The Selected Your Friendly Fascist

From Your Friendly Fascist 18

Published by Rochford Street Press Rochford Street Review PO Box 5399 West Chatswood NSW 1515 Email: rochfordstpress@optusnet.com.au Website: http://rochfordstreetpress.wordpress.com/

ISBN: 978-0-646-58605-2

Cover design by Rae Desmond Jones

John Jenkins page Reminiscences of childhood 5 Maybe 6 Mike Lenihan 1984 subconsciously

Rob Andrew i taught myself to learn

Denis Gallagher Sydney

Adrian Flavell When we were… is this the best way… Universal Pizza Parlour I was found drifting The girls were competed for A stone age arse A summer night’s breeze Peter Brown Sheriff of Nottingham Debbie Westbury Out of the blue these days Wise & Anonymous Carol White Threads Billy Ah Lun 3 little poems Prayer Pubs shut/ railway stn It was said Song Peter Brown Friendly Fascist Quizz

9 9 9 10 10 10 10 10

11 12 11

13 14 14 15 15 14

Lis Aroney The writer

Patrick Alexander In the Mirror At a bus stop Fidelity

16 17 17

Steve Sneyd For a nosey parker Kamikaze A healing art A sense of duty

19 19 19 20

Contents

Anne Wilkinson A thought came to me…

Carol White Threads

Ken Bolton Days For Ana & Stefan The trees were … Haikus

21 22 22 22

George Cairncross (UK) I have declared war … Night Rider

45 46

John Peter Horsam Horror Story

Steven K. Kelen The koala motel dream Words Toyota Corolla

47 48 48

Irene Wettenhall The maid’s song

Nigel Saad Academics

Jenny Boult (aka MML Bliss) To the minimal memory… 43 Python’s Pool 44

John Edwards Bond 7, tomato sauce &.. Moving house The dance of the bones… Poem for Diz Falsies

23 24 24 25 25

Robert C. Boyce Death by misadventure

Chris Mansell The Star Ball Contribution

Rae Desmond Jones jungle juice dig gas

26 27 29

Robert Carter Overheard order

Trevor Corliss When shit turns to gold

Kit Kelen In memory of Robt. Lowell Suburban paranoia Punks travels

31 32 32

Rob Andrew Blues Bummer

Jean Rhodes Oedipus Complex

Larry Buttrose The poetry reading 34 The corona 35 I see your face 36 The fruit salad tunnel of love 36 Joseph Chetcuti ...Bark … Dragging his shadow…

37 38

Alamgir Hashmi The Banquet of the Century 40 A Country Saga 41

Anne Davies Love with the other woman 52 Nicholas Pounder Christmas A historical fact In the catalogue I look …

54 54 55

Cornelis Vleeskens ROAST CHESTNUTS The importance of elegance OWN THIS First & Last poem

57 58 59 59

Andrew Rose She America! America! wish I had the blues To Shiva Repeating you come with me … Rhymes gone by

61 61 62 62 62 63 63

Joanne Burns rip off gypsy me i waited a very long time Heel on Honey

65 66 66 66

Les Wicks She shimmered Fragment 9 Sand Castles

69 69 70

Eric Beach Fuck me the dawns drag her down… dreaming my way out of .. australian very: poem not..

71 72 72 73

Ian We delight in the pleasure Gig Ryan (For Herodotus) Cruising Lis Aroney For a rock star П. O. Roast Colour T.V. Barry Edgar Pilcher Here she comes Andrew Darlington Love Pome The Holy Bible …BLUE SUEDE SHOES (ON THE RADIO) Holding my prick / Dorothy Porter From The Nashville Poems

74 74 75

76 77

78 78 79 79

Gary Oliver Bogus The captain The captive

82 83 83

Richard Tipping Noah’s Monark FASCIST COOKING

85 85

Micah DOM

Carol Novack Velikovsky’s Dream The last of the sirens Love Poem No

87 88 89

Peter Finch three quick glances into .. Films without voices Looking back, June

90 91 91 92

Evan Rainer Brightly Lighting

Graham Rowlands Ego and alter Lavatory pieces The pupil Irene Wettenhall My Azalea is alive and … Christopher Pollnitz Hunt Educating the ego Variations on a theme all my sperm Robert Carter After the nine o’clock news Philip Neilsen The Wedding Ballad of a selfish man Andrew Chadwick The Queen’s Lips

John Peter Horsam Spectator

105

Peter Murphy Colour-leaves Things Dies irae evil love You lose yourself in a poem

106 106 107 107 107

Karen Ellis Reality

107

Richard James Allen In praise of bodily functions 108 Rudi Krausmann Marching Song

109

93 93 94

Paul “Shakey” Brown Car Car Blues

110

Michael Sharkey Poems for littlies

111

96 96 97 97 97

98 99 99

STEPHAN WILLIAMS We argued of possessiveness 101 Meat 101 A late night poem 102 Rollin Schlicht Merry-Go-Round

103

Philip Hammial Girls Seven sighs, one grunt

104 105

Karen Hughes Contentment is a horrid state 111 Susan Hampton It

112

Rory Harris Four poems for women

113

Pie Corbett All Afternoon

115

Billy Marshall Stoneking Without a fist A MAP OF THE ALICE…

116 117

To any virginal poetaster who has wandered to this site, Your Friendly Fascist was a poetry magazine so deep underground that it caused tremors among persons of a pious literary persuasion on the dread occasions of its appearance. It could only be found as a result of personal acquaintanceship with the editors, or an expressed desire not to receive it. In the latter case, it would be forced into the victim’s post box, if not elsewhere. The magazine served as an outlet for views and feelings which are not expressed in polite company. Your Friendly Fascist was not the only outrageous small literary publication of its time, but it took pleasure in divergent views. Poetry can tend to sombre pomposity, or the self –consciously polite. If there is a secret to the Fascist’s modest success, it is in the energy with which it rode on the unironed coat tails of unruly expression. Rae Desmond Jones and John Edwards remained at the helm of the magazine despite frequent inebriation, from the magazine’s beginnings in 1971 to its final burial with absolutely no honours at all in 1986. Other persons shared in the dubious editorial labours intermittently. The late Carol Novack, Ken Bolton (also listed as Artist, typist and bottle washer for the 11th issue), Billy Ah-Lun, Ruth Saunders, Stephan Williams, Sandy Clark. Generous assistance is acknowledged from Nagel Kent and Johnny Stephenson, both of whom kissed several hundred copies of the magazine while Rae Desmond Jones stamped and stapled the infamous airmail issue of 1973. In selecting from an unruly pile of ancient magazines, I am indebted again to John Edwards and John Jenkins for their valuable suggestions. Your Friendly Fascist may have achieved more than it intended. Many of the poets represented here went on to literary respectability (one hopes not mediocrity). The experience of their youthful exuberance should not be painful. If it is, they deserve it. There are those who were disrespectful, who have died, and often died young. In publishing their disrespect I do not disrespect them, because they were alive when they wrote these poems, and the poems live on. Your Friendly Fascist enabled freedoms often stifled by the pieties of literature. As well as clustering the work of individual poets there are energetic and interesting poems by some poets who have only published one or two small poems, or who have left no trace in the googlesphere. We have scattered these brief gems throughout, because they are essential to an understanding of the frisson of the magazine. The irreverent nature of Your Friendly Fascist unleashed some writers from inhibited sobriety of premature middle age. Not all of the poetry here is consistent, but it should be read at a time when poetry appears mostly tame and tedious and terrified of an audience. Rae Desmond Jones For more on Your Friendly Fascist, see: http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2012/04/16/lotsof-energy-here-not-much-control-your-friendly-fascist-1970-1984-rae-desmond-jonesremembers/

John Jenkins 1984, subconsciously So we have Free love On tap Only old men Go to the Whores Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wrong Squirms the press With relish But poets sprout Of a modern Eden Far away A bitch drops A man dog -

Mike Lenihan

I taught myself to learn

John Jenkins is not anti-German and believes The War should be left behind. In fact, all wars - though he's not holding his breath. He's still politically affiliated, however: a reformminded social democrat, in the tradition of the Fabians, of which he is a member, and also of The Greens. Back then, however, in the stormtrooping, stapled-together and instantly roneoed days of YFF - yes, in the heady 1970s around Sydney's Glebe - he drank mostly Bin 54 cardboard laced with boofheadish humour and an anarchic streak. He still does! Though the beverages have improved, now he's living on the rural fringe of Melbourne, near the beautiful Yarra Valley. He remembers Herr Gruppenfuhrer RDJ and his boof-headed gang of sturm and drang troopers, waving poems of great delicacy on YFF's rare, sepia-printed silken parchment, with great affection. Thems the days!

But in the teaching I forgot what I knew

Reminiscences of childhood

And in staring proudly At the mansions of love I had built I forgot how to lay bricks.

Rob Andrew

flicking the occasional (off target) snotball at two unsuspecting flies which, quite oblivious, continue to copulate on the rim of his weeties bowl. Later, he will prise the sticky stuff from his pink belly button and gurgle with laughter in his paleblue backyard kiddycage (the one with white mice and duckies) before peeing his pants in the sun.

maybe if a knife could stab itself scorpion twist its sting around into its own brain redoubling bitterness strung out then like salt in a filthy sore we might hate enough to give a shit, maybe.

Denis Gallagher

While sharing a house with Ken Bolton and Rae Desmond Jones in the inner-Sydney suburb of Glebe during the 1970s, Denis became actively involved with poetrywriting and reading, leading to his first collection, International Stardom, published by Sea Cruise Books in 1977. He is the author of three other collections of poetry. He lives in Blackheath NSW.

Sydney it has taken weeks wandering backwards and forwards wondering about the clear summer sky how to say it looks appropriately nervous i can’t do it looking at it unable to forget it sitting at home looking out the window at it above the city in the morning away from it at work looking up from the bus stop missing the bus lying in the park and gazing looking down from the bridge on the weekend seeing it in the Harbour yachts sailing over it trompe l’oeil is that why Sydney people say so gladly good one the days so fine the bitumen footpaths forgiven like the enormous traffic the people so polite they say excuse me good morning lovely evening get fucked as they cross the bridge backwards and forwards looking for money knowing the Opera House is down there the breeze smoothing their faces dogs like it cats like it ranjipanis can’t help it like excitement the day grows remembering the sky everyone at the races shouts Raoul Dufy wouldn’t paint us he couldn’t

Your Friendly Fascist Number 15

Adrian Flavell

This photo of Adrian as a sumo instructor courtesy the Whyalla News http://www.whyallanewsonline.com.au/news/local/sport/other/locals-enjoyregional-little-athletics-carnival/1441337.aspx We have been unable to contact Adrian, but understand that he lives and writes prolifically at Aarbark in South Australia, despite a denial from Southern Ocean Review No. 50, New Zealand, 2009. During the Fascist years, he published a small but slightly less grubby magazine, Fields. His work has appeared in The Weekend Australian, Linq, Social Alternatives, The Canberra Times, (Aust) Takahe (NZ), Famous Reporter, Idiom23. When we were among the trees she undid the one remaining button of her shirt and pulled her jeans down below her bum. I fell between her legs and pretended it was you is this the best way, to bash at pain and see your own way through? Rest before you answer. Your hands are bloody With the tears You cannot forgive. Universal Pizza Parlour (Carlton) Through the rain and steamed up window I saw the guy Do his one-man-Zorba-dance Flipping his pastry And finally laying her in 9

The greased-round tray, Slammed in the oven And sizzled And then The final coffin of the take- away box

I was found drifting after swimming the length of your sweet water dam The girls were competed for, coins tossed and the winner out of three could take the two.

Sherriff of Nottingham The ghost of Belle Starr Jezebel the nun Hoot Mcgroot Julius Caesar

Were all finks - Peter Brown

Never lucky, you were left. We watched you from the carport, You and the pumping hand. (the rhythm of one manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream thumping out on the same sorry organ ) you were like a brother they said, as I folded between them like a sandwich. A stone age arse Opens up To the roll of drums And the treacle whispers Of unlovely lovers A summer nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breeze outside Rustling paper in the next room Distant slamming doors And you alone, with him Somewhere.

Debbie Westbury

http://www.varuna.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50 &Itemid=73 Deb Westbury's poetry was first published in 1975 and has since been widely anthologised, including the Oxford Anthology of Women's Verse (1995). She is a writer and teacher, with an undergraduate degree in teaching and a Master of Creative Arts degree in writing. She teaches courses in creative writing at university and for various community groups and high schools throughout the state. In 1999 she was guest lecturer at the prestigious Catskill Poetry Workshop in the US. In August 2000 she was writer in residence for James Cook University in Queensland. She was also awarded a two-year grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council to complete her collection titled Flying Blind. She is actively involved with the Poets' Union, The Australian Society of Authors and Varuna Writers' Centre in the Blue Mountains where she presently resides. (source: Red Room Company 2012 http://redroomcompany.org/poet/debwestbury/ ) She was published in Your Friendly Fascist in 1978, the famous ‘shit sandwich’ issue. Out of the blue From beyond the ever- present dark glasses, a dope eyed stare

As I slide down the bannister Of life –

her hair smells of henna and her fingers freshly of other pleasures.

I shall always remember Brisbane

she watches the lone runner in a dark tracksuit coming up the beach he looks like a moving target.

As the splinter in my arse - Wise & Anonymous

the black-finned humps 11

of giant mammals arch through the flare lit water huge white birds kamikaze out of a clear sky and into the blue which rises up to meet them on impact in shiny globules like mercury.

Threads

Old women

she leaves her dark glasses on but turns her stare inward just in time for the big flash.

With painted smiles Are like

these days

Loose threads

We were making love or something when his name escaped from my mouth open against your throat

From a patch That dangles

you chose to ignore it my love faltered but you never missed a beat thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the way we are these days.

Waiting to be pulled. Little by little They come unwound Until the masks Slowly crack and split Disintegrating Into a heap Of wasted rubble.

Billy Ah-Lun

Carol White

Billy Ah Lun was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He travelled widely during the 1970s, and was much published in underground magazines. He disappeared at some time early in the 1990s. Searches have yielded a variety of poems but few details of this secretive and mysterious bisexual Malaysian have appeared. For further detail, see note by Alan Wearne on Ern Malley at http://johntranter.net/2012/01/the-hoax-issue-jacket-17/

3 little poems The party 1. the dull fluorescence / catching the mood / slow somnambulism of factory engines / occasional taxi cabs/cruise slow drizzle / & night. music /kinks across /negroid hair (the window looks back/i look in â&#x20AC;Ś. / guilt & boredom/reflect FLICK_K_K/ me & empty verandah/time to go inside/the party is a safer discomfort) _________________________ The party 2 white man/pass the log shit your party is dreadful/& I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fuck your wife/ but if

i tried (she did) & you cared (you don’t) -------------------------------------------------Dakota, 1966 written on a rock/ in the indian reservation/ colonel custer / was here/ & still could be.

Friendly Fascist Quizz TAURANGA is:(Tick which is correct)

Prayer make me / male nude of the year creator of an immortal new wave album/ power broker & / star give me/ limitless take-away food in winter a fast open car/marmalade arse hit me / with the dole / breakfast on your body / no job & / an exocet full of dope pubs shut /railway stn. / midnight grok / I sd to the man sd/ i pointed to the girl who / lifted skirt dropped pant/ (ihose) /& squatted/ pissing on our modern expensive & very pretty/ railway line/ whereupon he/ glanced grunted & scratched his balls before/ looking back to his paper / but / I sd wot / he sd buhhhht / I sd yr nuts / he sd

1) A respiratory disease 2) A famous violinist born 1823 3) A machine used for peeling onions 4) Blind boy Grunt’s big hit record of 1937 5) A rare species of earthworm found only on Christmas Island 6) A standard phrase for constipated policemen 7) An Italian road sign 8) Tarzan’s dying words. -

Peter Brown

the platform shook / train puffs like a worn out dick conspiracy / so I cool v. fast/ we step / careful not to trip in/ but he folded (paper first) it was said it was said / in kuala lumpur / that australian women have cunts / that go sideways i set out / to confirm or deny / joyously I assert it is not so / be careful / when observing to avoid / those snapping teeth song i sang to her The Writer of the dew on the lotus & the moving millions offering brown eyes to the east / from the banks Stephen tried drugs and drink of the yangtze To make him right (write)

cupolas & domes / mr. whippy of the imagination / awaiting the long tongue / my love

To make him think But every time he’d Start his novel

you poets she said are weak as piss

A girl turned up and there He’d grovel. I know what’s wrong S’not writer’s block His mind’s been emptied Out his cock! Lis Aroney

Patrick Alexander

Patrick Macgillicuddy Alexander was born on 20 March 1940 Dublin, Dublin (County), Ireland and died on 21 September 2005 Fitzroy, Victoria. He studied to be an actor in London and moved to Australia in 1960. He lived in Sydney and Melbourne and published four best selling collections of his poetry and his poems have also been published in large magazines. Alexander was renowned as a performance poet. He was from 1983 to 2004 the only artist to produce an event for every Melbourne Fringe Festival. In honour of his contribution the Festival has named the spoken performance prize the Patrick Alexander Memorial Award. (from wikipaedia0 In the Mirror And for the presentee this trivial screeding on the glass has a trite importance, this mirror battleground where baby fat leviathans, pale behemoths twist squirm and rise â&#x20AC;&#x201C; will you conquer a new suburban Job? Or will the cherubs cover and expel into the hungry man (machine grin), soul merely another failed Hercules? Is there a playwright? Will anybody know â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in the grimy stalls will they stay beyond interval? Will anybody care? Will you?

At a bus stop They from their comforts, gossip, Romancing and small hard tragedies Derive a satisfaction and a resolution That I miss and sometimes envy. (Why this lack of love that blights the spring, This yearning that aspires to heights I dare not reach?) They unwitting find the sunset Lovely, ordered and expected – I, Poet, long to dye the words with colour And now linger in a futile desperation. Yet, listening again, I would surely Suffocate in the texture of their knitting. The cross-stitch With hook and needle Of their tinkering. I ascend or sink again Into grandiose frustration to dream Of another peace. Fidelity Loyalty I know of, with those close friends heard from, say, once in each ten days, all the games and infractions of the rules discussed and shared, with the trust that nothing be divulged to ominous stranger ot devious familiar. And one is always there, to listen, comfort, help, from the centre of a separateness. But fidelity? It is not a colour of my life, nor it seems one image from my future. A ‘self sufficiency of two’, that children may be free to leave that warmth, that they be hardly missed if there be none – for years, the mutual regard and strength, mutual acceptance of fallibility: the test and flower, perhaps of real integrity to enlarge the circle of the self in commitment, silent, total, to the other – no, it is not offered me, I do not sense its chance only this wanton hedonism that in time enforces, that time moulds from ever mounting desperation I run, I run, from stillness, where I find reflected This evasive hollow self.

Steve Sneyd (UK)

http://www.waldeneast.fsnet.co.uk/meetauthors.htm Steve Sneyd has published many collections of poetry, including In Coils of Earthen Hold (University of Salzburg 1993) and Gestaltmacher, Gestaltmacher, Make Me a Gestalt (Four Quarters Press 2000). His work has appeared in more than 1000 magazines, anthologies, etc., in many countries, and has been translated into Italian, Polish, and Romanian. His poetry has been broadcast in the UK, USA, and Russia. He has been nominated five times for the annual Rhysling SF Poetry Award, while he won the Peterson Trophy in 1996. Steve has also published over 500 short stories, including appearances in The Year's Best Horror Stories and The Best of Whispers. For a Nosy Parker when you see a face at the window knotted up & straining staring out at you just as you stare in at him

KAMIKAZE

could be he’s a pissing in the kitchen sink nearly hot enough to rot the stainless steel of it passing comment on the sight of you.

He loved himself like the tinopener loves the tin what other way to let the world know what glories lay within? -

a healing art so much more useful than reality this child’s images ‘pictures arrived from Mercury’ & she says ‘did they come by post?’ 19

Steve Sneyd

& in the night she starts to vomit ‘your stomach’s upset’ ‘oh’ she says ‘is it crying?’ usual picturesque imagery of children yes but what do we gain explaining what is really going on after all we’ve only the technocrat’s word for it

Threads

would you trust them as far as you could spew?

Old women With pained smiles Are like Loose threads From a patch That dangle Waiting to be pulled., Little by little They come unwound Until the masks Slowly crack and split Disintegrating Into a heap Of wasted rubble.

A sense of duty As I was interviewing Genghiz Khan to give his Tartar Land Investment & Securities’ latest near -monopoly takeover bid a favourable paid–for write up in the newspaper I wished instead that I could be inside some quiet poem drinking brown beer – with all my friends – out of the empty skulls of love.

- Carol White

Ken Bolton

Ken Bolton at the Wollongong Poets Ball 30 September 1979 KEN BOLTON played the serial killer, opposite Anita Ekberg, in SCREAMING MIMI. His own work has baffled critics & poets alike: vigorous, unashamedly frank, yet hermetic - in a way that Rodney Hall found "barbed" & Peter Craven "pointy". Lord David Cecil dubbed Bolton "the Hulk Hogan de nos jours" - a remark that has been found hermetic itself. days days, whose sensations had the textures of steel wool, dry and wiry, held beneath your fingertips or the wind on your cheeks when you’re drunk & it’s night & it reminds you / of Coltrane those days passed ages age you can remember them. & now / they are starting again – October, - late spring; -the first Of October. & the first of the days that began the year you like. 10, or 12 days ago ,

–thinking, they began

you can’t remember

for Anna & Stefan soon after, -sophisticated /in their grumbling silences, bath-robes; white towelling against Anna’s skin … (-but this was later. /I sat in the wind & sun in their backyard, on the steps, watching the cement, & cycle parts … hearing the tin of the garage lift & creek. … soon after then the day began the trees were tossing their heads from side to side : “worry worry worry” like a packet of drowned men fumbling at their razor blades slashing petals - that was Winter. it went out Like a cliché making signals: THIS IS THE END THIS IS THE END boy, It was cold. Haikus Silenus in an FJ, with eskies of cold KB (?) in the back

Academics

buses pass outside. on the bar / the rings beneath my glass multiply

Suffer too Don’t forget. -

Imagine them.

Nigel Saad 22

(University of New Delhi)

John Edwards

Over decades, the paths of the estimable editors of YFF have taken different yet strangely complementary paths. Both of us sought university approval of our genius qualities and attained the paperwork for our CVs. While Rae pursued the dangerous world of politics and the even more dangerous profession of teaching teenagers, I was content to occupy various public service jobs. My Social Security Tax Manual was read more widely than my poetry ever was. Contrary to popular opinion, the public service is not staffed by dry, boring bureaucrats – well, there are some, mostly the bosses – the rank and file are mostly eccentrics, reprobates, the insane and the unemployable, who somehow find refuge in this environment. Very entertaining. In recent years, I have replaced the juvenilia of poetry with the objective research of history, with particular focus on Australia’s colonial history. The result has been four books, the latest as yet unpublished. An alternative reading could be that I have forsaken the documentary clarity of poetry for the romantic fiction that is history. Mea culpa.

BOND 7, TOMATO SAUCE AND ASPROS there’s no bitch like an ole bitch-in-the-manger i said and there’s no more abortive affaire she said my wife doesn’t understand me

and i thought no wonder and i said do you tease her prik 2 ? do you tease or grease you must teach me yr kamp jestures and i’ll writ yr pottery 4 u aw c’mon less get buck to the womb is moon moomba far be it for me to discourage incest on its home ground.

Death By misadventure Not Knowing The gun Was loaded

Moving house

Pulled

The Emperor does not wish to see any slums. The edict goes out to the far inlets of the land. For his tour the Emperor has devised a giant pair of rose-glassed spectacles. Shuffling in packs of sprites they come to Osaka, donkeys laded, thinner than the reeds, there to avoid the Emperor’s displeasure and build a slum megalopolis to last forever.

The trigger In Jest killing no one but himself the moral

the dance of the bones in the stars shooting at raga speeds past the sure brios of the West the silver chalice of music past the applause of the few the surface noise of the tapering grass and the terrifying joy of aeons all pain dead pick up the rice hair that ties the asteroids twang of table dripping rolls of notes clatter clatter as ( ) ride out into the milky way Ravished shed 24

of the story being never look a gift gun in the mouth

Robert C. Boyce

shed shed shenko no *1 comes near the guitar SFSFSFSFSF SF SFSF SF SF SF SF SF SF SF suffer suffer the children children suffer suffer sufi sniffer snifter O triangle of disharmony Poem for Diz stars are our candles out from power time goes on and round unclothed as a parson’s joint let it be short and not bitter grace to say and grief to give live lady and day will blot the stars in love’s mantel shorn of double infinities as black coffee in the stark as straw dogs in the park and we, dew falsies wonder riff I can play base of the hot and rolled cunning daughter in the plosive / streams of potted plush rinding to wrack on the see shore of shoes blues sing the horn of dew-lit false ease

We haven’t

-----------------------------------------------

Got any poems To fit in this Space (From Your Friendly 25

Fascist 23)

Rae Desmond Jones

Among his many achievements Rae Desmond Jones served as the Mayor of Ashfield, and editor of Your Friendly Fascist magazine. He has always insisted that he has a serious spiritual side: This photograph of Archbishop Jones was taken in 1992.

Jungle Juice the slack lines of the rope bridge dipping to the river and the mountainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s white head plugging up the sky above the luch vegeatation the afternoon shadow coming across the trees and the slow meander of the mighty river bending around flat circle of dirt and huts in the open brass gong swinging outside the huts fine sticks on the wall and blades of grass coarsening then edges fading the sun goes down tarzan enters, his testicles banging together like billiard balls tiger skin hanging limp and delicate off one shoulder he is here for the 1936 Congo Fashion Parade and comes with his high heels in a plastic carry bag emblazoned with a UNION JACK 26

dr. livingstone steps out of a hut fine strands of grey hair basined over his head and eyes popping out of his sensitive delicate civilised face now crazed by the torment of loneliness, Christianity and the white man’s burden his dirty white trousers held up by rope his toes protruding from gaping gumboots jaw hanging slack eyes almost dead but now gleaming with faint hope - meantime natives leap down from trees the sound of distant drums itching against irritated eyelids/ rhythm drilling through the head THEN out of the jungle lush lantanas and chrysanthemums a pygmy holding a long spear rushes before dr. livingstone (just gripping tarzan’s hand tenderly and long his voice faltering) But the pugny says DOWN DE RIVER BWANNA! …. COME DE JUDGE! livingstone goes back to his hut to get his make-up compact and purse slowly in the gathering dusk the leaves of the bushes fondled by gold setting sun as the trees lean out over the river and drop snags stumps of rotting trees clustered in small islands in the water comes a gunboat pushing the logs aside a small moustache of water at the bows turns the bend graceful as a neutral bay ferry in rush hour it is the VORSTER (200tons) captained by Joseph Conrad on her decks princess grace kelly and robert morley arms linked each side of little black sambo and grace straightens his red coat and little button eyes (careful to polish out any gleam of savagery that might reflect the primeval HORROR (yuk!) of the surroundings thick sensuality of the leaves as they dip like lower lips in the breeze the VORSTER pulls in at the small rickety wharf timber slabs ripped out of her decks and spears still skewered in her spars left there by some of the less grateful inhabitants ah the delicate but heavy and sensuous smell of hamburger mince as neons go on above the huts small wisps of smoke and dark descends dig this is taa flight two on the 9th of december & twenty minutes after take- off we are somewhere west of the mountains I am sitting in the toilet scribbling in the margins of a paper back copy of Hotel Splendide the toilet is extraordinarily economical, situated where the body of the plane narrows the toilet is stainless steel & grey vinyl basic isolation the condition of the bourgeoisie there is a regular oscillating 27

howl i canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make up my mind whether it is the air conditioning or the jets am i shitting on the universe at an angle of 45% there is a plastic handle on my right just above my head oscillating silence robert oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;hara burke ate his last camel at coopers creek & Birdsville wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there rimbaud wrote the drunken boat with one foot against the toilet door & his mother screaming outside in the desert they expected silence but everywhere insects scratched through the sand they had to replace parts of the pipeline from Menindee because of the rats the soft air conditioner their teeth telephones plastic cups charlie king survived after burke & wills died we are going past lost marriages childhood rebirth into fire cauterised steel & boiling water I am expelled from life there are no windows my soul is drying out in the stillness of air conditioning a mirage i test the texta colour on the grey vinyl of the door i am thirsty

When shit turns to gold The poor will be without arseholes - Trevor Corliss

Gas we have a guarantee when we brought it that it was invisible odourless & tasteless we have it here in barrels of kryptonite & no snoopy reporter is going to rat on us now because we know your true identity you fucking little queen so sign the paper, sign it, & the world is our (we are nasty ja?

Rear view of the Andrew Warhol edition of Your Friendly Fascist

Chris Kelen

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Australian poet/scholar/artist who has taught Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Macau for the last eleven years. Volumes of his poetry have been published in Chinese, Portuguese, Italian and Swedish. A Filipino volume is currently in preparation. The most recent of Kit Kelen’s dozen English language poetry books is China Years – New and Selected Poems. For the last several years Kelen has been facilitating the translation of Australian poets into Chinese, a project which has far produced several large scale bilingual anthologies. We await the Chinese translation of Your Friendly Fascist.

In Memory of Robert Lowell Robert Lowell is suddenly dead in this morning’s paper in a taxi cab somewhere in america on page ten what edifice of legend and meaning will they collaborate upon this man whose death was as much a public embarrassment as his family and insanity and elvis is alive and well and living in one of his movies though somewhere in the deep south of mythical america a juke box holds fire for a minute in respect as two cowboys drive off into a coca cola sunset crammed with screaming prostrate little girls simultaneously slashing their silly little wrists and i just sit there in the bull pen watching with curlicues of marijuana in my air of lost connections

suburban paranoia the dog lives in the laundry the mad mother raping burglar left his clothes on the roof of the car lately this dog is mine i sweat upstairs in the unfair heat of the wrong season it won’t do you any good padlocking yourself to the toilet you can’t spend the rest of your life ignoring the mystery on the other side of the water tunnel when the police interviewed me in redfern in connection with an armed robbery I couldn’t even chew their hubcaps sometimes you get too scared to fart friday 31st march 1987 the cockroaches are finally fully immune to baygone they are plotting against us stay out of the kitchen i arrived here about a cigarette ago waited for him in the car his last messages were shorter, disturbed his paragraphs became less cohesive he’d sniffed too much toilet water or oven cleaner or something like that by that stage the dog jumped on the roof took off his collar screamed ran away i guess he did the only thing you can do with suburban paranoia Punks Travels Leaving behind the dim imaginary bloke in the last cubicle alone there for weeks wanking till his prick turned green and gangrenous with no food or water except maybe toilet water and only undergraduate publications to read leaving behind the thousand mad hallucinating parachutists fallen from the summer sky crowded into peak hour trains leaving behind the face of a man who smiled seeing just a thin cloud covering the moon before sunset last summer the memory of a long thoughtful piss on a beach down south a long time ago and it was cold and a black painted ship on the horizon and the wind blew steadily from wherever it blows from and she pulled down on the shutter and I sat on the end of the bed with a long distracted and not very polite yawn and threw my stillit cigarette end out the 32

window she tickled my freckled hairless back with her small toes the audience moaned with much drooling the sun half an hour high slanted through the half and inadvertently opened venetians what kind of men were we who could not embrace lovingly in each others arms who could rave crazy under lightbulbs the long painful ecstatic all night rave of the meaning of life but could not touch even once leave the city in the morning

Blues Bummer the camera-lens eyes picking fortunes by memory how long ago was it the start of this bad movie with no interval

how long ago was it I left?

train songs tapping into my blues and buses carrying them hopes back home. pink people have turned sky colour storybook blue and I feel like a cloud blocking the sun. itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cold enough to crack my crutch patterns of life taunt my brain tease my heart Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m coming home baby, hope you recognised me gone - Rob Andrew

Larry Buttrose

Oedipus Complex His dick strangled By his umbilical cord -

Jean Rhodes

Larry Buttrose STILL writes poetry, along with plays and fiction, and still bangs on about the things he always has, to wit, poetry, love, inspiration, politics. Along the way he's published poetry collections, novels and had works produced on the stage and screen, but all else remains a pale shadow of poetry. He's also somehow got himself called Dr Buttrose, but can only help with split infinitives. Favourite novel on poetry, The Savage Detectives by Bolano. Favourite quote on poetry (from Robert Graves) "It's true there's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money. the poetry reading and so close my eyes i will not concede this this cannot be all i will not concede this is our poetry this cannot be all i will remain sceptical i will remain happy i will reserve my judgement i will develop a stutter i will read only homer and dante i will read only rae jones and eric beach i 34

Confesssion AI

When I confessed I was a closet exhibitionist â&#x20AC;Ś You Called me An Oxy Moron.

will gain an interest in model trains and small boats i will look closely into pottery weaving silk screening and embroidery i will read the lives of great lovers and cartographers i will emulate the saints i will do anything (even go to plays) not to admit this is our poetry not to admit we take all that with us into our poems i am quite doomed The Corona

Jill Martindale Farrar

this place where lizards struggle over the bones of broken plants and the eye of being has reached out to grasp the meaning of the lost planet you face

here the dragon flies fire with your essence and you bottle up size and just before you find the golden dawn just before you swim the sea is warm looking back through your eyes to the foetal face to the sea with its spray and the Night, and the Day to the hard, remote stars of essential space.

----------------------------------------------I see your face in broken skin, and the silkiness of fur softness of feather and the toughness of the scale: your heart is beating with the fertile winds which blow across barren cosmic deserts with divine breath moving the subtle molecules which cluster around your pores and bubbles of oil bearing screaming light in the void traverse the illusory skin white ambulances move in slowly to the elbow point and the stars definitely have your eyes the fruit salad tunnel of love your cunt smells like a wharf you’re all sweet, soggy sandwiches, white sliced, tinned tomatoes; if I could throw back the French windows on all this I’d find grey cloud & a waterfront, semi –trailers with paw paw and mango; you wear your nightie like a badge, clutch at the tea, that passing B52 of a truck rattles the cup, and a wharf that smells of cucumber shudders like your cunt as you sail the fruit salad tunnel of love

Joseph Chetcuti

After living a naughty life in Sydney for years, Joseph shifted to Melbourne where he is now a member of the legal profession. ……. Bark……… For two tedious hours he spoke of Johann Sebastian Bach. He said: “if Weimar is distinguished by the composition of Bach’s organ works, and Leipzig by that of the oratoria, passions, masses and cantatas, the Cothon period is pre-eminently marked by the production of his chamber music,” I understood nothing - So I poured more tea and more tea and yet more tea - ate more iced vo-vos and more iced vo-vos and yet more iced vo-vos He continued: “sonorous tuttis crash in after exhilarating solo displays”. I added: more crumpets? He continued: “not just yet, thank you”. half- an- hour later, 37

we skipped off to bed - Antonio Vivaldi still screeching in the background. Distraught, I told him we had to stop seeing each other he, in turn, switched off the bed-side lamp. 

Easter Saturday, 1974.

dragging his shadow behind him like a second station, the hunchbacked fisherman from Piraeus spread the net along the northern bank of the canal copper- lit, his twelve stone, six foot body vapoured between the intricate patterns of the net tightening its bruised cords at midday with the grace of a Cleopatra, he made himself at home on a nearby rock, soaking cold, half cooked flatheads in the juice of olives peppering them with pieces of anchovy. Near where his hand rested, Someone had carved, ‘this is a fool’s paradise.’

A thought came to me in a dream and I decided to act Though action is vain except with inspiration The act completed I revised my motives, seething still Secretly denying the validity of thought. -Ann Wilkinson

Your Friendly Fascist 18 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; detail of cover

Dr. Alamgir Hashmi

Alamgir Hashmi is Pakistan’s leading English-language poet. An Anglophone poet, translator, and critic, his work has been published in journals and collections worldwide. He has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at European, American, and Asian universities. A recipient of the National Literary Prize of the Pakistan Academy of Letters, he has also served as a judge of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He has also been a consistent contributor to Your Friendly fascist.

(from: http://www1.ben.edu/springfield/quiddity/issue02-1/index.html ) THE BANQUET OF THE CENTURY IN PERSEPOLIS Some months ago a journalist Basking in royal favour, wrote, ‘I am a witness here of miserable sights. I have seen children, young people, Men and women slowly consumed By hunger. I know families Whose most ardent desire is to eat A piece of bread; I know girls Overcome with shame, who for months Don’t leave their houses, Because they lack minimal clothing. I know children, naked, Skinny as skeletons, Wallowing in mud To eat grasses And rotten fish all year.’ Sending the liar to jail, the Shah announced “The banquet” to coronate, With partridge eggs Stuffed with caviar Crabtail mousse Roast lamb stuffed with truffles Champagne ice-cream ( to refresh The palate at the end 40

Light part of the meal And prepare for the heavier) Ninety royal turkeys roasted And reconstructed With all their plumage Nut and truffle salad Figs in cream and strawberries In port wine, Imagination of the century. Those who honoured the feast Counted eight kings, thirteen presidents; Among them an emperor. How could any other in the country Have counted, or put his shoe? God, there were men like Spiro Agnew. * *Vice-President of the USA under President Richard Nixon A COUNTRY SAGA At last, the caravan slowly came To a stop. The landlord was alighting his beast that happily carried such a burden because that was the only owner-driven among his lot. Here the servant ran to help The master with his bloated belly. And The Lambardar sped For a lanated hand -tuft. Shaken he never was. Ceremony over, the day was done And dinner awaited. But a Full goat roasted and ten Seers of mutton, He thought, were not worth his button. He was not pleased. Then a menu of big old cock or, if he so pleased, a nice young capon. Condescending, he said, “Though I hate your vulgar chicanery, I like your chickens best. And, remember, send me some good stuff for after dinner chewing. Be it not a goddam’ old hen. No shrew. For I do not wish to brew My genteel tempests in her pot.”

And someone was there; her lips, as the enterprising hard-ploughing youths fondly guessed, dipped in honey. “Why have you called me, hauled me up in your bed?” to this the landlords said: “I came from town this afternoon to collect the annual tax. But I can condone some for a little sex.” But she pouted again. “I would not let you go Beyond a suck. And don’t you ever touch my string!” Now the landlord shouted. “Oh who dared to bring You here?” And “how the devil did you get in?” “O take away this hag. Chuck her out. This vixen does not deserve my fuck. May the devil take her. God, there will be no crop for you this year; and how will you stave off my curse?” saying this he cursed them on-spot. And as he raved that these villagers’ women were not quite behaved, morning came on. The villagers rose and saw the landlord going and thanked the girl was safe. God had blessed this habitation with local virginity, for whish we keep sponging those who are wet wrong and our dearest. So, be more attentive towards us.

Jenny Boult (aka MML Bliss)

Poet, playwright and film maker Jenny Boult, who later changed her name to MML Bliss) was born in England. She lived for some years in the inner city of Adelaide, and shifted later to Tasmania. She died there in 2005. To the minimal memory of Stockhausenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slipper

Blp.

Blp

blp

twngggâ&#x20AC;Ś

Note: to be played while meditating in the key of G, and repeated an infinite number of times or until the entire audience has left.

Python’s Pool In black shadow, under the red hill laughing faces, rests chilled water. Deep as time, shaded pool. Mud blended edges lap footprints, ripples smooth water worn stone, asbestos blue pebbles glint. Expansive hush. Tourists trapped. Bill King’s safari Bus (it’s 4-wheel drive) releases passengers to breathe. Toss test dark wet, spring back. Fingers pick stones into bags. Dust cloud on the road again, they’ve gone back into nowhere. Book chuckles, python writhing glances, gobbles lizard caught off guard, it’s hiding stones to decorate a T.V. top among reminders of the Outback and photographs.

George Cairncross (UK)

His magazine ‘Bogg’ began irreverent, oft daft, always fun. In the 1970’s it was a ‘Beano’ among poetry journals. Which is why it worked. Why it reaped contributors and held them with unique gravity. Each issue a party. A raucous disreputable gathering of mates and in-mates, yet ever-welcoming to anyone open to it. A Punk ethic before its time, a DIY everyone-can-do-it that nevertheless sucks in and nurtures fine poets. That’s quite something. George was ‘Bogg’. He was also much more. He splurged out absurdist samizdat novels circulated for the asking. Sure, he could be found between Corgi paperback covers (‘It’s World That Makes The Love Go Round’, 1968), and infiltrates the likes of ‘Gargoyle’ (USA), ‘Next Wave Poets’ and everywhere beyond too. But he’s always an unmistakeably distinctive voice. From review of Hot Dog Days – Collected Poems of George Cairncross 1996-2005, (Fiasco Publications, 31 Belle Vue Street, Filey, North Yorkshire YO14 9HU, £3.50p) from review blog by Andrew Darlington on lhttp://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/book-review-of-hot-dog-daysby-george.htm He’s our kind of guy.

I have declared war on the government I have declared war on the government planted firebombs in the garden raised 15 legions of invisible men and one horde by courtesy of Genhis Kahn and 20th Century Fox. I have declared war on the government and they’d just better watch it the back garden is full of pits to trap them in dungheaps of contempt and international commix have lent me Captain weird. I have declared war on the government recruited the 7th cavalry 3 Kami Kaze pilots And the ghosts of the Durrutti column Even the soldier ants have promised aid.

I have declared war on the government commissioned an armada of Portuguese men of war a team of unemployed sky divers and a gattling machine gun the orchard is full of booby traps. I have declared war on the government the attic is full of airfix tanks there’s a Zulku impi in the washhouse and a guerrilla band in the cellar.

Horror story Today, as I sat In my overhot office A man came flying by my window.

I have declared war on the government and they’d just better watch it there’s a time bomb in the cupboard and an H bomb on the wall an anarchist in the doldrums and that isn’t all, I have declared war on the government.

Being ten stories up I could see he was in trouble. He smiled as he fell past

Night Rider

Strangely enough.

He travelled on the night but with a suitcase full of revolution

Later, at the desk I heard he’d jumped. Back to work.

to blow the edge of darkness.

Vaguely disconcerting,

Disillusion I caught a starship to your eyes to find the secret of that smile that shines like daylight along the cobwebbed motorways of my thoughts but the lights have gone out now there was nothing to be found but space shelves of tinned teardrops are no consolation even the nightlights burn dim, behind the glittering façade there is nothing but a headful of decay.

I had seen he felt sorry for me Here. The next bird to fly.

John Peter Horsam

Steven K. Kelen

Steven K. Kelen’s first collection of poetry The Gods Ash Their Cigarettes was published in 1978. He has since published eleven further collections, including Dragon Rising, a chapbook published in Vietnam during his time there. His collection Earthly Delights was joint winner of the ACT’s Judith Wright Award for a published book of poetry in 2007. His poetry is noted for its wry humour, and for blending a wide knowledge of Eastern and Western history and mythology with an Australian experience. (from http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/kelen-s-k/ ) The Koala Motel Dream Maybe it’s those ’68 movies every now & then on sunday nights & sick again in sympathy with last night’s sickness vanity of an ugly man it’s wet socks squelching & goldfish struggling it’s a dog all right the nurse told you your wife has just given birth to a beautiful bouncing afghan hound you must decide either to hand out cigars & carry on or tell them at the office fuck something burn down your nice house starting with the carport so you flew south for the winter freer than a dream & on the way picking up a hippie girl hitching out of Albury if only the boys at the office & she feeds 47

you blue hallucinogens on the way to the Koala Motor Inn at Wangaratta, Vic Words The contract all but signed the hanged man loosens his tie. It’s no good clawing the walls you’ll only break your fingernails. I mean even Genghis Khan got his head together all that exquisite pain, fucking he’d blow out blood vessels in his girlfriend’s eyes. I mean I’ve never masturbated before such an intimate and passive audience. I mean sucking a biro won’t get you nowhere & all this talk of anarchy, I mean there’s no point. The dogs not even on heat lovingly fuck each other & the police have the place surrounded. Come out we know you’re in there it’s no good trying to shoot sit back & watch yourself burn down to the filter. An old black crow I know lives on paspalum & millet seeds is unhappy even in love Claims to have discovered life’s meaning - he’s old and black enough - & the bridges I crossed were from the future had not been built. Toyota Corolla 1 ‘Twas on a Friday in the winter of ’76 my consciousness lost its babyfat. I saw the skeletal nature of the self & lovely horribleness behind the mind. & the wide brown land with its sunburnt faces, just an advertising gimmick, is not the dream for me. No, ours is a place of hard street lamps, the snake its only fauna & the holy trinity Snoopy, Charlie Brown & Lucy lost in a hurricane off the Queensland coast, big game fishing.

‘Twas on the Queen’s birthday – fortunately Bob & Dolly stayed home that long weekend to mend some old wild oats. Then I bit you as hard as I could. 2 Coldblooded creatures these Australians with eyes for no one but their prey I’ll sit on the toilet till I’m blue in the face. Saints to win?? Look I don’t give a fuck about football. Darling I was only joking, where’s your sense of humour / come on, of course I follow the football/even got an old Balmain jersey with stripes & everything/ now & then I’ll kick a ball around with the boys & afterwards consume watered-down beer/ I was vice captain of the second fifteen at school in fact scoring the winning try of the quarter final but I haven’t played competitively since/ let us make love on the Great Barrier Reef/ or perhaps eat that once in a blue moon.

The Maid’s Song

If this is springtime For love and buttercups When the green earth Reels through the sky Then lay me down In a field of daisies Fuck me tenderly And with deep passion For the old crow Is calling from his grave And this will soon be over Love, this will soon be over -

Irene Wittenhall

Chris Mansell

Fictive fictive biog: Chris Mansell is currently living in abject luxury, tending her herd of poodles and writing verse while clad in any one of her extensive collection of cotton negligees. Her latest rumoured book was Spine Lingo. The Star Ball Contribution

First

there’s the fireworks. Golden Flowers Fountain Dancing Fresh Flowers Flying Crane Piccolo Pete Violets and Crimsons Triangular Chrysanthemum Butterflies Sparklers Twitter Glitter Parachute with Lantern and The Star Ball Contribution.

I found them in the morning grass Dew and gunpowder smells exotic like coming in a friend’s bathroom with jeans around the ankles. Well, if that’s not exotic tiles fell off the bathroom wall making it hard to work out whether you were in a or a Hemingway novel.

Fuck Poem

Dear , I enclose my unemployed poem. I know you want me to be alienated at work not happy in bathrooms but I resigned my post as guardian of rules. Really, a woman has parked her old car and is dancing around the newusedfinanceavailables with sparklers in her hands. He says it’s orgasmic but sees Harley Davidsons lined up like shock troops ready to jack-knife any smooth belly. It’s a military rule of thumb that the assault force outnumber defenders 3 or 4 to one. So when I get to the Hydro majestic I’m reminded of the absent Forbes. It’s a golden mouldie and there’s more utensils than menu. A hotel with as much dende as a second class railway carriage. Overheard Order

I only insult Forbes To keep his respect.

Hurry up! Put on your mask darling Or we’ll be late for the party. -Robert Carter

He told me on a bus he likes me because I dislike him which is why he hates me. You can’t argue with that. From Mt Riverview you can see quite a bit of the city’s lights the occasional sky rocket none of the bank balances nor any of the words on the Council sign in the park on the corner of Croydon & Church Sts where I’ll pick up the wet fireworks. 51

Dear Hemingway, Ben Franklin knew the bald eagle allows small king birds to pursue it. It scavenges. Tell me if I have dyscalculus and if three tiles falling off the wall counts. Reply quickly. I need to know before tonight.

Love With The other Woman No wonder sex with her is so ordinary It must drive you mad To have her yapping When all you want to do Is put your cock Right up her (stuff a sock into her mouth Or something) -

Anne Davies

Rear of Contemporary Nadir Issue

Nicholas Pounder

Having saddled the counters of various bookshops throughout the course of his working life, Pounder eventually withdrew from public view in 2005. He continues to service the needs of specialist and obscure reading tastes with regular catalogues. Such is his resourcefulness and peculiar expertise in this endeavour, he reports full days and sleepless nights. Christmas As well as the road toll there is the brain damage of the survivors this caravan park: these fat white people with plastic bats jumping in the sun.

A historical fact Claudia Caputi is the second woman in the judicial history of Italy to have her rapists tried in public. She could only identify seven of the eighteen men; eleven are free with countless allies. 54

At the hospital they thought her deluded. The father slapped her face, shaking her from his name. the mother pleaded with her to forget: it is not done; it must be forgotten; there is our shame. Six days after the first hearing Claudia was kidnapped - taken to the outskirts of Rome. There, four men shared a single razor blade: they worked up her legs, over her breasts, arrived at her face and continued recording their comments on change. In the catalogue I look up Sir Raymond Firths Human Types Last week I saw the Skull shopping in True Health Aids;

he stands out even for strangers. He’s as tall as he ever was - about 6’6” in his boots. Slight kyphosis (stoop) in upper back results in secondary sway (lordosis) in the lower back and a forward thrust of the neck. 55

Cervical spine (neck) about 19 cm – roughly in proportion from the clavicles to the hindbrain. He has a job with a uniform: badges, epaulettes … there could be rank and authority. This is the civilian life Of his lunch hour. He is orderly in the queue: waits in turn, looks straight ahead; the eyes in stasis behind the thick glasses, high up on the shining head. The line at the register looks pale; a crowd of short people with a protein deficiency, holding lentils, carob and honey. Up front Australia’s best known Nazi - a meateater for sure – is buying Lion of Babylon dates.

Cornelis Vleeskens

– Photo by Julianna Kolenberg . Cornelis Vleeskens was born in Holland in 1948. Between 1976 and 2011 he published some 25 books. Despite being prolific, he always wrote with clarity, honesty and energy. He died in May 2012. ROAST CHESTNUTS 1 the eye of the dragon Bruce Lee’s face contorts above the chestnut vendor’s barrow his body poised to strike. the poster artist has caught him larger than life, more in the proportion of legend. i feel light on my feet, ready to face the Hong Kong night and promise myself a work out in the morning. sun -up finds me back on Jordan road, hung-over and sluggish like an empty taxi looking for a fare. Bruce Lee hasn’t twitched a muscle, the vendors have taken home their barrows. the park is full of derelicts grinning at my slow legs kicking blindly at the morning. 57

2. twittering of the birds mah-jong tiles click with monotonous regularity. first time i played was with a sailor in a Kings X attic. that was back in 69 and i couldn’t win. we were only amateurs in love with the ‘four breezes’ and called the sound of the tiles the ‘twittering of the birds’. but these are professionals: their tables and concentration wedged in backrooms between pawn-shops and money-changers. 2 the death of Bruce Lee this is the story on the street: the brothers play to win. they are professionals. they claimed him from the streetgangs for his guts. they made him into a star. His films were a profitable, and legal, business venture. Hollywood is always on the lookout for box –office drawcards. they recognised potential and offered Lee a lucrative contract. but the brothers don’t let go easy. they also offered a contract and Bruce lee went down fighting for his life. The importance of elegance 1 You’re trying to generate enough public support or at least a reserve of power to keep the show on the road to Hong Kong where you transfer to a rickety rickshaw for a scenic trample to a waterfront hotel. 2 it’s cheap and nasty like a night in the park, you busk in the markets till well after dark hoping for a jump in your stocks and shares 58

or the arrival of a sugar-daddy to take you to dinner in the Hilton. 3 it’s plush and commercial like watered- down spirits and you try hard to make your chinese tailor see the importance of elegance. you put on airs and a liberal splash of Eau Savage. You can’t afford silk but you sport a decent cut just the same. 4 And yes you’re finally headed for the big time, the high wire. the cross fire brings you down to a keyboard solo in a sleazy Speakeasy in Kowloon, too plastered to remember the way home.

OWN THIS 1. the echo of footsteps in a backstreet 2. the nightsmell of a closed factory 3. skidmarks in greyhound shit i come out into the open: 4. strrtlights on paperbacks in a newsagent’s window 5. a love poem (haunted & hungry night & fountain turned off & no –one waits in the shadows) 6. the distance a train rumbles into First & Last poem for St. Andrew of the Crossroads i’m at the cross roads, next week is heaven till it becomes today, now is hell till it becomes last week, and last year, is a warm glow … Andrew Rose 1 it’s just not coming down, 59

the coin from the till of the bookshop where you made a last-ditch stand for the suburban ethic while movie poems & pot boilers were hidden under the counters. 2 your coin landed: heads. goodbye bookshop. sorry mum instant poems for 10c eachchalked on the footpaths dual voice cacophonies in the 20c theatre & on campus ah, we’ll get rich, this way!! 3 your coin landed: heads. on the road with the Ginsberg trip reading reading & writing writing bisexual love songs of the sixties & early seventies while your blond angel hid in Paris. 4 your coin landed: heads. following echoes of Viviane, your vision left your hell in India. left you dead in India. (this poem is in danger of becoming an elegy. you wouldn’t want that, but who else can i tell that my coin is just not coming down …

Andrew Rose Andrew Rose existed. A great deal of knowledge about him is contained in Cornelis Vleesken’s poem (above). I knew and liked him, as have several other people, all of whom were touched by his energy and willingness to live his dream. He wrote a lot of poetry, stayed for a while with Allen Ginsberg on his visit to Australia, and later travelled to India, where he died in the late 1970s. His poetry reflects the time. It has a quality and sincerity which lifts it beyond a transient counter culture. I have not been able to find a photograph of Andy. She she was 15 i was 17 she was a virgin i was a virgin she liked me i hungered her she was pretty i needed her she was naïve i needed her breats she wanted marriage i wanted thighs she wanted happily ever after i needed now! we made love ….

America! America! you were such a beautiful baby, how come you grew up so dumb? Australia! Australia! you were such a dumb baby and you still are

we were clumsy & exquisite we made love again still clumsy so exquisite we made love again & again & again & she worshipped me she gazed through me on buses she loved me she loved me i was cold she was hot her friends laughed mine grinned & one night she started to cry & 3 weeks later she was still crying they took her somewhere i never saw her again 61

Andrew Rose

& tonight 4 years later she visits my head & stands behind my eyes & whispers roses are blue & violets are red roses are blue & violets are red

wish I had the blues WOH what a drag ! Wish I had the blues Wish I was mean and chewed -up and Screwed up and busted and not to be trusted But the planets are dancing Earth is blue sun We are one What a drag! To Shiva it was you wasn’t it ? shiva it was you who threw salt in the eyes of the people ! that’s why they cannot see Krishna and radha making love on the purple bed of jacaranda petals in the botanical gardens Repeating “man (the mind who is all of us) has so much to unlearn to attain his daisy nature: he needs cannabis to make it as a daisy;”

“is there an alternative?” “yes: he can go on repeating his his endless relentless repeating repeating repeating repeating repeating killings”

you come with me but O God come with me come into me with venus & bullets & buddha & christ & om & hitler & thighs & yoni & riots in sydney & paris & bali & world on balconys on backseats on beds & floors & on motorbikes doing the ton i don’t care how you come with me but & God come with me

Rhymes gone by I burned I thought I owned but which owned me – the smoke of those words changing into ashes was sweet as any incense

Nicholas Pounder generously contributed this item to Your Friendly Fascist

Joanne Burns

Photo: Australian Poetry Library http://sn134w.snt134.mail.live.com/default.aspx#!/mail/InboxLight.aspx?n=17830 9752!n=1212715404&fid=1&fav=1&mid=b5e7329e-b428-11e1-a4da002264c17d50&fv=1 Joanne Burns has had numerous collections of her work published, the most recent being amphora by Giramondo Publishing 2011. rip off even if y gave the trees their leaves and left the roots alone yâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d still see symbols mobs of them mustering around the bone edged night filling up the skeletons with pockets full of fatty meat / meaning wide awake robbing the dream of its lean clean light

gypsy me

Heel on Honey searching it grabbing it greedy for more bodies in the dark am loathe to

into yr caravan of metaphors yr pots n’ pans of spells stewing on a stretching flame woven wild as tempers roll me, do across yr future crystal – curl – bell – tight (ah light)

lace the boots too tight to screw in

ahead it’s all hands

i’ll acrobat on the neat gold silences threaded thru yr ears and walk the tightrope to yr cateyes in the tent of nightest black

with lines worn so bland reading too much into unions

lonely galleries / i aspire clay models of desire

and if you are to yawn me with an instead ‘no i’ll hijack, yes ! yr only horse to crash it thru the unlopped timber tops of some other fairy tale

i’ll huff and i’ll puff kick their roofs in

Jo-anne Burns

i waited a very long time for you to keep yr mouth shut

until it was filled with parrots baboons ……….. stuffed owls …..

Could you manage a cup of tea?

Cover of Your Friendly Fascist celebrating the anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Mafeking (May 17 1900)

Rear of relief of Mafeking celebration issue

Les Wicks

YFF was the 2nd magazine to offer the schoolboy Wicks publication & there is a real fear Jones & Edwards will someday republish said juvenilia. Through the late 70’s, early 80’s Les Wicks became a household name across a range of similar flea-bitten, unread journals until he gave it up for the adulation & riches of the Trade Union Movement. For some inexplicable reason he returned to the page & smiles often amongst his fellow “ecstatic imbeciles”.

She shimmered in her silk kimono Stared sadly across the chasm Across it a little pond smiled With tiny trees and houses on its banks While grey sharks swam at the bottom Of the gorge Fragment 9 A mob Pushing me someplace I’m not going I’m worried ‘Cause I’m starting to cry And maybe the blind Science – fiction slave class Will find me and want to destroy me – The mutant

Sand Castles Michael was a private person. He had grown, a flower buried in the quiet pride of its own secrecy – very much there but thin and invisible as grammar. Right now he was hideously alone. He glanced at the opaque window on the door, breathed in and gave a nervous double tap which resulted in a rather unpleasant sound. A raspy, busy little gentleman behind a dust speckled mountain of paper answered his rattling knock. “Come in!” A nervous youth – little more than sixteen, entered … hesitant, aware. “Good morning Sir.” Eyebrows raised to meet the greeting like a phoenix through the flames (just a thought) he thought. “Well …” a pause. The boy waits for the inevitable insult. “What can I do for you, my boy?” (“My Boy!” thoughts scream …. Pain, it calms) “I’m answering your ad about a job.” Michael begins to pour petrol from a drum over the absurd mountain of paper. “ …. The position of office boy …” Michael noted the tiny trickles of petrol forming miniscule waterfalls as they run off of his face over blue serge. The drum is inverted. “Have you any experience?” “Have a match? … thank you.” “Have you any experience?” “Er.. no I just left school.” A voice rose from the smoke, requesting references. Michael had lost interest. He rose slowly, turned and left the room. “I hate to see a grown man fry,” thought the boy. Outside it had become cooler. It was going to be a comfortable day.

Eric Beach

http://www.poemhunter.com/eric-beach/biography/ Eric Beach is one of Australia's most unusual and accessible poets. His work has been performed all over the country, at the Pram Factory and the Opera House, on trams and ferries, sung in jazz festivals, and writ large on billboards in railway stations. Eric is well-known as an Australian poet, playwright and community writer who currently lives in Victoria, but who has spent many years in Tasmania. He has been included in every anthology published by major literary magazines in Australia and has published five collections of poetry including 'Weeping for Lost Babylon' (Angus & Robertson, 1996), winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Age Poetry Book of the Year award.

fuck me everytime I laugh my arse falls out my teeth splinter & I crack between th toes lost my hair to lice, police & company policy reality is only an aid to th imagination / th problem is one of economics dealers donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have friends / only customers born on an exposed nerve / rich white sugar born with a rotten tooth in my mouth / fuck me

the dawns drag her down th tired hounds so I’m a man except / I’m a man how man that ? I know yr direct yr bitterness against y’self / used to put my fist thru windows as a matter of course old men told me tame those women me, I’m no cage he can use doan y give my sister th unnecessary blues only I love a line which goes nowhere & yr a ferris wheel in bed that’s no pig praise (when I firstwent to dance-halls I couldn’t have been sleazier ) I caught th protest at th beauty contest fat man told me they always have been let’s face it – sex objects I measured him & laughed if y say I’m him / then I can say how much I’m afraid of a woman’s tears

dreaming my way out of pentridge water filling up to th top of th bluestone walls, washing barbed wire out of th eyes, turning th big wheel of spikes above th gates that would pierce yr guts deeper as th weight of yr escaping body went in unto it, & th race & rage of water tearing only a few roses, sky spilling over th high walls, wiping away th types, th weird eddies & blind bobs, gates rusting the prison into th past, paint flaking, rapes floating up towards a light that isn’t there, flies swimming in mad cells silence buzzing, throats knotting, ropes remembering, climbing into th well where there’s no thinking, everything issued

australian very :

poem notmuch

australians have th understandin’ of backyards th americans / they’ve got that nerve gas good old junkie America I prefer revolution – th old black one to th stony tits of undergraduates & th man on the cover of TIME (look on his face As tho’ he’d been entered by a woman from behind) lookin’ into th locked houses, woman wiped off the face of the earth & filled with rooms th shared loneliness of domestics & needle freaks have a hit of common denominator what’s th time ? where’s my job ? lives like hats – hats like boats – eyes like baths intelligence sinks like a fat man into the front seat of his car old protests against victims survive the huge weather nominal christians throw real people out of helicopters through th understatement & out on th freeway th garrulous rubber slips every bloody bastard he pisses it up against th wall rain climbs the weathered lady

We delight in the pleasure, the ple a-sure, we delight it is the delight, of pleasure in which we a – sure delight Ian - Ian 73

Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan is poetry editor of The Age, and the author of six collections of poetry, including Pure and Applied, which won the C.J. Dennis Award for Poetry, and Heroic Money, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her New and Selected Poems was published by Giramondo in 2011. http://www.mwf.com.au/2011/?name=Writer-Ryan-Gig

(for Herodotus) I want to fly to Egypt and look at it, as we sit here forever arguing. Why are good people so dull? But you wouldn’t know, obsessed with pulling tablecloths off quickly and watching the remains as you are. This drug, luckily, has narrowed me. Still, some dream-aversion of tonight is loping, as a brain unweaves all over you. And now, when you’re talking, you’re no problem. Dots on the curtain become blank fire. See, in my head, the hole they’re shooting? What happened to those buildings, that maze? Does everything crumble, or hurt?

Cruising I dreamt I drank too much lemonade and it was fatal. Everybody pointed and ran. The man came into my room in his office clothes. Go away I said, and I jumped out of my skin.

In the Italian café, I think of the wealthy. What helicopter must have sunk into the roof to be used so precariously by the management, or contrived. (it’s common now) I stare at the propeller, it shudders like a failure. Who can eat under that? You can see from the street they’ve added another storey. The pilot’s capsule’s been renovated, hired out for secret occasions, furtive and giddy, so secret we never heard. I’d find it claustrophobic and ruin my clothes. (After the bill gets drenched, the waiter takes it to dry in a microwave oven) a friend told me it’s been rigged without gravity, looking red and expensive. His mouth sloped down about to reveal something xenophobic. I had to leave. Is there a word which means ‘fear of things falling on you’? I wake up and look at the split in the ceiling. I jump out of my skin again, glad that I smoke, glad that I can become historical and calm at the same time, thinking of how non-smokers taste when you kiss them, pink and wet and physical like a baby.

For a Rock Star The mass production of sexual encounters with varied beginnings and repetitious endings oscillating contrasts of the warmth of bodies and the frigidity of feelings and meanings.

I distrust your indecent stare your pretty-pretty hands. You’re a connoisseur of whores who wheedles favours from star-fucked girls.

Lis Aroney

П. O.

П. O at the Wollongong Poets Ball 30 September 1979 П. O. was raised in Fitzroy, Melbourne and has worked as a draftsperson in the Titles Office, Law Department of the Victorian State Government. A visual, 'concrete' poet, he began writing in 1970, moving into concrete poetry through his own experiments and was delighted when he discovered it also through his reading. He became a major participant in Melbourne's concrete and performance poetry community and has participated in international exhibitions of concrete poetry in Amsterdam and Nevada. П. O. has edited a number of poetry magazines such as Fitzrot, Born to Concrete, and 9.2.5

Here she comes one haiku followed by two tanks equals one hot dog -

Barry Edgar Pilcher

Colour T.V. within this building there is the sound of my mother talking -

the landlord painting the outside porch brown 7 white

(he’s raised the rent To push her out) her finger pointing to the colour t.v. (we bought) & talking above the Noise - accusing & cursing points to john wayne & always 3 times a day she listens & talks to the newsmen “Lier. Lier. My choolden got life. you can do dat you. yes.” she grows fat, talking to the t.v. accusing & cursing. she tells me, she refuses to vote. - i agree. 77

Andrew Darlington (UK)

Andrew was discovered, or captured, by Editor John Edwards during his extended sojourn in England. He has “had masses of material published in all manner of strange and obscure places, magazines, websites, anthologies and books (including 'Faber & Faber', 'Ambit', 'New English Libraries', 'Minotaur' etc). He's also worked as a Stand-Up Poet on the ‘Alternative Cabaret Circuit’, and has interviewed very many people from the worlds of Literature, SF-Fantasy, Art and Rock-Music for a variety of publications (a selection of his favourite interviews collected into the ‘Headpress book, I WAS ELVIS PRESLEY’S BASTARD LOVE-CHILD).” More details can be found on: http://www.redfez.net/authors/486 Love Pome You are a Warhol banana on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. You are a Milkes Davis solo on the Jimmy Young Show You are Europe as envisaged by Edward Heath. You are a joint in church at midnight. You are Lois Lane to my Clark Kent. You are Britain as envisaged by Enoch Powell. You are Auden on the cover of the Beano. You are a Bach cantata on the blue boar juke box You are amazing grace.

The Holy Bible hiding on the bottom shelf of a second hand bookshop edged out by the pocket edition of Zen, and ‘How to achieve sexual harmony.’

(I WANNA HEAR) BLUE SUEDE SHOES (ON THE RADIO) I reach out, a kinetic energy provocation. She claws up to stand in my hand. Walls perspire, pressing in six centimetres from terror. I close fingers, fencing her in, brush her soft fur, sense the quivering pulse of her heart the throb of pure pure innocence …

Holding my prick / Like a joint You inhale deeply.

She whispers of severe perspectives. A city of fugitive lights, concrete ceilings, visceral matings, and exact gun-metal grey parameters. She hopes I won’t forget and flies gratefully through the window, out over the rooftops and into the melting sun. I become more aware of the dirt beneath my nails, the repetition of cages …

Andrew Darlington

Dorothy Porter

Dorothy Porter at the Wollongong Poets Ball 30 September 1979. Dorothy Porter died of breast cancer in 2008. Her passing was premature, however she achieved a great deal in the time she had. She remains one of Australia’s best known poets and poet/ novelists. More detail can be found on http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/porter-dorothy or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Porter

From The Nashville Poems Even an obsessive has verve sit pretty wait for its entrance then ride its curve – there’s a nocturne playing a wrenching and invisible fiddle up n’ down Parramatta Road it’s ludicrous to grin to be happy in a used car yard but if I’m just following you around so be it – if this were Paris if I had tap shoes shone by E=mc ² if you were a bit different 80

I’d dance up a galactic dust storm and take you to a spiralling nebula which would flash us through the spectrum red / blue you wouldn’t recognise yerself until things were dead still and I said you’ve just been listening to a golden album track sex n’ memory but now it’s the kind of wind that makes me think of the ocean floor and threshing squids fighting for their lives the cars struggle in their lanes my mouth fills with ink so I write like a fury I fight without the apparatus to sting you to death – oh, to be tranquil to hold you at arm’s length with determination with tenderness instead I’ll buy you the fastest yamaha in the world ride, ride, ride, the wild surf and drown, you barstard

Gary Oliver

Gary is a quiet achiever who produced a countless number of transient publications, such as the one reproduced above, which was handed out free at the entrance of 82

Chalmers Street Rail Station during January 1974. He produced other memorable publications such as Good Shit, the Duckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Pond+Bubbler+(glued onto sundry telephone boxes in Glebe and the inner city) and others, co-incidentally containing the works of many in this anthology. He is a capable but self effacing poet with a Fascist sense of humour, as the contributions below demonstrate. the Captain He was on board the ferry that sank in Sydney Harbour

Another Gary Oliver production

He was on board the ferry before it sank in Sydney harbour He was on board the ferry after it had sunk in Sydney harbour. the captive the monuments screen those that arrive & the chosen with their spectators together & in celebration begin procession scratching at words during the interlude of the march as bare feet crimple outsize chinks of angular gravel between the toes forcing soft & pale skin to 83

colour & glow against the blue & brown of other colours. the rain spits across them & dribbles on the shoulders of the ceremony. change & the event continue as the columns wheel oblivious in the counter sign & scuff through the wet turf & stones. 26 viii 74

page 3 of Bogus.

Richard Tipping

Richard Tipping is an Adelaide export currently living in uptown Sydney. He's been hardwiring poetry to art for decades. See Wikipedia for nuts and bolts on special. Noah’s Monark The Queen is bleeding tonight. Full moon. High tide. A great idea is born. She unlocks the gates of the erotic and Mona Lisa licks her lips. OK. The Royal Family sweat For their gold. Pass me that crown. Bring in the tiger butter. Butler! Is the Prince’s bottom warm? Where’s the women’s weekly? Thorns! Tell his Highness to get in there – Quick – beat me! Don’t just kneel you steaming git. Moisten the aching tips of those missiles in the bear pit. To sleep, perchance to dream. FASCIST COOKING (a recipe for violence) SHARPEN YOUR BLADE. ADJUST THE GAS. BREAK A DOZEN EGGS AND BEAT THEM TO A YELLOW PULP. GUT THAT FISH. CHOP THOSE KIDNEYS – REALLY FINE. SHRED THE CHEESE? SLICE THE BEANS SCALD THE MILK AND WHIP THE CREAM –NICE AND THICK. PEEL THE POTATOES, BOIL AND MASH. CRUSH THE GARLIC. 85

GRIND THE PEPPER. SQUEEZE THAT LEMON DRY. THE OVEN IS NOW BLOODY HOT AND YOUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;RE SIMMERING. ENJOY AS YOU DESTROY. OUT OF THE FRYING PAN SOMETHING DELICIOUS SLOUCHES TOWARD BETHLEHEM TO BE BORN. BON APETIT!

DOM The gonococci in the blood Make play about my vesicles And draining from my testicles Set my urethra in a flood. My stalctitic penis there Hangs from the arches of my crutch, All its fair beauty now a-smutch, Bloated, begrimed with pubic hair. Those amorous nights these sheets have seen White thighs gyrating in the dark, Are now forbidden, and the park, Bugger it, an outlawed demesne - Micah

Carol Novack

Carol Novack was born in the United States in 1948 and came to Australia in the early 1970s. She became active in literary circles, and was for a short period an editor of Your Friendly Fascist. One chapbook, Living Alone Without a Dictionary, was published by Makar Press. She received a literature grant from the Australia Council. After returning to the US, she became for some years an attorney in New York, then returned to literature and started the successful on line literary magazine, Mad Hatters Review. She published widely in the United States, before creating her major work in 2010: Giraffes in Hiding; The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack ((Spuyten Dyuvil Press). She shifted from New York to North Carolina, where she died in 2011. She is much missed in the United States and Australia. Velikovsky’s Dream 1 upon the first sexual landscape woman was torn from the cosmic web & simplified an instrument of god’s sweet rape who grew & at her peak attained an image magnified as stars & on the first day they learned to pronounce their names man & woman the enzymes of hunt adorned their living rooms with lions’ teeth & other emblems of the game as evolutions of flesh turned round 87

with careless patterns of planets’ births mothers & adulteresses helen & cleopatra swayed the tides of centuries’ dreams spun from so much space & mimes of tongueless archetypes like venus & mars attempted to echo the echoless stars & the sexual landscape broke 2 hints of bones under bones we are alone as cemeteries built oblivious to form not knowing how to be comfortable under the galaxy of flesh woman’s become mutation of mars & venus has come too fast into the unknown ball of fire we fuck as if what we want is a solar system of our own desire The last of the sirens The last of the Sirens she was born too evolved. The monster genes had receded into memory with her mother’s death and in infancy she stayed not knowing what to do with sailors when they came. She was without arms and learned to hide from centuries of men in ships passed by beyond the reeds while waves washed onto the shore of a dream of warriors turned to bones by song. Soon longings grew wave-born shadows 88

swallowed the coiling water-snakes which were her words and myth disappeared beneath the reeds. Love Poem No 1 as we lay our bellies rude to stars & violins played i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what a mountain of birds flew into my sacred twat & broke the roof upsetting folded wings of bats that blocked the light (naturally i screeched at such an intrusion & buttoned up my dress) 2 that night you remember? planets exploded out of my mouth one hundred tribes ran helter skelter into one another with spears 3 months later the abortionist removed bits of moon bones & stones & my mother cried her voice pierced the stars

Peter Finch (Wales)

In the sixties and seventies Peter Finch edited the ground-breaking literary magazine, second aeon, exhibited visual poetry internationally and toured with sound poet Bob Cobbing. In the eighties and nineties he concerned himself with performance poetry, was a founder member of Cardiff's Cabaret 246 and of the trio Horse's Mouth. This was work with props, owing as much to theatre as it did to literature. In the new Millennium he was worked on psychogeographies and alternative guides to his native city of Cardiff. The city has become his obsession. For a sample of his reading/performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eila3O9pL74 three quick glances into the sky moonshot a cold unearthly death I can see the blood dust s cratching the surface of the sky star search I find you twinkling under the lapel of my old raincoat sunspot a dot 90

in the distance “I can’t see it” she cried searching the clouds shuffling in the leaves April 1970 Films without voices oldtime dancing right there amongst the flickers of the new light

new October 1970

Looking back, from where I am now it is so easy now to breathe, to walk and to sleep colours are different the air no longer weeps. the moon, strange planet of my dreams enigma of my body the moon that I never knew as desolation while grinding my teeth on its rat rocked surface the moon a yellow myth again distant, cold, lonely. I promise myself this, that since the eye of god is too small for my hand and too large for my body I am apart and now that I know I shall sing softly let the day pour gently through my mouth and shall remain so, smiling. 91

who now do I thank ? thank the music thank the sun thank the river and the grass thank the feet that walk there beside me

Brightly Lighting

I am much fuller now With my feet On the ground.

A lightly tumbling

June

Murmuring mumbling

Tripping stumbling

Earth is crumbling

softly we make love in the darkness feel the sky drift, brush by our bodies, watch the moon come down and roll like a toy ball golden and shining at our naked feet.

Pocket fumbling Keys humbling All but the tumbling. Spell of light Spell of power, Wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you take me ?

Just Through the post-script:

Spell of love

FROM: YOUR FRIENDLY FASCIST No. 6, EST. DATE 1973. A dozen copies of Second Aeon, from Peter Finch in Wales. Beautifully printed, 104 page poetry mag. With work from Wantling, Jeff Nutall, Adrian Henri, Dannie Abse, Yukio Mishima, Robert Bly Bukowski & lots more; + concrete poems, & a minimum of crap. Puts anything in this country to shame, including the Govt. subsidised poetry mags. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; needless to say, editorial staff of Your Friendly Fascist, (not normally a modest crew) are blushing profusely behind their paperback copies of Mein Kampf. We got them cheap. There are still a few left. If you want a copy, send postal note or stamps for fifty five cents with sae to Your Friendly Fascist. Ah, the corrupt effeminate capitalist system! What do you get for 55cents and a stamp now? Eh?

Spell of flower Will you have me ? Hope of hearts In the sea Will you save me Deep in the love That you gave me Gave me Gave me

Evan Rainer

Graham Rowlands

Graham Rowlands is a well- known poet of dubious Social Democratic tendencies. He lives in Adelaide and dislikes being photographed, however after handcuffing him to this post in suburban South Australia, I was able to film him in the midst of late night drama in the mean streets of South Australia. Ego And Alter In green sun glasses, orange slacks, spotted scarf the driver wheels silver foil on a cushion of air. Women feel his ambition take the steep grade to the clifftop restaurant, flick their tongues up like lizards dip their cherries in cocktails and sip, slip, unzip black velvet tracksuits. Extravert worms summersault like jumping jacks. Taped and microfilmed in his room the professor devises a new system: seventy â&#x20AC;&#x201C;three civilisations on cards and still not a man of the world. In the perspective of his mind he lines up Manhattan with Babylon. Introvert worms bore straight for his eyes. Lavatory pieces I Toilet paper from Rome, Geneva, Berlin could be used, abused like any butler, sceptred isle victorious again. That earth, that realm, that lost Englandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name gone, even with the great from Britain. Methinks, me sees it otherwise. Not even proverbial kinks fit copra, spice, jute, cotton up the bum.

II Whether more humane to all and sundry, if still colonial, I don’t know. Poorer, certainly. Like Rome choked on its own vomit, America’s affluent arses, lacking tissue, content with currency issue, chafe on puritan scourge. The Pupil Years later he knew why he threw palm-tree nuts at God. His Sunday school teacher preached what other boys and he met only with fire-crackers and jeers. She ridiculed them for battling spirits in God’s House turned Joss House. Among defeats, her one victorious jibe that captured all the reasons why boys wouldn’t listen. They could have been children of the dragon or the Son of God, a bronze Buddha. The survivor He subs this paragraph, that paragraph until everything’s irrelevant, has to go. He starts again. Sentences are too long. He rounds commas into fullstops. Waste phrases clutter pages like peelings. There are no ends in the beginnings; no beginnings in ends. Spelling’s always problematic. His handwriting’s gone. L s won’t loop or looping turn to o s. Downstrokes go crooked; up strokes wobble. Nothing’s final or perfect, he concludes. He can’t even trust the integrity of thick blue underlining when small specks of white paper appear among molecules. He survives. Attempted suicide’s Too much to live with.

My Azalea is alive and growing Mummy, mummy, I do beseech thee: Don’t close the bathroom door Would I could drown in Lethe But no – The dumb clockwork orange faces Of Dachau, of school Recall me. Nausea – Vague anything But this vivid obscenity Of blood on white, Of spiky pen nibs tearing my paper skin, Of icy Judas kisses, Of rabbit stares And greasy hair (the tinny Jangle of my bangles) O Abba, mother, release me From all knowledge But patty pans and Beatrix Potter (all was possible for you) Hurdy gurdy grind: Ballet shoes And christmas cake. My azalea is alive and growing And so I, too – Stepping to you from my steambath Vesuvius Pure as a baby – in my aqua panties, My floral nightgown, my Modess Obliterating my cunt: Your delicate white daughter. -

Irene Wettenhall

Issue celebrating the sacking of Communist sympathiser Australian Government by the Governor General in 1975. Sadly, now former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser is following the communist road.

Look Back in Anxiety

Christopher Pollnitz

Hunt She pads about, screaming silence, my pretense of reading , silence & anger, stalking with a broom corners for object & fulfilment. Silence is my fault, her instinct hunts also male anger the mate. So what? I’m reading, the jungle hums inside my skin like sweat. She’ll sight, spring, utter, I’ll bleed, shatter her with my bullet of silence, the forest accept into mud, light come soft from where clouds balance …

It was with relief I noticed, in 1970, that Rae and John had not found a typewriter with Gothic type-face to cut the Gestetner stencils for Your Friendly Fascist. Not that I wasn’t always first out to the letterbox of my parents’ suburban Adelaide home when a new issue was in the post. I didn’t need to worry about being interned the kind of camp that had been opened for Barossa folk with German names and eighteenth-century German accents, a quarter of a century earlier. By 1970 Campbelltown was being called Hahndorf again. Nevertheless, I was suspicious – dead nervous, that is – that the lowering and unfriendly Fascists in the DLP, ASIO and the Department of Labour and National Service mightn’t take kindly to my receiving the cordial and cheery YFF. Looking back on my cross-dressing period (jeans for uni, daggy jeans for demos, and jungle greens for CMF parades), the finding of myself was something I took far too seriously ever to get YFF. It was seven years before Woodie Allen would make his two jokes about life in Annie Hall, but I did think some of the poetry in YFF was terrible, at the same time as I wondered how bad a magazine had to be before it would take my stuff – from Adelaide! I cleared out for the UK and a PhD in 1971. There I discovered, by stages, that I could postpone finding myself indefinitely; that is, become not a writer but a reader, not an intellectual but an academic. I still write the odd poem, and hope I’ve learnt to make said poem a little odder than it would have been, had I not had Rae and John’s example. Christopher Pollnitz, Newcastle, N.S.W

Educating the ego I used to whine I’ll Learn, I’ll learn Or even worse I’m sorry till my body murmured it didn’t give a shit how you might feel sometime then or then but now just in time eyed a mirror to catch it grinning satirically at education to some future while I could listen 96

down to lessons not outside mt current flooding relevance … Variations on a theme

skinglow & legsamong angelwings dovemake tungstender sheetmusic as li plipli plip butterfly kisses ilkshake kissmarriage of backsidedown bellysucked innersprung breaststopping bedfunk

skinglow singlow in go skin go kin glow sin low in low fin go solo o o glow sing low king low sin ew sink low in glow skinglow

all my sperm in one basket won’t go when it’s full of the week’s shopping

After the nine o’clock news Down falls the rain Swelling the ocean of liars Out comes the Sun Sucking up rock pools of truth - Robert Carter

Philip Neilsen

From http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844712861.htm Philip Neilsen is an acclaimed poet, fiction writer and editor. He has published five collections of poetry, five novellas or novels for young adults or children, a book of literary criticism on David Malouf, and edited two major collections of Australian satirical poetry. He is the founding head of creative writing and cultural studies at the Queensland University of Technology.

The Wedding She interviewed many suitors in the search to fit her grand plan/ not small things like eye colour religion politics/out of clothes or dirty habits/like bow legs nose picking/did not displease so long as they had Vision/ the ability to make a gesture/a wild panache an itchy crotch cancels hints of dandruff and other blemishes/suave darkness of the loins she read in Lawrence/somehow the minerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s style recalled the early girlhood books/the knights with curled hair and perfumed armpits/ horses hair stuck to their breeches/winched onto their steeds so heavy the armour/so heavy the burden of their lances/folded for castle conflict// she found him somewhere/five foot ten and somewhat receding/no job prospects/he whispered ideas in her ear/her eyes flamed her bosom heaved/she slapped her thigh

and cried/it is he/bold jockey and rode a white horse down the aisle the guests stared/at the droppings stuttered priest/to have/to hold

The Queen’s Lips

his scarlet plumes and cloak swept mother’s hats from heads/they galloped out to William Tell/rode West and swaggered to a nice hotel

(sans everything)

In the beginning she was a mere princess

and there they lay in chenille embrace/ ignoring food two days he rode her hard into the bed/back through her dreams/ her hard thighed prince her Galahad

They had twenty years to prepare

and not for another seven years came word until a card to mother/telling/ prince dead and horse sold/death in coitus/ in ecstasy he breathed/my love/and limp

Just a sweet shy thing,

he fell/just short of dreams brought down by fragile laws of man the strangled hernia/and long she mourned his horse’s prick/his mane/she heard him gallop still at night sometimes and lay/and cursed a woman’s fate/ but rode the world a second time/ to find again/the perfect mate

Another royal gynaecologist.

She inherited dominions she did not want Countries she could not rule. This is the sunlight on the garden; This is greed.

Ballad of a selfish man My car is parked straight in the driveway and the birds fly back to the water: wife one is in the east room waiting for the storm wife two is in the west room her mind on spiritual bargains wife three cuts the date loaft with a knife trained for flesh wife four is dancing to seduction with a dozen Spanish guitarists

Andrew Chadwick

wife five crosses herself before entering the ring into which mad cattle are released I shake my fist at all of them wife six passes the window in ignorance walking in the direction of the wise birds and never a thought for me I send three of my brothers to follow her

100

STEPHAN WILLIAMS (1953-2004)

A bisexual, alcoholic, chain-smoking, obsessive misanthrope – the bastard son of a Newcastle prostitute, Stephan was earmarked for a short (and often tragic) life but a merry one. He often joked that on his gravestone he wanted the simple inscription “Why not?” He was also a fountain of literary and musical knowledge, an autodidact whose learning was neither superficial nor academic. And like many who have drawn the short straw in early life, his humour was abundant and his wit could be acid. His opening gambit when I first met him in 1978 concerned some sexual kinkiness with a jar of Vaseline. Naturally we bonded instantly. A few years later, he worked with AA and managed to kick the alcohol habit, but remained a heavy smoker and toker. Stephan wrote some poetry and a number of booklets on various characters from early Australian history. He was particularly drawn to the bushrangers. He was incredibly generous and a man of principle, sometimes taking this to extremes. After the Whitlam government was dismissed, he refused to vote in any more elections – “What was my vote worth if the Governor General could just annul it?” Although his friends all knew the precarious state of his health, his sudden death at the age of 50 was a shock. Somewhere he’s laughing at this tribute. Source: John Edwards

We argued of possessiveness tho’ I can see no virtue in entangling love with ownership. May I elude the issue by saying that the moon owns you?

Meat My father’s mother loved her child’s only son, demonstrated the fact holding the grandson’s head against her milkless, wrinkled breast. 101

My father’s father loved his child’s only son, demonstrated the fact when he died bequeathing fifty cent scraps of each fortnight’s pension to a trust of his grandson’s name. My father’s parents neither loved each other nor loved their son, demonstrated the fact letting him grow fat on careless wedlock, double portions, his and theirs * * * This is a textbook of meat inspection. in the end it shows The life cycle of parasites. Hung for days, and let to bleed, I dump the carcass at the foot of the stairs amongst the weeds. This pink, baby flesh will taste so sweet, your greatest grandsons yearling beef. A late night poem Eunuch hermaphrodites LSD-scented roses harmless atomic bombs legalised homosexuality in Queensland cowshit on the podium at an ABC concert no spaceships no space tobacco in cigarettes cornflakes in cornflake packets

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Rollin Schlicht

Rollin Schlicht was better known for his visual art than for his poetry. “Darkly goodlooking, with a hooked nose and Zapata moustache, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Gauguin - an affinity that he did not overlook, doing a series of selfportraits at one stage representing himself as the French artist…” (from the obituary below.) He had the good fortune to reside next door to the house in Glebe lived in by Ken Bolton, Denis Gallagher and sundry other persons with literary and artistic interests. Stimulated by the chaos, he wrote a number of poems, several of which made it to the pages of the Fascist. Rollin passed away in 2011. For more details on Rollin, see: http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/architects-first-love-waspainting-20110501-1e2vs.html Merry-Go-Round It is a fine night For sailing the mild shore Off loves beguiling coast It is a winey night For twining Ending sad delirious Curling, calming as a rose In light, dark weaving, Thieving all her woes The reiver sows The pollened flower The stamens shower To feel her close Close to the milky way Soft carousel, whose Voice is singing, sing For the stars Warm reign, rejoice.

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Philip Hammial

(photo: John Tranter)

Philip Hammial & David Brooks waiting for the bell to ring for round 3. Philip Hammial was born in 1937 in the U.S.A., and grew up in and around Detroit, Michigan. After three years in the engine rooms of U.S. Navy ships he went to Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, and then to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he ‘discovered’ poetry, art, philosophy and history. He has published some twenty collections of poetry. Hammial is also an artist. He has had thirty-one solo exhibitions and his work has been included in sixty-six group exhibitions. He was first published in Australia by Your Friendly Fascist. Martin Duwell said of his poetry: “On the crudest level it takes a lot of energy to sustain a nineteen book career in a generally blasé literary culture like Australia’s. But at a more significant level, energy is what animates the poems. They have a life and intensity that makes them crackle for the reader despite the inevitable frustrations of our ‘irritable search after meaning’.” Girls The door opens. The girls file in. they’re naked. Their cow is blind. It’s milk gathers, flows down. The door closes. The girls sit down on a bed. They find a cat to fondle. They stroke its fur. Its back arches up, flows down. The sky (before excluded) leaks in (through a hole somewhere). is warm. Its colour is hard like blue on a gun.

Its colour

The girls are blind. They milk their cow. They touch 104

each other’s eyes. They rub some sky on the cat. Their hips arch up, flow down. Seven sighs, one grunt We approach on our bellies, through wickets. The stake’s alive, squirming, breeding as only a stake can. Were it not so. Were it not so obvious – this finger in our baby place. French tickle, but is the laughter divine? Almost home, but is it worth the squeeze, the rub, the turn of the cheek? As if the Priest had swallowed a god, the bubble a brook? The camera the couple with a click? A mallet if we do, a mallet if we don’t.

Spectator You glide through a narrow valley on blue lights slide across the thinnest of ice, boundless lake of hearts’s tears sobbed or rather wrenched away in the ribcage of this shattered car /windscreen tears spread like pearls underperfect/ no one doubts the prescence of death not I, not you, not least you chilled so close to your deepest bone and eyes packed crystal tight with the not freeze of pain unwilling I follow along your valley path not a pace behind, knowing full well that I might die, heart might stop taken shock, struck across the face the unstopped cry rising to my brain break free and flood me with remorse my own lake to tightrope across and even seeing that you’ll live still feel death’s life, fearful white close by, perhaps now casting for another life to come out dancing upon that ice. -

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John Peter Horsam

Peter Murphy

Peter Murphy writes poetry, short stories, plays, takes photographs and performs sound poems. His poetry books include Glass Doors, Lies and Snapshots and my short story books include Black Light and The Moving Shadow Problem.

Colour-leaves Underneath the green and shadowy cheek of the pines beneath the trellises of the sky’s blue hair a small and cloud-white bird sings as white fluff, caught to a low bough songs, slight as twilight, melodies, of the bare rose-bush which casts its filigree of shadows like thorns of a white and slender flame and a great and strong black crow electric, upon a fractured, crackling limb wavering, in its waining grasp, and catch-fling … for the light, of stars wild in his wilderness, and the charisma of his loveliness tenderly, and with the brutal dexterity of a god opens his burnt, scalded hands … for the sun turning, with wire thin and basilican-black, carillons the green frame, of day into night, for me. Things fire and waiting for a train have nothing at all in common suggest no serious destinations signify no conflict, indicate no need for harmony they only are 106

the sea and the hook, the reed and the motor-car signify nothing beyond themselves nothing relates them but the sun and like the sun

Reality Pity

they only are.

The stops are pulled out

Dies irae The stops are pulled out the book is shut lost is the memory of all false notes. The organist shuts up the shop.

Three score battles with conscience (thinks he is searching for truth)

evil love eiIiII i IIiIii IIIIIII I IIIIII eEeEEe e eEiEEe VVVVVV v VVvVVV

Smile We know better

oiIiII I IIiIii IIIIII I IILIIL eEeEEe e eEiEEe VVVVVV v VVVVVV eEeEEe e eEeEEe IIIIII I IIIILi Oooooo o oooooi

And learnt long ago Compromise is both rational and justifiable.

You lose yourself in a poem uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Yet A time is come And we are come to hate him.

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Karen Ellis

Richard James Allen

Australian born Richard James Allen has published nine books as a poet, fiction, performance writer and editor, most recently The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger). His writing has appeared widely in magazines, journals and anthologies, and online at the Australian Poetry Library and in Second Life. Dr Allen has combined a unique international career as a multi-award-winning poet, performer, choreographer, film and new media maker, and scholar, with screen adaptations of his writing at over 200 international film festivals as well as on television around the world, and live readings and performance adaptations at over 100 venues on three continents. Website: www.physicaltv.com. In Praise of Bodily functions Vulgar obscene filth pornography not poetry pure smut variations on piss shit fuck shout it out loud that’s disgusting you’d never say it to your grandmother urinate excrete fornicate wee-wee poo-poo get & give the jollies every minute of every day every second of every hour right now with every word I write human animals are humping pumping digestive & reproductive systems full speed ahead right now while you’re reading this strangle a darkie punch a grogen & when you’ve finished reading it syphon the python send a rattler up the drain pipe & when you’ve dismissed the whole thing as monumental unadulterated unnecessary bad taste the truth is marching on piss shit fuck lift up your hearts your balls your cocks your cunts your arses & Sing

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Rudi Krausmann

Since 1969, Krausmann has published eight collections of poems, mostly with small presses. In keeping with his desire to interrelate literature and the visual arts, some of them include illustrations by artists such as Brett Whitely and Garry Shead, while others have been published in both German and English. As one might expect given his background, one of Krausmann's main preoccupations is displacement and exile. (from http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/krausmann-rudi/ ) Marching Song nothingnothing leftrightnothing nodramanoorchestra noambitionsnocards nothingnothing leftrightnothing nobreadnoflies noacademicsnostairs nothingnothing leftrightnothing nodesiresnobeyond nohistorynosongs nothingnothing leftrightnothing noprofitnocapitalists noarenanobutcheries nothingnothing leftrightnothing 109

nolandscapenoplanes nocouchnodames nothingnothing leftrightnothing novictimsnocakes noinsurancenodeaths

Car Car Blues

nothingnothing leftrightnothing

Jesus came into the boardroom

nochurchesnostones nowinenobones

he was shining slightly but the company directors

nothingnothing leftrightnothing

unanimously put that down to those extra whiskies and sodas. “what do you want?” they asked. “No more forced overtime and a smoke on the hour every hour.’

“Crucify him!” they cried. And they did: they put him on the assembly line. When he’d been resurrected after falling down on the job, he always drove a Ford to any meeting of the trinity. - Paul “Shakey” Brown

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Contentment is a horrid state / - a soulless state /- a state without ambition / where baby-fresh waters/ trinkling through golden vales/ flow into a stagnant poison-pool - Karen Hughes

Michael Sharkey

Michael Sharkey has a wonderful insight into the human condition, and an eye for the quirky. His subjects range from individuals and their paradoxes, to rural and urban society, to consumerism, and even Vegemite. As one reviewer put it, he knows of no other poet, ‘who can move so smoothly from dandruff to Land Rights, from the backyard shed to the Han Tombs’. (http://www.michaelsharkeypoet.com/about.php ) Poems for littlies 1. Jack be Jack be nimble Jack be weird Jack hides roaches in his beard 2. MaryMary mary mary quite contrary how does yr garden grow? like pretty well with cannabis & half a dozen rows of O - I got a few datura too & one or two peyote; goldentops sure beat the lot, they blow yr mind to pieces – & pituri – wanna taste?

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Susan Hampton

Susan Hampton (b. 1949) was born in Inverell, New South Wales. She taught literature and journalism and has been writer-in-residence at several Australian universities. Since 1992, she has lived in Canberra, where she works as a freelance editor. Hampton has published short stories and literary criticism. With Kate Llewellyn, she edited the landmark Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, which gave point to the editors' assertion that a suppressed tradition of left and feminist writing has long existed in Australia. It It grabs you from behind & whomp! you’ve gone mad again tonight, despite Vitamin B & the gynaecologist’s plan for sanity. It’s too much, & worse, it’s predicatble as a tea cosy pattern, those hot loins, those egg-shooting ovaries a fortnight before, those lovely wet thighs – but the debt collector’s at your door dear, you grew up thinking blood money was a joke? The mafia inside have wrapped their neat black gloves around your glands, your hormones, 7 the chemicals in your brain. Now the world’s a different place, malign for sure, & we’re crying (big girls do) about nothing, we know it’s nothing, but we really want to kick the shit out of something tonight, we’re violent, & we’re tired of making little parcels & putting them in the cupboard. We’re tired of bashing ourselves with neat psychological fists, let’s hit the wall, let’s be Madame Lash and flay a few softies.

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Rory Harris

Rory Harris is a poet and teacher. His poetry collections include Over the outrow, From the residence, Snapshots from a moving train, 16 poems, Uncle Jack and other poems, Waterline and breeze. His radio dramas have been translated into Solomon Islands Pijin and broadcast on National Radio Solomon Islands. (http://friendlystreetpoets.org.au/?page_id=336 ) Four poems for women 1. her mother said she was down by the creek playing on the bank/ smiling at her name she had only months before planted out with water cress. she was clearing the grass & thistles from around it so her name/ would stand out to the town. she rolled & tied her dress around her thighs walked out into the water & using her shapeless white legs as traps waited for the sharp stinging burn of a leach. scurrying up the bank with her captives drawing into her flesh she would systematicall detach them & turn them inside out/ on a nail.

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2. she was new in town taught at the local school was independent/ was reliable she couldn’t watch the football/ Saturdays wasn’t interested used to go to the club the/ talk with the fathers “working b’ at school this Sunday” they were/ or were not/ interested ( no one was there the following day ) she would walk along the rivers edge step mindfully across the lattice roots of gums wasting to the surface rehearsing approaches to wired barbed minds &/ she wasn’t/ lesbian. 3. he said he didn’t mean it stitches/cracked ribs & one eye continually crying like a childs ( & it wasn’t saturday nite ) But it happened / again & she/ his wife ran the gauntlet of bright light after hours casualty section/ suburban hospital to sleep & wait for recovery he was in the bar the following day & the half full glasse didn’t shout/ “mate”.

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4. she was hunched forward on the bench with the noon sun breaking through the elms sheltering the path. she stirred from the glint of reflection or the crispness of a sparrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wing. opened her eyes blinked/ focused & saw the coin away from her feet. stabbing a creased hand in its direction arched her movements & deposited a closed fist inside her blouse pursed her lips & slept.

All Afternoon All afternoon your father has stood silent, and your mother pretends she is Maria Callas whilst the shadows elongate and angle into one, You sit smudge tearful in the corner, In trouble again; only the slightest trace of sticky fingers left upon her Polish writing table (pie`ce de re`sistance) causing finger blotched reflections. Yet was it perhaps merely to ease the moment? As you sit with your black edged note paper and pale trembling lips, wondering what you should say next. - Pie Corbett (UK)

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Billy Marshall Stoneking

For more on Billy, see http://www.wheresthedrama.com/ While living in remote Northern Territory communities, Billy Marshall Stoneking began publishing his own poetry—strongly influenced by the history and mythology of the Pintupi and Luritja people—in Australian literary journals such as Overland and Westerly, and his first collection of poems, Ear Ink, appeared in 1979. A major collection, Singing the Snake: Poems from the Western Desert 1979–1988, was published by Angus and Robertson in 1990. He was also involved in the performance poetry scene, and featured in the performance poetry anthology Off the Record, edited by Pi O (1985). In 1982, Stoneking enrolled in the screenwriting program at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney. He has since built a successful career as a playwright and scriptwriter and editor, stage, film and radio producer, and teacher and mentor. (from http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/marshall-stoneking-billy/ ) Without a fist You stop before the application form, sleep under sheets of iron; unemployment an untraditional way of dying. And all your babies going blind. Genuine Australian souvenirs: curio spear woomera key chains and gift boomerangs, but they didn’t put your portrait on the one dollar bill, anyway. What does one aborigine buy these days?

Photo: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49759

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A MAP OF THE ALICE SPRINGS CEMETERY

THE CATHOLICS ARE LINED UP OVER HERE, THE PLASTIC FLO WERS ARE SLOWLY FADING.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND’S

OVER HERE THE METHODISTS PUT UP COLOUR - PHOTOS OF THE DECEASED, YOUNG AND SMILING

AREA

SPREADS OUT AROUND LASSITER’ ‘S BONES

THE PRESSIES

ARE SURROUNDED BY FENCES. SOME OF THE STONES ARE OLD AND BROKEN. SOME

CHINESE

SOLDIERS SOLDIERS SOLDIERS SOLDIERS

Abor gin l Sec ion ( shot with holes )

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The Selected Your Friendly Fascist - edited by Rae Desmond Jones