Published 16 December 202225 January 2023 · Poetry / Friday Poetry Poetry | Wombats shit candy Michael Farrell To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no. The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony, or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims. Is that where We’re huddling, in a poem? And if so, narrated – spoken – by whom? The Witch of Hebron? Saint Commonwealth Bank? I just call her Aunty. That’s my affectionate nature. To improve, substantially, a patient must be well enough to realise that it is up to themselves. That’s the candy in the bed: it’s the last of it. Candy – lollies, to you – Must be reframed as making the bed. How sweet, you will say, as if sucking on a sheet or one of my socks. Well, you never know how queer a poem will go on you, like a virtual lover, or a cow dealing with trauma. What a chatty tone, as if staying up all night in Rome, with Jahan and Robberto, and finally letting my guard down. Or taking Speed, and getting fleas as I come down. Ultra rare episodes in a life of work. Cf (short for the Latin: confer/conferatur, both meaning ‘compare’) Roland Barthes, who trumps Oscar Wilde here. Barthes is hardly chatty. For an exemplar on surviving work – life even – see neither, but rather, Juan Ramón Jiménez. In his work on the poetics Of work, he urges us to live one hour at a time. All of us, he argues, can seize moment after moment, forgetting the day, and without ending up on the couch like Wilde, even if with less to show for it. My adolescent prose style was rather too replete with dashes, which were circled in red by Miss Hunt, yet they survive in my PhD thesis, As pointed out, in black, by Professor Gelder. I try to keep a rein on rhetorical questions, too, like, or unlike, a horse colliding with Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. That’s ekphrasis. There was a bad smell in my flat yesterday, and eventually I realised I had some patriarchy on my shoe. An ultimate lie, irony, metaphor, and / or punch line. Michael Farrell Originally from Bombala, NSW, Michael Farrell is a Melbourne-based poet, with a collage practice which can be seen on instagram @limechax. Googlecholia is out now from Giramondo. More by Michael Farrell › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 8 September 202312 September 2023 · Poetry Poetry | Games Heather Taylor-Johnson Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready. First published in Overland Issue 228 31 August 20236 September 2023 · Poetry Verbing the apocalypse: Alison Croggon’s Rilke Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne ‘This again?’ and ‘why now? Why not years ago?’ are the two questions raised in each new translation of a non-English piece of Western Canon. There’s an understanding—of course a poetic cycle like the Duino Elegies is incomplete in English, there are endless new readings—and a simultaneous sense of wounded pride/suspicion: what was missing the last time around? What were you concealing from me? What are you concealing now?