Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Uncategorized Beacon Corey Wakeling . A black sun lights the creases in capital’s night nightcrawlers prong. The congratulatory vanguardists can accept lyrical cinema, somehow, and get away with it. Many of the butterflies puppet impressionism too. The fingers shatter on the keyboard like icicles. It is Canada, last year. Here, dolphins have given up all hope of penetrating the distant bay. Tuna fishing an obscure south-western aesthetic policy. So, she goes on hegira to the obscurest west. Ambulances lubricate words before they mince them. Then we die, best of all. Better that than bedridden or the lawn’s pandering sprinkler, the particulates get in everywhere anyhow anyway, even a little further north of the campus. He really can see Russia from the horn, the lahar a spoil of war as the isthmus breaks off. Flotillas of people remind the accountants of the G20. We must do something urgently with our pockets, chimes the ID bracelet. Not kidding, my lint paradise is a correctional facility. The books on screams are being censored, inevitably, as we rack up debts in every other humanitarian redoubt on the ferocious globe. I am an ambulance, after all. Lights are peaking. When we leave Grey Gardens for the swamp, the two malingerers greet a distant beacon. Read the rest of Overland 227 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Corey Wakeling Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator living in Tokyo. In 2013, he was granted a PhD in English and theatre studies at the University of Melbourne. Corey has lived in Japan since 2015, currently working as an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. His most recent poetry collection, Uncle of Cats, appears with Cordite in 2024. More by Corey Wakeling › 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 May 2026 · Journalism Journalism in decline: a response to Michael Gawenda Jeff Sparrow As the author of a jeremiad about media ethics, Gawenda must, at some stage, have stumbled across point twelve in the MEAA code. It reads: “do your utmost to achieve fair correction of errors”. I await his retraction and apology. 1 May 20261 May 2026 · Long read Dungeons & Dragons is a waste of time: an unproductive case for radical action Scott Hudson Another such casualty is the push of AI into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Used in this way, AI purports to hack your recreational time, allowing you to maximise it by smoothing over the nitty gritty. But the thing is, the joy of D&D is the nitty gritty. AI promises to improve the productivity of work and leisure, but much of D&D thrives on being unproductive.
