Davey Dreamnation

“One of the thirty six or seven greatest writers alive today aged between thirty three and thirty four.”
“This book made me late for work again today.”
“I have read this book.”
“One of the six or seven must-reads that I have been forced to read this year.”
“Can you please buy some milk on your way home? Thanks.”
“Crying [...]

Mokochukcha, you know you want to. Look at me: I want to. Look at everyone else: they want to. You want to. Stay.
Mokochukcha, do you know what happens to yesterdays? Do they turn into tomorrows? Who cares, your glass is empty.
Mokochukcha, I’m seeing lots of purple and strawberry colours. Is this bad? Please tell me [...]

usually a footnote
explains the words
or meanings in the
poem - but in this
case the opposite
is true - see below
*across the breeze/ birds fly/ foam in their beaks/ silver wings/ radar traces/ trans/ lateral/ trans/ am/ take me away/ silver bird/ foam in your beak/ across the breeze/ trans/ are/ we flying/ the friendly skies/ am/ trans/ [...]

Once upon a time there was a piece of paper through which the words printed on the other side could not be seen, a piece of paper so thick it might have been made of wood. Twice upon a time there was a transparent screen through which one could see the other side of the [...]

eh! the plane! the plane!
    come to rescue a princess
        hoju bihang-gi like silver
  birds above our skylines
over the wires        a plane!
a silver plane! coming to
            save their hoju princess
  to fly her to hawaii! or
                 anywhere but here! her fur
    coat trailing in the dust
on the sleepy seoul tarmac
         silver plane full of furs!
come to rescue her again
              this time - from us! [...]

Ern Malley, the original dromedary of Australian poetry, has been anthologised, criticised and mythologised beyond belief. It’s perhaps sobering to reflect that while Ern Malley’s creators, his twin Gepettos James McAuley and Harold Stewart along with his original sponsor Max Harris have passed from this world, Ern’s legend lives on. What is it about Ern [...]

building a spaceship
     to take me to a moon
made out of makkolli*
        a dead sparrow falls
through the window i
    left open overnight
  in case it snowed …
   the sparrow’s white
beak & feathers are
          frozen (made of snow
   i hold in my hands
  as if it might melt
& outside even the
         moon’s falling down
like snow or a bird
       in the darkest days
(when the spaceships
           first landed here
i [...]

City that encloses many other cities, like a lunch pail filled with multiple containers, each of which holds a prescribed number of foodstuffs - nuts, sultanas, rice, meatstuffs, tapioca, croutons, larvae. An anticity formed from invisible matter, shifting its colours and contours, blown by desert winds and dream tornadoes. An atrocity filled with horrors, spikes [...]

The city is tiny but it takes up so much space. In the tunnels, on the wagons and under the stars. One more push and then the darkness will cloak us, or crack. Dreams of a black crow with a blade of grass in its beak. City of wondrous walls and far-up windows, through which [...]

City of dread, of shanties and loam. In a police state jacked on lonely clubs and bullet time, some streetwalkers trip the line, busting the bleeding hearts and painting skyscrapers red. The tenements by the disused stream are no longer reliably dangerous. Shadows swoop on crumbs of maize and shoot arrows into corporate plans but [...]