Wordly goods
on this last day
of February
outside Cupid's Cup Cakes
on the main street
of this utterly strange
hilly town,
dawdling down
to Iso Bar
to take account
of the planet's fields -
wild beast grazing,
a scene cut intermittently
with alluring products
carried up street poles
by narrow vertical lines
cabling connection
to anywhere else
hoping for a place
deep in the shade,
verandahs all around,
somewhere to contemplate
what brought us here
to such manicured beauty -
formal garden hedges,
well-tended kerbs
no gangs no blades
up here in the hills,
just x-box and the dole
they say
the kids are drunk
or on ice
at their clubs
or anorexic wherever
in rehab.
hopeful beginnings,
promised more
than pleasure,
but
they're not grown up,
not a..d..u..l..t
just caught in a reverie,
not ready
for voting driving loving
working cooking
learning new languages
new skills, talents,
what legacy ?
*
without income
for the first time
in a long long time
sounds like a song
coming on
(undercurrent worry
too)
on the last day of February,
the end of four months
on the road,
anyway, without
a fixed address
and the sun shines down
around, all around,
waiting for the book exchange
to open
to hire a computer
to check the mail, and the spam
and the petitions,
to let the government know
we don't like it ! at all !
etcetera no we don't !
illegal detainees, climate change,
education policy, refugees,
equal rights for gays,
indigenous land rights,
justice, etcetera.
my ergonomic-chair activism,
today
the mere thought
of these emails
only exasperates
perhaps I'll delete them
straightaway
*
all my things
boxed and stored interstate,
I miss some of the stuff,
need it, even,
most of it
I've forgotten
as a sanyasin
travelling
on air
might
My poem Worldly goods is set in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, Ken Bolton, co-ordinator of the Lee Marvin Readings in Adelaide, wrote a poem in response, but he hasn't been to the Blue Mountains for many moons and has mistaken the place for Blackheath, a town that could benefit, variously, from having an Iso Bar :
Mademoiselle Apollinaire in Blackheath
for Pam Brown
In the end you are tired of living between always between
& wend your way to the Iso Bar here rather than in
Adelaide tho there is an Iso Bar in Adelaide too
You have lived in Adelaide
You have had enough of leaving Sydney
for Melbourne never to arrive
Blackheath’s Iso Bar must do
connecting you electronically to the world
making modern the cow in the nearby field
the hill the old car coming down the road
& in it a modern farmer Denis Gallagher say
more a poet really than a farmer
a gardener
something modern like a well-tended kerb
or the distemper of youth
a lawnmower a ladder crack cocaine TV
anorexia
& the sun shines down
waiting for the book-exchange, a computer
& politics
—to be avoided some days
others to be embraced—
Politics
In our ergonomic chairs
You remove us from abstractions the expansion of the
spirit—
producing heat
involving the body
Like something intense & blue in Chagall
the memory of an object—a shirt a book an
ashtray with paperclips & your pencils in
a bottle, bound with an elastic band
You will have them soon
A sanyasin travelling on the air at night
lands at home
the moths batting about you as you write
Life tossed off like a glass of spirits
For who can stand outside time
Ken Bolton, Adelaide, a couple of years ago.
