Davey Dreamnation

Lady d’Almonde’s dream — her arms floating pale and smooth atop a brocade coverlet, the rest of her self barely moving beneath the embroiling threads — is like a horse in the snow, blowing little jets of steam between pursed lips, for even at the top of the house winter announces itself, sometimes with a [...]

Zachariah fishes on a deep forest bank of the River, thinking himself alone, prodding its icy surface with a wet branch, hoping for a dream carp or a sugar whale. The wind makes the ice crinkle and bump; the water flowing beneath it winks like gold leaf. A bird shoots down from the sky and [...]

Beck’s feet stomp up the stairs, through the small vestibule outside the warehouse, the Dining Room, finally ascending to the level of the chambers of Lord and Lady Peele. She can already hear her tossing in the bed. A band of light peeks from under the door. On the landing Beck can make out the [...]

The cobblestone streets of Ahem, like fresh loaves of bread assembled in an intricate criss-cross pattern, fuse together to form an unbroken carpet of crusts that weaves its way up through the laneways towards the inevitable green spires of the Town. Up and down the streets Baker Boys skip and dance. How the Merchant houses [...]

Orders mysterious and illegal, Dogmas vigorously revived and suppressed, stirrings of Globalism and Politic in the colonial texts and histories …
As the sounds of the riot decreased in volume to the rear, Terror Nullius’s bearers slowed their pace, eventually coming to a complete stop. He was placed upon his butt and allowed to look at [...]

When it rains non-stop for twenty four hours, that’s Buddha. Both the rain and the end of the rain, after which the freshness is Buddha, too. When two Chinese girls dressed in white stare at you for a while and then ask to have their photo taken with you, that’s Buddha. When you try to [...]

“And the Box?” the Merchant asks quickly.
“Here, my Lord Peele!”
The Servant Girl holds out some shards of what was once wood.
The Merchant’s face takes on a slightly green tinge. Perhaps there is some trickery in his facial preparations, concerning the substitution of peach kernels for almonds.
The Nun, still blasted by the Pharmacist’s words, allows a [...]

there is something very
pseudo about all this -
there is something very
pseudo about you - every
thing you do is fake (you
are a fake - is nothing
real to you? your ‘art’
(if you can call it that)
is mediocre) it’s all so
juvenile and all so -
‘middlebrow’ … king of
kmart - it’s all just a
little game for you -
for some [...]

Boy Catcher wastes no time carrying Zachariah up the hill towards the House of the Merchant. He peers along a side alley, towards the single step connecting the House to the cobbled street there. Broken glass speckles beneath the lantern light; from behind the side door, its paintwork scorched or blasted, comes the sound of [...]

our first date - what a write-off!
i even bought you flowers - you
selfish man! you could have told
me you’d double-booked - hell!
million-booked more like it boy
you had a nerve making all of us
line up like school-kids in our
uniforms hand in hand boys &
girls two by two round & round
the square for hours on end! as
my [...]

On the landing, Beck slurps thirstily at the last drops of her Lady’s anniversary tea. Three months now she has been working here, and Lady d’Almonde still mistakes her for Lue, who was taken away in a box, her hands and wrists gone porcelain-like, they said, as if she were growing into a statue.
Whether I [...]

two fluffy white buns
filled with nothing but hot air
ah, spring in beijing! 

outside my window
a hundred games of mah-jonng
spring rain in shanghai

even yesterday there was a tomorrow but that’s today
and now yesterday has no tomorrow only something
like the days before when armies were just as foreign
as something in a foreign newspaper that (torn down 
contained news from our foreign wars that happened
days before or even some time in that crystal future’s
past - denied its presence or even [...]

Ni Hao! Greetings to the world from Shanghai, where for some reason I am able to open the Blogger site but not my homepage itself, meaning that for the next week or two I will be posting blind, hoping that some of my formatting is not lost, and that these posts and poems will not [...]