Bijou

Collated extracts from an epic prose poem, written between 1991 and 1997.

Stop!

When the phone call is over and they’re wheeling you back in,

three green pills in a plastic cup later, on an all night bus ticket, changing seats.

Watching your clothes wrestling with each other in the tumble drier in the laundromat

when tomorrow comes and it’s raining the globe is blown.

‘Insert Coin Here’ beside stamped instructions, next to coin slot,

(like we’re too dumb to work that out!),

and then scratched beside that, with arrows,

‘Try chewing it first…

If you have teeth.’

Who ever you could not explain to, who ever you could not make understand.

Written somewhere else, which must be found, on the other side of town, holding it up to the light

when the shadow comes, you’re just going to have to believe me now it’s over,

when I found it just kept missing, just stretched out.

Timing is everything, the less you know the better. If they’re laughing at the small jokes save some of the good ones, leave what’s been crossed out and get out of town.

Tonight, when they let me out, I’ll hide here, where no one ever goes, at the end of the movie,

when the ring of hand drawn stars circle the painted snow capped peak through the gelatin under the glass encased cathode light gun, aimed at all of us.

Achievements which changed the world during the commercial breaks.

So, the world changes anyway, no matter what, stay tuned when they say, ‘The End’.

It was real after all.

A ring of smouldering red and white lights were reported to have appeared above the city’s furthest outlying suburbs where the poor people lived for a number of hours on the night he awoke from the post operative anesthetic sleeping spell and grabbed the buzzer.

Desert Island

The proliferation of the televisual culture is evidenced by the graffiti spray clad cities and public suburban spaces. These are an expression of a desire to conform to a global culture through mimicry. This indicates a similitude in the source of influence. There is a saturation point of information absorption.

The computer has the potential to make every video camera an electron microscope.

A young couple strode by carrying a baby in a plastic crib.

The young ghost man waited by the grave. He had been an announcer at the local radio station on the late shift.

Then came the evening when her voice purred from the reels.

On the console he searched the schedule for her name.

He had seen her only once.

In his imagination, running his fingers through her hair’s wisps of sugary golden brown. He had spent his life wondering whether they would ever meet.

Of all the nights he had worked in the radio station the most memorable event had been the occasion when the security alarm issued from the darkened wing of the aged home over the way. He telephoned the police and stated his name very clearly to the operator when she requested it as if he were speaking into the studio microphone.

In the broad daylight of the hot afternoon the car entered the petrol station.

One of the front wheels just outside the range of the driveway hit the curb and sent the front right corner of the car into an airborne hop. Rhythmic tribal music blared from windows. The car screeched as it skidded out of a patch of oil and petrol scum and came to a halt. The car stopped on the alarm bell hose and its continual ringing throttled the air, bringing more attention to its occupants. Adding to the general din the station manager began shouting in a stiff voice having already been risen from his chair beside the TV on the counter and he came out into the filling area after witnessing the vehicular aerobatics. He reprimanded the car’s occupants, all of whom wore expressions behind their sunglasses as though they cannot comprehend the source of his indignation.

The thought of where he might be without her in ten years from this quiet fireside Christmas Eve caused the strange silence that she had just asked him about.

But, he could not bear to mention, or even conceive of this thought, which lingered as a lurking mystery in his subconscious until it had driven her away.

He paused for a moment in silent recognition, ten years later.

Some people when in pain are at first compelled to speak about it all of the time. Later they don’t like to talk about it.

While her twin was enjoying the evening in a bowling alley with the champion swimmer and his parents on the evening they had free from the convention, the other was dripping acid into the third tumbler of the casino’s vault.

He held a flower in his coat’s breast pocket.

The lock on the bus’s luggage compartment would later be dusted for finger prints as its occupant worked the binding tape away from his hands and mouth.

Twisted the wire’s exposed end and on contact threw a tiny blue spark across the terminal.

He worked franticly. It was imperative that the string of lanterns on the harbour foreshore be lit that evening. The coded message had to be deciphered.

The flower was very old, forgotten and pale, with its scent and colour drained by the wringing through of the dry-cleaning fluids.

Gorging himself on chocolate coated peanuts by the fistful.

A supermodel had been bitten by an amoeba and there was a dermatologist, a cardiologist and a general physician assigned to her while she recovered. All of them flown thousands of miles to the island by chartered helicopter. Children cried out in hunger. The train kept on rolling.

What will they think in five hundred years? That’s what they think there.

Clapping some public display of wanton obscenity as if that were the height of contemporary entertainment.

They were eating salt.

She was wearing heavy make-up to conceal that bruised eye.

The ex-cop on the motorbike became the president and it was thought quite appropriate when he publicly stoked up a joint.

The thief slunk onto the recessed stairwell landing from out of the alleyway leaving him at eye-level with the empty night street to which he listened intently.

Approaching from the trees by the fence at the back of the yard he wiped the sweat from his forehead before knocking.

The lawyer explained to the court that she had been in the bowling at the precise time that the burglary took place and had amongst many other witnesses, a well-respected orthodontist, and his wife, and their son, a swimming champion.

She listened carefully through the stethoscope for the tumblers to drop before changing the plan.

The wrecking crew entered the abandoned polar glacier station.

The bat/vulture eggs were intact in their phials in the laboratory as he adjusted his earpiece and pulled up his thermal goggles.

When they opened the door to admit him he didn’t want them to think he’d just burglarised a business only streets away on that same night.

It was against their policy to buy the red ones.

Radio Studio Log Book

There was a mad rush for the door, I tore my jacket on the barbed wire at the top of the fence. The shred is still flapping there in the wind.

He had fallen asleep and the record was stuck.

As he approached the house from the other side of the road a figure could be seen moving about in the sun room window on the top floor.

Running from room to room he found the entire place vacant.

It was still as secure as it had been left.

That was in a time when everyone smoked, grandmothers, babies, dogs...

There were four soldiers on a beach on leave, I produced a deck of cards.

The screen play was based on a comic book that had its roots in a T-shirt, although the original concept was an anecdote involving a hula-hoop which had been meticulously carved into the heart wood of a twenty eight meter blue gum tree just above the tree house, then they cut it down and I was the only person in the theatre that day, it was air conditioned.

The piano mouse hatched and swam through the pool of the fire retardant fluid the hardest thing to forget was the swivel of the camera and the music that played on its own.

Why is gold so precious?

There was nothing to worry about. According to the private investigator’s report the family Chihuahua had a serious heart condition. It wouldn’t be talking and with no will drawn up we stood to inherit the entire north face of the Moon.

I pushed the invisibility switch and stepped into the chamber all the bullets missed me I was just in time for the quiz show.

The notes were passed in for comparison and the hand writing was different that was long after the day that land fishing became a fashion.

Most of people’s leisure time is arranged to subvert or avoid the notion of death.

Outside the picture theatre the footpath spells out in thousands of spat out chewing gum polka dots that youth was here.

The meter went off the dial for hours.

That’s just what you were thinking.

In the latter part of the twentieth century the incidences of mental illness were rising.

I told her it would be the sound of petals falling, how could I have known it was true?

She always read the ‘Births’ column in the newspaper because she liked to see what names people had given their babies.

Social problems were of no consequence if the economy was running smoothly.

It’s designed to make them think. We don’t want them thinking, that’s why they’re watching.

At midnight on June twenty three, nineteen seventy three a couple seated in a parked car heard weird shrieks from the nearby bush.

Other sightings became known.

I was sprawled out on the ground taking photographs of an orchid.

Workers at a nearby fair ground said this is no hoax.

All four telephone lines rang without reason.

Please stop thinking.

What do I think?

Time will tell.

Dead Letter Office

Two droplets of liquid caught temporarily, your eyes.

Adhesive sticker on a piece of fruit.

Landed in the warehouse.

They had to be flown in.

They had nothing to say and no one to say it.

That was when it was all over.

He sat quietly in the corner of the white marble tower fashioning a bolt from sugar feathers and fell into the basement in the cargo hold the crate skidded I took out the chalk and the wind sounded a screeching girl at the fist fight at the end of the fair outside the pre-dawn casino in the steel cables running at the side of the mast. He tipped his hat and tore off the false beard and mustache all the red control panel lights winked out one by one and the silence of our great altitude took up where the sounds from the engines had been as the sunlight dipped across the continent. Another bundle passed through the door chute this time a brown paper bag filled with banana sandwiches under the string. I was still working desperately at filling off this ankle chain.

Every culture which has existed on the earth was under the impression that it would always be here. The civilizations of today have also created fro themselves a means of self extermination proportionate to their size.

Our refuse sights are prepared archaeological digs.

When the sun hits the big screen I’ll be flying right there beside you.

It happened but I enjoyed it so there was no problem, not everyone does, managing to point.

He wanted to borrow a typewriter from anyone to type out some false letterheads.

All he ever does is drive around.

Don’t forget to buy a kitten, just testing your reflexes for twelve days, maybe it’ll go O.K. on video, she hung up.

He was trying to tell me but I knew he had it wrong, I only wanted to talk to her, I ran after her, he was trying to help him, that made it easier to remember, there was no guarantee that they would be coming back.

There wasn’t a story if you looked hard at it all night long nestled there in the jewel case straw twigs mother’s spit, made it through silent and safe, not really happening, fattened on romantic strawberries, he’d rather sleep on the floor he was like that, the owners of the spaghetti farm stowed him in the ranch-house something snapped he had a lighter, do-it-yourself T-shirt transfer kit, twice the weight price for fruit deemed ‘non-eating ornamental’ and injected with a dose of strychnine to discourage consumption.

I don’t know what you’re talking about and he is running out the door, the telephone must have been tapped, exercising some form of restraint whilst wondering what to do next.

The lid had been taken off and it occurred to him that there was an element in the hot water jug that he might be able to light the bon-fire with, but to no avail.

Acting in the non-acting style, it was in my pocket all along, trying to find something to leave out.

The dinosaur turned into a rib cage cave of plasma organ jewels when it fell into the vent of the volcano, the only catch is that you have to spend time with me.

I opened the letter, sent the final scene plumb askew, as if it really meant something, moving in a liquid form out to get it.

He wants out, he can’t wait to get on.

I’d deciphered that code before, every night it was the same routine, it just felt late earlier.

There was a bit I was trying to avoid.

I immediately formed the city council volunteer task force to make up the short fall, knowing that one day it meant I’d be sprayed with cash.

It was only then I realised there was someone in the bushes.

He’d stay there.

Warning Clouds

Could we be anywhere but here you never saw what they were saying you weren’t there I’m watching what you’re thinking alone on the back of a bus on a street which bears your name.

It’s only the shadows moving up a chairs legs.

If I could have made it out of the arm chair there’s something spiralling in the moat, red jelly tentacles stained black by the ages in the stagnant waters.

Drew the bow and sent the willow sliver bolt bearing the message to the nearest hollow, besieged turrets looking out on all sides at the empty thunder carrot tops the people were hundreds of miles away still running in the opposite direction.

It is an incident omitted from the record of history.

A king trapped alone in the castle some type of land squid/mosquito besieging the castle.

I telephoned the environmental protection agency and now had a bullet in the gun, remembering the two planes crumbling against each other to shower the small town’s centre with shards.

It was a place that was frequented by comparatively barren air traffic lanes.

It was all just a dream it seemed by day anyway.

A path had worked away the colour on the carpet of social security office.

She took his hand as they alighted the bus, they couldn’t wait to tell their friend the secret, filled the TV with murder mysteries just to stop you thinking about life and death.

Having run out of ink the bow string slack bouquet faded by age the king was trapped there in his empty courtyard now more poor than an ash tray full of ravaged, dissected, gutted and disseminated cigarette butts they turned off the lights and divided the left over hamburgers slowly slumped falling from the throne bones de calcified dropped the empty goblet invisible strings of cable TV telephone lines spilling across the city landscape rug in the deserted gallery, anonymous.

The radar and radio telescope found no trace of any of them.

The drive-in was long gone by the dawn obscured hulking pines which became a part of it if she speaks like that unlocking the car boot unwary of the torch light with only a week’s supply of sugar and an old student card and notebook on a Friday night, he pressed the encrypt key.

Ravenous the ship sailed from the city harbour towing the life raft in a safe proximity of the stern and surge of the propeller, on a dare.

His face once the smoothest of all the nobles, made the cymbals chime, the maracas crack amongst the incense mixed sulphurous plumes of red firecrackers splitting in meaty reams, his beard is long and white gliding away on the end of a duck’s beak.

We were there and he was out to dinner, that is all which now remains intact glowing red domes hidden on the forest floor emptying their light as the day gathered that which had escaped as the archway collapsed put a stroke through I’ll meet you there later, causing a hysteria in equal proportion to the towns folks uncertain knowledge.

It wasn’t what I wanted after all.

Albumin

He would not have considered dancing that night if the scent of her perfume had not wafted, waning her eyelids at the top of the stair, when ever it was like that.

“That perfume smells good.”

“I’m not wearing any perfume.”

Tearing the document into a glass of water droplets like an air born plum.

Green are the chariot’s streamers trailing at speed along the beach.

He married a rich woman who would not haul the barrow.

Paper, scissors, stone, jam jaw, sides closing in to create a sphere, mannequin talk, when ever and when it never occurred.

I came back to greet them at the station engaged in a loose concoction of figures and numerals.

Riddles that had no one answer.

I had the precise weight in dew drops with me to clear the palace and idly laze in the garden where the owl skitted at the sound of the couple treading on the branch.

The Moon, she was there with her petals bounding she was coming back later that afternoon at midnight.

You’re going so soon?

Are you asleep?

Who really knew?

Horse Feathers

You couldn’t understand him even if you were really listening the balloon burst the tap was on again. There was a large crowd in he basement glossy black painted brick walls a surge of direction he knew what he was going to do it was about to start he left alone found the hidden compartment, late one night, mumbling into the fireplace, an axe man, walking home by the dawn’s light, somewhere far away a seagull chased a kite.

A train obscured my eyes closed on the dank pillow in the disused cool room on an aluminium fold out camp bed three miles on a double bell and left a space there between the rails.

Having entered a scene that he obviously wants to know nothing about out on the town in Moon City the kids hanging out in the mall before going to see a movie where they belly laugh at the astronomer deducing that the Moon is made from green cheese in the children’s half price day matinee,

we’re closing the covers now, good night.

What was it that kept ticking between the beats hidden somewhere in the gentle stillness there was hardly any talking going on their lips were moving in and out like the bellows beside a blacksmith’s forge, headlights turning cypresses opening the refrigerator door a green toffee apple turned the washing machine into a spun sugar carousel black hewn frosted stone of the hotel door way.

Where she runs to now is only where she can with nowhere yet decided upon, she wasn’t even really there.

She told you she knew she’d get there, somehow.

Carved into that ice clad stone,

I never forgot.

They had left for a while that’s why there was no one here.

She drove away quickly to spend a night on Widow’s Peak.

The circus was in town again and late one night in a shell by the sea where the road became three forks the street lamps flew on across the continent following the shadow as it swept.

It was all over the place.

Found in the corner of a barn and made the international news.

The thermometer’s mercury rose and the desert shed doorway emptied into parallel lines in black, white and grey tones.

Don’t forget to vote by six pm.

This has been based on a true incident somewhere near the back of the escalator queue at the mouth of the electric cave. he held out the links from a heavy gold chain, having examined each page for secret messages.

While wildly improbable the story is possible, picking blackberries from beside the snake hole now its working machines drop the flavours I gave up trying to hide it.

She missed the people she wanted to show things to for every drop we drink there are a hundred that fly away.

There are as many whales as there are corporate monarchs.

Video taping programs from the TV is playing an active role in the Hollywood production process. Traffic at the interchange.

What is there over the orchid laden back fence door, trench over the gate, words you haven’t heard somewhere before have you aloud where the blackboard hung in the fountain, drenched, answered the telephone as at the window it grew dusk.

Tracking beacon and other devices designed to blatantly monitor your every movement was placed by the blinkers of the news media on the premise of the promise of your safe recovery if terrorists move into the back of your sleepy mountain town and steal your car.

They have only joined the social nation in the last year.

For the first one hundred and fifty the language patterns didn’t change that much.

Ticket coin bunting spearmint golf ball penny weather it was the day you were born every day cartoon checking the answers zones blown blurred octave blue talc submarines pulsing out at the back of beyond.

You’ve never been here before.

The time to come is over when the end of the day becomes the late night telephone call.

He flipped a coin and chose between buses it was the one clad with less graffiti publications.

At the bottom of the film canister settled in the solvent pond was this unknown journey, to travel the world and have enough money to never have to speak with anyone.

Black and white twice. They turned their dumpy old house in the slum into a mouse shop and won an entrepreneur’s award.

Since history has caught up with its recording the danger is here.

The farm land left ten inches under sea water after its traditional owners were given sixty cents for the mining lease rights.

Sections of the ocean examined in the context of their descriptions from the previous century bring grief.

They were only school children then but they learned the expense of the potato.

Why do people destroy that which stretches above the ground in favour of a tuber which resides in the dirty darkness beneath it?

A ride down nostalgia’s melancholic alley way we found over turned carts in the desert a broken boarded hut like a mouth with every second tooth missing being covered by the sand and uncovered, evidence that this may have been the place where they stayed as described in the journal.

The ribbons were bubble gum the bronze bust confusing the scene with its thrown silhouette.

She spent the whole night listening to the invisible piano player spun the wheel as we entered the housing development we had to reset the radar as the headlights arced upon the white weather boards, barber’s pole, set among the horses.

Graphite

What ever was beneath the rose sash held water droplets clinging to the dawn pony’s greasy skin.

I can get all the talk I want at the mall bolted the morning dew.

Escalator statues either poised in mystery anonymity or engaged in conversations where you can predict every next question and reply as you’re imagining the script.

Running out from behind the eight ball on the back of the port freight train was going to get there somehow having run out of things to say wondered what names he’d choose to be feeling and looking just like a million dollars worth of mixed lollies.

Out came the creature with the white pancake make up, the manager was there to greet us the tyre a ripped mass of melted black rubber threaded with wire mesh, the motel sign blinked from a momentary power station overload. Even though the landscape was made completely from moulded coloured plastic where the road curved the experts had lead us to believe the scissors were blunt tapped the lint from the harmonica on the heel of his boot.

That wasn’t meant to happen in zero gravity.

Skun the rabbit moth’s wing wagon wheel in the suburban beach cave.

He had given the same lecture last year but had confirmed with revisions, outlining a history of coffee sales involving polystyrene cups.

The decorative decal on the front of the disposable milk shake container was exactly the same as that on the front of the waste disposal bins with the only difference being that the emblem on the bins had been rotated by fifteen degrees.

I know I’ve told you this before but there was tower coming out of the center of the roof of the house which was invisible to the eye unless you were positioned at a certain location a few streets away. There was a rope hanging from its entrance portal above the stairs, its darkness like the space inside of a closed hand.

I had seen it before but never had the friend I shared the house with.

He was standing by idly drinking coffee and quizzically looking at the end of the rope when I awoke and came out of my room.

It didn’t seem very unusual to him that a square portal above the stairs with a rope dangling from it should have gone unnoticed by us all for so long while living there, but then it was only a dream.

I decided this time to climb the rope and see what was up there.

It was knotted and passed through the man-hole sized openings in each of the subsequent floors.

I was so tired that I had to stop and rest on a platform from time to time.

These were identical to each other, devoid of any furnishings and consisting of bare boards and a window in each of the four walls.

I was so high up that the view from them did not encompass the ground and all that I could see were the clouds and shining blue sky.

When I rested my head on its side to look up the column of empty space where the rope ran I could see only vanishing point and its illusion of darkness.

After an inestimable amount of time had passed I could see at last that the summit was just a few floors ahead.

Its roof was made from corrugated iron.

As I placed my feet on the platform of the last floor I looked back down the vast distance I had climbed.

I thought the room I thought until when turning around again I saw a figure beside one of the windows. It was a ghost. My double.

He was trapped there.

After the interesting part of the journey had been dispensed with I was already back down there on the ground floor of the house.

It had been renovated since I began climbing and was in the process of being converted into a hot dog shop, obviously some entrepreneur had decided to take advantage of the street frontage.

None of the machinery in there had yet been positioned correctly or connected to electricity.

There were mounds of curly wood shavings swept into piles on the floor.

As I walked out into the street it was Friday, four thirty five pm.

I woke up.