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 4 First published in Overland Issue 228 1 February 20233 February 2023 Reviews This is where the rat bastard poem comes in Dan Hogan Rats will be found wherever nonsense presented as sense becomes the authority. Such is the cornerstone of anything organised along lines of capital: bureaucracies, workplace hierarchies, real estate, aspiration culture, institutions, ruling class artifice, governments, etcetera. Wherever there is capital there are rats—hoarding creatures, capital’s henchmen. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 14 December 202225 January 2023 Reviews The moral risk of taking things too seriously: on Gareth Morgan’s When A Punk Becomes A Spunk Elese Dowden In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes 'against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.' This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that's more … metal?