My soul is not healthy or clean
For a moose with undisciplined trousers
Is slightly less smart than it seems
But you'd like my friend, his name’s Jesus
He’s tall and he’s handsome and cool
He’s especially relaxed among lepers
He’s the grooviest kid in the school
I awake from a dream that I’m sleeping
In the soft magazine of your hair
It’s warm and it’s dark and it’s raining
And I’m coming to Scarborough Fair
There’s a man on the TV who’s standing
On a mountain of glasses and shoes
They’ve ambushed the train from Vienna
On the six and a half o’clock news
There are ten thousand Aryan women
In position and firing at will
I’ll take the ones in the tower
And Jesus the fools on the hill
And we synchronise watches and guide books
And our weapons, false papers and charts
General Mills on deployment of symbols
General Boon on the breaking of hearts
Then I’ll send in my troops in their millions
I’ve trained them to swim in the dark
Resistance is futile, we’re poets,
And we’ll touch your perfect bodies
With our shlong
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
Paul Dorkan
Paul is one of the most successful poets writing today. His work includes ‘Some of My Favourite Women’ and ‘Aren’t I Clever?’, both of which are collected in his anthology Look! Over Here!SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
Twenty years to the day after Edmund Hillary
Conquered Mount Everest, Terry Peterson conquered
Heather O’Dwyer
Who was at the time,
The highest woman in the world.
Exactly fifty years after Einstein discovered relativity
Mrs Glenys Simpson discovered that under the house
Without the aid of time or space,
And using only friction and an active imagination
Her son Bevan had effected an increase in mass.
In 1925 James Joyce left Dublin for Zurich, with Nora.
In 1983 Suzie Daley left Brisbane for Melbourne with Barry,
A man she’d met on a train, who had something to do with computers.
‘Don’t forget to write’ her mother had said, but unlike James she never really bothered.
Eighteen years after the famous tied test between Australia and the West Indies,
Nipper Dixon and his team ran exactly as far as the police,
Although it has to be said the police covered the distance slightly faster.
Onlookers said it was all very confused and they weren’t there
And they didn’t know where they’d got the microwave ovens.
Nearly four hundred years after William Shakespeare wrote to be or not to be in Hamlet
Owen McKenzie wrote to be in the draw for a luxury unit on the Gold Coast.
‘You can’t win it if you’re not in it,’ vouchsafed Owen within the privacy of his own mind.
Half a century after Wittgenstein had taken issue with himself and revised his entire position on language,
A plumber in Orbost changed his mind about the nature of elbow joints and thereafter did them in plastic.
Hamish Sweeney
Hamish, who translated the Australian constitution into English, is the current undisputed world heavyweight champion.ST FRANCES AND THE BROLGAS
In the big wet, in the north, where I grew up, they couldn’t keep me inside,
The minute the new rhythm hit the roof and rain speared the red earth
I was off outside, hub-deep on the bike and pulling focus in all directions
As the dust changed partners and danced into mud, kaolin and silt.
This is the way it has always been, in this territory of grace,
And a few clicks up the road was my sister, not looking down,
Where the sky was reflected, but away and up, head back on an angle,
Her senses full of birds, corroborating and watchful.
If they had met her, had been introduced, they would sit on her arms,
Would drift down and have their young with confidence
Along her sinew and among the soft strength of her,
For she could hold no singers in higher regard
Than those who had the knowing of the season,
And below her, pressed in the flowing ground, her feet,
Washed with the earth and helping her to the sky.
Margaret Attwood
Margaret comes from the bush up near Cooma and writes almost everything produced in Cooma. As well as her poetry she has produced a number of novels, mainly about Cooma.EVERYONE DANCES
Look Janet look.
See Janet run.
Why is Janet running?
More particularly why is she running from John?
Can anyone think of a reason why she might be running towards Peter?
How many people have spotted Janet’s mistake?
Janet wants to be a nurse when she grows up.
Janet wants to help people.
Janet is a people person.
Oliver wants to be a doctor and cure diseases.
Oliver is too young to know what doctors really do.
Oliver and Janet attain their majorities and meet at a party at Peter’s house.
They fall in love over half a bottle of wine and a Raoul Dufy
print and they leave in Oliver’s powerful thrusting sports car.
Oliver turns out to be a complete arsehole of course.
How many of you noticed me setting him up?
Janet runs into John at a Woody Allen movie and
although John is almost as boring as the Woody Allen
movie, he offers stability and reasonable genetic
stock. They marry and Janet has two babies almost
immediately.
Janet loves her children but something is missing.
After a time of wonder, she identifies the missing
element as Peter. She meets Peter at a series of
rendezvous so as not to alert Peter’s wife. This works
well and John is not at all suspicious since he is not
that sort of person. He is the sort of person who has
been corking his secretary, the lissome Fiona, for
nearly four years.
Janet and Peter eventually find their affair becoming
slightly less magical so they give it away and go back
to civilian life. Peter makes a confession to his wife
in which he pretends to recognise her value and blames
himself in a manner which makes her feel responsible.
Janet drinks like a fish and St John the Martyr feels
justified in manipulating Fiona.
Can we all see the people Janet helped?
Can Janet see?
Look Janet look.
1 Although fragments have been found around Stratford near Horsham of a work beginning ‘Would there be any point in my drawing some sort of comparison between yourself and an absolute scorcher?’
2 ‘Pommymandius’ can still be heard in pubs but no authentic manuscript exists.
3 Stumpy Byron V.C. Best known
