Immovable (January)

The ice we made from fossil burn, whole continents frozen, unable to move. Palladian masterpieces hide under snow. Streetlights are lonely at midday. Our skulls, immovable quantities, contain enough memory to understand. The heat we made from fossil smoke lasts one January to the next, the next. Our sophisticate cars line the bitumen fields. Their skull sleekness includes movable windows; blinkers make them look alive. Five generations of jets patterned heaven with change. They moved quicker than anyone imagined, their rust preserved under bone-hard ice. Great Moon and Stars make their Galileo moves, as sublunar us jesting, adjust, adjust, just.

Skeleton (January)

These words climb up out of the skeletons of words buried in desk drawers. They break free of word-skeletons worn thin and broken on outdated discs. They exist due to remains of finished ribcages, each right bone rhyming with its left, hidden somewhere in forgotten correspondence. City of HAPPY advertisements and FOAD graffiti, one x-ray overlaid on another, vision of overload, who is reading these words that quietly step from the boneyard of poetry past? These words spiral from skulls of wordless seventy years, smiling their oft-told odes to January, their bumptious limericks and yearn yarns, their own little golgothas.

Make-believe (January)

Fearsome and oafish, Skull Murphy strode through our weekends, a glowing TV titan. In league with tag-team partner Brute Bernard, mad, bad Skull administered eye gouges, powerslams, atomic drops and other holds that would’ve got them arrested outside the ring. They were scarcely legal inside, but the boundary between wrestling and make-believe was very blurry. They were more like Abbott and Costello than Ajax and Achilles. World Championship Wrestling was a misnomer for old American stagers still acting the part in makeshift studios in Richmond. Only January break kept us from watching Skull apply the hammer lock, one more time.    

Skull (January)

 

The whole box of tricks. The balancing act. The inside story. The holey head. The head case. The last laugh. The permanent smile. The Macleans showing. The penthouse. The inside storey. The empty attic. The brain’s trust. The think tank. The hollow crown. The sound system. The echo chamber. The bone dome. The infinite jest. The jolly Roger. The memento mori. The Janus gate. [The January exhibition] The stone face. The osseous oculi. The eyeless gazer. The vanity mirror. The earth orbiter. The miniscule moon. The great equalizer. The graveyard sift. The pod cast. The kicked bucket. The wrested piece.

Headmaster (January)

The headmaster of my school was nicknamed ‘Skull’ Lumsden. One Oxford definition states a skull, originally, was a head of an Oxford college, slang that shifted to Australia and America as a head, chief, or expert. My headmaster’s vast bald cranium loomed above a veined high forehead. Numerous teachers endeavoured to get things through my thick skull but, ironically, not ‘Skull’. Both shy and reticent, we barely passed a word in all the time I was there. His Speech Night platitudes were those typically practised by adults. By January holidays I’d quite forgotten ‘Skull’, till Term One came around, again.

Chap-fallen (January)

How far has a chap fallen that his lower jaw is quite chap-fallen? Question follows question in search of a punch-line. Was it de rigueur to talk to a skull? On such familiar terms? On stage? After dark? In a graveyard? Is it now? Theatre uses aliases, alas. Jaw falls open and it’s all laughs, disarming grins, a fixed smile. Our Yorick moments increase with time, Buster Keaton’s gibes and gambols, the mad rogue Goons wont to set the table on a roar, fellows of infinite jest we replay inside, on January afternoons, too hot for gardening, or reading, even.

Ocean (January)

Purpose-made, our skull is the only place wherein consciousness awakes, exercises, changes, knows, and rests. Round and hard like the Earth it mimics, alone our skull is some special planet, though for some, seen one seen them all. Oceanic fertility is our truth, every month’s January when we wake from sleep, our senses returning to duty, renewed and amazed; our skull, the vital carrier. Our dreams are oceanic, unconscious head drifting out into depths of ancient existence. Day is wakeful relief from such soup. Tide out, watchful behind two perfect sockets, we enjoy the littoral of everything sun keeps alive.

Ballarat (January)

One January day we train it to Ballarat, to see centuries of the skull in art, but only after Earl Grey in the tearooms. She likes delicate inks by Kim Anderson. I like the Japanese skeleton spectres of Tachihara Kurainuki. Till eventually, “All these skulls are doing my head in.” “I’m up to my neck in skulls.” Adjourning for lunch we bump into Jill Blee and her shy bulldog Sadie. Talk turns to the ribbons tied along the wrought fence of St. Patrick’s. The cathedral tried to take them down, Jill says, but there was public protest, so they stay.