I’m not shaking to music or trying to dance my way out of the cup rolling in the saucer. There’s Blues in the shuffle allright; a soundtrack that blew the amp cut the circuit at the wrong wire – didn’t guess it right. Instead it went off all over me, the pulse misfiring. Translation’s lost … Continue reading Brunch with Parky

I think I finally see clearly out of those trespassed estate streets where the sounds of looking are dusted over by unmade roads like some early Drysdale, a veteran’s emphysema in a backyard shed skew whiff late afternoon shadows stretched children playing cricket the warty rabbitoh with all his skinned specials, next door’s son dying … Continue reading Boldrewood Parade

The cherry wood honour roll burns air gasping for lettering a toast for scalers who bathed at the source of the Ganges just so they could divine is Atman Brahman an answer reaching for those beads of months without footing while Bach parades Air on a G String amid foothills of ever decreasing amplitude the … Continue reading The I Know a Dead Mountaineer Society, Concedes : A new poem up at Bluepepper

A new poem at Birdsong Journal https://birdsongjournal.blogspot.com/2020/05/shoe-laces-and-dragon-flies-by-james.html

My sister found my father in his chair. A can of beer and the TV still going. Not like Shane or Pale Rider or Appaloosa. We don’t get to ride away the chances hanging. She asked me why he was floated like that. No song of farewell a crooning defiance. His old RAN tattoo keepsake … Continue reading Boot Hill, Vacancies

Unlike my desk or room and bookcases the garage is a mess that hides things. The extra set of screw drivers handles eaten by rats. That ball of twine, now I have a baker’s dozen. I never left the fencing pliers by the one inch joiners in that box. Surely something else, an incantation a … Continue reading Ludwig’s Riff

I heard from Hooper you were dead like whale song in watery fragments through Donovan’s harmonica see you running down the corridor in velvet defiance of the headmaster’s ropes to separate the sexes that lasted as long as peace you and Debbie chided my chauvinism over My Lai photos that dragged barbed wire through our … Continue reading Last Days of Watsonia High

How simple in the end: to smell the vinegar of an infant’s head this blink: how different to the beginning, when the whole world collapses to a baby’s cry. Know the pomegranate cheated with hibiscus flowers, and siren ficifolia recruited through marooned stars falling in an aureole of shell bursts (the blue mosque unseen the … Continue reading Last Breath of an Unknown Soldier, at Canakkale

Simon sits in the paddock entrance alone at his table with his drawings, in his pocket a piece of cotton jade (Number 29 of Work Team 3). Although the State has copies it promises to keep, he worries New Europe doesn’t want to remember, how much love passed down that road (Avenue 1 New Life … Continue reading Map Maker of (Number Five)