Fading


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 ›

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