Sometimes I get out of bed
or I’m the Oblomov of Canning Street
someone of little surface, somehow
morning, more morning
in glorious deferral
of debts and death—
(we live before we die
)
My phone died. I went out
walking :
Carlton Gardens
habiting myself
to the dazzling and vast
epiphenomena of mineral extraction;
cold that day with the window thrown
how coffee cools off in sun
I’ve been thinking
nice enough could be
nice—I could
finish this later—you could
just come round
talk to me, why
let these
words come between us:
395 Canning Street
Carlton North, VIC 3054
stranger, my
stranger, step out
into the
out here
even god
doesn’t believe
in god
but studies
anthropology
in a
university
in New South Wales
and sometimes
struck
by the urge
of
words
writes: BIG
on doorsteps—
each
of the three
unfeasible
letters
alone
and
large
in
red
white-
board marker,
the hand unsteady,
someone has to rub the stone clean
I’ve seen them,
erasing
all evening, soap red
with stain
’
Either we know everything or we know nothing.
Start over.
Do not write poetry. Do not
Read poetry. Not from now
Until this time next year. 3.21 a.m.
Unlike eels in the submerged river
unlike possum pelt, black liver, this this:
stone, in many ways but not all ways like
flesh—Sarajevo—in many ways but not all
ways like the body, my body, a place
to keep my bones, this, this