Jackson

blistercrack blacktop voice, hotmix mind, chopped-up line This is the output of the old and new millennia … We reach out to touch but there’s too much space JD Salinger moans in our head Sylvia Plath kills herself again and again and again, finally gets it right, lies dead at our feet, her children screaming… Read more

when I trim nails, shave, put on underwear; put on pants and a tight black shirt; when I read a bright-ache text or coded visual; when I drink; when I hear a punk song, a rock, a love song; when I drink; when I stroke the steel hair of my much-used instrument, make a new… Read more

21. No longer a student, I became a “real person”, as he called it. I made quiet art in the small spaces between work and what passed for relationships. I thought, I’m an artist, but I was a well-dressed middle-class professional. I made money, spent it, married a “real person”, had two children, real as… Read more

Dana lies on the leather sofa. Louis sits on the woollen rug. In their mahogany frames his painted birds twitter above the aquarium. In its black metal border her Rothko print broods beside the airconditioner. They flick on the television and watch a movie about Jim Morrison. Louis’s eyes drift shut. Jim, played by an… Read more

Having been in the pretend-New-York Fitzroy grid and the pretend-Europe St Kilda seaside village and the city upstairs yellow Hare Krsna foodroom and the Fuck Off architecture of Federation Square I’m lentil as anything looking for some place to be alone and to think of you what I damn well think of you So right… Read more

The purple-nailed, blacksuited, mad-hatted, workbooted, vodka-drinking, rollie-sucking, McCartney-bashing, Lennon-hugging, clanging, slanging, banging, whanging, smoothfaced and making up for it poems Here’s Jack White*, with Satan still in front of him and without the marimba —Ain’t that a kick in the head? Nah, it’s a bottle of vodka Drown yourself *From The White Stripes (First published… Read more