The Idea Groves

They rush into the chippie in the woozy rum hours after 3am, the hours of Formica and kebabs. They gather armfuls of greaseproof paper, pungent and vinegary, with small, scrabbled hands. Wee anteater hipsters, foraging.

They resemble bug-eyed thyroid kids, expressions as huge as fists. Undoubtedly, their nails are dirty and feet unclean. They reek of pollen, the wallowing cherry blossoms of Hillhead Park and the West End.

No one asks their names, and no one gives them bother. Folk know better. That’s the way it is with the Chipshop Darlings.

Once, the kid on dish duty tried to break their fragile poise. He gathered his suds and gestured to one of the girls, with a guttural voice and all-right-darlin air. She gaped at him, eyes widening, tears large and hot like infected wounds.

The papers rustled.

Converse scudded across the lino, doors slammed.

The shop fell silent and strangled as a dial tone, and stayed that way for a week. There were recriminations, wallops from the manager.

No one bothered them again.

…


They work at the Idea Grove. It’s fallen into disrepair these days, but the Chipshop Darlings still nurse the dying plants, try to tend them back to health.

That’s why they need the paper. Nothing nurtures the fragile roots of idea cuttings like the warm vinegar teats of fish&chip paper. It’s best harvested at those small hours too, while it’s still warm with drunken rambling and the thrill-gasp evening adventure smell of still-before-bedtime. That’s what works best for the ideas, keeps them cosy and fresh through all kinds of weather. Keeps them alive.

…

No one else much bothers with the Groves these days. They’ve got synthetics, acrylic ideas that rinse at 60 degrees, alloy ideas that withstand road tests at up to 120mph.

In Switzerland, they’re testing a new metaphysic crafted from atomised nylon that holds firm against ninety-seven degrees of scepticism. They built a long tunnel, and fired Eleatic electrons at it, almost at the speed of light. The idea held up well.

They don’t need the Groves.
No one needs the Groves.
Apart from the Chipshop Darlings.

…

The Groves are pretty old, and this is one reason to have faith in them. Although the ideas there have grown gnarly and wizened with disrepair, they’re not dead yet. This may be because they are quiet ideas too; the synthetic manufacturers don’t feel they need to bother with sabotage.

But the grove ideas are there, worming their way into the earth. Persisting.

…

Sometimes the kids take dares at the Groves. Sometimes the drunks in the district wander home via them and piss through the hedgerows. Young, blossoming inspirations buckle under a streak of urine.

The Chipshop Darlings don’t have time to stand guard all the time, though they always worry about the ideas, camp out in the fertile months.

But it’s terrible.

The kids yank handfuls of ideas out of the earth for an afternoon dare, run them to the schoolyard and present them for inspection. No one ever thinks much of these ideas. They’re picked too soon; they wilt like dandelions in a glass tumbler. None of them makes the afternoon; they’re flung to the fields with derision, and the entertainment turns to thumb wars and peanuts.

The kids still bother, because they once caught a beauty. Billy Slater did. He ran fearless as a gunner right to the centre of The Groves. Of course, that was where the witch lived, the bug-eyed witch who would peel off your skin if you ever came near, wrap it round her roots, and cackle. Oh, she was evil. She reeked of pickled eggs and vinegar, hair as black as rotten teeth. No one went to the centre of The Groves. Except for wee Billy Slater.

He ran in, grabbed a good-un, and pelted for the yard. He heard the yells of the Chipshop Darlings and bombed it right out of there, didn’t stop until he was right inside the gates, heaving and panting like an only-just-victorious gazelle.

It was a beauty. The Chipshop Darlings had been nursing this one, tending it with all the vinegar papers they could find. It reeked of promise, a real diamond, right up there with Socrates ilk. Right up with the Swiss.

In the middle of their circle, it glowed. Everyone felt wiser just looking at it, felt good, all understanding and nods. There was sense. The girls grinned, bit lips, embarrassed by a sudden knowing. The boys jostled, abashed but happy with that hot rush of superiority.

Of course, they all wanted it. The older boys demanded it should be theirs, Billy contested – all hands flung in and pulled pieces to their chests. That sublime idea ended up in pieces. Everyone clutched the empty words they had won but, of course, the pieces were nothing. They tried to tape them back together, PrittStick, stitching, Uhu, putty, nails, hammers. Later, they tried water and earth, planting the broken roots in a window box outside the maths class where they could watch it with impunity, notice if it flourished. Of course, it died.

…

The Chipshop Darlings were sad about that one, but they carried on, delicate fingered and ever-eager. They spent hours in city bookshops, rushed back resplendent with copies of Kant and Schopenhauer from the wee corner shops on Otago Lane. These were tucked deep in the earth and vinegar-nourished. They waited, watched and spoke of propositions. Something was bound to happen soon.

…

As ever, something did.

…

The Groves did not belong to the Chipshop Darlings. If anyone’s, they were the Council’s. The Council did not believe in the Idea Groves. The Council believed in flats and supermarkets and parking meters. The Council sold the Groves to Sainsbury’s, who do three-for-two on sausages and 12-pack beers during major sports events.

I guess that’s an idea too.

…

Sometime I still see the Chipshop Darlings, silent and wide-eyed in the West-End cafes. They keep window boxes now, and keep quiet.

The Swiss have moved on too.
These days, they’re making guns.

Fucking Bananas

“There’s no banana in this smoothie,” he says, all portly and righteous. “Excuse me! Waitress! There’s no banana in here.” He wibbles his hands at the glass, frowning at his fruitless drink.
Except he’s wrong.
There is a banana.

I know there is because I just took a big fucking yellow banana from the fruit bowl, peeled it, chopped it and blendered it. I know there is because we don’t have a gleaming kitchen of staff at hand, rushed off their whites, cooking up cordon bleu, dashing round the countertops who might (just possibly) forget the banana. Nope. We have me, and a blender, and a wallop of ice cream. And a fucking banana.

“I can assure you there is, sir. I just made it myself.”

Ooh, he doesn’t like that. Hasn’t anyone told this bitch that the customer is always right?

Well yes, they have.
And if she didn’t think doing so could lose her this shitty job, that banana and ice cream debacle would be dripping down your crotch.

“There isn’t. Taste it.”

I don’t need to taste it, I made it. I toy with refusing on the grounds that I’m allergic to fruit. Instead, I smile the classic well-worn waitress smile, all tucked in teeth and quiet snarling.

“No, thank you.”

“Take it back. I’d like another. With a banana in it.”

I take the fucking glass, which I would drink in the back with a slug of rum, but, as I say, I’m allergic to fruit.
And the soggy saliva of wanker customers.

This time he’s watching, sees the peeling and the chopping and the ice cream. He looks satisfied, like he’s got one over me, or managed to cop a feel.

“Ahh, now that’s better. See, that is a smoothie with a banana in it.”

Well, that it is.

There are other customers, coffees to grind and milk to froth, so I leave the Banana Man for a while, leave him to enjoy his drink and his victory. Until he sticks an arm out when I’m trying to squeeze past with a tray.

“I’d like some tea now. Earl Grey, Pot for 1.”

“Certainly, sir.”

Cafés in Sydney are never so clean, especially not Kings Cross way. It’s a city of cockroaches, all scuttling and beady in the corners, dashing out of bins and waiting for Armageddon to take over. You can always find dead ones curled at the back of cupboards, their spindly legs poking in the air. Black little legs, broken off.

You’d be surprised how much they resemble tea leaves.
A subtle flavour.

“Earl Grey?”



The bastard didn’t even tip.

Why are they together and what does she see in him?

Why are they together and what does she see in him?

Well, it started when they got drunk and she slept with him by mistake. No one would have expected them to sleep together. She was very pretty, with very green eyes that gleamed like a jealous mother of pearl. She was also very smart and had read a lot of books, which she could introduce into any conversation intelligently. Her references always fell in just the right place. She didn’t bring them up to sound clever, but placed them purposefully into her speech as if Nabokov and traffic wardens always belonged next to each other on any library shelf, as if they had been numbered just so in the Dewey Decimal of intuition. Anyone who heard her talk wondered why they had never associated them before.

She had got drunk and he had walked her home, and she had fucked him because when she was drunk she really enjoyed fucking. Ordinarily she would take care of her body with a quiet dignity, but when she was drunk she would accede responsibility like an exhausted mother hustling children into the garden to amuse themselves. Like the children, her body would come home grubby and tired, full of the adventures of freedom. In the mornings, she would pick up her responsibility once more.

When they woke up in bed, she felt a little bad. At this point, she didn’t expect that they were going to end up together. She presumed that they would have some coffee and not talk too much, because he was an awkward boy and would be more so in his hangover. Then she would see him to the door and never phone him, and he would feel bad because the sex had been magnificent. He would wonder how she could have such magnificent sex with him and then never see him again. If it were up to him, they would write a book together on the perfect fuck, hold evening classes, chronicle their incomprehensibly perfect fucking in a column in the Saturday supplements. After that night, he believed they fit together like pornographic Lego bricks.

He got up and went to make breakfast. The kitchen was very cold and he hadn’t dressed properly yet, he stood in just a t-shirt, shivering a little. The toaster was broken, so he made toast using the grill instead. It took a long time. She waited in bed, worried that one of her flatmates would wake up and see him standing in the too-small shirt in the kitchen. He would get embarrassed, and when he was embarrassed he stuttered terribly, as if all his words had been plucked out and replaced with newspaper coupons. It would ruin the morning. Possibly the entire day.

He came back to bed with the toast he had prepared, lovingly, under the slow grill. He handed it to her as if it was a cupcake covered with candles on a birthday morning. Suddenly, she didn’t know how to react. She had lived through many interesting experiences in her life, but she had never had a man make her toast underneath a grill before because the toaster was broken. She had no idea what to say to a man who would do such a thing, how to repay such a quiet act of kindness. He looked at her with hot butter and expectancy.

That is why they are together now, even though she has very green eyes and knows how to talk about Faulkner.

dinner

dinner came like a deserter from the
dreams of Romans.

we feasted!

sugar-syrup pirates sailed whisky boats to the tongue,
smoking, cussing and legless

wine was flung from the Sydney Harbour Bridge
- a sack of rubies glistening into the water
which the peasants dove to retrieve -

burning gravy-oil spattered from castles, iron urns,
scalded the marauding invaders
who turned and fled. The nymphs sighed relief,
reclined on the fluffed and gold-fringed, feathermost pillows,
pulling on hookahs,
puffing hovered clouds of mash
with onion
and sage

my beautiful typewriter 

Mexico

He took me to see the plane.
Crashed nose-heavy into the sand,
rusting.

We stood on the wings where the heat hissed and
bit at our toes, the metal blinking astonishment in the savage
white of the sun.

It was no longer filled with cocaine,
so we crawled in the windows and slept an afternoon sleep
in the cool saltiness of the sand.

Pancakes

We ate pancakes at 4am, tongues thick with syrup
and coffee, thick with excuses
not to sleep.

The nights weighed out long
and strange in the fleshy neon streets.
If we slept we would miss the world, the pavements would wear down and eyes would glitter without seeing pillows.
There would be wine without us.

The earth was not sleeping.
So we drank on, eyes hot like infected wounds
and waited for morning to start
for bed.

Waiting for Summer

We are waiting for summer.
The old man who lives above me said today,
“It’s still cold.”
This resentful truth, this
much is true.

The old are peeved at the seasons.
You cannot have a funeral
when it is windy.
Gusts mock the looming weightiness of the world
clothes dance merrily, trees bop.

We should die in the snow
in the clean and sombre white
or hope for cremation
instead.

The Happy Feminist

And if it all goes well
we can hope to earn thousands more each year
grinning equally at our desks,
heads burst through shattered ceilings
clutching solid pension plans.

This, my friend, is The Dream.

Innisfail

Our ring gear is shot through and those plans of mountains and waterfalls, of unfurled roads like bowling alley balls, pelting into the distance - they are sitting in broken pieces, waiting to be scrapped. We are in the north, somewhere large enough for a garage but too small for parts. The town’s industry is banana picking, and the banana pickers rise at 6am to go to the banana fields. By 9pm there is nothing but quiet dogs and wet dust air, and on the main road a drive-through store with a laminate sign the size of a lorry: SUPER CHEAP LIQUOR.

We buy rum in a brown bag, walk to the banana fields which are silent and night time. There is a dog, but he is too concerned with things which concern dogs in hot climates; his sweat, the insects, fireflies with wings like drunken bats. There are stars, so we place bets on them; play bluff, exchange constellations, look serious into the long night. We drink. The rum is like running through a field of striped candy canes, hand in hand with a ruby haired Egyptian. We drink it lying in the earth under the great wallowing bananas.

I raise him; three sisters and a Great Bear.
He, confident; the Milky Way.

By the time we get home, the van is wheezing gasoline tears into the sky of our spoils.

blue tramp-piss shoes

Dribbles of tramp expelled Tennents Special are sketching maps of Malaysia
across the Clerk Sreet pavements
waiting for blue heels to stumble
tsunamis and earthquakes through the cigarette butt cities
on the way home
from the pub

45 minutes from now those blue shoes will be tangled in sheets
that should not have tramp urine ground into their pillows
and it will cross my mind to tell you, seconds before you take
the shoes
in the tangles
with the legs
and I forget

47 minutes from now these thoughts of blue shoes etiquette
will be replaced by a peripheral vision
of television static
and the citizens of Malaysia will suffer as
civilizations are drenched in new pavement expulsions.

Meanwhile the stained blue shoes kick and scream and twitch
around anatomies,
unconcerned.

mistranslating rimbaud

Mistranslating Rimbaud
on the Northern Line
in the back alleyway cobbled death streets of Pere Lachaise
along the swaying stuttering riverbanks
wine sodden
and terrible

sir, when it is cold in the desert
when, in the dripping abattoirs,
the sometime angels are with you…
nature will deflower
all arbitrary and huge acts
the precious, cornered, and delicious

This, with too much sunshine for November,
clutching coffee cups which make a mockery of scale

This an impulse which can be taken home
to the grey building, Lemsip streets
to line the herbal tea, double duvet winter
and make it through till spring

swiss

I learned to drink beer
up scaffolding
with red geraniums
(the realisation of 2 childhood dreams)

It was hot enough to make lifting crates seem like a sweated and romantic notion
like calloused hands or checked shirts
of mice and men

Later, I went to the park, rocked back and forth on the swings
trying to match stereo lyrics and birdsong

It got dark

The beer and the sunshine had soaked through my clothes
leaving me cold and damp with the residue
lonely for red geraniums
and lyrics about buses

When I got back the room was peering out over the nightline mountains,
a room with bed linen whiter than ironed shirts at 7am.
I slept softly on thoughts about swings and long months of summer

Dreaming a bed of fallen red petals
like nosebleeds in snowfall

dream

Paris.
We dine on mussels braised in garlic heads
and horses tears,
conduct cobbled sociology projects
with a picture of a monkey printed in biro
on a lined notebook

- the terrorists have attacked Syria with fireballs
and a rushing wind-plague;
the old and infirm are falling -

In the restaurant, a waiter reads Russian tragedies
and loops famine repeats from the evening news

The horses sob.

porkies strip bar, 4am

George tells us about playing Scrabble with his mother
as a salt-and-vinegar eyed blonde
offers surround sound views
of knees, ankles, breasts

They have a navy bound book to record their scores, although if they get less than 800 they don’t bother.

Crotches waft by, naked, hairless, innocuous as collarbones.
Whisky is spilt.

George would like to buy me a lapdance
and watch.

Tangle knuckleless fingers through his fly,
fumbling wet thoughts of
triple word scores.

cymru

naked vegans on trampolines...

andy warhol

We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things couldn't look this strange and new without some barrier being broken. "It's like the Red Seeea," Nico said, standing next to me one night on the Dom balcony that looked out over all the action, "paaaaarting." andy warhol

words like wine on the tongue

closet prophet of the apocalypse
in strained/restrained fandom
effusive fiery death illuminati

stringent.arbitrary.confusion

murtelyze dehypnotized toothpaste

Priapism; the kissing bandit
in unwholesome relationships
of psychic larceny

avuncular twitching gel
complex panoramic paranoia
anarchic drunken slobs/persona non grata

the naïve romance/romancing naivety
dubious prolific urbane cachet didactic


indefatigable quandary

prescient-admonishment

enervated gutter poet


the sky’s electric gash
salient!
apoplectic anguish, basic and permanent
subterranean wisecrack, erratic unorthodox cinders of
demonic ferocity
symbolic nightmares, eminently drinkable
and champagne cork thoughts
besmirched

your back

as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus,
not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim

I am watching your back
sleeping.
and wondering the dream your back is whirling through:
against the wall, blindfold, waiting for the final
gunshot
tangled in rapeseed fields, buttercups, daisy imaginations
harsh and insistent carpet burn, back
on the bedroom floor
swooping through dusty skies and firework illuminati
as you learn to fly.

I am waiting to touch your back
waiting for some mole twitched sign which would allow
my fingers to resurrect the alcohol courage,
and begin a tentative invasion
- which by 3am will have set up flags and instigated governments, councils, entire religions
to the crotch.

a month in bed will be unleashed by this first touch:
an extinguished match of a touch,
Jacuzzi bubble through tight swimwear,
ice cube dripping from lips
- kind of touch

which would set up the tripwire on the clifftop
and let us plunge mercilessly into
that sublime realm
where everything is permitted
and fingers expected.

where your back is facing the window
with the freckles
grinning

last night, wine, ribs and hipbones

you are stroking my hair with a salient paranoia
burying tiny sugarcoated land mines
among the split ends and unwashed roots
without asking the questions which are vibrating around your tongue
about last night, wine, ribs and hipbones
and the taste of my lips in the morning.

you are weaving future traps
of unutterable suspicions tucked in the back of bookcases
and under newspapers
which one day we will trip over and watch sever the limbs
from these months
strew the happiness moments in bloody clumps
across muddy gutters

I am waiting for you to ask me
where I spent the evening
so I can explain, tarnishing but salvaging
something?
with some cowardly honesty
and discount excuse

but you continue to stroke my hair
in silence
picturing his skin on mine
in whispered bliss
planting an endless fission of uranium thoughts
and waiting
for the bomb

I am tired of listening to you wasting your precious breath

your thoughts are wasted
on her
they are reference flotsam to bob around her mind for weeks
until a pubside patter resurrects them
and those ideas can be flung out knowledgably
ideas pillaged from long
wine afternoons of psychic larceny

she will prostitute lines of poetic magnitude for a newspaper caption
to underline the grainy pout.
curate an art form of casting aside the backbeat
in favour of aimless lyrics
and of trading sentiments
for words

a smoker wasting the fiery dust
of the centre of the sun
and the cosmic cinders
of the sky’s electric gash

this is time which would be better spent reminiscing with people you have never met;
reading Chinese tea leaf foam patterns in the ale glasses of alcoholics
or collecting foreign health warnings
from the half-smoked packets
of Spanish cigarettes.

rain

the rain is ferreting at the windows, waiting to be let in
long arguments with doormen invoking lost keys in paperweight excuses
pleas for shelter from the harsh, wet outdoors.

it is rasping like a stuck-needle record end
a detuned television
wheezing promises of dances in puddles, in gumboots
soggy mattresses to bounce on the pavements
begs for hair to drench and foreheads to trample

rain does not like to be ignored
if the rain falls in the desert, and there is no one there to get wet,
is it still raining?
the rain cannot tell.

so it splatters on the windowsill, cracking electrical volts
teasing monsoon thoughts
waiting for the doors to open, the pipes to burst
and the world to come out and get wet