Corey Wakeling


Dashed During the Inarticulate Movements

What do you make of the immolation of our terminals
during the attempt to sabotage the backup generator?
It is the desultory target par excellence being a crosshatch of
moving histories; a Pound. The school of
mackerel are predictable, but I suppose I’m frightened
of the grimace of the upheld harpoon, not so much
the barb at the end of the pole under control of the fingertips.
Merce Cunningham couldn’t have prophesised
more with his physical mesostics, couldn’t
have staged a fuller seabird transparency
put up to the sparking light of our terminals, than
all of that calamity. Cage and Cunningham then looks like
the ability to disappear, asking to be fed again, then again.
Yes, the peak hour flooding of the South East exit of Shinjuku
Station. Once again on the gesture of the hour. What
would a jilt to the clock mean? Its immediate collapse,
and the legacy of afterthoughts? It’s funny how
irresolvable the failed tourniquet of our transport
terminals remains overseen by panels of naturopaths
whose holism is lifting the vein above the head, each
and every time, and that’s about all.
Shinjuku Station’s cannonballs conceal wet pitch and rot by
shipworm. The hull is a quagmire without alcove to put your charge.
The boys of fodder know the powder glint not the value
of the hairy rock and so gain will never be the name
of dynamite to them. Dynamite, through whatever medium,
will be a turned nose, a constricting maw, and the trigger
fingers of ten men, horny in the prospector’s capsule, laughing
“stage fright”.
Good day for it.
Close off the in-traffic.
By god, perish the entire hull, let’s be powder kegs of visiting disaster.
Let’s affirm how unstable the great chemical flesh can be; let’s do as
the terminal best allows us. The South East exit. Columns of
grey tile precede the approach of bodies. Every notch of
the compass is accounted for by the appearance of traipsing
agents. It is always hotter underground, and it’s stuffy as hell.
Sweating men and women, and then the sodden man
and woman. The powder keg pair. Don’t expect them to leave
anytime soon. There was a long walk to Kyoto once. Then
again, there was once a pilgrimage, and also meanings for each of
the souvenirs hanging from the stakes of the checkpoints.
Folded paper and pickled daikon and brass bells. To be gone in a second,
that’s not such a pretty notion any longer, en route to trading with the distiller.
Is it because we are all fated to meet with the immigration
officer once or twice? What are these tight lips?
They’re squinting from all the charcoal, aren’t they?
Working a second job, are you? You’ve been assigned to hide your pretty
face, gargoyle, haven’t you.



The Couples

She can feel the sunburn as it comes on better
than I can. It has something to do with being suspicious
of the sulphur-crested cockatoos, the grinning cacophonists.
The forehead’s upward glance spurned during an espy,
scorned. Even with all the gums and prehistoric ferns
and felicity of familiar discreetness, fated to the circumspect
sideways saunter of a rosella.
Neither minds the other, horny
no matter how devastating the heat.
Already coupled. After one another reiterating the couple.
Forever chasing, then yarning on it in gangs. That sounds
like the one or two dozen conversations I’ve heard on
the subject of insatiable appetites. She welcomes a seat as
I moisten my towel. It
could be dusk, does it billow so blue.

Unlike the wide lens of the southern hemisphere,
her hands never catch sight of fire in the dry; the head begins blue,
turning red. At least, she believes so. Imitating the rosella again.
These are predictions, we are wont to this vague observance. Chatting
about the sunburn, once more assuaging the mysterious disappearance
of the ambient chainsaws muffled inside hermitages. Heads nabbed with sacks.
Political cries for help and national succour. The mind unravels,
leathery and beaten lies its concealed observation: that truth, as it
is named, can be found somewhere behind a trapdoor in the pocked grill
of the megaphone. It is all not at all by accident. Male choirs:
can you imagine the sunburnt country practising indoors?
The sulphur-crested cockatoo is as much on TV as indoors. Protesting a
discursive threat on agriculture, that’s the embroidered megaphone.
She asks me to check her temperature. You’d think it was a fever, I tell her.
A blue head persists. Strange politics

of a black t-shirt ravelled by the Ferntree Gully station storm drain.
There is a violence in the cockatoo’s ability to loiter about the
blue skip in groups and not cause alarm. Her and I,
we even thought there was something cute, something
contused about the indifference of their eyes as
they perched glaucomatous in the muck, observing us as
we passed.



Corey Wakeling lives in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Cordite, Famous Reporter, H_NGM_N, Overland, foam:e, Steamer, Otoliths, Poetry Salzburg Review, Willows Wept Review, Art Monthly (Australia), NZEPC, Hawai'i Review, and The Australian Book Review, national newspapers, and anthologies Some Sonnets, The Reader, and Nth Degree.
 
 
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