Michael Farrel! bagboy he knew the butt tattoo his friend had but said nothing afraid someone might think theyd sworn together in the school of easy knocks or aversions he came like a shark & butted bis teeth into the lovers they locked him in a cell the bays connected to the sea like a heart & he had rather kill than retreat to his midden of pipis noone writes about it noone has the rough knife on bark style needed at night when the nausea peaks & his work lies undone & an automatic feeling brings him close to someone ■who says what he auditions to the air & the speeding trees he empties his pockets as pathetically as at an airport sunshine you areas going anywhere but theres noone there to say it only a braiding sensation & blood coming out of him in ecstasy or as close as hell get sympathetic homicide they call it hallucinatory bullet wounds & the culture says adulterys anachronistic & j ealousys for straights it seemed to him hed proven something the prison had great acoustics & he had an escapees lungs Angela Gardner Bel Canto moments intervening one voice and another between language and coupling spathes of unthrifty music engage a beauty not your present truth that devour how when when — glass paper metal plastic all the elements — into an imitating movement traced back to the work itself which it Ells with rightful obsessions heated to a liquidity of touch of intention a glancing gaze or silence remembered as woven voice opulent erven in the sweet mistaken wholeness of the body mgmlmSm fflJBMffl iihh< the is.ce in the tray is remembering light .ia the of light put down — such a load r just a moment David Malouf Like Our First Paintbox Like our first paintbox: colour in graduated rows more various even than the rainbow, encouraging the eye and the small adventurous hand to try for others, cloud -castles of a sty more Disney-gaudy than the azure overhead, as if mineral dust and breath could reach alchemical midday on a planet further off than the one they taste and smell of. Bruise violet and veridian a threat of storms I could conduct -with an index finger wet from the cup, catching a hint of what God felt, trying for this, then that; learning to see the earth as it is from failed experiments — and even those we give our hearts to and can't forget. "When sleep has unsealed our eyes, we walk in the pink woods of that other world our hands imagine — lost, like all angels, in the flesh. Mauve grass, red weather, the fruit gift-wrapped in its blue peel, O so edible? Futures and Stardust w-■tH A mesh that is not so seamless. Those little dings and impossibilities. ft- Glow out of the big sky. w Innocence is a universe — hut not sanctuary. 1 1 F If friends crash and faces are hollow. 1 If the thrilling: emptiness is just a biology. Kiss the children between the lies. Stoke our whitewashed outlines. Touching the walls, what is common. Your cool skin maybe but breathing, Beyond the stages of importance. Burrow into the sweeter afternoon. Perhaps the Stardust song settles it It must get easier out in blade. TVhat flowers, we don't know yet you touch. & is lik aphotogrirpb. ■It is life you step imo .t e space. 100 the most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinldng & -what of thoughts that you lose accidentally btfoxe you have finished using them stones fallen deep into a pool of forgetfulness covdd i persuade then to stay bribe them with, chocolates or new joggers try barring the door arms operaticslly outstretched? but those conceptual delinquents wear their baseball caps backwards menace me with handguns &fiee toliat goes from, land to land ■ in the holy rtighl? i send tracker dogs to retrieve them but thoughts have weak scents & when something more pungent drifts on the air the dogs take a disloyal detour & i'm left racking my brains hoping these moments of absence will pass as now zee are a sign that is not read Chris Edwards Missing something Maybe I've been missing something true, luminous and noble — Ian Thorpe has his Kyhe Minogue CDs, other people have Ian Thorpe, Maybe there's something in the world I need to get down pat, or get patted down by lilse the rest of the crew. But if so, what — or who? And what's this here about going for gold down a pitch-dark stairwell to the startled but amenably blacked-out landing where rioting allegedly continues? Somewhere, somebody knows something about it. All over the planet people are training kaleidoscopes on it— whether it's tips for effective how-to-rag or quick and easy charms for reproducing winning recipes in chilling little monsters, the tend no-one would ever suggest Ian Thorpe resembles. That'll be him now, wanting to talk , to either you or your auxiliary committee about the freak " crisis he faces, along with tb e rest of us, who have been faced with it for quite sojne time. It's his mission 'J in life to be a reminder, I suppose. I'm confident s you'll deal gently with him — after alL it isn't a crime to go traipsing through other people's dreams all night on, what is it, seventeen feet? Michael Farreli proust aboard a doomed corvette the blue car was too slow maybe! insisted this was a virtue so we toured the galleries gave cats lifts painted bodies as we passed there were some whose souls we entered briefly & saddened like weevils in an opened cheese remained jlldisposed to heroics haircutting ate nothing so this is the moon marcel remarked gloomily the life forms are disappointing i dont understand what god was getting at leave god out of it i said annoyed at last by his trilby twitching watch the road baron he replied there arent any moon roads anyway i thought you were driving out of petrol time to abandon vessel lay low hope a cattle farmer comes along we can steal his wife horizon his bitter expressions well die first figure to come along was an army deserter we were too sentimental to harm we lent Mm a cork shelter a phone that remembered princes number ned kelly shrieEed mp we continued without holdups Dorothy Porter Radiation When pushing back strands of her hair straying around her dangerous qoick-quipping roouth kissing kej. feeling her mouth open like an anemone under mine I wkenlflowtoher I fast and shallow I Ufa: a channel $M fro5»a<äeeplagoorj fr01^ across to the sea I IW ha-intense attention. I Xt's 0Dlr afterwards I w^7 living home jj I feel my skia I flake awav : in a leprous snowfall ' as if I've strayed ! atid played in Jupiter's radiation belt. 145 Pam Brown This is all ■this is all I -will bring to you from the deep humidity here where everything about this evening hurts, from the helpless beauty of the pale orange sky to the darkening wall of the cemetery. tonight it seems we were never here, that we never slept here, that the dust gathered in a hrand new house and it became a museum overnight this evening short involuntary gasps interrupt my practice of abstinence and hurtle me across the equator across the world. Scott-Patrick Mitchell tHIS scRIBing s& all these beached ripples will wash away their being to reappear , varied only by wind for the autistic sand knows no better & the gleeful waves do , so listen here sea: we'd be lovers if you weren't so Wet &blue litorally changing your mind every second ...adieu.