ON THE ROAD

In Santa Cruz

I feel so at home here,
Thirty years after the lentil soup
Grew mould. And more years still
Since Kesey’s Koolaid bus left town,*
When the clocks were melting,
And the walls were bending.

In the Saturn Café
The chick-pea soup
Leaves the lentils for dead.
And the soy burger plugs the gaps
In memories sparked
By long-haired Goddesses,
Still wearing petuli oil.

And the three young boys
At the table next to mine,
Are the dharma bums I once met
On the road that was once mine —
Stroking their baby beards,
And adjusting their bandannas
To the times.

They are the new pilgrims.

And out in the car park
The organic vegetable market
Is floating happily
Above the sump oil,
Where clear-eyed girls sell honey,
And fog-eyed ones
Tell fortunes.

And later,
Down at Streetlight Records **
There’s a cockney girl
Pierced with safety pins,
Fingering the section called
“Demented punk” —
You can tell she’s into speed,
Not ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
Already, she thinks it’s 1977.

And for me?

There is this sweet dizziness
In time’s momentary retreat,
As I stumble self-consciously
Out into the street. And pausing,
Beside a weather-worn fisherman
Dressed in high heels and drag,
I stash my country album
In its brown paper bag.

California, USA, 2003

* A reference to Tom Wolfe’s canonical non-fiction novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967). The book was a celebration of 1960’s counterculture. Writer Ken Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters’ set off from Santa Cruz on their infamous acid-fuelled road trip across America.

** A well-known chain of hip record stores in Northern California.

A Visit to Christiania* 

[i]

Sharing a park bench,
I tell him: “I’m going to
C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n-i-a.”
When he hears the word
C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n-i-a —
The drunk gets a misty look.

Are those flower children
I see dancing in his eyes?

Then a rueful smile
Makes a weary ascent
Up the craggy face.
And I’m thinking,
“No more free love
For this flower child
On the clean streets
Of Copenhagen” —

Just vodka and memories …

Of once upon a time
At the end of the Sixties,
When the flower children
Stormed the barracks
And proclaimed a commune —

Right in the backyard of power!
Right under the nose of parliament!

C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n-i-a —
From social experiment
To warped eco-tourist event —
Welcome to a lost world!

[ii]

Leaving the drunk
I cross busy Princess Strasse,
And darting between trees,
Tumble through a slip
In the stitch of time/space.

When I look up it is 1972,
And there’s a mural painted
On Luther’s church,
Of a giant six-armed
Purple Love Goddess,
Perched on a lotus blossom
Smoking ganga.

Like cooooool man.

But walking down
Pusher Street in 2008,
All the hash dealers
Look like Mad Max extras.
And across the street at
Korsokoff’s Bar,
Mordor’s Orcs are drooling
In their beers.

Eyebrows raised,
Grapefruit juice in hand,
I repair to the Organic Café
(Gluten-free and certified),
Where a giant six-breasted
Green Earth Goddess,
Smelling of petuli oil,
Hands me a lentil burger.

Confused,
While I count her breasts
She points the way
To a magical lake.

Gaia has shown me the path!

[iii]

I sit by the magical lake
Beneath ‘Ulrich’s Bastion’.
No sound of cars;
Only birds singing,
And hippy houses
Floating on water,
And somewhere above me
A gypsy orchestra
Lights up the sky.

Then I remember
Journeys long ago,
And things left at forks
On the road to paradise.

Outside,
The big city banks
Are melting down.**

Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008

* Christiania is an urban commune in inner city Copenhagen, Denmark. It was formed in the early 1970s when squatters occupied army land (a large barracks surrounded by a wooded lake). The Danish government now wants to ‘progressively’ resume the land. 

** On the day I visited Christiania the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) was beginning. 

GONE TROPPO

Mangrove Man

Salty mangrove man lives in the swamp,
Progeny of the ancient mud between his toes.

At dawn’s light he slips between shadows,
Breathes the popping gas in Darwin’s forest.

By day he sniffs the briny bogs for memories,
Listens for their crack and fizz, as they escape

The sticky uncivilized clutches of history.

Distracted now, he scratches at small molluscs
That graze for salt on his calves and ankles.

Salty mangrove man has evolved in the mud.
A captive of wildlife — only ever glimpsed —

The smile caged inside ancient tree-roots.
The eyes glazed, bleached shells in liminal moonlight.

2009

Hooks

I’m the kind of fisherman that takes too many
Hooks — just in case —
There’s a hook for every occasion.

But I have a problem remembering swivels —
Elusive little twisters —
And I can never find the right sinker —

They’re always hidden at the bottom of the bag,
Deep down,
Buried in the rubble of the process.

Ah … but hooks? … I am a master of hooks.
Chemically sharpened if you like,
With plenty of stainless barb.

The hook waits for the denouement —
That moment of moments
When a gleaming truth is pinioned and pulled,
This way and that way
Across the pressing blue ocean of time.

Is this why I take too many hooks?
To jag every possible transcendent moment?
Forgetting the sinkers and the swivels,

And the tide book?
Are there others like me?
Or am I the only bloke

That’s mesmerized by glinting long-shanks?
That contemplates demonic trebles and gangs?
That gapes at red suicides?

What’s the point?
When it’s all happening down there below,
With the sinkers and swivels directing the show.

2002

HOME AND HEART

Jophy

 (4 years old)

Jophy flew before he walked.
A white-skinned cherub,
A sweet-smelling angel
Let loose in the suburbs.

He is an archetype landed.
A magical Rubens child,
A little Renaissance satyr,
Got off at the antipodes
In late-to-post modernity —

A good time and place
For satirizing aerobics,
For goose-stepping in goggles
‘Round the slippery rim
Of our backyard pool.

1998

Billabong

I am watching my lover
Ripening with the mangos
On hot November evenings;
The night full of thunder
That shakes open the pregnant sky,
And it rains babies.

I am watching my lover
Nursing a pink hippo in her billabong,
In her permanent waterhole.
The little hippo paddles its legs
And listens to distant peals of thunder.

I am watching my lover
Cradling a pillow in her sleep.
Outside, frogs are croaking philosophy,
Certain that existence is green.
On the roof I hear the drumbeat
Of a tiny heart, as it rains babies.

1991

OUT OF OUR MINDS

In a Room with Mark Rothko

In a room with Mark Rothko and the mysterians,*
Over there behind that curtain of maroon paint,
In the shadow of shadows that pierce our hearts
So mysteriously here at the Tate.

Here the solemnity of the gothic, the mediaeval
In blacker pigments at the margins,
And dark shimmering columns that mask the sun.
And now tears well up — at a glimpse of eternity?

As if all of time were conjured in layers of paint,
And all our histories were now laid bare.
And there’s a pulsing in the room, and a warping of the air.
And ecstasy and tragedy are leaching from the canvas,

In magic silver trails and dark maroon veins
That creep across the floor to where I stand —
Invisible, gape-mouthed, astonished —
With no story to tell outside this shadowy room.

And Rothko too — that shaman — has vanished,
Has left the building by a back door. Alas, too soon!

2015

* Mysterians are philosophers who take the position that the riddles of human consciousness are unsolvable. The room was a gallery at the Tate Modern, in London.

Boy in a Red Cardigan*

Boy in a red cardigan
Trembles eternal,
As the looming sky darkens

And the ordinary clutter
Of powerlines, weeds, and streets
Envelopes his tender breathing.

Boy in a red cardigan
Looks up bravely
As time rattles the rooftops,

And a swirling column
Of photographs
Rends the suburban void.

Boy in a red cardigan
Is all things here; all sorrows,
All hopes; all fears;

Every tremble and every cry,
A burning ember
Against the looming sky.

In him I see myself, my sons,
And every little boy
That ever breathed.

London, England, 2003

* Inspired by a photograph, ‘Boy in a Red Sweater’, by William Eggleston, exhibited at the Tate Modern art gallery in London.

MYSTERIOUS ENCOUNTERS

At Windy Corner

Meet you
At windy corner,
Since you’re
In the poem.

At windy corner,
Newsprint rapped
Around lamp posts
Like a cat on heat.

You were there —
Hiding between lines,
Flapping about,
Your thoughts tangled
For a choice.

At windy corner
Words are coiled like snakes,
Like poetry on ticket tape,
Like cats glimpsed fleeing.

2014

What is it?

What is it?
Who can say?

It dances a merry jig
Between our eyes.

It darts about
In the echoes of talk.

What is it?

A tingle in fingertips
That prop and fumble
With the edge of things.

A murmuring of voices
In the drum roll of memory.

A wrap at the gates
Of consciousness.

Outside, the day’s a forgery.
Inside, it’s a masterpiece.

2001