Today's wildlife drama,

played out beneath my feet—almost literally since they were on the top step outside the back door when I went out to have a cigarette—was a wasp or hornet, all bright black & yellow & the length of the two top joints of my little finger, dragging around a fat-bellied spider not much smaller than itself.

I think the theory is that the hornet/wasp injects, first, some sort of incapacitating agent, then an egg, into the spider, drags it somewhere isolated, begins building a papier-mâché shell attached to a beam or wall, deposits the still live if somewhat comatose spider inside, completes the shell. The wasp/hornet egg goes through its metamorphosis, changes from egg to larva & then to pupa at which point it starts to feed off the spider & grows quite large until it finishes that stage of its life cycle, turns into a horp/wasnet, cracks open the shell & emerges to hunt down a spider.

& frighten the shit out of me!

I'm interviewed

by Sheila Murphy at Jeffrey Side's The Argotist online.

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Young%20interview.htm

"We will pass by poetry & not drop a coin in its cup."
One out of several, sometimes contradictory, predictions I make about the future of poetry.

Unfortunate names #5709

The headline says it all.

DDA gets the sack, Dikshit broom to clean Village

Following criticism from various quarters about the mess and hygiene conditions at the CWG Village complex, the Government has decided to withdraw maintenance responsibility from Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrasekhar has directed the Delhi Government to take charge of the housekeeping and cleanliness of the Commonwealth Games Village. The maintenance and housekeeping was earlier assigned to Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which is under the Ministry of Urban Development and Lieutenant Governor is the controlling authority in the national Capital.

Following the directions, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, along with her Principal Secretary PK Tripathi and Chief Secretary Rakesh Mehta, visited the Games village complex thrice since Wednesday night to take stock of the situation there. She then directed her officers to monitor the cleanliness of the Games village area and all the 34 towers, which will house the delegates and sportsperson during the mega-sporting event. On Thursday morning, Dikshit spent around three hours at the village complex and checked almost all 34 towers. She also reviewed the work being undertaken. The Chief Minister again visited the village complex in the evening to take stock of the preparations.

The Daily Pioneer

Eat your heart out, Methuselah

On the Meritage Press website for Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008, I note:

"My father died when he was 93, &, even then, his death was at least partially due to complications from an amputated leg. Which means there are longevity genes in my family. So it's somewhat ironic that the earliest poem in this selection / collection, "Lizard", written when I was seventeen — 'When one is seventeen, one isn't serious' wrote Rimbaud, in error, but he can be forgiven for he was only fifteen when he wrote the line — stems from feelings of mortality brought on by the teenage angst that beset me at the time.

"As the subtitle of this book indicates — Poems 1959-2008 — those feelings were somewhat premature. But they're still around, since my vision of a neat fifty years of poetry was taken over once again by similar feelings: I wanted the book out there in order to make sure that I was around to see it."

However, based on the title given in a 2009 report on highlights of the previous year in New Zealand literature published in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, I seem to have severely underestimated my longevity. There, the book is called Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1859-2998.

Pity I can't lay my hands on it to see what I'm going to write during the next 800 or so years. Or what I wrote during my Victorian Period.

Khartoum

blodne

Musk bollOx

Okay, color me nekulturny, but the following piece of florid prose for a fragrance pour homme—

Top notes are rosemary, artemisia, coriander, galbanum and lemon; middle notes are carnation, cypress, orris, cinnamon, lavender and jasmine; base notes are sandalwood, fir, amber, patchouli, musk, coconut, vetiver, incense and cedar.—

is so over the top that I think the only name the perfume could be given is OverKill.

The Wonders of Nature

One of the
wonders of
nature is its
ability to re-
use objects
over & over

in similar
or disparate
settings &
make them
new again.
So, once

more a ship,
the waves,
the very sea
shore, on which
a pair of stone-
crossed lovers.

Worried about

being accused of being slack on censorship?

Easily fixed! Just use a mis-spellchecker &, instead, everyone will see & hear just how touchy feely & tasty you really are.

"We don't just get it in from Australia and put it on air. Every time a programme comes in it is looked at by our in house sensors."

samedi

Stars & Stripes Forever

Just before he drifted off into his dotage, he went out & burned down all the band rotundas in the city
      except for the one that would be nearest to the nursing home he intended to move into. That way, he would be able
             to be wheeled out on Sunday afternoons to hear the military bands play marches by John Philip Sousa.

Harley & me

Harley, we were told, was the runt of his litter. Eventually had to be taken away & hand-fed, hand-reared. As a result, quite placid. But less than half the size a crocodile of its age—two years—should be. Most suitable for that most desirable of tourist photos.....Portrait of the artist with a young crocodile. Even so, the jaws are taped shut. From birth extremely sharp teeth.

Belly skin oh so soft leather. Suede. But back samurai armor. Small plates, each containing a bone. Extreme protection.

Today the
postman brought
me a seven-figure
check in payment
for the piece of
thick artist's paper
I'd left under the
front door mat
for six months &
then sold on eBay
as the original
Rauschenburg 
erasure of de
Kooning's nude.

I'm a little bit
worried though.
Modern technology
being what it is
it won't be long
before what I
described as the
vestigial remnants
of the figure are
identified as a
not-too-clear
impression of
the maker's mark,
an image of Kali—
get it? four arms 
welcoming the
visitor—& beneath:
          The
       Bengali
      Coir Mat
      Factories
          P/L.

dakar

I've been a bit slack

getting to work on the next issue of Otoliths. Have now started, & feel like one of those Chilean miners trapped underground & waiting for the heavy machinery to arrive & start drilling down to them. Two months.......

9/13

This written for the future,
something to look back on, to see
what my thoughts were
at the time. A commentary on what
is now before me, how you feast
on the dead, play replay after replay,
from different angles, rewritten
as choreography, a Hollywood blockbuster
with the producers wanting to make sure
the audience gets its money’s worth. It is
what you’ve come to expect; but most
movies are cleaner, have stars that are
paid more for their one performance
than this whole episode would have cost
to carry out. Think on it. Brood on the
implications of what you’ve learnt
in the two days since. The stand-in pilots
had work visas, lived next door,
supported themselves & contributed to
the economy of the country
they have just put on notice. The airlines
paid for & provided the bombs.
The extras paid for their own parts.
There was no need for rehearsal.

He deliberately refrains

from using any of the myriad of post titles that the following news report provokes.....

"Female marine snails living off the Perth coast are growing male sex organs on their heads after exposure to the chemical TBT, according to local researchers.

Curtin University researchers have revealed the snails are suffering from imposex, a condition that involves the development of a second sex organ after being exposed to the chemical.

Unlike garden snails, which are hermaphrodites, this species of marine snail has distinct sexes."

The body language of Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott, consigned to being Leader of the Opposition once more, rather than his obviously desired office of Prime Minister, gives very mobile head when he has a press conference—oops, meant to say he has a very mobile head when he gives press conferences. There is a vigorous nodding, & an equally vigorous shaking of the head from side to side. With most of us, that would mean either nodding agreement or shaking disagreement. Not necessarily for Tony Abbott. The first holds true, but as for the second.....

L. has a theory that the nodding comes when he says something he believes in, & the shaking occurs when he makes what appears to be a positive statement, but his underlying belief is actually the opposite negative. If, for example, he says something along the lines of "I'm highly pissed that the Liberal-National Coalition won't be the Government of Australia," his head goes up & down. If he then goes on to say that "The Coalition will do everything to ensure the stability of Government," his head will go into metronome mode, meaning that what he actually believes is "The hell we will. We'll be as disruptive & destabilizing as we possibly can."

Chasing a clip to prove the theory, I found there weren't all that many of the "mad monk" around, possibly because he's considered neither news- or trustworthy. The one below gives a hint. If someone knows of a better one, please let me know.

harar

& on the 17th day

after the Federal elections, two of the three remaining uncommitted independent Members of Parliament sided with the more rural & regional-friendly policies of the Labor Party, meaning that Julia Gillard now becomes the first elected female Prime Minister of Australia.

A line from Jackson Mac Low

Even a word for it.
Fratricide. The murder
of brother by brother.
Nothing new. But now

returned as redux Kale-
vala. The act turned into
a darkened prose poem
by a Finnish band; the

video & lyrics posted
to a books & literature
group on FaceBook. What
inflections we hear in

the rhythms, how ecstatic,
all wild & dark. But also
randomness. Words given
different etymologies or

simplified to syllables to
attract those bouncing
balls of karaoke. (&, within
parentheses, traces of the

social sounds of whales.) It
won't be long before the
plasma screens of mainstream
radio will be playing it.

a kind of continuity

Tassled Figures
Grion Grion rock painting
Kimberley Region, Western Australia
Date unknown.
(The only dateable evidence for these paintings
is a petrified wasps' nest found
built on top of one. It has
been established as being
17,500 years old, & it is evident
that the painting had been there
for some time before the wasps
built their nest upon it.)



The Promised Land
René Magritte
1947.

mercredi

The

phrase, the idea of, "re-booting a bus" is not one that, even at my most stochastic, I could arrive at. & yet.....

I'm in Sydney, using public transport some of the time. No cash sales on the bus, pre-paid tickets from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. coming out of the city. Ticket scanner goes down, won't accept tickets, milling throngs around the driver. He just tells everybody to sit down sans scan.

Then, out of the city center, he turns the bus off. No lights, no cctv. Darkness. Driver says nothing. You can almost see the combined question mark forming above the heads of the passengers. Then the driver turns the bus back on. Re-booted it in other words. Lights, camera, action. Ticket scanner now working.