Paul Dawson is currently completing a PhD in the English at the University of Melbourne. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in a range of journals and newspapers, including The Sydney Morning Herald, Imago: New Writing, Meanjin and Southerly. Anthropomorphism slaughterhouse holocaust / porterhouse wholesale cost / daughterspouse / laughterlost slaughter cost / hollow house bloodhouse / hothouse / farmhouse / workhouse gashouse / steakhouse our house / our place of residence / of living / a life flashed in the glint of a blade / like lambs to the slaughter the train departs the camps / the butchers frozen corpses / dangling from hooks rump chuck gravy blade pound of flesh / medium rare mad souls / roaming Europe final solution? Morningside The colour of beer they croon in their schooners, all sweat and yeasty breath. They don't know the etymology, they haven't tasted the amber fluid: a Latin scent, the blood of trees, oil on the ocean shot from Sydney like hammer up an arm, like a blast of opium up the Brisbane river vein – you sugared me with your smile, the smell of bourbon and cigarettes a perfume on your lips and your cool tongue wading through my mouth. I got drunk with you I got drunk on you I held the hot skin of your feet like embers in my palm I watched your jeans rumple to the floor. You smuggled your body into my sheets, you stripped your heart and laid it on my pillow; it thumped in my ear as we sexed our raw flesh and you salved me, like a lozenge in a smoked-out throat. We left Wednesday out in the sun and hoarded the shadows, lounging like invalids, while my sperm died inside you. Amber. A fossil in my memory. You left a tangle of hair in my brush, you left a red pen and a shred of wounded paper. You left your name and a phone number that isn't yours. Yabbering Sextons You rise with birdsong whittling Dawn from the sky And watch bricks turn blue As night loses its dye Last night you saw the moon Caught thrashing in a streetlamp And yesterday the dead sunbaked While wind tore the suburbs From a gardener's radio and spilled Billy Joel all over the gravestones. You scribble your dewy pre-coffee thoughts, You smoke your rejection slips and dream About winning the Vogels, You buy your handbooks and sell your Atwood, and you wonder Are you a writer? You go to class and hail the pyschologised Muse; not nine but one One for every writer seeking their voice. You tell your story, everyone has a story, You're told, but who said anyone Wants to read it? So you workshop, you read like a writer, You read from the inside, you read Hemingway and Carver You talk voice, plot, dialogue, character Stream of consciousness, point of view, structure You do exercises in form, you do automatic writing You listen to Lou Reed, you trace the shape of an egg With your fingers as pens, you write your meandering Slice of life stories, you go to parties to observe, You eavesdrop in trains, you keep a journal, you stockpile Newspaper clippings, you write your free verse your Lines of prose arranged in visual patterns With line breaks for punctuation You show don't tell, dramatic not epic Is she angry or is she gripping The tablecloth with whitened knuckles, You hunt adjectives and kill them, You Twain, you Hemingway, you Carver You Porter, you objective, you spare, you write The harsh, white, strobe captured the pale, white skin of Her soft round, face, in it's stark and stuttering, flash – The girl next to you wonders If you need the second white Someone suggests it could be a metaphor For the mimicry of alterity In the condition of postcoloniality, The dope fiend says its cool Because it's like she has captured the strobe The teacher wonders why no-one knows How to use a fucking comma, It's not a breathing apparatus for readers, And do you have any idea when it's its or it's? The class says ooh I like this line about the moon and You treasure that little nugget, the teacher Gives it a tick, and you get credit for your Group exercise in vanity publishing And you go to writers festivals and you think Do we really want to hear that young writer talk about the Generational rhythms of innercity culturescapes And those fat Australia Council wine-drinkers From the Blue Mountains telling us that literature Is art not politics And jaunty panel sessions on Sex and Motherhood By women whose greatest achievement was giving birth Or Time and Memory by people who write their memoirs at thirty And questions from the floor like I was very impressed by how you managed To get inside the mind of a foetus. Pause. I'm wondering how you did that? And you wait in line for your muffins and your nori rolls Behind housewives with silk scarves and powder In their facial crevices, scrabbling After their luscious books and their signings And their mid-afternoon wine And you follow the hordes of would-bes with stories Stuck inside them like they're constipated Who send poems to Australian Short Stories And nature ditties to the Itzy-bitzy Wing-Ding literary competitions for Ten bucks and the chance of a certificate And look for laxatives at sessions with advice On how to clog up the slush piles, Jotting gems in their notebooks like Give the publisher a call after three weeks Just to check your manuscript got there (what, in case you got the wrong address?) And you stare at Mandy Sayer Walking around the Malthouse As if she's some strange god Even though she was just another Woman with long legs Before you overheard a lady Creaking that's Mandy Sayer I wonder where she gets her IDEAS, But now Omigawd she's a writer But she doesn't look so different she's got coffee Drooling in her saucer and she coughed a Golly you can write too, you know, you can you can you can You leer at the agents with your sweaty stories under arm And you wonder how many Creative Writing, student anthology Minor literature, underworld fringe writers are actually any Good, why didn't that guy in your fiction class make it All the teachers said he was good and they were published Authors. Are you a writer? Put it all on the internet, go on, everyone, Fuck the multi-nationals and their one-hit wonder kids And the ganglanders and their boomer conspiracy, Post all your work on the greatest democratising Medium of ephemeral pulp in history and See if anyone cares, see if it survives See if it makes a difference, do you want to Make a difference, or do you just want to see your Photo on a back cover, your little nugget in typeset, Yourself chatting with Delia Falconer, or do you what? Stop asking if you can write and ask Why you write. George? Joan? Why? Ooh but can you call yourself a writer? Are you a writer because you write, Only when you write, when people ask What do you do, meaning what wage labour Do you exchange for capital? Are you a writer? Maybe when your poems start to float around With the rest of the turn-of-the-century poetic detritus, Glanced over by an academic who buys the little magazines You had never heard of until you saw the list Of journals which the Writers Centre (where you really should volunteer for gardening in case it helps you get published) Said accepts poetry and none of which anyone In your class reads or subscribes to Although they send a bundle of poems Four times a year Maybe when your book gets published and it changes your life And the spine peeks out from the Australian fiction shelf (hiding the matt cover with the arty naked chick) Before it gets pulped after three weeks and You get negative royalty payments And maybe you got a review but they said You needed an editor not a designer Dear ed. I would like to submit this piece, submit to your flightly authority, for your consideration, this desideratum, show some consideration can you please publish my poem I've enclosed an SSAE you Self-sucking Arsehole Editor so you can return my crumpled manuscript after you've Rejected me When do you know that you're not going to make it? How many years, how many rejections, How many blood tests, how many dole queues, How many courses, how many envelopes And stamps, how much solemn delusion? How long can you keep on being One of those undeterred, unpublished But unbowed writers Who just won't admit they're fucking talentless? Are you a nightingale in the dark? Are you Blake, writing your wild visions Without fear or fame Are you Flaubert carving word by word Convinced your Emma won't be read Are you Dickinson in your attic, Ready to flower from the grave? Are you a mute inglorious Milton Of the publishing world Or just another yabbering Sexton In need of a shrink? Are you a writer? Are you are you Are you Thanks for the Poems, Pauline Hanson 1996, Brisbane a pall of censorship has been lifted we're all a little more free and easy to speak our minds relaxed and comfortable the neo-mcCarthyists will be witch-hunted that's a core promise Each day, in the stink of an all year summer, Amidst the riot of mango and jacaranda, Sweating rain and heat that trembles I read the papers: Manning Clark the communist / Helen Garner the anti-feminist / Grunge-lit Ex-generationalist / immigration and political correctness / Black armband history / the Aboriginal industry / And there, under the crotchety throb of the overhead fan, Her face rustles, Pauline Hanson Just a little bit of the devil Why am I fascinated by every page, every story Every word? Why do I stare, shaking my head, At her face, Pauline Hanson, the red-haired ignoramus, Just a little bit of the devil? 1997, Sydney Hurstville, halfway to Sutherland, it's a city now, You know? Only twenty-minutes south Of the city / behind Westfields My feet on automatic pilot, twenty years of walking Behind Westfields, I am stopped By an old woman 'Excuse me, do you speak English?' I stare, gorilla-shouldered, quasimodoed And with my 3 unit English / Communications honours degree / Masters in Creative Writing / father is Australian / been here My whole life / accent of a digger voice / I can muster only A question: 'What?' 'Never mind,' she turns, raising her voice, 'I was going to ask for some change for the train But I'll ask an AUSTRALIAN'. My girlfriend, blue-eyed, fair-haired, goes ballistic I watch them fight / behind Westfields Twenty years of my life / my whole life Is no longer mine I'm not angry, I'm hurt I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses How did she know? Central / Redfern / Sydenham/ Tempe / Rockdale / Kogarah Hurstville From the top floor of the carriage we watch two skinheads, rank with beer, suspenders Dangling from jeans, enter The vestibule / one sits next to the Korean youth pressed in the corner / the other sits opposite a friendly chat ensues: 'Why you reading that book? / Why don't you read it in English? / What does it say? / What's that book? / Where you from / Here, shake my hand / Come on / Don't be rude / You call that a handshake / mate, if we were in a pub / And you shook my hand like that / I'd take you out the back And beat the shit outta ya / shake my fuckin' HAND Pumping adrenalin through his hand, pumping blood in my heart 'Leave him alone,' says my girlfriend He turns, we have moved from the top floor to the vestibule, What are we, some sort of fucking guardian angels? He sees her, blue-eyed, fair-haired / he sees me Black-haired, scowling, trying to fill out my oversized leather jacket He makes some kind of connection in his buzzing Head, draws up to his full runtish height, smirk/snarls With knowing contempt, with that oh my god / what have we here – if only he knew, she was a Jew – He stares, like Hando in Romper Stomper 'I'm just having a friendly chat / trying to shake his hand' 'He doesn't want to / you're harassing him' 'He's just having a conversation' says Hando's friend There's a bristle in the vestibule Sydenham / Tempe / Rockdale Two stops to Hurstville 'Come on mate,' says Hando's friend, 'it's not worth it' It stirs him up 'I'm an AUSTRALIAN. I won't be told what to do IN MY OWN COUNTRY' This is not high school taunting of difference Four-eyed / fat / ugly / nerdy / pimply / chingchong / wog This is relaxed and comfortable Kogarah / the Korean has disembarked I dream of being strong, not for politics, or tolerance, Or freedom, or multiculturalism For masculine pride, for testosterone / I'm ready To cut my fingers on his teeth, to feel his nose crunch Under my knuckles, his head splinter Against the window / I'm ready To get a knife stuck in my gut For MY COUNTRY, not his Hurstville / we disembark / my feet on automatic pilot Twenty years of stepping onto the platform, Of going home 1998, Melbourne Richmond Town Hall / anti-racist rally / bring your placards Bring your hate Black texta on newsagent cardboard PAULINE HANSON – THE PEOPLE'S PERIL PAULINE HANSON has POLICIES of HATRED The crowd laughs, the crowd chants, the crowd screams The crowd hates / Pauline Hanson / is nowhere to be seen Old men, old women, before our time, before we were born, In their day, milk was cheaper, and nothing was a lot of money Grandparents coming to see the red-head with the pink and the legs Just a little bit of the devil Their eyes jostling like egg-yolks behind plate-glass spectacles Frail bodies shuddering, withered skin bruising As the crowd shoves, pushes, insults, refuses Entry / young male protesters saying cool as they see the crowd grapple with a thick-necked redneck And I roar / WHAT ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH / FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY / some agree, some say Fuck off / and Pauline Hanson is nowhere to be seen Then the lighthorsemen, the cossacks, the men from Snowy River, The Victorian Mounted Police, round the corner At the gallop, sparking flint from the concrete We plunge into ourselves, I see a man Tumble beneath hooves, Skull slapping the pavement. 1999, Sydney Do you take this Australian-Hungarian Jew To be your lawful wedded wife? / I do We are mongrels / times two Sydney 2000 Australia has come of age. Yeah right. Thanks for the poems, Pauline Hanson. Lunatic Brothel If you're filthy rich and you're Looking for a good time looking For a fuck to soothe your itchy veins But you're sick of street whores And strip joints, escort services, Mail-order brides and computer Dating agencies and you're bored With cruising public toilets or pretending To be Uncle Jack outside Blue Light discos And you want to experience Virtual Insanity, There's a rotting galleon A reeking black hulk That caters for your kind – It's a floating whorehouse And it doesn't have any of the Tarted-up sluts you're used to, It's full of all the screaming Rejects that nobody wants And nobody wants to see Because they make everyone sick just Looking at them makes people's guts Crawl up their throat and dangle like Oozing fungus from their tongue So all the screaming rejects that Nobody wants and nobody Wants to see were put on a boat And you hear stories sometimes Stories about this huge asylum that Never docks, its hull rattling with The bay and howl of festering idiots And now everyone wants to see Them but only you, only if you're filthy and Rich can you get on board all aboard Chaaron will row you out to The Narrenschiff, Ship of Fools, Foucault's Renaissance Hell, The Lunatic Brothel – Are you ready Now you'd better be Ready because You might not come back, You might hate it, you might be Disgusted – But then again, You might LOVE IT Darling For an outrageous price Chaaron the Boatman, So named for that Classical touch, Will ferry you to the Lunatic Brothel – Pay him, That ancient pariah Hollow mouth, no teeth No tongue, black eyes In a black hood chained To the barge Purple twisted hands Roped with swollen tendons Grip the bargepole You slither through Water red and Slimy like an oil Slick blisters popping On the surface Razed By a sun gone to canker Wavering in a squint The Flying Dutchman Squats fat and sweaty On the water Waiting While slow as all Hell The Ferryman Rows you in Slow as all Hell Night crawls out Like a weed The moon leers Mildewed over Dribbling its trail Of snail sheen spit On dead obsidian water Your barge rides The goblin strip Bumping against The creaking hull And you're there. * Welcome to the Ark. Charnel House. Carnal House. Hotel flesh. Brothel of the Dead. Gives good head. Frothing red. Stewed up broth. Eat the Dead. Curdled cheese. Rotting bread. In your head. In your bed. Stinking arse or cunt You can fuck the Broken junkie dolls Of the Brothel of the Dead. It's a filthy rich fee To get on board But when you're on board You'll see why when you Wander the oozing decks and You see the drooling idiot lashed To the foremast naked eyeballs Dangling on his cheek from Strings of dead tissue screaming When the wardens suck his dick Or shove their batons up his arse They carry bull horns on their hips And call themselves matadors They chase the deformed kid with the Elongated face around the quarterdeck Until he pisses his pants and scrabbles up The mizzenmast shrieking and dances A mad jiggle on the crow's nest like A puppet on broken strings Then, down below You'll salivate and leer At the cooped up hordes Stripped naked, blasted by hoses, Ready to be fucked Genetic engineering mishaps, crippled centaurs wheezing dehydrated mermaids, plastic surgery failures, melted faces, skin-grafted surgical guinea pigs pharmaceutical experiment volunteers kids on crack and heroin, whacked-up, doped-out, jittering, shitting in their hands, tearing the wings off frozen turkeys, modern day lepers AIDS and cancer festering sores, lesions, blisters, puss and pissing blood coughing bile split peeling skin, homeless orphans, shambling bums, degenerates, the unemployed, the insane, temporarily insane, criminally insane, certifiable, emotionally disturbed, mentally unhinged, psychologically maladjusted, handicapped, disabled, demented, deformed, comatose, braindead, lobotomized, amputated, castrated, mutated, retards, freaks, lunatics, maniacs. Children Of God. But the real treat, the filthy rich Delicacy is down in the bowels Where the surgeons work They wear red butcher's aprons And call themselves toreadors They give their wives facelifts So they can fuck their eyesockets They give their wives lobotomies So they can fuck their brains out They give their wives stomach tucks So they can peel their skin back and Fuck their entrails through their ribcage In the surgeons' den with Huge glass jars lined up On dripping shelves like Lolly shop sweets you can suck, Gall bladder candy, liver, Punctured heart, dead foetus Lie on the slippery operating table Look up at the dying lightbulb Swaying like a fevered pendulum Trainee medical students lurch From the shadows and Grease you with slathers of blood Full body massage With a bludgeon From the burnt out whores The surgeons cluster in, giggling, Carve new orifices with Their scalpels graft Bits of pulsing flesh to your Erogenous zones cut out The pieces you don't need Until you're the abortion your Mother always wanted It's heaven, hard-core fantasy, Cerebally unbound interactive sex, Virtual insanity, Even the crew are mad. They wear togas and call themselves emperors, And if you don't applaud their singing They tie you in a burning sack Toss you overboard And laugh hysterically While you drown. * The Drunken Boat lists Under a carousel vulture, The sun is rancid And hot as all hell. Chaaron dozes. Waiting.