days roaring by like the 1980s / train days weddings parties
anything days to pass the time / a gear stuck on saturdays
bumbling & roaring / sticky-signalled roadwork delay rays
on long doomstruck slow-mo haul days playing on the radio
western country tune spiked with cigarette ash / prolapsed
economy death march / funeral parades of days past & still
passing slowly boom times made of booming days released
of their tabloid burdens / set to replay every subterranean
bowel-shuddering day courses through the vein but slowly
as if it's here to stay or boom slowly in space-like stations
selling food or fuel but never both eyes whining like elastic
bands but the smoke screens sight with its curling fancies
& the gig's up (ended or over / in the same way as animal
days fade / & our dusks collapse in a roar or a motorcade
Category: Leaves of Glass (page 1 of 6)
In late 2007 I received a grant from Arts Victoria to write a series of poems based on correspondence between Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd and Walt Whitman. The results were published as Leaves of Glass by Sydney-based publisher Puncher and Wattmann in 2013.
You did interest us by referring to your Japanese correspondent, though I have never been to Nagasaki, or seen its leaves. Tell me, have you heard anything from him since then? We’ve not Heard a peep out of you through the post & can’t help but Wonder what might have gone wrong. Your interest in ‘Western’ Orientals pleases us too, binds us closer to you – in an Abstract way, of course – and gives us strength to go where e’er You do. I refer, in passing, to more spiritual transports Whose meaning remains deliberately obtuse. Tom Touchstone, Who was there, met instead his nemesis, Kapital – not to Mention ours! Six months he spent pitching his ‘lucky strikes’ At the proles before Japanese anarchists blew his cover as A correspondent for a magazine devoted to the projectile arts. Walt, I have made friends with Chinese men. Your poems Have truly inspired them as much as me. If it pleases you I’ll Send some translations your way, though of course I can’t Read a word! We are planning a workers’ holiday, using only Public transportation to shuttle us to the sea. Somehow it Loosens a coil of anger inside me, the years of living tension A memory. Some kind of peace that Eva & I never knew. I know we’d light up the Nagasaki night together, Walt! May We never need to go home again, never wake up. My head This morning! Must’ve been the rice wine or the booze, the Pilsener brew that someone snuck into the Athenaeum. Ah! Liquor! Love of the working man! In bars and laneways, Master, pink lanterns. We make merry with hostesses & Spiral like leaves in a moving circle around the courtyard. Tomorrow I will write poems in your soft grass style.
Most of us make America mean the world,
or sometimes we put ‘Australia’ in its place.
B. O’D.
the drones of prole patrol the moon that satellite of filth - their lanterns mark the greasy poles its dark side pepper (salt with futile cries & lunar dews & sad stories drones will tell of extra-terrestrial rents & arbitrage by mammon's earthly (hags o'er those captains of industry whose gold we gleefully polish in our dull second-class illusion we will rise above the (swill for life is complicated by the fact we all must die but also by the fact that tungsten's rare & bitumen scarce as well still we pave our lunar (roads & the drones of prole asssemble until someone flicks a switch then via teleportal shoots them & thus arriving new on the moon they're sent to work the mines or steer the portal ships that bring the lunar riches back to earth to feed the new (machines that give us birth we're programmed to repeat then fade like instrumental tracks the germ of human struggle manufactured (soup & on the drones of prole do seethe in chatter & in bits ‘twas ever thus & thus shall be their role to us (resist as we look up through mists to see the moon's dim gulf of proletaria - that new eureka for the (proles
‘Proletaria’
B. O’D. (date)
i am not fazed by spurious notions
of what is good or what is bad
i just flip open that temporal wallet
& spend (it's like getting laid
or tying one on & imagining X
could well be my imaginary friend
or else i simply steal someone else's
idea (it's true i have no shame
laughing in the face of those fogey
poets who call meh 'a disgrace'
to them i bellow simply that my
muse must be obeyed (and paid!
who said that art's god's way of
helping us pass the time? what rot
equally crap's the notion that we
write to please this so-called god
do i write to illuminate some trace
of time on a sky's tight canvas?
to harp on about beauty? no!
(unless it be a sniper's silent gun
i'll trade both the names i call
myself for ern's eponymous knacks
the only mystery is how far i've
come without being hit by jitches!
for an undisclosed sum i'll gladly
write an ode to the constitution
& for not much more i'll pen a laud
to a common or garden hose
whatever the turgid coolhunters
recommend as being of the now
i'll damn with my seething stanzas
(yea i'll even consider it fascist
like mosquitoes trapped in amber
they'll learn to regret their fads
& those requiring elegies (or funeral
songs will simply have to wait
theoretically I'm something of a prick
(i'm not too proud to admit
to prostitute my talent thus while
so many good poems beg to be -
but I must somehow make the down-
payments on my Etruscan villa
& for those of us in the industry
this means writing is simply a job
i am poet momentous (no more
moody or sleepless nights for meh!
i'd rather see my poems on greeting
cards than yell at empty chairs
now there's no poem that can match
the noisome grandeur of war -
but at least i can think about peace
while praising cheap champagne
‘A Poet of the Moment’
B. O’D. (date)