in vietnam of course we’d all be considered peasants up to our necks in sweat & sun cancers – our tans coooked in a coconut sauce the cannibal implications of which i don’t care to explore but here where a thousand & one dalmations sizzle on stones with all the intelligence of their namesakes those…

i could murder a cigarette but i’ll hold off for now – the time is not right – & if i ignite here wow who knows what might go up with me there in the stratos, in the fear the wind-up bird that’s growing old constrained at every turn the signs to left & right…

the parchment’s overgrown now & flies no longer buzz down by the hydro-electric facilities – the bus route’s open for business all along it twenty four hour cafes spring up like pillboxes some people speak of screams in the night houses on fire & some barely speak at all just a fingerbone or shattered skull…

could you be flirting with me (tiny periwinkle of a trip-hop soundtrack? was that a smile (pretty vacuous air bubble at the bottom of this glass? come here slide down my throat (abstract freckle of a thirst quencher hobo of the backwash past (reboot the soda stream of our invisible passions (poet of the cafe…

(1) crystal: dignitary portraits his men clean-shaven the women stern children on sleds if you remember rightly panoramas of coal mine towns silly dogs chins pointing to the future the sun – gold haloes spirits with whiskers windowframes … (2) crumpled: just out of bed or home from a long night of drinking all traces…

you dispense with direct emotion/ experience & become the second person the observer – it’s safer here you see & as for your reader well she’s gone her own way she’ll meet you later in the old town – for now be content to sit & watch as tourists wait impatiently for their boat to…

we landed emus on the moon & fed them cake until they glowed we could see them from space – maralinga, woomera’s satellite dishes grew absurd corruptions our original superpower dreams [hiroshima moruroa maralinga] a future where girls worry their bikini lines into shape formations of crystals metamorphose into undersea microphones in stereo & we…

in a scene from the cassandra crossing pitch black serbian night gives way to the acetylene of factories tunnels & dams ringed by lights blazing passports waving (facsimiles of concrete aqueducts soldered bridges inch over ravines & the night mists are pumped from some arcane machines we followed the blue line of the bosniak river…

who will give colour to joe sacco’s black & white cartoons of gora&#382de safe haven – & who will go there is it needed are the people safe? when will the mist shrouds on the mountains give up their secrets these criminals those war dead & weary – which daughters sons? how are we to…

symbolic of our electrical impulse simple swift & filled with dreams fast flowing rivers sweep away all these tedious fears & expectations & dump them at a delta somewhere marry them with saltwater tears then disappear forever rivers flood the villages irrigate graves flash like camera bulbs as in the olden days catch our passing…

here the stencil art seems more restrained or better placed (my favourite so far a do the right thing image: chuck swastikas in the bin but then there’s the rifles silhouetted soldier slogans like ‘make your own world’ these meanings are clear: & all for a spray can or stains graffiti’s private symbols i’m in…

day broke inexorably over the sunshine cobbles over the old habsburg plaza over the electric trolley buses over the coffee grounds in the cup over the roma woman shooshed away over the music store over rat svetova over mikhail bulgakov; the russions are coming have come have gone (i negotiated briskly with the taxi driver…

For Keiji (again), I compose a few lines. It’s useless. Iíll never be a haiku writer. My destiny lies amid the Cyrillic paperbacks, apartment blocks & spines of books Iíll never read or pay to have published. If we are poets then cities are Koala Strawberries, rotting cherries in cardboard boxes. We’ll write poems on…

oh bulgaria! what has money done to you no one here has change girls & striptease club posters make us all less human oh bulgaria! your elevators have doors to trick foreigners pretty girls in miniskirts keep our change as tips oh bulgaria! you serve us red beer & white beer & green salads with…