Jackson

Don’t touch these untuned keys, don’t hear this thing with strings so dissonant, so dissident: seek simply to sink into thick distracting complexity. Think movie. Think beer. Think weekend. Think fuck. Put your workboots on the ornamental carpet, yell “Party!” into the smell of pretzels, into the barbecue, into the karaoke street, in Perth, Western Read more

(The Queenslander) Feet firm on his country’s ground. Head among its stars. First published in Creatrix Read more

Whoever you are, you want more words, don’t you? You want more images. You want more wings and breaths, more stones and rivers, more gloves and roses, more Celtic boats, more hands and eyes and mouths. Well, I don’t have any of those tonight, only inarticulate howls and tears and abstract nouns like that one Read more

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