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.

the mid-evening news

The highest wind gust yesterday was officially recorded at 94kph.

It's going to cost us just over $1000 to get the damaged trees trimmed & fixed up.

A broken branch at the local zoo fell on the monkey cage . Two monkeys escaped, but because they were so unused to freedom they just hung around until their keepers came for them.

I am glad so many Iraqis voted. I am sad the U.S. say they have no intention of leaving.

Condoleezza Rice talks in clichés. She'll go far. I notice there's a website advocating her as the Republican Presidential candidate for 2008.

One of the reasons I don't like either George W. Bush or Tony Blair is because their eyes are set too close together. Seen one after another on tv I start thinking I am watching Wind in the Willows.

Mole? Or Badger?

My tooth is hurting again. Glad it's coming out on Wednesday.

Some twenty years ago the state of New South Wales in Australia repealed the law that made consensual sex between adult males a crime, punishable by up to five years in jail.

But they didn't make the repeal retrospective. & so, in a Sydney Court last week, a priest in his sixties was charged with indecent assault & attempted buggery for a consensual act that was committed 23 years ago.

The other party, a teacher, 29 at the the time & who does not deny being gay, claimed in a victim statement that he has led a "wretched life of guilt, shame & pain" which he blames entirely on his encounter. "I had a sense that if I couldn't trust a priest, who could I trust, who could trust me."

The magistrate acknowledged the teacher's sense of betrayal, but rejected other claims that there had been physical intimidation, that the teacher was frightened, that there was post-traumatic stress. He found that the sex was consensual. "The adult victim was aware of the situation he was in & did not seek to leave it."

But although he admitted that "a conviction would not be obtained today" on the facts the magistrate still found the defendant guilty under the laws at the time of the offense. He sentenced the defendent "to the rising of the court" & then declared "all rise".

What remains, however, is the fact that homosexuals active before the law reforms of 1984 - &, to quote David Marr in the Sydney Morning Herald, "that means most gay men over 40" - may still face prosecution for having had sex back then, even though that sex would now be regarded as lawful.

The power has just come back on after being off for several hours. A clear day, temperature up to 38° C (just over 100 F), humid; & then, just after 5 p.m., a small weather cell came up from the south that turned into a mini cyclone, 100kph winds, rain sweeping in. Extremely localised. But a 30 metre high tree was uprooted on our bottom street frontage, smashing the neighbour's fence. A tree fell across our back driveway. Branches came off or broke halfway off the large tree in the backyard and filled the pool. Other branches were blown onto the roof falling across the power lines which were also threatened by more broken branches hanging from the large tree in the front. Fortunately no damage to the house. I rang the local power company & the State Emergency Services & both were round within the hour, orange hazard lights flashing from trucks in the dusk, the older workers complaining about being dragged away from watching the cricket or the tennis on tv, the younger ones having a ball cutting up branches with chainsaws & saws on telescopic poles.

& so, tomorrow, waiting for the Council to come & see what part of the mess is theirs. The tree at the back is definitely their responsibility & possibly some of the ones at the front. Insurance assessors. & no doubt the difficult task of finding a tree-lopper to come & cut the broken branches away cleanly &, hopefully, chip the broken branches & get rid of the mess.

Sometime, if I have time, I may go in & revise the poems at Series Magritte. I have always regarded it as a work in progress, both its open-ended entirety & the individual poems. I have, in fact, revised some of the earlier ones, but for a long time I've generally left them alone once they've been posted.

But the latest poem I posted, Irène, has been bugging the shit out of me. Since its original appearance I have gone back in three times & deleted & replaced it. Version #4 is now up; & though I shall probably dwell further upon it, I intend to leave it alone for a while.

ant doodles

in the
corridors
between
the bricks
there are
perambul-
ants

*

might
be
corridas
if they
are bull
ants

*

either
way
eleph-
ants
would not
fit in
there

The next interview

is up at Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S with Tom interviewing Thomas Fink. Dare I say it, but the piece throbs with a tom-tom beat.

Jukka's new direction

This is an example of what you're missing out on if you're not keeping up to date with what Jukka-Pekka Kervinen is doing at nonlinear poetry.
 

with a churl in the middle of his forehead

I have turned into a curmudgeon.

Today I have rung the complaints department – sorry, customer service department – of a national flour milling & breadmaking company to complain of foreign matter in a loaf of bread. There was a one-inch cube inside the loaf of what looked like a cross between shit & oilslick, uncooked. I suspect it's a raw material from another batch of a different bread variety & their between-run cleaning procedures have gone down the gurgler. The local sales manager is calling around this afternoon to pick it up.

I have also rung the distribution department of the local weekly giveaway paper – a branch of the evil Murdoch empire; how could I resist this - & told them they were stupid for delivering the paper, unwrapped, at night in a rainstorm so that when you found it in the morning it was so sodden it went straight into the recycling. The whole street, & probably every paper delivered within the neighbourhood, would end up in the same condition as ours. I am having a new paper hand-delivered tomorrow.

& I have rung up our swimming pool maintenance people & accused them of stuffing up the pool. Which they have. There seems to be a rather large turnover of staff – I suspect they pay shithouse wages which in Rockhampton means SHITHOUSE - & so all these people with about two hours actual training are sent round supposedly to maintain the quality of your pool. The supervisor is coming around tomorrow for me to vent my spleen upon.

Plus, I got a call last week from the dentist I visited saying that he'd looked at the x-rays & suggested that I have the rest of my teeth pulled out. This from a dentist who has to refer me to an "oral surgeon" – now there's a job for you, Tom – because he doesn't think there's enough tooth showing to extract what's left without an operation. For you, my dear sir, two words.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's

It has been raining for most of the last week. Not heavily but continuously, about 18mm - ¾s of an inch – a day. The rain has cooled the place down by several degrees, 25° C. today where a week ago it was 35, has turned the countryside green, but has only left a pittance of water on the beds of the totally dried-up lagoons & barely increased the levels of those that still had water in them. By my calculations it would take another 1-2 months of this level of rain to bring them back up to the levels they were when we arrived 18 months ago.

On both the Yeppen Yeppen lagoon – a couple of hundred metres away from our house - & the Woolwash lagoon – a couple of kilometres away – there are a single pair of pelicans. Most have headed towards the inland lakes which are filling up from the seasonal monsoon rains that drench northern Australia at this time of the year & flow south. I do not know why these few remain. Maybe they've been appointed as caretakers, or maybe they just don't want to follow the crowd. They have the lagoons pretty much to themselves, though a couple of weeks ago I watched four hawks or kites, some sort of raptor anyway, perch on fenceposts beside the Woolwash &, at regular intervals, take off & rake the shallow water with their claws, perhaps in search of the small fish that inhabit the lagoons, perhaps newly hatched turtles, but whichever one, now in danger because there is no depth left to escape to.

The river is muddy & fuller than it normally is. Its catchment area is much further north, further inland; there are anecdotal stories of it flooding locally when there hasn't been any rain for several months. The last big flood in Rockhampton was in 1991, a combination of heavy local rain as well as in the catchment area. The city was isolated for three weeks. When the river floods, it spreads across the flood plain from the north & west, circles south, & joins the lagoons together until they form a second river that meets up again with its current course east of the island that the southern part of the city has become. The airport is on the flood plain, the highway, at best, only a metre or so above it.

The river has changed its course over the millenia; it has emptied into the sea at various points within a four hundred kilometre range. The chain of lagoons mark the meandering of the river at some point, some points, in its past.

Lethargy -
an alternative
to fossil fuels.

New Directions at Nonlinear

Check out Jukka's new work at nonlinear & selfsimilar.

wonderful stuff!!!

have added Irène or Forbidden Literature to my Series Magritte.

le temps qui passe

I
fumble through
the daylight hours.

At
night I
am equally blind.

John Coltrane
quoting from
'Fascinating Rhythm'
in his solo
on
Milestones
is one of
my favourite things.

thanks, harry, for giving me an escape route

A comment by harry k. stammer about the hay(na)ku posted yesterday has offered me a much more personally-acceptable first stanza.

You
know it's
heavy medication when

etc.