a is for absinthe

ambition is the cruellest month
bravado comes creeping on little cat feet
courage & the slithy toves did gyre & gimble
death spreadeagled in the empty air of existence
ethics has a man in it. he is transparent
fame is glazed by rain water
greed considered as a
hunger of semi-precious stones
inventiveness we trust
justice comme je suis
karma just happened to come along
liberty at five in the afternoon
minestrone wears a glove on which his crimes cannot be read
nature died in the church & was buried along with her name. nobody came
optimism loses all the time
prejudice is poisonous but pretty in autumn
quietness bent over a blue guitar
rapaciousness is no country for old men
sleep in whom I dream angels
tension was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair
unhappiness saw him disembark in the unanimous night
vanishing species on the left hand side of the beach like a motorcycle club
water was ours before we were the land's
xenophobia breaks where no sun shines
youth your rooster crows at the break of dawn
zodiac signs with few friends & no ambitions

originally published in Tin Lustre Mobile
 

Karri Kokko in The City of Light

April in Paris
chestnuts in blossom
holiday tables
under the trees.

Yip Harburg's lyrics to the wonderful Vernon Duke thirties ballad "April in Paris" (favourite version Ella Fitzgerald with Count Basie's Band). A brilliant composer - the fact that Ira Gershwin wrote lyrics for him is indicative of that - Duke also wrote another great 'seasonal' song "Autumn in New York" (favourite version a fifty-year old recording by the Modern Jazz Quartet).

One of the drawbacks to living at the bottom of the globe is the distances. I would love to be in either place, in any month, in any season. But so far, so far....

Though L. is going to a conference in South Carolina next year. Perhaps then.
 

36 views of Lion Mountain #2

Night
does not
fall

on Lion
Mountain -

it wraps
around it.
 

An ephemeral collage

Jukka tears into Das Kapital at Nonlinear Poetry & puts the pieces back together in his own inimitable way.
 

The Mail Poem

Bill Allegrezza's Mail Poems are a wonderful act of anarchy.

".....the idea behind the mail poem is that i write them to send to people who happen to have the same names as poets. i randomnly choose them and then write a poem dedicated to them, which i then send through the mail without my return address. i keep no record of the poems besides occasionally recording myself reading one before i send it out. at this point, i've written about a hundred of them."

He has links to some of those readings at p-ramblings.

I wonder if he's ever accidently sent one to the actual poet...
 

sharing my table at yesterday's lunch

 
 

new at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

I admire many, many things about Eileen Tabios. & one of the reasons for the "many, many" is that I'm convinced that she lives in a parallel universe where the days are 30 hours long. She has to to be able to do as much as she does, in so many fields. & I may have to revise that hour figure - not to be confused with her hourglass figure - upwards, because here she is at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s being interviewed by Tom Beckett.
 

The Cicerone - an extended version

Just out from Jukka's xPress(ed), The Cicerone is a sequence of poems, an extended narrative, that wraps around a piece of the same name that was posted to Series Magritte.

The dance mix & an instrumental version will be released soon.
&

It's a long time since I've driven distances in the dark. But yesterday we left in the afternoon & headed north, towards the shorter days in the year, towards the tropics where night falls early anyway.

So the last few hundred kilometres through dusk & dark. A couple of fresh-killed kangaroos, one in the centre, one on the side of the road. Always a hazard in the dawn & dusk when they come out searching for water, for fresh grass. But of more concern the smaller things, the plethora of insects & moths that emerge in the twilight, smashing & smearing against the windscreen. & with wipers perished from the sun & not previously noticed from lack of use, a white film gradually coated the whole of the glass, so that we arrived with a windscreen blinded as if with cataracts.
 

 PLAT
F O R M

The object of desire worship

There are many of us who are fans of the work of Sheila Murphy. & then there is The Fan. Polite, respectful, but with just a hint of stalking in there. This site has the beginnings of the blog equivalent of a room full of photos.
 

Waiting for Jodie

Martin Edmond, after a year as writer in residence at Auckland University in New Zealand, is back in Sydney & working as a taxi driver. His recent posts at Luca Antara are as wide & diverse as the stochastic process of his fare existence.
 

A spellcheck glitch? Or subtle racism?

From a local paper, in an article on precursors to the Michael Jackson trial, basically a quick précis of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon with a couple of more contemporary trials added.

"Jackson already has some of the big gums from the black community behind him."

This week, I keep thinking about this poem

AFTER LORCA
by Robert Creeley

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.
                                      When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go doucement,  doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it's crazy.

the thame thinger, another thong

Snakes
shuck their
skins in Summer.

That's
where squirrels
get their thongs.

You
can't keep
a good man

down.
Tom Beckett
reappears in blogland.

Continuing Difficulties
Vanishing Points of Resemblance
Unprotected Texts
Vaudeville without Organs
Shadows within Shadows

Meanwhile, in Australia, in 2005

"(Australian Prime Minister) John Howard may be shocked by what he sees in Wadeye next week during a rare visit to a remote Aboriginal community.

The town with the biggest Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory, 270 kilometres south-west of Darwin, looks like a refugee camp in a Third World country.

An average 17 people are cramped into each sweltering, graffiti-covered house. Almost half the population is under 15; most of the children have had no formal education and cannot speak English; many grow up not knowing their fathers who are dead or in jail; infant mortality is four times the national average; life expectancy is 20 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians; and only 4 per cent of people of working age have mainstream jobs.

Unlike southern towns of comparable size - Picton, Bellingen or Bourke, for example - Wadeye has no mobile phone coverage and its landline phone service is outdated and unreliable, making a mockery of Telstra's claims that its services in the bush are "world class".

The town, which is cut off by road for five months each year during the wet season, is still waiting for a doctor, funding for which was promised last month.

The town, built at the edge of mangroves, has no commercial businesses such as banks, cafes, restaurants, hotels or motels. And a new study of the community, which will have implications for other Aboriginal communities, finds that governments are spending far less on its residents than on an average Territorian child.

The report finds that for every dollar spent educating the average child in the territory, only 26 cents is spent on an Aboriginal child in Wadeye."
Lindsay Murdoch: The Sydney Morning Herald, 4/2/2005

Robert Creeley in New Zealand.

Robert Creeley visited New Zealand a couple of times. The New Zealand electronic poetry centre has records of these visits including audio, video, poems, posters & photos.
 

Things I never knew we needed #471,313

Dog condoms.
 

Comings & goings

Cassie Lewis has started up a new blog, The Little Workshop. Welcome back, Cassie.

I'm also adding ecce mulier, an anonymous blog "posted by R.L." although up until a couple of days ago it was "posted by Nietzsche's Wife" which I kinda liked since it reminded me of the great Charlie Mingus' tune "All the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother". I mentally translate ecce mulier as "Behold the Donkey-Driver", but since the blog emanates from Mexico that might be construed as racist, so I'll let it pass.

I've also linked to Poetic Inhalation's eye peasant page, a comprehensive listing of "written creation links".

& I've drawn a line through all those links - although the link is still there - to blogs which have been silent for a number of months.
 

Robert Creeley 1926-2005

A COUNTERPOINT

Let me be my own fool
of my own making, the sum of it

is equivocal.
One says of the drunken farmer:

leave him lay off it. And this is
the explanation.

Robert Creeley

The exhibition of vispo

at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami, Florida has closed, but the entire show is still viewable here.

Well worth the visit. Several visits in fact.
 

Graffiti memories & junk emails or: How much is that Doge in the window?

Once I was young & had so much more orientation & could talk with nervous intelligence about everything – no, that's the beginning of a novel by Kerouac. Let's restart. I remember when Rock was young. Uh oh. Elton John.

Okay. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I found humour in a couple of much-quoted & -reproduced pieces of what I would describe as repartee graffiti, that is graffiti where a line is answered by another line in someone else's hand.

My favourite was always My mother made me a homosexual to which somebody had written underneath That's nice. If I gave her the wool would she make me one too. But close behind it was

I hate grils
You mean girls you fool
What about us grils?

I was reminded of the second sequence – which, of course, reminded me of the first – by the subject line of a junk email I received today. Fsreh e-book on how to make wemon really happy.

But I'd almost been brought there yesterday by a google search for doges fucking women that ended up at the pelican. How could I not resist tracking that back one step? About sixty results, one of which appears to be an essay on Ezra Pound by Jennifer Scappettone, another from the Muse Apprentice Guild – why am I not surprised? - but most of the rest mis-spellings - the car brand; he doges the blows of his opponent; a few looking for bestial sex sites. Or should that be bastial sox?

Git along little doge...
 

Heading
north for
a couple of

days.
I might
post. Might pass.

The Nightjar

Jean Vengua has revamped the format of her poetry blog The Nightjar. Gone are the surroundings that used to remind me somewhat of a Quaker kitchen. In their place is a black background. The page is crowned by a photo of arched windows reaching towards a flat roof, a dark blue sky above, all seen from the perspective of someone looking up.

The presentation conveys a depth, a darkness, an infinite night with the words as stars. &, in what is probably a totally subjective judgement because I've always liked her work, I feel an additional power, a strength, a hard-edged beauty in the new poems that are posted there.
 

A very moving piece

by Allen Bramhall at tributary on the death of his father after a long illness.

It is undercut with an emotion, a grief, that you cannot help but share.
 

A rare pleasure

to be able to include a link to another New Zealand poet's blog.

Have added Jill Chan's Navel Orange to the sidebar.

Some recent work of hers appeared in the latest issue of foam:e. Earlier poems can be found at the New Zealand electronic poetry centre.
 

Pour Prévert, some autumn leaves

              l                         t
l
  e               l
                            o
          u
                                r
       f            e                          s
                     s

            i
     s
 
        e              m                  e

After joy, sadness

I
have donned
sackcloth & ashes.

Tom
Beckett's blog
has gone dark.

Vaudeville
apparently needs
organs to survive.

I
will happily
donate my heart.
 

pelican dreaming is 1 year old today

so it seems appropriate to recognise the occasion by posting the poem from whence it got its name.

PELICAN DREAMING

Later he would walk down to the lagoon
to look for the pelicans. They were
his touchstone, the way their
solid bodies gave substance to the
landscape, a centre to it. Only when
they found him would he return.

What part
of
      NO
don't you
under-
stand?

N?

No,
O.
 

Savaged
& ravaged
by rabid mosquitoes.
 

Have added another couple of poems to Series Magritte, The Misanthropes & The Wedding Breakfast.
 

"The thing that's really become important with me now is my involvement in ear research. I know you would think I'd be involved in eye research, but it is not so. It's ear research because I have so much respect for hearing. I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't been able to hear."
Ray Charles

Metropolis

is
full of
Moloch & marquee.
 

Felt the need for the ocean today, so this afternoon drove the forty kilometres out to it. Then twenty kilometres along the coast, pausing every so often, before turning inland again.

Apart from the wave caps, the sea was the colour of wet sand.
 

Have added

The Pillow Book - Makura no Soshi - of Shin Yu Pai to the sidebar.

& have just finished reading Unnecessary Roughness, her wonderful & witty collection of sports poems. It takes the piss out of everything athletic, but with an incisive insight that would probably get her a major coaching job.
 

Eileen Tabios on Philip Lamantia

At The Chatelaine's Poetics Eileen has a wonderful & deeply moving series of posts.
 

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s

In keeping with the expansionary intention of Tom Beckett's philosophy for the blog, former interviewee Thomas Fink becomes current interviewer of the wonderful Sheila Murphy at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.

& as I write this, a kingfisher swoops across the yard to pause in a tree. I am a firm believer in omens.
 

36 Views of Lion Mountain

# 1

Lion
does not
appear

in the
lexicon

of the
traditional
owners

of the
land.
 

Philip Lamantia (1927-2005)

Man is a room
     where the malefic hand turns a knob
     on the unseen unknown double's door
 

Making it
happen, in a
slow
dispirited
way.
 

 
 

taiL

The Use of Torture

Severely
beaten. Knocked
unconscious. Eventually came

round
to their
way of thinking.
 

for Miss M.

cat kookaburra
late-night owl

the
avariciousness
of another
avatar

attacked by
angry ants &
in defence
a self-
inflicted
mortal blow

attempting
to emulate
the Worm
Ouroboros

auto-erotic
asphyxiation
 

Speculative Fiction

FROM: Sgt. Mark Ed
Important Message
To President / Managing Director..

Good day,


My name is Mark Ed, I am an American soldier, I am serving in the military of the 1st Armoured Division in Iraq, As you know we are being attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombs.We managed to move funds belonging to Saddam Hussien's family.

We want to move this money to you, so that you may invest it for us and keep our share for banking.We will take 50%, my partner and I. You take the other 50%. no strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a warzone. We plan on using diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in one large silver box, using diplomatic immunity.

If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust and that will assist us. Can I ! trust you? When you receive this letter,kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This business is risk free. The box can be shipped out in 48hrs.

Respectfully,
Sgt. Mark Ed

Ah well, it makes a change from Nigerian scams. But you think they'd get the spelling of Saddam's name right. Or is the misspelling meant to be proof of the email's authenticity?
 

a disturbing fact for the day

The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth -- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.

Nearly all Inuit tested in Greenland and more than half in Canada have levels of PCBs and mercury exceeding international health guidelines.

Snail Mail

He
wrote a
letter while the

mail-
art blog
delivered the post.
 

Gecko

 
 

spec   intro   tion

Marquee & Music

At first the
tinkle
of a temple bell
but with
each refresh
the line
grows
longer.

Jukka's marquee pieces, more beautiful than ever, now come with or without accompaniment. See / hear / be amazed via Nonlinear Poetry.

& it would be remiss of me not to mention the marquee pieces by Jack Kimball at Pantaloons. The latest one is quite splendid.
 

sit 11

a visual / textual piece posted by harry k. stammer to his eponymous blog on 3/2/05 is wonderful. harry's work, textual, visual, visual/textual, textual/visual (& occasionally textural), both on his own blog & at As/Is is some of the best work going on around the place in any field.
 

Luca Antara

At Luca Antara, Martin Edmond posts the contents of his new book Luca Antara which don't include any mention of Luca Antara.

But what's there prompted me to answer "yes" to his question "..would you want to read a book like this?"
 

Lady Guinevere's hay(na)ku of love

The
beat of
my knight's heart
is the pulse
of my
daze.
 

non sequiturs
                                   followed

 

Will no-one free me of this turbulent priest?

Vaudeville without Organs. Tom Beckett is back!!!!

"I'm not sure I should be here again in the world of personal (poisonal--to give it a 3 Stooges inflection) blogging, but I am weak. Poor impulse control, don't you know. So, a soft opening. No e-mails to announce the rebirth. I'm not reborn."

Ah, Tom,

Withdrawals
in Winter
are alWays Worse
 

& so, in honour

I've decided to repost this poem that first appeared on As/Is since it seems quite appropriate.

My life in Vaudeville

for Nick Piombino because he didn't / ask the question
& for Tom Beckett because he gave me / the title

The players in the orchestra pit
are aging, some are
already dead or too infirm
to hold their instruments. Only
the drummer manages to keep
a beat; & that occasionally
runs ragged since his
bass drum had a triple bypass
four months ago. Nobody
wants to play this type of music
anymore. No fame or
fortune in it. The singers have all
left, the jugglers drop more
than they catch & local bylaws
have taken the fire-eater
out of the program. Two years ago
my partner died. No one to replace him
so I've been using a dummy
whose response to "Why is there
a gryphon in the garden?"
is a very wooden
"Because Thurber took the unicorn".
We've had the North Korean
Totalitarian Drill & Marching Band
in for a couple of weeks but now
they've overstayed their visas
& are due to be deported
in the morning. There's nothing
left except to clear the last
tableau & close. Next week it's
strippers, sound machine & a single
spotlight. The theatre's being re-
named, either "Vanishing Acts" or
"Pussies Galore". They'll probably
go for the latter. Boom tish.

the letter e

Jukka's latest kinetic piece, letters, has me transfixed. There is something magical, mystical about the transformation of the letter

e

as it disappears off-screen to the right.
 

from Jukka (front)

brightening up my day considerably!
 
 

from Jukka (back)

& a J.S.Bach mailart stamp!
 
 

Nick Piombino

of fait accompli is Tom Beckett's latest interviewee at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.
 

dbqp

argument as moving text
moving text as argument

Geof Huth at dbqp. & then, in the physically preceding, temporally proceeding post, from his own Alexandrine library, he unearths a piece of vispo by Ron Silliman & comments on it with that reasoned thoroughness one finds in all of Geof's posts.
 

10.55 p.m.

Half
an umlaut
modifying the Moon's

waning
O. Jupiter
at eight o'clock.
 

The prejudice of Church

The worldwide Anglican Church has edged closer to schism, with the US & Canadian churches to be disciplined for their role in the dispute over gay bishops & same-sex unions.

Conservatives from the Sydney Diocese are among church leaders to have demanded the North American churches repent & withdraw their sanctioning of blessings of gay unions & the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire.

& State

The US military has had to spend an estimated $200 million over the past ten years to replace the 9488 gays & lesbians kicked out of the service.

More than 300 of them were foreign-language specialists considered crucial in the "fight against terrorism".

(Mind you, that was only one half of one percent of the 2.37 million members of the military kicked out for all reasons during the same period of time.)

census

In the background the pool pump hums.
Put clarifier in the water, & now
it has to circulate for thirty-six hours
to allow the clouding particles to
coalesce.

There is a smoke smell in the air.
Driving around over the last few days
on roads impinged upon
by opportunistic grasses. A day
of rain & they grow. A month later
they are dry, primed for burning.
Easier to set them alight than mow
the strip that runs along the roadside.

       cigarettes   
coffee
          chicken & rice
       burnt grass    
               a tart plum     

The static geometry of the house
separates the evening into panels.
A quintych. Angular, oblique. Trees fill in
some of the gaps, but the most striking
are those where there are gaps
in the trees themselves, one in
particular, bite shaped, as if someone
had tried an apple & then abandoned
it. Acute.

Touch yourself
            & the hand passes through
the flesh
as if it wasn’t there.
 

the pre-gonzo days

When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all-night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. I went over my living-room carefully for signs of body lice and other small animals but found nothing. I waited nervously for about ten days, thinking he might have dropped eggs that were still incubating, but no vermin appeared. We played a lot of Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterwards I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice.

Hunter S. Thompson: Hell's Angels

& then The Master comes along

Several of us have been playing around with moving text in the last couple of days – Karri Kokko, Eileen Tabios & Ernesto Priego on their blogs, Tom Beckett & myself at As/Is. But compared to the Formula One master, we’re just mere amateurs playing with pedal cars in the back yard..

To see the real stuff, check out what Jukka-Pekka Kervinen has just posted, either through the link at Nonlinear Poetry, or directly here. & it’s not just a single piece, it’s a post with infinite depth. Refresh & another variant appears. Refresh again & yet another…& another….& what the hell are you still doing here? You should be admiring the miracles of the infinite universe of J-K.P.
 

Les Mémoires d'un saint

 
My paperback book of Magritte paintings is, short of cutting out the pages, too thick to scan. So I'm cheating, posting a painting here, & using that as the URL to which the poem at Series Magritte is linked.

& cheating a little bit more, because it's actually one of those "genuine oil paintings" reproductions. But it was either that, or having a watermarked illustration.....
 
 
 

Karri Kokko

posts a moving hay(na)ku.
 

gone
the way
of the gonzo

driving instructions

light brakes where notion shines
 

the young

I don't want to be like my parents and
say I wish I was still a kid so I can do
this or that. I don't want to spend my life
wondering. I want I to know.

13 year old Nicole, from Michigan. Her blog is These are my poems. Criticize all you want. I don’t care.
 

& the old

Two elderly Australian bocce players face two-year bans from the sport after they tested positive to banned drugs. Both were taking medically prescribed beta-blockers as part of their heart medications when they gave their urine samples during the Australian championships which were held last year.

The man is understood to be particularly distressed at the test results, & grave fears are held for his health.
 

iraQ & A

Q. When is an interrogation not an interrogation?

A. When it's being conducted by Australian Intelligence personnel in Abu Ghraib or other Iraqi detention centres. Then it's called an interview.

Senator Hill concedes Australians did interview prisoners but they were not involved in any interrogations.

The Name of the Rose

is Jacques Prévert.
 
 

Adding

Jordan Stempleman's Growing Nation to the blog links in the sidebar.

Have also added, in the other links section, Walleah Press, a small Tasmanian publishing house who have graciously included pelican dreaming in their ever-growing list of links to Australian & overseas sites. & have also added Softblow, the fairly recently begun poetry e-zine out of Singapore which is developing into a very interesting journal.
 

Avec Prévert

Garçon. A new
tablecloth
please. This
one has
poems
spilt upon it.

*

Today's
specials are
spelt out on
the table-
cloth. After
you have
read them
please ball
the paper &
place it in
the finger-
bowl. I hope
you like
the flower
that un-
folds. It is the
special
sans paroles.

*

Fucking
Prévert. He
can pay for
the tablecloths
next time.
 

An intercepted missive from the Napa Valley Health Inspector

Dear
Ms Tabios.
I do hope

your
dog washed
her paws before

taking
part in
the culinary adventures.
 

Big Bridge

Despite trial & tribulation of an extreme order, Michael Rothenberg has brought out a new issue of my favourite e-zine Big Bridge. The contributor list is stellar!
 

Force Frappe

It is said that these days it is not necessary to test a nuclear weapon to know that it will work. But when I was growing up, in the days of the Arms Race & the Cold War, nuclear tests were all the go.

In New Zealand we didn't have the paranoia of nuclear strikes & bomb shelters. Our fear was more real, a fear of the impact of the tests, because the South Pacific was a favourite testing ground. The U.S. used Bikini Atoll; the English tested their bombs either on the mainland of Australia or on islands off the coast. & the French? Well they used Mururoa Atoll which was so close to N.Z. that there was an earthquake everytime they set a bomb off. They started in 1966, & didn't finish until less than a decade ago. The report below, from a speech in the New South Wales Parliament in 1995 condemning the French for carrying out another test, covers the history.

In 1966 France moved its testing program to the South Pacific. It resumed atmospheric tests instead of underground tests. Those bombs were detonated using either barges or balloons. On three occasions the bombs were dropped from high-flying aircraft. I refer to a number of incidents in relation to the safety record of the French nuclear testing. In July 1966 a safety firing was conducted at Mururoa. It was designed not to explode, and it did not. However, the bomb fragmented and the case broke apart, resulting in the dispersal of plutonium. In order to contain the radiation, the French simply covered the contaminated area with bitumen. In September 1966, just following that so-called safety firing, President de Gaulle attended another test at Mururoa. It is reported that due to his impatience the bomb was detonated despite adverse wind conditions, which resulted in radioactive fallout to all islands west of Mururoa, including Western Samoa - 2,000 miles away - Fiji and the Cook Islands.

After a nuclear test on Fangataufa atoll in 1968 it was said that the atoll was so heavily contaminated that all tests were conducted on Mururoa for the next two years. It was recommended that humans not visit Fangataufa atoll for six years. In 1970 the French defence Minister flew into Mururoa and took a swim in the lagoon six hours after a detonation, to placate the critics. French atmospheric tests have resulted in widespread fallout of radioactive material on many countries bordering the South Pacific, including a further disastrous account of fallout on one of the Polynesian atolls in 1971.

Despite these slight difficulties, President de Gaulle's atmospheric tests continued until 1974. International outrage finally forced France to move the South Pacific tests underground from 1975, but the testing continued relentlessly. A further eight underground tests were conducted in the 1970s. One test in 1976 was infamous because radioactive gas did not escape along the predicted path and, according to media reports of the time, technicians were still trying to find out what happened to it. A further 103 bombs were exploded in the South Pacific atolls between 1980 and the moratorium in 1992. It is believed that, in total, France has exploded 191 nuclear weapons during its testing program - 17 in Algeria and the remainder in our ocean.

An Australian Government report states, "There seems no doubt that nuclear explosions have damaged the structure of the surrounding reef at Mururoa." In 1987 Jacques Cousteau found what was thought to be manmade cracking or fissuring during inspection dives. However, France is not too worried about this cracking. It claims that the volcanic rock underneath is unaffected, but admits that the basalt rock can be fractured up to 400 metres around the bomb site. It is best to think of the atolls as Swiss cheese: as each explosion is moved to a different location, it creates an underground cavern. There is a pattern of them across the atoll. President Chirac wants us to believe that such a radioactive honeycomb is safe forever. It is important to remember that the French do not have a good safety record with regard to nuclear testing; in fact, its record is very poor.

& not content with that, agents of the French Secret Service blew up Greenpeace's flagship Rainbow Warrior, a major participant in the on-going flotilla of protest boats that blockaded the test sites, in Auckland Harbour in 1985, killing one of the crew.

So forgive me if I find a certain black humour in the news announcement that a French company is seeking to mine for uranium in Australia's heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. (Think Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon for U.S. equivalents.)
 

what was said / what was meant

We
have no
intention of bombing

Iran.
Leaving that
to the Israelis.
 

Infinite or out

My belief that the web was infinite has been dealt a savage blow. I cannot find an image anywhere of a particular Magritte painting, even though he did three with the same title & either of the other two would suffice at a pinch. I'm pleased that the poem stands pretty much by itself.
 

Some rain recently, & so the green has reappeared. From a distance smooth; but up close spiky, irregular. Marsh grasses with heavy seed heads, tall enough to hide any oncoming traffic on this country road. I drive sedately, but even so butterflies die on the windscreen.
 

The Disabled Were Used To Test The Gas Chambers. Don't Tell Me That They Are Useless

I don't know of any other way to describe the above post on Jim Ryals' The Lawyer Novelist except to say read it & weep.
 

Chameleon

Every time a different poem, a different
context, but the biographical note remains a variation
on the one theme. How I was born in Hokitika
in New Zealand sixty-three years ago, have
done this / that, published here / there, am now
living in Rockhampton, Australia. It's the truth, no
denying or escaping that. But scared
I will give too much away if I put too much in
I leave out the most interesting parts. Now only
the bare bones are revealed; & reading them
more than once is more than boring. & that's
just for me — think what it must be like
for other people who follow the sport.

So I have decided to write a chameleon poem,
submit only that but change the biography with each
submission so that meaning, subtexts, even
the very sound of the poem are transformed
by the information that accompanies it. I have
beginnings, have biographies, though which
is which is open to debate. Put it down to the fact
that my mother spoke rapidly, had a tendency
to blur her words so that I was never sure
if it was aliens or Raelians who had
abducted & cloned me when I was nine. Sent
the clone home she believed. Left the
real me wandering the world.

He  Me  We

grew up to be R2-D2, grew down
to be George Bush senior with chromosomes
so damaged by the cloning process
that any male offspring would almost
certainly be intellectually impaired.

Set out to prove Fermat's last theorem
but were beaten to the punchline.

Changed our name to Richie Valens.

Were so badly scarred in the plane crash
in which Buddy Holly & the Big Bopper died
we pretended we had died as well, disappeared
into another name change & forged a will
giving our new selves as the beneficiaries
in the hope that the cyclical nature of fashion
would make us popular again in thirty or so years
especially since our death had happened
in such dramatic circumstances
it would probably inspire a Hollywood movie.

It was a good call. We have lived off
the royalties & on an abandoned oil rig
in the Southern Ocean ever since. Spend most
of our time refining the definitive piece on
whether Procul Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale
contains more of Bach's Air on The G String
or his Wachtet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. But we
cannot agree. So in the meantime, in between times,

he
writes the poems

I
write the bionotes

& occasionally
we write to one another.
 

big things.....

Kong is King

small things......

I always like to leave a line between the end of a post & the "posted by" that follows. Up until yesterday all I had to do was hit the enter key. Now Blogger has decided that's not enough, edits the post & omits the blank line.

So now I have to put a space or something to achieve the same thing. What else have they changed?
 

r.i.p.

Years ago, in the belief
that it was a book of
short stories by Arthur Miller
whom I knew of as the author
of Death of a Salesman & the
husband of Marilyn Monroe.....

small things.......

I like the way Arabic blogs appear in the referrers' list with the number on the lefthand side.

Thank you, César

for your Antipodean assemblage.

When I was growing up in New Zealand I was taught that if you drilled a hole directly through the Earth you would come up in the Iberian Peninsula. It always seemed a long way away.

Now as I learn, with more precision, that if I'd started digging from my then home in Hokitika I would have exited in your home in Grijó

the
distance doesn't
seem that great.

The Numbers of The Chatelaine

In a recent incarnation as part of the flotsam & jetsam that bobs along marking the flow of the universe I remarked in an email to Eileen Tabios that of course I had seen an item she’d posted to The Chatelaine's Poetics because I was one of her five billion peeps.

Eileen, although by nature a conservative person, is definitely not a member of the FLUX SUX brigade; & since five billion is the next significant number (based on the Laplace operator, the sum of the second partial derivatives of a function) after the twenty million & some change she'd previously been quoting, she quite happily accepted this amended figure as the current readership of her blog.

So when I received an email today in my hotmail account with the subject 54868179 satisfied customers and still counting, I thought it was a rare act of grandstanding from her. Then I saw that the sender was New Diet Pill, realised the error of my ways, & wondered what the relationship was. Decided that what the writer of the missive was doing was contacting the readers of La Chatelaine & offering them the chance to regain their trim, taut, terrific figures after over-indulging in the gourmet (gourmand?) recipes – leaving aside the Achillean ones - & wine lists that they had discovered there.

I think you should ask for royalties, Eileen. Even at a cent per customer that's an awful lot of books that Meritage could publish.

(& not to forget Achilles. As I bobbed along I was pased by a whaler whose sailors were singing a sea shanty as they trimmed the sails. The chorus went:

Oh soon the town of Gloucester will glimmer so.
The ladies waiting there will shimmer so.
Such a pity my balls met the trimmer, oh.
For me it'll be basted turkey for dinner, oh.)

Kung Hei Fat Choi

A stamp from an earlier Year of the Rooster when the world was a different place.
 

Indentured, or one more reason why this is no country for old men

My broken tooth came out last week. Which means that the plate that age has determined should grace my lower jaw needs to be added to.

It's something I've had done before. But that was in Sydney, where you'd go into the dentist one day, they'd take an impression, you'd come back the next day & they'd extract the tooth & put in the amended denture.

Here there is no connectivity. Once you've had the tooth out you're on your own to find someone to do the next part.

So I rang the recommended dental technician - one of the only two in the city - yesterday, to be met with the message "The office is unattended. Please leave your name & contact details & we'll get back to you." Which I did & which they did, today, their turn to leave a message which included "We are only open on Mondays, Wednesdays & Thursdays."

So I rang back. To an hour of busy signals. Finally got through, explained what I wanted. Was offered an appointment in August.

Am rather proud of myself that I did not become arrogantly abusive which is how I usually react to such levels of service. Enquired politely why, if they are that busy, did they only work three days a week. Was given a convoluted answer which was not an answer but I must have pressed some button because I was offered an appointment in two weeks time.

Get me back to the big smoke!

To whoever

Googled egyptian eye sockets looked black and what made it look black and it has to rhyme with (which is where they ran out of space to enter more words) & ended up at pelican dreaming, if by chance you come back again the answer is kohl.

Avian harassment

Our cat is a supervisor. Which means that when you go to do something around the house she tags along, finds a convenient tree to sharpen her claws on to get into the right frame of mind, & then settles down to watch, to make sure that whatever you're doing is being done correctly.

So this morning, I'm at the pool checking the pH, the cat watching me, when down from the trees in rapid succession come about 40 blue-eyed honeyeaters which perch on two sides of the pool fence & in the bamboo above & shriek at the cat. She looks at them, makes bird noises back, & then looks at me as if to say "Okay, Buster, you're the muscle round here. Get rid of them." I obliged.

I don't like birds that shriek. Though these have some redeeming qualities in that they're quite attractively coloured, & they hang from branches upside down in their search for insects & such. In Sydney we had noisy miners which have absolutely no redeeming features. They're even more noisy, & extremely aggressive, driving most of the other varieties of birds away from any territory that they take over. They also have a fetish for grey fur, line their nests with it. & in Sydney we had a grey cat (which contracted diabetes & died after seven months of insulin injections, morning & night). The birds would spy her on the lawn & come sweeping down, dive-bombing her, grabbing tufts of fur & taking off as she lay hunched up, paranoid & petrified. Mind you, they probably had just cause because she was a bit of a bird-catcher.

There is another, smaller variety of the same bird family that I have never seen, only heard. It is the bell-miner, whose melodic 'pings' quite often accompany you as you drive through heavily-wooded sections of the highways. It is a sound you listen for, & are delighted when you hear.

 

But if you're not into toys, plush or otherwise

then perhaps you should check out the Spring 2005 issue of Gregory Vincent St Thomasino's eratio which has just been published.

Care for anyone enough to give them Ebola?

One of the range of Giant Microbe plush toys(?) available. The whole range can be found here. As well as Ebola they include HIV AIDS, Hepatitis C & The Black Death.

 

Memory

Just as the
seasons & the sun
& the position of
the other
stars start
growth in plants
& birds to
fly to imprinted
destinations

so, too, do
anniversaries of
certain incidents
in the life
of Giorgio de Chirico
cause bells
to fall silent &
fall to earth.

Antiquities weep
blood. In the
Byzantine piazzas
of the labyrinth
pigeons pause
& whisper
Hebdomeros.

Jill Jones

posts poems from Paris.

new & upcoming

Issue #7 of Word For/Word is out.

Poetic Inhalation has a new issue of Tin Lustre Mobile up, plus new e-books.

& Paul Hardacre asks that the word be spread that submissions for Papertiger Media #5 CDROM are still open. Guidelines here.