if you haven’t been lost
            at the showground,
in the bush,         in Westfield Plaza,
                           on an island

you may not know
                the perpetual present
            is exhausting,

way too many
            concurrent points of view,

– something too free in aleatory –

and further,
            a burden – a century
        of hortatory Steinisms,
Yes, that’s how I read it –

                        famously, she says
‘a sentence is not emotional, a paragraph is’

the ‘difficult’ Stein at her best

    ‘Think carefully of nouns.
    Vary and think very think very once
    and once more of a noun a noun they like’

DRINKING STRAW — there’s your noun, mrs!
                            hope you like it

*

discussing Immaculate Conception
                            on the landline
&
        Original Sin –
                    who knows what it is?

    does an individual matter?
                                 (immeasurable)

*

boys own rumbles by
                on a rusted bicycle
ruining the dawn’s bleak dream,
        the flattened one,
                where you emerge from the lake
     and wave, almost languidly

*

there’s the dribbling bronze boar
            outside Sydney hospital,
        its snout shiny from stroking

dwelling
            on isolation (don’t dwell)
    and other sad feelings (shouldn’t dwell)
like a detainee in this,
                   the inadequate body

red bumps
            bigger than goosebumps –
but not exactly pimple size
                  more weals than whelks

who can understand the nurse
        when she phones
                with the laboratory test data?

*

No one ever here, no footpath crowd,
    every knock of a hinge is creepy
                crack of a floorboard,
                                    rustle and gust

perhaps it’s revelatory,
                    or will be

can the past catch up with you

*

problem     –         how to begin the music,
                            harder than beginning a poem?

the ringtone
                    was the sound of that decade

if you just keep turning up
                            on time

eventually

                    might rain photons

*

that’d be good

*

you’re embarrassed
                    by my slurp
when I’m
                guzzling spirulina
                                but
I’ve been to my personal best
                and back —
        I’m not worried

*

early intervention buys time,

how much is time these days?
                      (a cheap question)

*

if you see something
                        say something –

This is everything I could want
                            in a lifetime of products

*

pulling on another shirt
        over two shirts
as weather
            sets in

standing in the clothes
                        that you once wore

*

hours sitting in one spot

a rosella fell, lodged dead in the branches,
                 I took it down
      and buried it behind the begonia

                        a new cicada began to chirr

*

I’ve been coasting,
                a clown visiting a conservatorium,

        time now for application

I want to reach the inhumans,
        find the kind of poetry
                            that appeals to them,
to their original intelligence,
            and then,
struck by enargia, Propriety Limited is us

*

Unable to afford
            the G’Day Highway Motel,
    I sleep in a car in its shadow

while

the town that makes
        the world’s supply
            of plastic drinking straws
    is booming

*

the dendrite moves slowly
                towards the synapse –
        arrives two weeks later

                WISHING YOU
            A SPEEDY RECOVERY

                the light here is so dim

*

an indestructible host organism
                has the softest touch

strike another match, go start anew