Davey Dreamnation

This is getting serious. I’ve just got to see you live.
Ninety nine rabbits with big fangs can’t be wrong.
I’m stuck in a lower east side case machine looking
cool, if not cold. Let’s not get old, forever moulded.
I like John Ashbery’s fingernails. He did look good
in that lecture theatre, as the early 1990s whirled.
Flow Chart was [...]

Sorting through some old unlabelled CDs yesterday, I came across a few gems, including of course a couple of CDs worth of pictures from previous overseas trips, when I looked slightly younger but no less idiotic than I do today. Then there were the failed band experiments, the obscure software updates and one disc from [...]

i’m not sure why your windows are all shut
said a man with a beer gut & tan don’t you
know that the change’s coming sooner than
you think (but we all shook our heads had
some more to drink (it dulled that impulse
to get political (switch off the interpol man!
when the change comes it’s going to flatten
the pane trigger dissolutions [...]

the sky’s gone orange mining & we’re left to
wander (i’m waiting for a change in a tunnel
filled with gas panic someone flipped me the
bird it was a canary (shortly dead & the day
remained sunny (zero chance of rain gauged
delays were spattered with faux frustration
& pule & it continued to shine that great big
dumb orange ball [...]

she rains heavy & she rains late i syndicate
the weather & report with coffee like a tiny
brown moon circling in the white cup made
with two hands holding clouds up at sunset
her eyes are red the rain falls heavy on the
bedroom floor puddles of rain to hold down
the fumes we ride through shiny streets &
eradicate base as [...]

who will harbour you when the seas erupt
harbour when the grave is shallow & leaks
who willed this place of calm into being it’s
a small harbour when the shots ping & hit
i will harbour you when the minister won’t
harbour you when all protest fails & build
you an asylum if it costs me my life it will
harbour us then [...]

that place where we all someday hope to die
or rot at least (our skins like autumn leaves
a shelf or two devoted to each mind aloof or
in solidarity with those whose fame exceeds
our own (no matter now this system lets us
alphabetise our names as privilege leans on
the obscure & the vain support the humbled
yes the catalogue [...]

While I’ve been sweating over the choice of promotional photo for my upcoming debut book of poetry, I’ve also been grappling with issues of artistic integrity and interrogating my own self-image, with alarming results. How do I want the world to view me? Is it possible for me to control the image I present to [...]

In the spirit of all things pertaining to rolling thunder, increasing expectations and maximising tension, I’m happy to report that my debut poetry collection We Will Disappear, to be published by soi 3, an imprint of papertiger media, is edging closer to reality. The text is currently with a proofreader and the cover artwork is [...]

said let’s buy tulips because you were homesick
twenty four hour florists late night emergencies
the tulips sat inside a cool store freezer still wet
& trembling fragile as a whispered wish (we said
let’s buy some tulips today there’s more sun than
cloud their powers are quite expensive but what
does money matter (when there’s more sun than
clouds scanning the supermarket [...]

There was a time when I read books voraciously. In fact for most of my life I have read at least one book per month, if not week, meaning that if I was to enter a fund-raising read-a-thon I would most most likely send all of my sponsors broke (assuming, of course, that I didn’t [...]

Today I received an email from a fellow poet who was involved in Cordite’s Search Poem issue asking me about the methodology we employed in the exercise. For those with long memories, the Search issue came out in January 2004, however the experiment itself was originally enacted on the Poetry Espresso mailing list as part [...]

The creek’s steam mingles with our
gossip, picking apart other peoples’
reputations, as we do. The morning
stream calls. I ran out of the house,
missing the fern by millimetres. In
a way this flood is funny. It washes
so much of the year away. It’s as if
we were caught stealing or smoking
cigarettes, Joni, me and Star. Durry
bombs deep in the [...]

Well, I read the news today and oh boy - I heard that Jean Baudrillard had died, and I thought, yeah, I should write a blog post about him, and about how his ideas of the simulacra and the evil demon of images were burnt onto the back of my eyelids as a student back [...]