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 spiresand crackling desert,
a skein of chromatic CDs:deep and progress-ive house compiled
and mixed by JohnDigweed, Wally Lopez.Michelle texted, today:
Listening to newmusic — bloody fantastic! Meand Willa are dancing! I
stopped for a momentto do some dishesonly to feel a little tug
on my short shorts —her wanting me to rejoinher on the dance floor.
Five years old, wobblingin Dad's Blunnies to DollyParton'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 hatcherieseat, drink, be merry —do it again, again, again
every Jack has his jackarooboys will be girls will be boys …three sheets to the provincial Christmas window
Venus is the root of all evila moll's as good as a missmarriage is a sacred sanatoriumsuffer the Prada-wearing Devil or the Deep Blue Seaadversity makes humdrum bedfellowsbetter late than pregnantHeaven knows no beauty like a woman divorcedabsence makes the heart grow abscessesoffer your grandmother rotten eggs
only mire fights fire
enough's never enoughX marks the death's-headblood's thinner than affinityevery cloud has a charcoal vinyla poet's not recognised in his own landall good things come to the maître d', never the waitertroubles shared are troubles doublednothing's rare in love and wartomorrow always comes
The Cure's the goddamn diseaseSiouxsie should've died a BansheeRolling Stones only gather dross
time heals no wound
sola lingua bona est lingua mortua
Artist
Silence, Silence. The sun runsThrough the great red eyeOf the mountainsLike plasma. From arboreal hooksThe night birdsAnd the batsSuspend 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 eyeLike Horus —Leaps like a leopardAmongst the willows and white tumuli,Limbs of low Botticelli cloudsGracing 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.