hands so cold
fingers cold
tucked under legs
sitting in insect hiss
...
the millennium train
whips past
the tollway to the Harbour Bridge
CHANGE GIVEN CHANGE GIVEN AUTO COINS ONLY
...
these are the long years and these years
are the years which pass quickly.
these are the middle years.
these are the years when we realise
...
born in a de-mountable, there you are now,
fifty-something years gone by not a disaster,
in the centre of the car-lined road,
a paper bag
...
Artworld Theoryworld Mediaworld Infoworld Touristworld Olympicworld Foxworld Bushworld : Oneworld
Susan Buck-Morss, Art in the Age of Technological Surveillance
...
if you haven’t been lost
at the showground,
in the bush, in Westfield Plaza,
on an island
...
I’ve forgotten what to do
and I should be keeping that
to myself
not to be too lyrical
...
throttled and threatened
with being thrown
from the third tier
of the bricked-up block.
...
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
...
these cold, known objects
are not very likeable –
aluminium frames
& curved glass with optical tricks –
...
what's graspable
on the starless night
of the blackout
as the gleaming cars
...
Pam Brown (born 1948) is an Australian poet. Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria, and her childhood was spent in on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. Since her early twenties, she has mostly lived in Sydney. She has made her living as a silkscreen printer, musician and film-maker, has taught writing, multi-media studies and film-making and worked from 1989 - 2006 as a librarian at University of Sydney. She lives in Sydney, Australia. From 1997 to 2002 Pam Brown was the poetry editor of Overland and since 2004 has been the associate editor of Jacket magazine. She has been a guest at poetry festivals worldwide, taught at the University for Foreign Languages, Hanoi, and during 2003 had Australia Council writers residency in Rome.)
Rehab For Everyone
hands so cold
fingers cold
tucked under legs
sitting in insect hiss
low white noise
gas heater undertone
no other sound
nothing
almost asleep,
a car pulling up the hill
a currawong
does that shrill thing
into pink air
a huge open yawn
almost breaks my jaw
the pen that makes the marks
alters the angles of the letters
a patch
of yesterday’s chocolate
stuck to my corduroy sleeve –
a signal
imagined and interpreted
we look back
at the years in the tops
waiting to be taken out of time
red brick
wall map of Australia
grass green carpet
mustard coloured plastic chairs
clumpy piling on the mittens
mitts on the keyboard
pushing thoughts and jingles
out
to Dublin to Seattle,
Adelaide, Kane'ohe,
Faversham, Glebe
sadly notating dim trivia
me-minus-you
outside community
literary festivals
can’t help anyone
like a rehab book sale
making mistakes,
so different
from being morally wrong
in an unsettling world
it’s a rabbit life,
built the walls from Castrol cases
black tyre ribbons
strewn
like a giant’s licorice
under the striated cutting
siding on the highway,
say goodbye
to the Woodford bends
sometimes the clunky
can incandesce
but I want to know
how to vitalize gawkiness,
sometimes
I’m in my no-mind sometimes
in a technological mindlessness
sometimes nowhere near limber,
although that’s unusual
some people
just float along all the time
accumulating the placid
sometimes
when you think you’re going down
you’re not,
you’re going straight ahead
to a utopia of modernity.