Davey Dreamnation

Way back in the late 1990s, when I was still living in Sydney and feeling extremely sorry for myself, I wrote an article for a Sydney design magazine which took Le Courbusier’s machines For living in as its inspiration. The magazine unfortunately rejected the article, which actually concerns coffins, or machines for dying in - [...]

I
What I was thinking is not important. I will pass my mid-term examination,
Or fail it just to be with him. He has a car and respects me. I love his new
Haircut. The other girls, what do they matter? All I know is all of him. We’re
Crazy to be this way. I’d like to be an [...]

It’s there and it’s real, like snow. Trucks carrying newsprint clog the freeways with its rumour. I was walking along beside it. Something about its timing, its velocity, struck me. I thought, for the first time, that it might be real. It is. It’s there, inside the word. It’s a breathless word. It’s a mountain. [...]

DNRC056 | LP | 2005 | DELETED
Husband and Wife team Vim and Janet Prenderghast were responsible for what one critic called - without any apparent irony - “the saddest evocation of happiness I’ve ever heard”. Their nine tender Fender-driven dirges about marital bliss and its antecedents may not have garnered them anything in the way [...]

i got frisked in fukuoka/ like a dog i just woofed and rolled over/ i had a date with a destination/ had to get to the bullet train station/ validated my japanese rail pass/ calculated how long it would last until/ I had to get off to get on to get off/ to ride a [...]

One for none. All for none. One for all of us. No one for us. You for me. Me for all of us. Us for you. You for me of us. We for them. Them for all of us. Us for all. You for us of us. One for none. Two for none. Two for [...]

I got into a car with a stranger. I was five years old and temporarily deaf. I remember now getting off the school bus, at the corner of our street, then running across the bitumen road. It was on Lawson Crescent, in Orange, that I got into the stranger’s car. I’d tripped over in the [...]

The sound of the falling. Under scattered neon raindrops form a pool. Rain swims in the sky. Faster than any other sound. Sheets of cloud tears. Bosom of rain. Swelling through the grizzly morning. Bird calls in the rain. Rooves peppered with raindrops. Pools of last night’s rain in the oily streets. Cars moving through [...]

Audience of subway strangers. Stagger at them! Pelt them with praise! I’m Ko Un, and I’m drunker than a poem. This text, pirated, sallies forth upon the bristled breeze. Ko Un! Standing in your shadow magic. Spam, originating from the Republic of Soju, hits me fortnightly. Ko Un! Standing by the door, laughing at advertisements. [...]

My body is a plastic radio tuned to static. It’s hidden in the leaves. Children try to find my cord but I’m powered by batteries tuned to static. My body is a well. My body is buried under a pile of books I’ve read but can’t recall. My body is a salmon. It’s a lonely [...]

My re-baptism of fire on the Melbourne spoken word circuit last night at Babble provided me with some food for thought about how to get the most out of performance poetry. As I’ve not really performed as such for over six months, I of course went into the gig with grand plans and unpredictable outcomes. [...]