That’s the way. I bet that’s the way.
That’s the way it always works, well come on Mr Devil,
Let’s see what you’ve got, and the next one looking to york me but
I come down the wicket and make a full toss of it and he watches
It go over his head and into the sightscreen and the crowd is
Dancing and banging the lids together and laughing and the man
At the non-striker’s end is coming down and talking to me.
Calm down he says, don’t be too hot-headed, this man, he’s good.
Good? I say. He’s no good. He’s bad.
This is rubbish he’s bowling. We can take him apart.
Better not, he says, prodding the pitch
With the toe of his Stuart Surridge.
Why not? I say.
He buys eighty-seven per cent of our sugar, he says.
The ball is there to be hit, I say
As drinks come on to the ground
And we return you now to the studio.
Sylvia Blath
Born in Mosman, Sylvia wrote about illness and death. She sometimes did it ironically but always, behind all the fun, were illness and death. She called it a day in 1963.SELF DEFENCE
You do no soft, you do no soft,
No more the old soft shoe,
In which I once delighted when you
Danced upon my cradle, as I
Annexed the Sedatenland.
I clapped my partly German hand,
On my partly Polish one,
Just like in real life,
And when you came home, achtung!
You wiped your boots on my face.
In the shadows you ordered away the lives
Of all of us black Jewish Poles,
Your daughter you condemned
To the oven, subtle in leather,
Der Ofen! Schnell!
Pig brute fatso bastard,
Shit bugger bum fuck poos,
Daddy Daddy I’m through, Hello?
Germaine I can hardly hear you,
This is a very bad line.
Henry Adrian
One of the ‘Parramatta Poets’, so popular in Sydney during the 1960s. They believed poetry should describe the experience of ordinary people and that it should be performed in their voice.HERE ARE THE NEWS
Once upon a fair old cow of a night
In the four corners of The Empire, the
Bar and Grill upon which the sun never
Set menu number twenty-five was taking a caning from
Nipper Yarwood and self with two
Unidentified young female friends.
‘I don’t like yours much,’ said Nipper,
On account of being very witty, when we first
Saw them at high noon in Jarvis Street
Them in the boots and cigarettes of the period.
This of course was his way of saying
He had fallen in lust with the other one.
If I’d known then what I know now
I’d have been completely confused but
It seemed to me at the time they
Were made for each other, she to share his
Clapped-out green Hillman and he to have Maureen
Tattooed on a big red heart across his right arse.
If anyone had told me then, that
By the age of forty-seven, he’d be fat and useless
And a drunken ugly mad and lonely shit and
She’d have left him twenty years ago and
The State would have the children, what I’d have said was
‘Hang on a minute. What are the other one and I going to do now?’
John Platten
Another of the ‘Parramatta Poets’ and perennial Hawthorn rover. The image of Platten streaming away from the pack bouncing the stitched icon on his own bow-wave carries with it the picture four seconds later of Jason Dunstall surfing through the rich loam with a mark on his chest and the opposing fullback pleading insanity.ARE WE THERE YET?
My father and I would sometimes go out,
Looking for ideas,
Now and again we’d bag one,
But most of them
Would get away.
You have to come at them downwind,
They can smell embarrassment
A mile away.
He never talked about ideas,
He told stories,
Which would sometimes illustrate an idea.
The idea they would sometimes illustrate
Was that he didn’t talk
About ideas.
Nob Dylan
Nob came originally from Charade, a small town near Piffle, New South Wales. His real name was Ern Zimmermalley and his work turned out to have been an elaborate joke concocted by other poets, notably James Dean and Woody Guthrie.RAIN PAIN TRAIN SONG NUMBER 407B
Lyric reprinted from The Genius of Nob Dylan by Nob Dylan. By kind permission of the publishers, Zimmerdrivel Productions.
There’s a martyr standing laughing on the dark side of the road
There’s a crimson coloured fire across the land
And Iscariots in every house hold tightly to their dream
With their thirty silver reasons in their hand
Their graven image worshipping their horn of stolen plenty
Singing songs that make the river want to cry
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
I’m as radical as a chocolate frog
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
You’ve got to do as you’re told by someone
And it might as well be me
The Mississippi moon comes up the window of the train
Making good time down to Frisco in the early morning rain
I can’t get me no interest rates, Oh Lord, I can’t, oh no
I can’t get me no short term market, Oh Lord, I can’t, no mo’
Ain’t no one prepared to pay twenty, Great Jesus, you tell me
Please tell me how’s a workin man spose to live
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
I’m as radical as a chocolate frog
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
You’ve got to do as you’re told by someone
And it might as well be me
We got a call at work today from some guy on the road,
Crosses shifted, any distance, family business, nothing down,
Smart kid wanted with own transport, who must know at least
Three ways of getting out to Calvary from town,
And a man with bleeding feet came in to shelter from the storm,
And he said he’d take it right away but he wanted Mondays off
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
I’m as radical as a chocolate frog
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
You’ve got to do as you’re told by someone
And it might as well be me
Leonard Con
A deeply sensitive and wickedly humorous writer whose use of irony is greatly admired by very small children.THE EMPEROR'S NEW ALBUM
I want you but
