Learn to Fly

Burn the birds

Burn them now

Use our fire, breath fear on their wings.

We gulp down lies and simplifications

Like petrol

Spit it out. Circus jerks.

“Here we are now, entertain us.”

My vote for you protects my perks:

Islamic racists loving mini-skirts.

Burn the birds

Let’s wipe the sky with tongues of flame

Keep them out. The old, the young, the lame.

We love a sun-fun country

A lad of chefs and sushi trains.

To many fuckers, too many fish with feathers.

Call the monk. Club and crucifix.

Burn the birds. They have no name.

Perks. Jerks. Soon we’ll all be running

Bad weather is coming.

Hide the money from our children.

Down in Antarctica among the last stones

Someone called The Leader can explain

Why it was we ate tomorrow.

Bird bones in our throats. No brains.

- Mark Mordue

Listening to 'Chinese Radiation'

Here I am.

Here!

Listening to Pere Ubu’s Chinese Radiation.

There we are. There!

Kissing, in bed, naked, young, studying our own feelings, our university,

You wondering what Bob Dylan meant in Desolation Row,

While all I can think about is holding you and Friday night.

Holding you and wanting you to be proud.

The guitar has gone. Now there is a piano and everything is dark.

Is this the same song?

I’m here after the event. Longing myself back inside it.

Hurt as ever by the mystery of being held back.

Hearing the crowd cheer, the sad piano, ‘I saw it coming’.

Do you think memory is a crack in the mind?

Is radiation an emotion beneath our words?

I put a Geiger counter to your heart and call it my hand,

But my technology is simple, like a fat man dreaming he is a bird.

I can’t believe we were so inventive, that we grabbed another world.

Your pink jumper, your mini skirt, your books on Structuralism.

Can I take you out Friday night? Can we go see sounds

That scribble in our head like urgent love. Infection.

Infection gives me wings to be distorted. Help me fall.

Here comes the real world, just like the fat man sings.

I saw the New World, I saw the real world, I saw the big world.

- Mark Mordue

Hold That Tiger

A tyrant can shoot down a tiger but shakes in fear when someone whispers a poem.


A poem whispers down a tyrant but shakes when a tyrant shoots a woman.


A woman is a tiger shooting poems through a tyrant's dreams.


Twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once in the head at point-blank range.


Hold that tiger, hold that tiger...


- Mark Mordue

Ceremony (The Poem of the Dead)

The poem of the dead is made of this:

dirt or fire, bones and skin, worms or ash,

favourite things, a book, a ring, a guitar or just a toy,

a song to carry out the coffin out, tears and wine and tea that’s not too strong,

a cruel blue sky, consoling rain, the weather as a voice,

one shiny car, quiet movements made, a stunning Bible line,

a few lyrics from Dylan Thomas’s light, white flowers, a Stop sign,

a priest whose words just sink away, the incense in the air,

a friend who laughs, a mother’s cries, a father’s face of stone,

a hand upon your shoulder now, a strange car ride, a bird’s cold tune,

a child who lost another, cakes and bread and garden chairs,

the note they left, the will they wrote, the things that we have heard,

their favourite clothes, and when it passed, take a handful of this soil,

the milk is here, the beer is there, an aunt from way up north will speak to you,

new machinery creaks them into fire, a curtain closes slow,

a hallowed be thy name is called, the sunlight on the graves,

smoke rises from a chimney slow, we turn our eyes and walk away,

by night the loved ones, still, are gathered around the songs we used to know,

the family lives alone with loss, the ceremony is tomorrow.

- Mark Mordue


* Graveyard photo taken on south coast of New South Wales using my iPhone.

... so anyway the bones are small

    for Jim Carroll

…so anyway the bones are small, fan-like, tender in their motion
It’s surprising to consider that dinosaurs evaporated this way
Up into the blue yonder, the branches, the breeze
After so long thundering the earth

What fine legs
A chest you could crush with your thumb
Only the beak betrays an old viciousness
A map left over from a hunger for fleshier times

I’m always sent heart-beating into this mysterious evolution
Beatified and depressed by it depending on the hour of the day

Like now, in the afternoon, with a late winter wind rustling the sunny leaves,
A mower whining over suburban fences, my children still at school,
When belated news of a New York poet dead brings these same impressions to me
And I have no reason clear why such associations fly into the mind

But fly they do

A basketball through a rusted aluminium hoop
Loneliness into a glass of wine
My children’s smiles up into the sunshiny day of dreams
The homeward teeming of the city into something reassuring
A passing train upon its tracks a rattled music from my past
Leaves, wings, death, grace, loss, sky, heart – bones 

- Mark Mordue

* Image sourced from Wikipedia: shows Jim Carroll in New York in 2005.

In the Garden

 

“A man who doesn’t have a rice field should

strive to cultive the land within himself”

– Ida Pedanda Made Sideman, ‘Salampah Laku’

We lived like kings and queens

in a spoiled garden

our homes built of stone

while the locals lived on grass

their feet pasted with mud and rice

serving our smiles

away to the west a cloud rose

a sort of incense finishing the day

we drank beer

watched frangipani fall into a pool

ducks and dogs and flags

moving in the padi fields

the rest of the world

was made out of t-shirt slogans

motorbikes, kites and wi-fi connections

children played football in the dust

the sun was the sun but it was green

voices talking, a séance of the globe,

jewelry on a wrist

beside the road men sat caressing roosters

children stared through a window screen

men like tiger-things – teeth + smile –

Sprite, fries, sorrow: the entrepreneurs,

while the musicians turned echoes into bells

outside at night the dogs barked

at the already dead, hepatitis moons

shone in the eyes of the mosquitoes,

a boy holding a used plastic bag

walked down the road seemingly happy,

horns tooted and a thin trail of smoke

ghosted the darkness as a motorcyclist

took another drag of Djarum Bl∆ck

and rode on

everywhere else the strewn offerings

for the dead

were kicked and trodden on, or avoided,

a climate of flowers and pizza

breathed in the shadows and dirt,

masks and dancing, cobras, transgenic rice, cobwebs

they dug up the dead chanting a new litany and burned them

while the roosters killed each other with knives

and the crumpled notes unfolded in dry bloom.

  

- Mark Mordue

* Written on the eve of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. 
First published at Meanjin online October 7th, 2011. 'Djarum Black' is a 
local cigarette that uses a triangle instead of an 'A' for its branding.

28 thoughts

Coffee, rain, umbrellas, grass damp as the sea,

shells washed in wind,

trees sad as limbs we befriend.

The white car, small as acceptance.

The ocean, grey as a breathing, flurried, stone.

It stands up to kill you,

You who stand,

ready to snap in the wind.

Wotya gonna do?

Put Moses and his curses into your hands?

Yeah. Plant wood in the dirt,

ask for water to be turned into sky?

It won't save you.

Inside, glass and radio are gawking.

A question rises.

It's gargled,

on the letter "G"

like "geeeeeeesss-uuuss".

Dry,

I state the argument:

This stem, what is it, paraffin-laced, on my throat,

made of words and burning uses?

Light?

Nah, this is tidal, lapping, cool as lake-water on a

bow.

It laces me with a green-blue wanting sinewed into

night.

But I splash for freedom, kill a friend for the rush.

Sail away, casual, like a cheap fisherman, handreeling

the slick.

I know behind me, a light, blood-thick, muddy fear

is keeping me to the knotted whisper.

Yes. Yes.

Crocodiles bark amid my reaching limbs.

But back here on the coast, deadstone leaves sing

from my touch.

The sky blows down, wet as a winter glass, milk as

wire, even pulse.

Yes. Yes.

I am. I said.

I and I. I and I. Babylon.

Yes.

I am dancing, fine as lemon, crazy as a gin, to the

crunching.

Yes. I answer the snow-want.

Yes. I answer the burnt bitter autumn.

Yes. I touched your leg. I hurt flesh with want.

Yes. I beg sleep, I live the late morning.

Yes, I poison apples.

Yes.

Water and vinegar, thief of clocks.

I will tell time by your demise.

I will tell time.

Look upon this.

Reflect. There are no eyes.

I will tell time.

- Mark Mordue

First published April 2001 in Quadrant, thanks to Les Murray, Poetry Editor.

* Photo sourced from http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Black_Rain/black-rain-2.jpg

snow prayer

Animal without grace, God-

fearing, something or other, I don’t know –

but I don’t want a truth on my knees

unless I go there to kneel and say my thanks

of my own volition.

Put it another way

Sunlight is one

of the ecstasies of winter

on the skin, on the face

to stop the heart beaching itself

on a bellyful of desires.

Cormac McCarthy was right

children are the last God

in all of us.

And this is why I am

trying so hard to live

in my own present again.

To not regret the future

We can’t cheat time

only rapture it

with our true joy:

my daughter’s eyes,

my eldest son’s eyes,

my youngest son’s eyes,

my partner’s eyes,

how I love you all

and love you all.

Sometimes I dream of snow

like a world of feathers floating.

It’s a memory too.

A street wet with morning light.

The feathers dissolve into my coat.

I’m a bird in this glass cool thought,

dreaming of you all before I knew you.

It’s a memory too.

That Fuller quote, ‘fire

is the sun unwinding itself from the wood.’

Maybe it’s right and I’ve got this inside out.

My love yearning a world away,

the fire unwinding back to you:

I want to love you after I am dead.

When the trees talk to me,

breathing their divine green

wind-woven words

a 1000 tongues

shimmering like Holy Ghosts

on nature’s bones

I feel easier about it all

As if every lie and weakness and failure

since my birth is nothing more than a drop

of rain or light or tears or air.

I forgive everybody and hope they will forgive me.

Nothing matters anymore but kindness and forgiveness.

All else is stone after stone on the chest.

Burial music.

A feather falls to my tongue.

I turn into a bird made of white, white ice

and fly high into a white, white sky.

It’s a long time ago this happened. On that street I walked.

You can’t see me anymore, there or here.

But I love you. I loved you my children and my love

and my love was there before I knew you, and after I went away

into this white forever. A white bird remembered.

God breathes down on me and I melt away mid-flight.

Inevitably. Snow on a country street that you walk one day.

Rain and sleet through the wet bones of the crystal trees

I spoke in prayer

The strangest kiss that you kiss back to me. Air.

- Mark Mordue

* Image of snow crystals by Calico Jack and found at

http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs43/f/2009/080/f/3/Snow_Crystals_by_calicojack19.jpg

Opium Poem

Just listen to the conversation in a room:
drum 'n' bass, hawkwind, palace-
musical names and drugs
like hashish and opium.
The candle burns
and the gatherers suck half
a plastic bottle full of smoke.
Spines disappear, skin warms,
techniques get developed.
Stories of the self
can now begin:

The first one is pulled from a river
after an escape through toys
pursued by police in a supermarket.
Another crawls in the dirt
for a committee of childhood
in a secret place among the bushes.
She remembers her hair
in the black world
and bones that held it high.
While the boy wants Nirvana,
a band not a place,
pale and young
on his last cigarette outta here.
All this while the leathermaker
repairs a money belt
and recalls vegetable names
from the farm of his experience.

This is a room in Shiraz,
a travellers' place.
Familiarity is a light cord
around each voice.
Some shared slowness
to the evening's tales
enveloping them all.
Just listen to the conversation
Listen, listen to it disappear.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Allen & Unwin Publishers, Sydney Australia 2001; Hawthorne Books, Portland USA 2004).

= Photo of opium set by Steve Martin, web sourced.

Shelter in a storm...

Lightning splashes across
the skin of your closed night eyes
like high beams, instamatic,
from a dream car passing in the street…

a premonition before thunder
breaks the roof of your home

wide open to what really is.

Your children cry out in fear,
and you close all the windows,
to the wet incense of the storm,
in a mad rush like a pioneer.

It seems only minutes until
the city too has been forced
to wake up to itself: sirens, rain,
thoughts of broken lines, fallen
trees, old people dying, a journey
taken by glassy wet speculation,
the entire aquarium of the heart
swimming up into your head.

You pat down the baby girl. ‘Rain
daddy,’ she says. ‘Yes it’s nice,’
you reply, a shaman
of sweet simplicities.

Your wife goes, lays with the boy,
your son, who pointed to the lightning
as if the Bible were opening by itself
somewhere way above his gentle mind.

Now it is only the rain that is left,
a guttering music that smells like silver
and the sound of trees accepting the wind.

The family has returned itself to bed,
skin to skin, and that breathing deep sleep
of children you can practically taste,
shelter in a storm, shelter in a storm, shelter in a storm…

- Mark Mordue

He Dead

Hey man,
your secrets are going to be buried with you now
or burnt
or hidden in the trees
for birds to find.
One way or another
you’ll become the story
of bones scattered by a runaway
across the sky
fragments that turned into stars
and made a Milky Way.
Back here on earth
I’ll never know what happened
that night:
whether it was rape,
whether you took part.
I want to know…
I’ll just remember
the chilly, thin sound of begging
and water from a broken tap,
“please don’t, please stop”,
the blackness of the sub-tropical night,
a community rioting,
us all trying to escape by the moon,
me so white
I moved like a ghost
among the fists and feet and light.
I did not exist.
I was not touched.
When the door opened
and a fat black boy
came out crying,
a hand over one eye,
talking about “those animals”,
the crimes were all scrambled.
Eventually you were pulled too
from this place,
muttering “I did not rape anyone”
in that kind, sweet, sorry voice of yours,
but it was hard to believe you
even though I wanted to believe,
and later chose to forget.
That night the moon turned yellow
as we escaped
and everything clung to us.
Conversations bit one another,
broke into shouting.
In town we refueled
and soon the law of fists came
but its hand was broken.
Under the florescence
conspiracy and rumour burned
and those few of us who were white
had no place
no rules
only our instinctual wrongness
and an inkling of its meaninglessness.
We drove and drove,
fell asleep by the roadside
with fires burning,
woke up in their ash and smoke
as if we had fallen
out of a bad Dream.
You were banished on an aeroplane
while whirli-whirlis turned
weary and sullen
and powdered with dirt,
and we went on.
Time passed,
eventually we met again.
I shook your black hand, felt your hand,
wondered about forgiveness and complicity,
about what happened.
I listened to you play guitar
that kind sweet sorry sound:
you sent my eyes skyward
and I thought of birds flying.


- Mark Mordue










* Poem first published in Meanjin, 2006, Volume 65, No. 3

- Image of a whirly whirly in the distance near Red Hill is taken from ABC Broken Hill website as posted by Ron Josephs.

= Skull images from W. Ramsay Smith, ‘The Place of the Australian Aboriginal in Recent Anthropological Research’, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Proceedings. 1907. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. It was commonplace for anthroplogists of the era to use skulls and teeth for research, sending many back to museums in Europe and the UK. Aboriginal people are still trying to retrieve the skeletal remains of their ancestors so that appropriate burial rites can be given.

Born

I slept like a lion
for a whole day
while the women came in whispers
pens at their throat, light at their feet
to stroke the blocked tear duct of your eye
wash the blood from your skin
and teach you about milk
your mother among them
holding you to her, new in the world.

Their movements were like spotted dreams
and each time I woke
garbled to rise
they hushed me with laughter
and kept you warm.

I’d seen you arrive
bawling while your mother screamed
a great heaving downward
into the delight of tears
between her planted feet
the red field of your universe
chasing after you
as your mother reached to love you.

I served as her second spine
during the last great calling down.
My son Atticus Bird Mordue
I held you to my chest. I cut the cord.
But I knew deep inside
you were your mother’s son
such love in a face I cannot explain
the very shape inheriting loyalty.

Afterwards I slept and slept
while you were attended to.
Your mother was sown together again.
Yes I slept like a lion
in some kingdom lower than thought
while your mother kissed me
and held you through the first night,
the first day, then a second…
her eyes blessing your skin.

- Mark Mordue


* Previously published in Australian literary magazine HEAT, Issue No 8. Edited by Ivor Indyk. Giramondo Press, Sydney, December 2004.

It Ain't the Cool Ones

It ain’t the cool ones
who know what it means to be free
it’s the prisoners of their own passions
hearts bursting through
the buttons of their corduroy jackets
slicking their hair back
through a night full of Bourke Street leaves

Yeah, it ain’t the cool ones
who kiss like the wind is whipping them
then serenity-in-a-breath
like a glimpse of a single star,
o to burn with you when you’re 26 years old
and walking home from the music of a late-night, Taylor Square bar

It ain’t the cool ones who will do that!
who will part on corners
like hieroglyphs in dreams,
who will taste Friday
night in the scent of soft street lights,
turning-on-a-dime straight after it all
then looking back
because they can’t help their ecstasy

It ain’t the cool ones
who will call sooner than they should
who feel their heads bursting with blood
by Sunday, not Monday!
who’ve spent the whole weekend as prisoners
in a universe of songs
that lead to you like maps,
like gravity against a bird’s chest

It ain’t the cool ones
who hand you their corduroy jacket
that Sunday night near 12
happy to breath with you once more,
a poem hidden in the top right-hand pocket,
pulling at their t-shirt after you’ve gone
just to taste the scent of you
again on their shoulder

- Mark Mordue

Burning

We go under dark stars
and call it a long night.
We go under dark stars
and say the moon is bright.

We go under dark stars
to find a sleep that’s light.
We go under dark stars
into rain that’s made of glass.

We go under dark stars
on a road that’s shining black.
We go under dark stars,
they’re in our eyes, they burn our heart.


- Mark Mordue

Tracks

There’s an eagle on your chest,
but I can’t read the message beyond
the snarl of your fuck-off eyes

as you nod into the window on a train
with your trakkies on, skew-whiff,
blue and baggy like a cheap commercial
for the sky.

Your hair is straight and brown
and it reminds me of a boy
who’s been out playing for too long.
Your beauty is formerly attractive.
And that’s the depressing part of something else.

Maybe the silver grind of the wheels
betrays the twilight in your blood?

It’s a kind of ghost story under flouros
and you half scare me into hating you
when I’m not just beating my heart
with an invisible stone called ‘the end’.

Aboriginal girl, there not here, scratching out
a smacky dream slow and sure
on the city circle where you ride and ride and ride.

I’ll leave you in that window, subterranean, in a false light
scratching at your neck through the closed eyes of a dream
tunneling your own night. Bird on your own flight.


- Mark Mordue


* First published in The Fine Print (University of Technology, Sydney, 2007)

Alive in the City of Sound: A Night with the Dirty Three

Sometimes I could just run into a river and drown. That's what I'm thinking about mid-way into the set tonight when some electrical thing passes over me and this other realization comes that sound is the city's river and we're here in it already, in the river of a music coming right out of our landscape, and when I think that I see that I felt this from the start, in the anticipatory pulse of the crowd as a prerecording of Television's Marquee Moon rained heavy guitar 'hesitating' right over us and how all of a sudden the Dirty Three were on stage together as one unit, no stars, no order to their procession, Warren Ellis taking too long to untangle the lead to his electric violin as if he could be patient and a bit of a kook because of what he knew would come, oh the confidence to be stupid!, while Jim White smiled and waited behind the low drums and guitarist Mick Turner stood moochily in his jeans and black t-shirt which I think are his only clothes and probably his pyjamas as well, does Mick Turner have other clothes? I wonder, then 1000 Fucking Miles bursts and Ellis thrashes his coat off and stretches out his arms, flamenco Jesus style, lots of happy hecklers requesting all these songs, so many demands, a shouting rabble, who knows what they're fucking saying, so Ellis says "yeah they're all good ones" and everybody laughs, then he gets into a rave about playing "a country alternative rock number NOT" and it starts and the amplifiers and floodlight-stands cast singular shadows backward like lonely buildings which makes me think of New York and September 11 and the way the band are in this dream city on stage, beautiful planes of colour (blue, red, manganese) burning behind them, sometimes heating up, intensifying and cooling down with their music, till Jim White's drums sound like feedback and Mick Turner's guitar is a violin riff and Warren Ellis' violin is being played like a guitar and you're not sure what's coming from who anymore as they melt together till there's another Ellis joke-story about some girl ringing him up to let him know the Dirty Three are part of a movement called post-rock to which he says "What?" so she tells him about "all these bands named after animals and cars" he shrugs, ah its time to get down to earth and play This Some Summer They're Dropping Like Flies when I get a sad flicker on me and think about a guy I spoke to on a phone once who got killed a few hours later that same day, hit by a bus while he was riding home on his pushbike, and the stuff he said to me about his wife and kid, mild, sweet, ordinary stuff, wiped out forever, he was no one to me, a phone voice, so the memory goes and the music gets center of my head again, really pulsing now, which makes me think about the differences between the words 'danger' and 'thrill' and all these river thoughts that started this 'review' are coming now but the band stops and the song is over and Jim White looks like he's lost a drumstick or himself and even as they begin again he's still looking for something under his kit and it's the song Hope and the colour of their city on stage is jacaranda now and I'm off thinking of tree blossoms and a girl's name that I can't put a face too and this whole thing of time that's going on here tonight, time, the Dirty Three really have time in their hands, Jim White's drums sounding like he's hitting the bottom of a bucket then shimmering and then like thunder and then like horse's feet and all of a sudden Warren Ellis is there with him and his violin is a fat blood stream and the two of them are watching Mick Turner's fingers, watching and waiting for his signal to change, thoughts of Ivan Southall's novels about lonely boys and country hills in summer and old drawings by Lloyd Rees popping into my mind till Warren Ellis rants about how "they said we'd never make it" and says Blow It Out Your Arse and then and then and then I can smell pot being smoked and a couple are pashing off just to my right like they've finally confessed it's real and they want it badly and the crowd is moving in this hypnotized way, like we're spaghetti in a boiling pot, a monumental version of Suze's Last Ride "for anyone grieving here tonight" is announced, Jim White's hands faster than light, the fastest hands I have ever seen, then Deeper Water and an encore of Everything's Fucked and Indian Love Song, all in this orange blaze of colour, Warren Ellis spitting at the sky, and then and then and then it's over, but the river is still in our heads and mostly I don't know the names of the songs or the names of anything, certainly not these feelings and words that break and flow and run through me but I know this band can take you into a very big river and that everyone here tonight has found a lot going on beneath the surface.

- Mark Mordue

* Performance at Metro Theatre, Sydney, 05.11.2001. Review published in Drum Media, Sydney on 23.04.2002. Above photo of Dirty Three taken by Pete Ottery (www.c41.au)