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'Advantages of Stopovers', a new poem by Michael Farrell

by
September 2019, no. 414

'Advantages of Stopovers', a new poem by Michael Farrell

by
September 2019, no. 414

Writing a line, as if from bed, on a lovely, handmade
organ based on Gerald Murnane, the Goroke novelist
last seen pouring a glass of amber silk and swaying
imperceptibly enough to be called coincidental to Hot
Chocolate. I would not be the writer I am if I forebore to
mention the snowy peaks outside, being an analogy of
actual peaks. You see me out there gesturing at their
anti-poetic line, my hand perhaps making a mosquitoey
movement in the air, a veritable range-splainer or
Attenborough in Asia  Sentences erode like

 

ripped earth, as if an editor or technological malfunction
(how can a malfunction be bad when it sounds so good?
you can’t spell a-b-c-d without b-a-d) were large yellow
machinery with the name Cat, or Komatsu. Do you
believe like me, in a different way, in Spinoza, in deco-
nstruction? It is not, to return to the trope of the hand-
made musical instrument, as if wood is dead, I mean
wood as word or key. Call science (but how? where?)
romantic then, I may add there are rows of yellowing as-
pen in clear view like I might – going blonde in midlife

 

  It started with a kiss and if a lengthy
trial must be undergone, it is not too shabby a thing to
wake in a room like this. What, I’ve been asked is the
tension between a sentence and a stanza? (Or you might
say: between a block of flats and a plaza.) This is a
question for the infinite forest to ignore, but I must give
it some thought, in order not to begin to sound like a
mechanical monkey, however cute, based on Broken Hill
essayist Evan de K – not their real name, last seen drop-
ping a dingleberry into someone’s coffee, perhaps at the

 

height of their humour, and irony  So I begin to chop
in earnest as if I earn money from making salad, or it’s
my passion: lettuce under the knife, just needing freshly
roasted advice to bring its yellowing heart back to life
  Should prose rhyme? Another question I’ve never been
asked, but on a night when you know that sleep will make
you ill, and road fatality statistics arise like clapped-in
topiary at an impatient neocon convention – I’d marry
Time, but I just turned seventeen and by the next day
the voice on the radio says it doesn’t remember me

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