What is on my mind
A question that fades behind
The machine singing in my ear

At one angle the day seems clear
But with this boom-bam blockage
Wearing me apart, I'm edge

Hugging the horizon is the brown
All that's fluffy in this town
Rises, mingle-parts of day song

I breathe, I sense, I get along
My heady doof-doof's mine alone
O yellow day within this groan

An alternative history in scratch
The body song become unlatched
As if every thing had its inner air

Twigs and steel, my squeaky chair
What is there to heft or mine
A question today won't refine

Jill Jones
11.15 am Sydney 27 July 2005

***

It Is All There

It is all there
and nowhere.
But nowhere is where.
Is it there
or not there?
Is is not
but when and where?

Oh, there it is
but it is not.
Oh there
that is where
and nowhere.

Harriet Zinnes

***

sixty one today
what's left to say

the funny cards are in
the air kisses blown

last night created havoc
in an Italian restaurant

this morning I clean
mould off the shower recess

tonight the seduction scene
is assured of success

unless I get too cocky
(unlikely at sixty one)

Andrew Burke

***

LONDON CALLING

It seems that

cheery image

of mr plod

the copper

on the beat

'what's the time?'

'how do you get to?'

is now a bit

out of date

been revised

for now under

new headings of

'reasonable restraint'

even in plain clothes

he can shoot you

shoot to kill

seven bullets or so

to the head

especially if

your visa

is out of date

but perhaps it's

a senior moment

I can't remember

voting for the

return of the

death penalty

even with a jury

dear tourists

and others

better buy

a watch

an A to Z

and renew

that visa

pronto.

pmcmanus

raynesparklondon

n666

bit rushed out this !

***

Casting On, Casting Off

Now her only niece is eight,
and here on her annual visit,
my wife decides it¹s time she learnt to knit.

Like this, Belinda. She watches her aunt:
woollen thread, needles, fingers
demonstrate their dance.

Belinda¹s grandma (OBuba¹)
watches benignly: a generation back
she wouldn¹t teach her girls
the Polish way to knit. It was fast, but
Oin Australia let them learn
the slow Australian way.¹
This Belinda now happily learns.

But first, watch a moment:
Buba is casting on. Fast, firm:
wool, needles, fingers, execute
their Polish dance. Miraculous!
Now undo it all, that way is over.
Belinda learns the slow Australian way,
casting on, casting off.

Max Richards, North Balwyn, Melbourne

***

I have just
thrown my wife
out of the window.

I wish I had opened it first.

Robin Hamilton

***

I was (as one does) sitting in a bar in West 42nd street in 1939, nursing a
double bourbon with a beer chaser when dis bum sidled up to me and said,
"Buddy, can you spare a dime?"

Waht do you day?

"Look sunny jim, not only we in the wrong century, they ain't even going to
discover the concept of the police procedural noir detective novel [with a
post-modernist commentary] till thirty years down the line.

"Oh, right," grunted the bum, "Maigret?"

"All I wanted was a buck for hooch, and what do I get? A lecture on
trans-temporal literary aesthetics.

"Sod you an the horse you rode in on," he mumbled, bouncing against
the swing-doors of the bar on the way out.

Clarence Mumford

***

Blood Sisters

Through the tiny
magic of a fine grade paper
I see my mother - her wide-eyed
wonder.
Again; she waits for me to discover
the words of another poem.
Mother is anxious , she is excited as if
I were her
(only chance?)
The artist, the designer, the writer
every possible greatness
imagined
There is something desperate
in that moment -
something primitive and
raw, like the torn flesh
of a living creature
The blood gush moment
that pumps its hot scent
into the air and just then .
we were no longer mother and daughter
but tied and true blood sisters

Deborah Russell
Fort Collins, Co

***

under our footsteps

unconscious decays

support our back and forths

wondrous moments like

Sumer Thebes Now

flicker as stills

on our vacant walls

so much so

that I sense

we will never

dwell anywhere

Gerald Schwartz
West Irondequoit/New York/US
11:52 AM

***

Snapping along in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning in Leah Garchik's
daily column:

"Walking on 22nd Street between Sanchez and Church, Stephen Vincent found a notice from MJZ Productions warning neighbors that the street would be closed today for the shooting of a Sony ad. This commercial will have thousands of soft rubber balls cascading down the streets in your neighborhood. We have a large group of personnel to help wrangle all these balls when each take is concluded. A host of balls will be caught in nets'."

Stephen Vincent

***

On Being Asked for a Poem About Mental Illness,
He Thinks of Passchendaele, August 1917

4:00 AM. Restive sleep ends.
Farting, objectless dream-erections,
dream-weeping, oh Jesus
I want to go home.
Filth in everything, orders and
ordure everywhere. No imagining
the outhouses: they will become life,
old men will die in 1960
still trapped in the stench.
Fear lives even in the trench lice.

To rise and peer over the top
is to demand disaster.
It is irresistible
to peer at one's coming fate
300 yards across the mud.
Curse the dead mule
that blocks your view.

Summer crawls in the flesh,
madness, no control,
you are pledged to this Thing
become your life
no escape except to go mad
and answer the blowing whistle
Go over the top
the term for coming generations
for it is your duty
your horror
your life and maybe death
unoptioned
out of control no control
obedience to the force
that drives you forward
for this moment endless.

Kenneth Wolman

***