Which was, is and remains a wonderful title. It is, however, not mine, and that is a cause of deep sadness. In lieu of it being mine, I will steal it with all due credit to John Darnielle (who planned a return tour to Australia and then called it all off at the last moment, and for this he needs his knees broken [at least one knee, don't say I'm not generous]), and use it to headline these here poems, which I'm submitting later this morning for peer review. If I get anything reasonable from the session, I'll come back and tweak this entry accordingly.

Laugh and I'll come around to your house and hit you with one of your children.

Oh, all right, you can have the original poems until such time as I have a suitable picture of a puppy to replace them with. Don't say I don't give you bastards anything:

esprit de corpse ('spirit of the body')

clots of ethereal blue, pulled from turquoise waters somewhere off a coast where the napalm still burns. they escape their enclaves and enclosures, coops and corrals, and run like sweat, on mottled cilia, across the open deck, to grope your calves, climb the backs of your thighs, they drape crafty tentacles across your swimmer's shoulders, probe with gelatinous care the shattered sockets of your smiling eyes, and clumsily craft fiery arabesques from free-floating ribbons of your glowing flesh.

the transatlantic jellyfish transporters (they know about these things, you see), they recommend that your shiny immolated bones be packed, for posterity, in the superheated cordite left over from artillery salvos, costed at $80,000 a round, coasting and loosed for a lark on frightened deer turning tail in the undergrowth.

they decant you, as promised, into brittle and blackened packing peanuts, unsunned Godless faces turned from the sky and the daily Eastern incineration, in the light of which motes of you dance on

--

hourly

we fell in and out of love hourly in an apartment formed entirely from the detritus of a life lived lively, wrappers and discarded roll-ups all underfoot i wonder idly 'performance art hell, construct stated cynically, or anti-capitalist statement taken too seriously? but her DVDs are ordered alphabetically! her records autobiographically, or is it chronologically? she piles her coins with numismatic efficiency, efficiently fucking my first last semblance of a theory; thinking thickly, we dance poorly: her teeth in my lips tautly, drunkly, too sloshed, sauced, lubricated, blasted, canned, cockeyed, too pissed, to do it properly, separated shortly, i'd miss her, in a dozen ways grandly and greatly, if only: she hit her head on the bath, and forgot to remember me

--

devastation (a tanka on the subject of loss)

you're devastated smashed by grief into pieces not for the first time you reached for the coffee cup thieves! scoundrels! it was empty

--

Quick summary: The first poem came out of an exercise in pain visualisation. The war imagery and necrophilia were just a happy accident. The second is a recounting of a fun night I spent with a career alcoholic in her apartment in Carlton (Friends will know her by her bass-playing), combined with an enforced -ly rhyming scheme, and I will only say that it's impossible to get into the spirit of the moment when you're the only sober person in the room.