This will hurt me...

Ramus. St David's Park, Hobart. July 2012. A belated Q and A, again stolen from Sunday Stealing: The 88 Meme: The Last Part ! 69. Song you're thinking of right now? Even the Bad Times Are Good by The Tremeloes. 70. Want someone back in your life? Not particularly… 71. Will tomorrow be better than today? It is extremely unlikely. 72. What's the colour of the underwear you are wearing? Black, with a white waistband. 73. Who was the first best friend that you ever had? I’ve never really been a ‘best friend’ type of fellow. If I am honest, it would probably be my wife. 74. How do you react when someone disappoints you? Usually with disappointment. There’s a resignation to the fact that people generally let you down. 75. Is there anyone who understands your sexuality? I’m not even certain that I understand it! 76. Are you a naturally happy person? Or is your happiness forced? I don’t ‘force’ those moments that I am happy (or appear to be), but I woul...

Grass lights. St David's Park, Hobart. June 2012. No matter how many times I try, and despite the fact that I am aware of the challenge of it, I always manage to spell the word 'buerocracy' 'beauruocracy' 'beareuocracy' 'bureaucracy' incorrectly. Spelling , Margaret Atwood My daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters, red, blue & hard yellow, learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells. * I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words. * A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. There is no either / or. However. * I return to the story of the woman caught in the war & in labour, her thighs tied together by the enemy so she could not give birth. Ancestress: the burning witch, her mouth covered by leather to strangle words. A word after a word after a word is power. * At the point where language fa...

Bandstand. St David's Park, Hobart. August 2012. I can't be one-hundred percent certain, but I suspect that this poem by the indomitable Philip Larkin might just well be the bleakest poem that I have read in my entire life. Enjoy! Love Again , Philip Larkin Love again: wanking at ten past three (Surely he's taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing how To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery. Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, And me supposed to be ignorant, Or find it funny, or not to care, Even ... but why put it into words? Isolate rather this element That spreads through other lives like a tree And sways them on in a sort of sense And say why it never worked for me. Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity.

Winter. St David's Park, Hobart. July 2012. I better rush out today's Top Five before the Limpicks run out of time (they are still going on, aren't they?). Anyway, in no particular order, My Top Five Official Olympic Logos That Are All A Damn Sight Better Than The Incestuous Monstrosity This Year!

Elves under trees. St Davids Park, Hobart. July 2012. Grass , brother. GRASS . Uh-huh. That's right. GRASS , Carl Sandburg ILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo, Shovel them under and let me work-- I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

Blue skies. St David's Park, Hobart. July 2012. Sunday Top Five? Not today it is raining.

[Whispers] Henry can see dead people.

What are they doing in there? St David's Park. November 2011. Oh I do love peeking over a fence. Two Songs , Adrienne Rich 1. Sex, as they harshly call it, I fell into this morning at ten o'clock, a drizzling hour of traffic and wet newspapers. I thought of him who yesterday clearly didn't turn me to a hot field ready for plowing, and longing for that young man pierced me to the roots bathing every vein, etc. All day he appears to me touchingly desirable, a prize one could wreck one's peace for. I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel a sweet flower and what pure happiness to know all our high-toned questions breed in a lively animal. 2. That "old last act"! And yet sometimes all seems post coitum triste and I a mere bystander. Somebody else is going off, getting shot to the moon. Or a moon-race! Split seconds after my opposite number lands I make it-- we lie fainting together at a crater-edge heavy as mercury in our ...

A palm tree in the dead of winter. June 2010. If you've not had the chance to get onto the new master of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street , get out there and get your grubby little hands on it. Don't make the mistake and think that it's sloppy . It's relaxed , but dudes, it is tight . Name of a Tree , Catherine Anderson Some days I am Ana's teacher, some days she is mine. This morning, we look through her kitchen window, the one she can't get clean, cobwebs massed between sash and pane. The sky is blue-gold, almost the colour of home. Ana, I say, each winter I get more lonely. Both of us would like the sun to linger as that round fruit in June, but Ana says it's better to forget what you used to know...

Lieutenant Thomas Burnett arrived at Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land on 6 January 1837 aboard the barque Fairlie , accompanying Captain Sir John Franklin who was taking up his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor of the colony. Unfortunately for Burnett, his stay in Tasmania was but a brief one. He drowned on 21 May 1837 when his whaler ran into a spot of weather Bruny Island in D’Entrecasteaux Channel. The photo above is the monument to Burnett, utilising the stone plinth imported from England which was to have been the main stand for an observatory for the man. Bummer. He was thirty-one. History , by Robert Lowell History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had-- it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his baby crying all night like a new machine. As in our Bibles, white-faced, ...

I have a tendency to look up trees and see what I can find. This tree is in St David's Park. Have I found anything of note? Apologies for the brevity of late, but it's National Drug Strategy time of year, and I'm whirling like a dervish to get the bugger done.

Back when Tasmania was still Van Diemen's Land, a lot of babies died. A lot of babies. Earlier this week I spent my lunch break wandering around St David's Park here in Hobart looking at the gravestones they tore up to make a park. I snapped a few photos off, and noticed the preponderance of children's gravestones. The stones alone tell a bit of a story so I'll keep my mouth shut and let you look.