Process

They have the numbers, they’re at pains to stress.

We listen closely, restudy the rules.

They like agreement, won’t put up with fools.

They act, deciding on the process.

We listen like mutes then speak our distress.

The Disaster Committee takes big notes.

We write a letter, we add up the votes

Tidily abiding by the process.

The Disaster Committee claims success,

Contrary to us on the receiving end

Out there deriding the whole damn process.

We are all grieving, we won’t try to guess

We think it for the best, we won’t offend

Leaving them hiding behind their process.

Algorithm

 Framed by the mouse: all-go rhythm futures

A walking cliché of pop art what-seems,

Thin as a light beam, broad as a stretch screen,

An up-down hallway of fairground mirrors.

Me and my algorithm every day

Advertising selves I would rather hide,

Just my type as the keyboard decides

Which pick-and-choose next to scroll on display.

Am I really that person staring back

Self-portrait of stream data in the cloud,

Pixel parody of random search tracks

Overdetermined and under-resourced,

Those me’s I see trapped in my in-crowd

Living every second computer-endorsed?

Enemy

My enemy’s face is somewhat like mine

Eye on the main chance, lip bitten by fears,

Watching his back, thought not as appears,

Hung, drawn, and quartered by infamous time.

My enemy’s hand writes insinuations,

Did deeds late at night, signed off on the kill.

Make-up, the art of the impossible.

Be assured he has plans, he has reasons.

My enemy’s home is an unsorry sight,

Doors locked with my keys, walls built on good lies,

His own views are always completely right.

My enemy’s grave is a lasting promise

Told over and over, internal picture

Framed by the past for a lonely future.

Fava

Bean come of age calls for birth of mirth,

Melbourne November my green tended patch

Survivor of heatwave’s wrinkling dispatch,

Protruding through leaves from composted earth.

White purple flower made way for the sight,

Now I pod the soft linings and pop and drop

Into a white bowl not quite to the top,

Try dry, or light boiled – oh! here’s an invite!

The Roman staple, best eat on its own

With butter, garlic, or oil depending

Maybe mashed potato, ham from the bone.

Their fava flavour, who’s in a hurry,

A glass of Clare Valley white depending,

Remembering snatches of Les Murray.

Item

Item: one crash land result of science.

One machine that behaves in defiance.

Item: one ship full of chandeliers.

One ocean that is not as it appears.

Item: one human in a greenleaf vest.

One prayerbook of continuous inquest.

Item: one nation forsaken by time.

One capital city true to its crime.

Item: one biro (writ this) brand name Quill.

One bird of a feather at the windowsill.

Item: one dream waking up to reality.

One reality slept off for sanity.

Item: one constellation of life spun.

One star with the full-on rage of the sun.

Photograph: The cricket nets at Fitzroy Oval, Edinburgh Gardens, North Fitzroy.

G

Curls in a swirl, a gas giant, and leaps.

G goes everywhere, G gets things going:

The ultimate goal, gyrates growing,

Garners golly gosh, gleans glorious greets.

Or else hangs about, hangs loose, hangs out, hangs.

Generally good about its give.

Plays the goose, lends to grace, live and let live,

Gags, gapes, gossips, group-thinks, googles in gangs.

G writes the game rules, signs the guarantee,

Smart move G, long on dreams and memories.

In their minds they’re premiers at the G.

G keeps them guessing, godawful then great

Gutterals, gentles, gagas, gallantries.

G goes without saying now computerate.

Procedure

Hang by your rewards dreaming through recheck.

Absorb as while white diet the world’s colour.

Fill out the health form boxing your whole life.

Divorce daytime TV its waiting room script.

Hold that thought. Count the half hours watching

Hospital ceilings lenses sprinklers vents

Repeat anaesthetist’s twenty questions

Alarms spotlights then needle in the vein.

Take me to the mostest amazinger party

Volume up ‘Everlasting Love’ and friends

Coming through doors more friends and spangled food.

Wake to anaesthetic curtaining up on

A world where Australia’s on fire

Gripped by science, intrepid and grandiose.

Photograph: The Austin Hospital and Burgundy Street in Heidelberg from the Level 3 waiting room of Warringal Private.

Penguin

The words in moorage, the same black Penguins

‘My Childhood’ and ‘Youth’ relived when sanguine.

Martial and Virgil there in parallel

Their side and my side of what’s more to tell.

François Rabelais as by J. M. Cohen

Who doubled his lists to keep things goin’.

Gustave Flaubert in fifties-ish English.

Thomas Hardy – should have stayed singleish?

Leo Tolstoy, brisk then frownable,

His backbroken books unputdownable.

Or Herman Melville’s great brute of a thing

To chase again, or leave to its living?

Likely line-up, permanently on edge,

Defying me not to reach for their ledge.

Substance

Your eye, telling me everything, everything

Rapid lie, flesh fast blink, move on rolling.

Your news, melting ice where the braincap fits

Pulse under skin heatwave, it never quits.

Your leaves, shrivelled layers caught by ground flame,

Down their trees, in ash return blackened names.

Your sea, like your coast, adventures in change,

Your choice to ignore except at close range.

Your money, yearning figures, melts in heat

Sand grains burning out the banks of defeat.

Your coal, black in earth store a press release

Lost cause, lonely millions, useless repeats.

Your speech, thin on substance to city and bush

Deliberately over empty space pushed.

Cloud

Beaut flocks that tease out according to moods

Billowing beauties above old Gloucestershire

Spider lightning over Sumatra

Sunset Fiji pink, Kenyan quietudes.

It’s official, I have finally unfriended

The Cloud Appreciation Society Pages

Its surfeit of surface that daily engages

Worldwide cover: clouds-in-the-Cloud ended.

The screen is off, I’m out the door what’s more

To extend appreciation to my place

Piebald cumulus over Collingwood

Storm warnings entering my neighbourhood,

Noontide of fritter, wet ones full of grace,

Friday night Eaglemont’s glam-like forms.

Stewart Terrace in Macleod on Saturday morning

Likeness

He can do anything, reference a class of fighter,

Disassemble and reassemble cars,

Pack an audience, march through Siberia,

Keep them all guessing, make black sound whiter,

Mastermind headlines, get ten thousand Likes,

Infuse all futures with his proud likeness.

His Likeness, they say, has excess wellness,

Before he speaks please soundcheck the mikes.

What he cannot do is hear what you say,

Say no, or ignore the smell of money,

Remember to ask or how to say sorry,

Count the cost, notice human boundaries,

Put out the fires, slow down softened ice,

Pull up the bitumen, rain on dry glaze.