Stu Hatton


in the lower branches

a transparent soup
thinned by numb amnesia
is all that trickles down

while money rises
like a kind of heat



getting to the point

A story worth the name
will not tell itself.

‘No risk, no story’? Sure,
but who could risk telling it? Who

could suffer another bland tale
re the risks of taking no risks
(to be housed discreetly under glass,
eyes unable to turn,
sky refusing to darken, etc)?

Or else it’s the same old
(stranger-than-) fiction, e.g.
‘my aborted career
as a vending machine’.

Nowadays it seems redundant to ask,
‘Am I pretending?’
or ‘Are you a trap?’

One may declare oneself a sensualist
by falling asleep
on a treadmill, snifter in hand.

What is left over
should be noted:

the tired inward eye clouding,
buying into the gilded sweat

of above-board success,
what with its chummy public purse
& occulted KPIs

& how, during a dance
so clumsy, so forced,
the words tactfully skirted until now
are barked atop a flimsy mandate.



trailing

Walking the trail you choose when you wish to see no one.

                The morning dew that settled on your beard may have evaporated, but you still wear tangles of grass on your jumper, a badge of birdcrap on your cap.

                Searching for something to search for … Stopping to piss by a tree.

                Once again you will try & fail to build a sky of your own out of sticks.

                Having shifted allegiances from (1) forbidden pleasures to (2) unforbidden pleasures to (3) being without allegiances, you feel you can’t be far from fluking a way through your own defences.

                For now you work at not being an idiot, drifting into dim mornings of surreptitious note-taking, strumming your newfound composure. Yes, you’ll write—if not to keep warm, then in a bid to keep yourself awake.

                You rest your blood as the sunlight allows, knowing there are shortcuts to tracing that which doesn’t (yet) exist. But why go to such lengths to disguise what you want to say?

                From a certain angle, as you approach the pine litter, mushrooms appear like floating coins. These little beauties are known to bring fever & drizzly visions. But fool that you are, you do not forage. Instead you vow to dodge towards the present, as if it were a sign there for all to see, like some obscene gesture of the chin.




Stu Hatton is a writer and editor. He lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country in Victoria, Australia. He occasionally posts things at https://outerblog.tumblr.com/.
 
 
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