Rawshock Book Launch

On Sunday April 22nd, 2012, I'll be giving a reading at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, Sydney, and having my book Rawshock launched! From 2pm...

Not all details are finalised, but the book is about to go to the printers. In the meantime, if you can find yourself a copy of the March edition of Australian Book Review, you can read my poem 'Oscillations', which has been shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2012 (I'd publish it on this here blog if I could, but it's particularly tricky to format, what being a massive 2-3 page cyclone).

Everyday Static

Driving along alone

between unforgiving buildings,

raindrops flicked up by tyres,

airwaves breaking

like rain on a windscreen,

reminded me of you and me

in the car, in static:

windscreen wipers tired;

the tyres flat;

the fire and its mountain-flames

hovering in our minds

like a back-seat driver gone to sleep;

the world at water level as we pulled up

and gazed out into the harbour,

mountains and rain dissolving in lumpy waves.

(published in Everyday Static, Vagabond, 2010)

Sonar

From a drunken cruise on the harbour

comes a bouncing melody: I wanna

have sex on the beach. You can

see it on everyone’s (anyone’s)

mind as the summertime trees nod assent

in the Botanic Gardens,

their scent wafting up to the nostrils

of skyscrapers breathing in fumes,

pumping out bucks,

relaying UV to the ant-sized joggers

who bound up and down along the shoreline

on sand grains jostling for legroom.

Above them, birds, checking out the goods

of a small grey woman staring at the bridge,

thinking: I wanna walk across water

like sound, as her skin remembers a distant 

prickling, another season,

a sun and a wind that lifts her hairs.

(published in Overland, 2012)