Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized Fading Pam Brown conjecture if I can’t come up with anything I’ll crawl over and tap out one note I’m trying hard to live a bourgeois life – taking double-strength cappuccinos tying coloured balloons to the fence Ladies & Gentlemen Please Stop at Security and put your mobile phone number on your child’s arm crepe paper streaked with cream darkness drops like a blind holy ghost keeps hanging on muffled steps relaxed like hands in pockets Block people moved to Housing Department flats clutching brown paper bagged bottles moping round on the bus route * fading beyond whatever you were a boatload of rats a-rowing down some slippery stream sitting on the carpet rug reading the long list of benefactors to the art magazine is anyone still ever born again? no phenomenon but in things like slim cyber tablets scissor sharpeners glass paperweights vinyl bucket seats brass padlocks a sundial you only get one jubilee and I’ve had mine no poem is meant for anyone literary magazine editor gets intoxicated we get drunk make an unintended poem a yahoo might like Pam Brown Pam Brown has published many chapbooks, pamphlets and full collections of poetry, most recently Stasis Shuffle (Hunter Publishers, 2021). She lives in a south Sydney suburb on reclaimed swampland on Gadigal Country. More by Pam Brown › 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.