Chris Brown


Awe-stralian sublime

Cool and warmer air sparring in a doorway.
An island locked in the arms of its interior.
Here a photo of a dust-storm in the rough
shape of Uluru on a shelf in the post office
(Also a bottlo and a papershop). If that’s not
country enough the new year streets are quiet
seeming wider (“town’s dead” said the driver).
And the weather’s reel of matching icons till
Salvation. Still games will be fixtures so look
alive! Their shirts: bold and self-referencing.
You can watch the game as you play it…back.
Trees and machines make up the ambience.
You don’t miss what isn’t there until it’s_____.
(Instant still rings louder than a latent hum.)
We can’t pick smoke not even wind-affected
vestigial flight from cloud. Plan becomes
confusion. Ash monument. “It happened
so quickly.”



By your credo

A skywritten holy
wish and you thought
a tag on a carriage an
optimal visibility some
gesture: for ephemera
it’s grandiose

All topical I mean
obvious but irresistible
so leave it alone
crowds checking out and
these we relish to tell you are
just the minor triggers

Just an ad small fee
for what we receive
and that reminds me
mostly unopposed
to here this the present
though the endless odd-intentioned

prompts (LIVE DREAM (no pressure
no pressure)) seem helpful
in their way…dials climb
may rave yet tangentiality
was never madness here

No risk like impunity –
so do it…borderline at
the wheel coasting quietly
home and dismissing the real
the lights and omens those tedious
but mainly spectral police on the trail



Blue Lounge

Swift escort for a placard un petit coup in how you pay.
Some goose eggs the whig in his ball cap and sobriquet.
And walks. Stealth-raked skies:
[O’] pyne’s parting gift. How’s
tricks in the harmy? As long
as your world stands still
washed out millennial fatigues are all context. If
you’re leaving town the traffic’s locked
and if you’re staying.
There may be still be time.
Before the voiceover’s right of attorney
pathetic fallacy apropos a voiceless environment.
So we communicate: design of open plan
living and what draws you in draws you out
(as if you weren’t already in. In and of). Here
is my life in pictures and now my camera has
a phone. Though mostly we just txt.
High adventure in Belmont. In sub
urban Maitland or Charlestown City
the vision’s renewal
the prize acquisitive
then why not keep it.
A few sunstruck cadets
though why in fickle History
is the audience
always standing be
hind the sovereign when he speaks.
Neon decorates
but mainly feeds off the wreck
and all of its regular treasures.
Among the medals and the lanyards
we go looking for a common ground.
Having lived our own rich histories
of oversight or underthinking where
dashing titles rhyme into self-parody.
(What could save them now?) We’d
like to think
for the trials of the past
we’d learn to speak again.
In the break we nick off
in the Escape –
for mountains the sound
of birds and frogs
and a failed media
moratorium. (Those digs:
you couldn’t imagine
a less military dorm.)
Just lying there
rinsing the greens
dicing the carrots
clearing the mail
the FYIs
we cross sweet
Daisy Cousens –
vamp “Provocateur”
of the New Philosophy.
If they are doing their job
earning their keep
this reply (riposte?) is
hardly what they had in mind.
It is albeit from where we stand a test
case for how far the human voice will carry.
Sound travels this far. At least. The
metre spikes either way. Alone in
the studio. Widowed to my radio
in the midnight! Plain routine (to
night): my dream residency.



Untitled

The Dream itself to leave it all behind – so say the towers on the range.

                               Soluble by Smiths or thereabouts
                               at least the radio knows its limits.

It’s lost now cue the audio romance. Windows green for miles. In a seam
less sympathetic build we’d live fairly in the hills make us snug between

                               a pressed earth floor and moss roof
                               and reconciled though secret nails

hold the place together. Coffee or conversation are what we need at this
midpoint. The road ramps off to playgrounds. Though all passengers are

                               soundly entertained. Their ears cupped. It all
                               streams by…cows the creek the trees the bell

birds…familiar song we could never put a face to. Again the radio
searching…coarse…but clearing: “What’s on your mind Australia?”

                               Annie Lennox: “must be talk-ing to an
                               an-gel”. (All attempts to sing along are
                               doomed.) ……………………………………….

Directions should be easier than this then I’m reading Voss on a verandahh.

                               Where imagination eclipses history
                                              becomes history.

                               No map as frontispiece but no notes.
                               (No wonder then they get so lost.)

The book’s a bargain hardback brick. Now closed. Bequeath it to the house.



Till cup be hid

The mind:
so much as so little else on it –
Ere thrice my
glass mislaid!

-

Like in your eyes I
become the distant recent past.

-

Warm tenor.
Then Japanese.
Then Allegory:
where everything’s about
onething else (what it’s really
about).

-

Ahh the

very irresponsible
service of alcohol

and if this all takes me back

Involuntary Memory
changing
subject

-

Chuffed moon.


(My glass!)

-

And like Paul Weller
and Tory Crimes
played drums for The Clash.

-

And the house on two clear levels
and the party out with invitations
(icy catalysts) that clearly define it.

_

50!

Decades travel poetry
still a “wilful
subjectivity”?

–

In the open set
the desk’s up for grabs

and not a song goes the distance
                even the dedicated

                               my love
                               and the dance

-

“getting late”

“still early”



Owing (and adding) to saturation

Topical risk
(adds to saturation)

adds nothing

-

Trespass
                (just leaving
the house)

present landscape

                of a new domestic
                genre

Like even new reactive
England under Br/exit
got cold feet

                and forgot
to bolt

its doors
                               in time


“There will be lots of death”

                (Countably)


                To graph more
than finance (one

universal virus destroys another)

yet the fear
that Present Landscape
vindicates an economic

model of leadership

                (Politics)


If this is war
and if the Hilton’s
“like a prison”

we’ve never been…


                (Blank

                comparison)


                So this

                “prison”

                (isolation)


Or…

all our little
ritual chancing on
essentially human

                discretionary law

We rehearse:

Just say…
just tell them

(you had
no wireless)

-

Why are we
alone here

why
not in prison

-

Amped late slotted
                surf talk
on the stairs

Light
                traffic passing

for the sound of the shore

Perplexed magnetism of the
particular Person of Interest
at the limit of an animated

leash

-

(Was all Yesterday
beachy nostalgia the
Landscape of retro
spective reliance)

-

Was all TV

-

How
many’s
a crowd?


I dream more

-

The sea goes out grey to its limit

Today and tomorrow the only
place we’ve been

(Promise)




Chris Brown is a poet and teacher living in Newcastle, Australia.
 
 
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