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 17 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.
