The lines line up & nothing happens.
What was that about ‘affect', your attitude detached
but still in the black?
...
Night closes in, sea spray
& spindrift
curl around my idle feet
...
Under the dim grey sky of an early evening
in September, that mountain sky
when air rests across the surface of the world
and strays on the body like cold,
...
You enter the suburbs,
drive down through the fair blue distance
swelling at the road's end,
the luminous window
...
When you walk out
into the derangement of earliest morning,
too early, for the stars
still examine you and trees, unencumbered
...
The world does not know it offers nothing.
I am meant to see a white shirt,
whale bone buttons flashing under lights,
the advice of a lissom woman
...
Foam Days
Waves topple
and roll over, spray may
affect visibility
...
Lately, what have you, my arrogance, been writing
in The Pieces, the sense of you in That Library on the shore one of me
let's say
...
The day's evil ends, county of soft air and airport bars
where dog's hair slogs out the horoscope
floats atween logic
nor the Other View
...
All academics are hopeless
is a line I remember from Ed Dorn's
‘The Land Below'. It synchs neatly
...
i.
The dream begins here
on a Good Day, where light
whittles up hands' gold
...
Peter Minter, an award-winning poet, editor and scholar, lectures in Indigenous studies and poetics at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. His poetry collections include blue grass, Empty Texas and Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin.)
Intellectual Perverts
The lines line up & nothing happens.
What was that about ‘affect', your attitude detached
but still in the black?
The event sounds like a feral,
capital sense of timing,
talkback static as it empties all night
clearly & quietly as rain
or a commitment to free speech
as it drains out each Friday
& comes round as incessant, languorous prose.
Every movement is strobed by flash light.
We shake hands, smile
as an art form, like Frederic Jameson
deep in a conversation
going nowhere, that look of euphoria
exactly like praxis
thought through & executed on the upper west side,
per diem covering expenses.
What was that about your organ,
that bit where you wore your heart in your mouth?
As if it really paid attention?
We mingle outside the gallery,
background sucked in like soft cocaine.
You lean up warm against stars
panoramic as a beauty spot
emptied again for the weekend,
neat folds in itineraries matching & fun,
dazzling headspace decorative.