It's alright
… it's gonna be alright cos the music plays forever …
Paris Brightledge, 'Sterling Void'
Last week I liberated,
west across steel and spires
and crackling desert,
a skein of chromatic CDs:
deep and progress-
ive house compiled
and mixed by John
Digweed, Wally Lopez.
Michelle texted, today:
Listening to new
music — bloody fantastic! Me
and Willa are dancing! I
stopped for a moment
to do some dishes
only to feel a little tug
on my short shorts —
her wanting me to rejoin
her on the dance floor.
Five years old, wobbling
in Dad's Blunnies to Dolly
Parton's 'Jolene' with
Mum, draped in frangipani,
both under house arrest.
In the iPhone's screen,
basset hound eyes.
Twisted
liber noctem
batter up the hatcheries
eat, drink, be merry —
do it again, again, again
every Jack has his jackaroo
boys will be girls will be boys …
three sheets to the provincial Christmas window
Venus is the root of all evil
a moll's as good as a miss
marriage is a sacred sanatorium
suffer the Prada-wearing Devil or the Deep Blue Sea
adversity makes humdrum bedfellows
better late than pregnant
Heaven knows no beauty like a woman divorced
absence makes the heart grow abscesses
offer your grandmother rotten eggs
only mire fights fire
enough's never enough
X marks the death's-head
blood's thinner than affinity
every cloud has a charcoal vinyl
a poet's not recognised in his own land
all good things come to the maître d', never the waiter
troubles shared are troubles doubled
nothing's rare in love and war
tomorrow always comes
The Cure's the goddamn disease
Siouxsie should've died a Banshee
Rolling Stones only gather dross
time heals no wound
sola lingua bona est lingua mortua
Artist
Silence,
Silence. The sun runs
Through the great red eye
Of the mountains
Like plasma. From arboreal hooks
The night birds
And the bats
Suspend their dirty cloaks.
Jasmines weep no griefs —
The moon is not corporeal.
Even the slow roses are at peace.
The artist —
Light as sacred papyrus,
Sight restored to his left eye
Like Horus —
Leaps like a leopard
Amongst the willows and white tumuli,
Limbs of low Botticelli clouds
Gracing
His mulatto skin.
Fortunate to have sealed the marbled cracks,
To have faced, to have backed away from his blacks,
He whispers, Within,
Within.
In 2001 Stuart Barnes completed a Bachelor of Arts (Literature, Philosophy) at Monash University. Currently he's assembling his first chapbook, Uprising (poems of the New World Order), and writing his first novel. He was shortlisted, in 2010, for the Newcastle Poetry Prize.