[d/dn]

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…

Like me they cannot speak of a Slavic memory, or Soviet tanks, so they bark all night along the streets of Sofia. The echo is empty, like the cobbled lanes beneath the abandoned Palaces of Culture, Science & Agriculture. Dreams of living & speaking again. Slippery tongue, translated into coffee grounds. Contact with nocturnal demolition…