfire smoke,
a back-burn gone arse-up,
blitzing ku-ring-gai
and threatening land and sky,
kangaroo and dog,
as circular quayed trombonist
begins the muppets' theme (again).

busily appreciating sydney,
in full-time employ of enjoying
the harbour bridge,
i'm keen to lick the opera house
if security will allow me
(my photo is on their hq wall).

busily appreciating sandstone and brick,
and streets that end in beaches,
busily appreciating seagull fleeing ferry
and the pearly-churn of wake,
busily appreciating tree and sky,
busily appreciating this
australian day.

2006-10-12T12:41:00.000+10:00

ode against october

By Adam Gibson

october, what shall we do with you?
you offer no specific promise,
no telling cliché nor
fundamental electricity.

you sit in the barren crevice
between the end of the football season
and the start of the cricket.
your weekends have no direction:
no kick-off to dictate movement,
no sessions to dictate the lack thereof,
plonked on the couch,
the thwack of willow against ball
on lime-green screen.

october you offer us nothing
with your weather we cannot trust,
33 degrees one day and
18 the next with a southerly
direct from mawsons's hut
(only minus the penguins.)

october, you can't be tipped or picked,
the bookies won't frame a market,
the spring carnival only empties our wallets
and there is no christmas to drink to,
no remembrance day to forget,
your labour day is simply a chore
of pacific highway snarls and
cottesloe chaos (weather permitting)

october, what shall we do with you?
your days which pointlessly don't save daylight
and dawn at 5am,
your sunsets that tease with a hint of lingering
but pull the pin when we arrive at beach.

october, get over and done with,
you've had your fun and now it's time to
go …

***************
notes on poem: The idea for this came after a request from Steve "Karpy" Karp, "beeuty". Lamenting the lull between footy and cricket season, Karpy suggested the topic. It's perhaps a new path for me ... the "poem by request". It's a bloody good idea ... and if anyone else has suggestions for topics to be covered, please feel free to let me know! I'm serious.
***************

2006-10-05T14:25:00.000+10:00

on the punt

By Adam Gibson

my father loved a punt and on most afternoons
we'd come home from school and
he'd be calling PhoneTAB:

this is 207919100, he'd say,
race 5, Eagle Farm, number six, four units each way,
race 6, Flemington, number 12, two units each way

his transistor covered in a brown leather case,
frayed at the edges
and the lino floor in the kitchen
and dad loved a punt
and he lost a lot

and i connect that with
long drives in big cars, hot leather seats
which burnt your legs to touch
and non-specific coastal roads;

these aren't the places of magazines,
these are nowhere in history written,
they figure in no mythology.

static on the car radio
and many years have passed,
scattered cassettes are now lying on the floor,
window wipers are stuck-still-fast-dust-dry,
and out the windows,
bits of roadside kill
and it's been several years now that
i've been lost,
seven years since my father died
and i don't believe a minute of that for a second.

because the bitumen flew into my face many years ago,
embedded in my cheeks
stuck in my chin
caught in my eyes
and it's been many years
and in all manner of cars:
Chargers and other Valiants,
Holdens, varieties of Japanese imports.

we've been across and up and down,
eaten so many bags of hot chips,
so many meatpies,
drunk so many cans of Coke,
bottles of lemonade and milkshakes,
had so many cakes from cake shops
bananas from roadside stalls.

and all these years i have been lost,
just driving,
raising our index fingers
to acknowledge oncoming cars,
just to say g'day
how's it going?
and keeping on going,
across rivers and through towns and over plains,
places which don't resonate with the tourists,
the tourists have no idea of this history,
because for many years we've been lost,
we've been so stuck on the roads that
we've become a road ourselves.

it sounds stupid,
it sounds so stupid;
a road of our lives,
little signs saying such and such
and such and such.

this is the road to there,
the is the road back,
this is about the time I drove
so far
so long
this is about the time I
ate
that
hamburger.

and all the while i've been dragging something,
bits have been falling off,
things holding me back,
and so I drive on to another coastal town
and the radio flickers to life
and the races come on and I hear it again:

this is 207919100,
race 5, Eagle Farm, number six, four units each way,
race 6, Flemington, number 12, two units each way…

2006-09-28T14:32:00.000+10:00

Angel Alley

By Adam Gibson

we walk through the Heathrow streets at dawn,
we gather in the local pubs east of Angel Alley
and the flat skies of England above
the rows of houses gather slowly to permanent dusk;

and how I went to Fulham in the night,
in the dark lonely London night, on buses,
the black Houses of Parliament,
near where I worked on a building site
and heard the bells and chimes from the Abbey
as I swept floors and carried wood.

London still exists

afternoons in the coldest winter of my soul,
going all the way to Speaker's Corner
just to hear people speak
of damnation and sex
and sporadic ramblings of the innermost bell-clang
of jumbled thoughts.

London still exists

and we went home through the streets still cobbled with stones,
the low gutters towards and past the E1
and past Angel Alley streets lined with
bright fruit stalls of the street market on cold street,
and the cold faces past Ilford and the Island
and the girls in black jackets
smoking Silk Cuts at bus stops

London still exists

and the lorries passing through Wapping and
the Angel Alley sadness of descending days
or expiring work visas, loves we lost,
in Jamaican-sounding summers on trips to the Westway,
to Portabello pubs across mini-cab nights
and Nigerian navigation back through football streets
reverberating from Stamford Bridge and across to night
to the home of the Hammers,
the men in their colours with oversized cans of Tennants

London still exists

on the underground arteries and
the black soot tunnels that
Make you believe that Victoria is still on the throne
And Dickens is hiding in a filthy enclave
ready to grab your arm with filthy-fingered glove.

the slanting terraces
extending across threading streets and
all the sadness that descends upon me;
the low-pressure bathtaps,
the lime-fuzz around the top of the kettle,
the rim of the pots.

London still exists

and the jet-black girl who stood close to me on a bus
who didn't move despite the opportunity
and the complicit illicit smile she gave me on leaving
after 20 minutes of our knees touching,
and how she is now more lost to me
than anything can possibly be

London exists
London exists right now

in Angel Alley
and beyond.

***************
notes on poem: well this one's self-explanatory, i suppose. Written about the time i spent in London, and also the dreams i had of London before i went there and "idea" of London most Australians grow up with in their minds. Also, it's referencing the line from the Go-Betweens's song "And London no longer exists", plus the Waifs' song, 'London Still' and the old Little Heroes classic 'One Perfect Day'.
***************

2006-09-21T19:38:00.000+10:00

my town on the riverbank

By Adam Gibson

running by the riverbank of our rivertown
i remember the punt across to the other side
and the men at the pub on Melbourne Cup Day
and the women on the balconies under the shade of trees

and the second son of someone's mum
was killed in another war fought overseas
and on Anzac Day we stood around the memorial
with our shoes polished and clean and
each day at assembly we sang oh God please save our Queen

and our dreams all spoke American and
we dreamt of American cars
and a show came to town
where the two men played a banjo and a clarinet and
nothing else besides

and the river was brown and moved to the sea
and thunderstorms broke things apart and branches off the trees
and we ran along the riverbank and
the people from the city came past and acted like we didn't exist

they moved along like headlight highway ghosts and
we breathed our words in close against the flickering lights
and held our candles and hoped that they were wrong and
we'd survive and the world would ignite as
we watched the broad brushstrokes of the night

***************
notes on poem:. just a strange idea I had, partly inspired by the area around Grafton and Ulmarra in northern NSW, Australia.
***************

2006-09-21T13:04:00.000+10:00

To my children

By Adam Gibson

do you have dark hair
or do you have light?
is it long and straight
or is it curly and wild?
have you my greenish eyes
that look greener in sunlight
or when hungover on afternoons
after a late night?
what have i named you?
have i won my battle for "Amber"
or my inexorable drive for "Jerry"?
has Blanche triumphed or Robert won out?
do you have skinny legs like me
and are you sitting in your future world
and saying "yes!" right now?
do you wonder what i was like
at the age of 38
on this winter night on which i write?
are you imagining the night outside
and the world in which i live now,
before the certain disasters and catastrophes
that will definitely occur have happened?
before that bombing or before the collapse
of something else we hold dear?
my children, always venture and never be still,
always question and stay forever bright-eyed.
it is the least you can do for me,
your dear old dad who is 38
and hasn't had you yet.

2006-09-14T13:00:00.000+10:00

Tension

By Adam Gibson

like an historian
you talk about our past
in the present tense

but the present is tense
that's for certain
but the past has gone
so let's draw that curtain

when we ride bicycles
the fact is we no longer do so together

when we make love
i'm imagining i'm making something
that will never be completed

2006-09-13T11:06:00.000+10:00

we were drunk

By Adam Gibson

"you know where i live?"

"yeah i know where you live"

"who told you?"

"c'mon bec course i know where you live"

"doesn't matter, cheeseface"

"here's one for ya, orangeheart"

"heat, run, they're gonna meet ya on the fax
in five minutes and now is calling"

"well but the neon lights come through the door"

"oh, so you do know"

"i already said i did"

2006-09-05T13:28:00.000+10:00

The time of spiders

By Adam Gibson

The time of spiders
will return before we know it.

Before we know it
rooms will be declared
off limits
to be entered only with a broom
or other such long stick
stuck into the corners.

And the running upside-down madness
will occur at bedtime as the
hunch of black
that has toured the top half of the house
will disappear and suddenly re-appear
right above one's head
then scurry down behind the bed
necessitating major upheaval
and the stepping forth of
The Brave One
to do the honours
with that stick or a can of Mortein or Pea Beau or
oven cleaner or shower wipe
if nothing else can be bloody well be dug out of

the Museum of Canned Things

beneath the sink,
from behind the rock-hard chamois and the
knuckled-up scrunches of pot scrubbers which
(at a pinch)
can be used to throw at the fugitive if all else fails

and that probably will
as screams fathom the neighbourhood and
toes are stubbed and
swearing is accomplished.

The time of spiders will return before we know it,
the cycle will go on:

spider seen,
spider attempted to be removed,
spider disappearing somewhere,
to maybe die,
to maybe live,
but whatever the case
to almost certainly haunt the memories
of those who interfered with
the natural way of things,
during the time of spiders.

2006-09-05T12:28:00.000+10:00

imagined spam

By Adam Gibson

any green computer calculates or maybe any bluish noisy bra walks.
any given small sony stinks the time that any beautiful eraser got an idea.
any given beautiful ram calculates and still her hairy gun got an idea.
a red recycle bin snores and their well-crafted noisy pensil smiles at the place that any stupid soda calms-down as soon as any given white dog stands-still or her daughters golden eraser arrives and any silver bicycle calms-down.
her purple bra looks around.
any tall carpet shows its value the time that our children well-crafted sport shoes arrives.
the fancy bluish beautiful smart sport shoes sleeps.
a silver boots prepare for fight.
her daughters green recycle bin fidgeting at the place that their expensive well-crafted round-shaped recycle bin spit.
his brothers well-crafted paper run.
a given well-crafted forge show its value while mine smart omprella run.
our well-crafted soft ipaq fidgeting or maybe any given small clock spit.
the expensive beautiful beautiful shining printer calms-down and perhaps a given golden soft book smiles.
a soft printer stares or maybe her daughters red boots sleeps.
a given small ram run.
his golden bicycle spit while mine red noisy camera smells.
mine stupid white bed smiles at the place that any smart wine prepare for fight or the fancy mobile phone snores.
any noisy paper falls and perhaps any soft ram is on fire.
whose noisy mobile phone is on fire as soon as any given odd shaped wine smiles.
his round-shaped spoon adheres.
her round gun prepare for fight.
a round-shaped gun lies or maybe our silver omprella prepare for fight at the place that our children expensive eraser got an idea.
her daughters small red bicycle spit.
their well-crafted bluish car stands-still.
our children red spoon arrives or maybe her daughters soft balloon lies and a white golden tv smiles.

2006-09-05T12:14:00.000+10:00

conversation

By Adam Gibson

every time
i go to speak
to someone
i imagine
they can't hear me
at the very beginning
of speaking
a single word
in the first place

2006-09-05T12:12:00.000+10:00

i know

By Adam Gibson

i know i'm neurotic
it's me who bricked up the window
to stop hearing the birds and the buses.
i know i'm neurotic
i can't sleep with myself in the bed
let alone anyone else.
i know i'm neurotic
if your phone calls aren't returned
i can't help it,
i've gone underground
and can speak to no-one.
i know i'm neurotic.

2006-09-04T12:03:00.000+10:00

this temperature or town

By Adam Gibson

this quiet land, these days at the ocean
nothing this year seems as it seems:
we smash bottles from the balcony
with the world shining towards December
and i have been awake for 18 hours
when i could just sleep like a cat.

she had been away so long,
through the asthma winds and daily grinds,
so when she presses her hands across my bed now
i don't keep track of time or distance and
her blue lips are pressed against the cold morning
and now she creeps upon the covers and kisses me
and i would continue to sleep broken in her thin arms for ages if she let me.

she is a girl who cannot cope with winter
or the struggle to remember to rug-up
but talks about the open fires on the beach
in the late nineteen nineties,
about full nights with dry days
and when someone jumped off the roof into the pool
and she reminds me of a life i have forgotten,
that there's sometimes beauty and heart in what you find
when you collapse with the heat of the sun.

i have the last letter she sent me from overseas
and this whole thing could lead to highway dreams and
i would dream my dreams for her,
a person who wasn't born for this
temperature or this town

2006-09-03T21:11:00.000+10:00

still-life

By Adam Gibson

was she Dutch, from Holland or the Netherlands?
I couldn't work it out

she'd done the coffee shops of Amsterdam
but everyone's done that

she had an accent I couldn't put my finger on
and no doubt that's a metaphor for the lot

She said "Van Go", I said "Van Goff"
I should have twigged there and then
And called the whole thing off.

but i was tilting at windmills again,
chasing a dream through green fields
but the only sunflower i saw,
the only tulip i spotted,
the only poppy that popped into view,
was captured, frozen,
in a still-life print on the wall.

2006-09-03T16:30:00.000+10:00

distant event

By Adam Gibson

she had tenancy troubles,
a flatmate with an eye for her at night, late,
moving in for a kiss that
she made him miss:
she moved out the next day
and never went back.

there followed sharehouses
in the sharehouse suburbs of shareburbia
among young professionals
in some vague field of
accountancy or IT or design or IT design
or accountancy designing for IT:
i don't know, i lost track.

but then backpackers arrived
back from somewhere and
brought with them a lousy itch
which took up swift residence in her room
and she told me (with rings under her eyes)
that she needed a room/any room
to escape the bugs and the scratching
and the bugs and the scratching
and i tried to think of solutions
but could think of none.

and soon a guy she'd mentioned
had become a boy and then a
boy she was seeing and then
a boyfriend and then
a boyfriend she was moving in with

i'm not jealous,
it's just a good face i see
when i look at hers
and a face i like
and i'm pleased to see it –
among sentinels of unacted dreams
and flattened spirits,
she keeps her eyes blue
even when ruined by tiredness,
crushed with no sleep or
drugged with stress.

she is running now,
in training for some distant event
that i've never heard of and
probably won't see competed.

i haven't even sponsored her for her cause:
i know i should, but i like to maintain
our sense of vague disappointment with the world

just between us.