and amidst the death march he asks, within a staccato of our
banter
“so how do you get published?”
over and over like an echo, this sour requiem I endure
and yes, yes I am glad
there is no longer heroin in this place
no sharps, no nothing
yet, cheap red wine and regurgitated
memories of a young woman
who once touched us both
wakes a bad taste in my mouth
“You have to submit your stuff to the literary mags...”
“I have!”
sun trying to bend the dust-caked blinds
little death hands down my back
knowing 1 could write better in there with him
but no, whilst there are more negotiations as I reach for the door
some plans to have dinner with Sarah and I in the future,
sometime
“can I grab some money from ya ... shout me another wine?”
crust
man in the glass crust
walks up to the bin on the street and rummages
l0am traffic and oblivious
vitreous and dirty and open
no one builds a nest for him,
him in his stained denims
and glass crust
and vitreous ways walks the sidewalk alone
probably fought until it got over him?
maybe still fighting?
maybe victorious already
but then again, we all figure
you never really get over the big punches
the glass crust
or the vitreous demise
the writer’s suitcase
it spilled out onto the bitumen
like the bursting stomach of a consumed beast
the writer’s black suitcase
bleeding onto the pavement
where he fell for the last time
and the black moths within escaped
fled for cover in the light they’d been deprived of
witnesses and prisoners unto his pain
secrets into the wind
onlookers gasping in shock
the writer in a ball of terror
his state exposed to the world
and little immortality to come of anything
light shining on the darkest of journeys in the suitcase
nights of drunken ramblings
where the writer fell lower than ever
body convulsing
thoughts fleeing the open air
pages scatter amongst the breeze
the writer dies lying in a pool of his words
a mess of lies and truths
a crowd of condemnation and little comfort
finally a spectacle of his art
the art in dying alone
an external soul of tattered black cardboard
picked up in the ruthless breeze of the city
he dies like his ideas
in a bundle on the sidewalk
where the children find his writings in the gutter
and laugh them off as discarded letters of love
midnight’s plague
with a head full
of bad tunes
and
wanting to attack
the cerebral cortex
with a pair of scissors,
cutting the black squares
that keep appearing
multiplying, mutilating
in the room
that never sees sunlight
and
a clock set to midnight
repetitively
thoughts incubate
gestate
pictures from
an out-of-tune television screen
rotate, ignite
the sorry memories
spread like midnight’s plague
the constant visitation
of places without phone numbers
where the wrong moments
have left their mark
and an immune system frail,
reminder notes manifest
into death threats
macabre melodies rise
to the roof of the skull
fall into the covers
nose bleeding
midnight’s plague
taking another victim
the mind infected
with suggestions
like
fortune cookie disasters
labelled
the doctors probed
while I persisted stamping my hooves
on the cold floor of the locked ward
“Mr Watson ... you don’t eat grass!”
“ Crap!”I flared.
hooves tap, clop, tok, tap...
“ Molasses, salt tablets. Now!” I snarled.
“ Mr Watson ... why these antics’!”
“ Let me out of here ... I’m a winner ... I have a Cup to win!”
“ Mr Watson ... you’re not a race horse ... you’re a human being!
Oh yeah?
all my life I’ve been under some kind of label—
full blood?
half blood...
half breed!
half caste—
and even questioned about being
a quadroon
well
with magnificent bloodlines like that
I decided
I must be a goddamned pedigree of some sort!
for the wake and skeleton dance
the dreamtime Dostoyevskys murmur of a recession in the spirit
world
they say,
the night creatures are feeling the pinch
of growing disbelief and western rationality
that the apparitions of black dingos stalk the city night, hungry
their ectoplasm on the sidewalk in a cocktail of vomit and swill
waiting outside the drinking holes of the living
preying on the dwindling souls fenced in by assimilation
the dreamtime Dostoyevskys ponder
as dark riders in the sky signal a movement
for the wake and skeleton dance
it’s payback time for the bureaucrats in black skins
and the fratricide troopers before them
with no room to move on a dead man’s bed
is it all worth holding onto these memories
amidst the blood-drenched sands?
better to forget?
the dreamtime Dostoyevskys feel the early winter
chilled footsteps walk across their backs in the dark hours,
the white man didn’t bring all the evil
some of it was here already
gestating
laughing
intoxicated
untapped
harassing the living
welcoming the tallship leviathans of two centuries ago
that crossed the line drawn in the sand by the Serpent
spilling dark horses from their bowels
and something called the Covenant,
infecting the dreamtime with the ghosts of a million lost entities
merely faces in the crowd at the festival of the dead,
the wake is over
and to the skeleton dance the bonemen smile
open season on chaos theory
and retirement eternal for the dreamtime Dostoyevsky
the dingo lounge
those of the brown-skin lycanthrope
have merely become the forgotten offspring
from the dark ages of the dreamtime
the black man’s beliefs
are being swallowed up and regurgitated in foreign lands for a
dollar
the night creatures sucked into a vacuum of the techronic abyss
the shapeshifters skulk around the dingo lounge
haunted by the screaming engines of the machines of
consequence
lon
gevity just a whisper in the wind
as their numbers dwindle
and the dark hours are stolen by the monsters of new:
drug addicts, paedophiles and killers
the spirits have almost lost their foothold
the children of the rainbow serpent have no use for demons
scientific justification has rationalised their roles with prozac
and institutionalisation
the dreamtime can be resurrected anytime
and found on the video store shelves
while in the dingo lounge
redundancy and health in death escalates
the bonemen have performed their last dance
and the shrieks of the black dingo go unheard in the night
as the ferryman has already gone down with his ship
and Morpheus in his arduous attempts to dream
has taken to anti-depressants
there comes no storrnbird to deliver them to another side
as they fall into the landscape of the shadowmead
and the faded memories of the storytelling damned
valley man
He had rough hands
street hands
black hands
hands
that reached out
and felt the dark places
but
feeling the dark places
He would always return
with something in his face
his face that held abuse
served in an irrational way by society
the material society
a society existent on the dark places
the dark places
places that could not harness him
but only create temporary peace with him
for so many moments
He destroyed the dark places’ grasp
and finally
He danced up a wind
and mocked the dark places
until He laid silent,
waiting...
for when the brolga met his breath
inviting his dance to join hers
when,
once again
He felt the dance of the young
cheap white-goods at the dreamtime sale
if only the alloy-winged angels could perform better
and lift Uluru; a site with grandeur
the neolithic additive missing from that seventh wonder of the
world expo,
under the arms of a neon goddess, under the hammer in London,
murderers turning trustees
a possession from a death estate
maybe flogged off to the sweet seduction of yen
to sit in the halls of a Swiss bank
or be paraded around Paris’ Left Bank
where the natives believe
that art breathed for the first time;
culture, bohemian and bare and maybe brutal
and how the critics neglect the Rubenesque roundness of a
bora-ring
unfolded to an academia of art
yes, that pure soil in front of you
the dealers in Manhattan lay back and vomit
they’re the genius behind dot paintings and ochre hand prints
rattling studios from the East Side to the Village
and across the ass of designer jeans
porcelain dolls from Soho wanting a part in it so bad
as the same scene discards their shells upon the catwalks
like in the land of the original Dreaming
comatose totems litter the landscape
bargains and half-truths simmer over authenticity
copyright and copious character assassination on the menu
sacred dances available out of the yellow pages
and
cheap white-goods at the Dreamtime sale!
First published 2000 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© Samuel Wagan Watson 2000
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Sponsored by the Queensland Office of Arts and Cultural Development
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Watson, Samuel Wagan.
Of muse, meandering and midnight.
1. Watson, Samuel Wagan – Childhood and youth – Poetry.
2. Australian poetry – Aboriginal authors. 3. Aborigines, Australian – Poetry. I. Title.
A821.3
ISBN 978 0 7022 3174 2 (pbk)
978 0 7022 5040 8 (pdf)
978 0 7022 5041 5 (epub)
978 0 7022 5042 2 (kindle)
Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight Page 3
