d this guy
says, nor can I say I love you
but a gentle calligraphy informs your
brow. What a whacker! I know shit
from clay, he just reckoned he could get
away with saying nothing. Dickhead!
Guys are like that with money
like its some fucking secret.

Who Killed Brett Whiteley

Actually, it was Lloyd Rees
killed off Brett Whiteley who couldnt
live the promise of old age,
the calm terror of it. Thats what
Rees meant in his letter to Brett:
carry the torch forward
and something about being a warrior
for Art. Brett, in fact, was
skittled by a high powered mix of
narcissism & clown. Forget what
he had to, or couldnt leave behind &
anything to do with High Seriousness.
He got caught up in latitudes
of sex where the Olgas loomed round as
buttocks. Brett became his own
myth when he died, and effectively
slammed the door on the 60s.
Maybe some other seascape, like Thera,
suggestive of broken altars;
looking down into the cratered harbour
he might have seen beneath the
lapis lazuli waters, an ivory
scimitar held in the gaze of Portunus,
perfectly preserved, snapped in two.

Sugarbag Carpenter

Them days all you
needed was a blunt saw &
an axe thrown in a

sack. If you could
drive a 3" nail through a
pound of butter

you got the job
and thats a fact ask
Bob the Builder

who shook the hand
of Banjo Patterson though
no-one believes him.

Theres not one
finial or mullion round
Boomi that hasnt

his name on it;
he was there with the ox
& swivel chain.

When he couldnt
make a deaner he went bumper
shooting in the 30s

way back before
the Great War the first of the
street kids in Ultimo,

and his father
(hell tell you) saw electricity
come to Tamworth in 1888.

From Tilba Tilba
to Bondi, the last of the
Sugarbag Carpenters.

Aunty Eve

who always kept the Aspidistras
flying high up in her Georgian house on
the windy Terrace from marble urns

had lipstick bomber pilot red
& nails the colour of flame.

It was often elevenses in her lounge
with Gordons served on a silver platter and
THE GRAND HOTEL, DUNEDIN 1932 engraved

on the rim. Another stim dear?
from the mahogany sideboard repository to dozens
of weighty 78 jazz records in brown paper
jackets stacked like so many ossified flapjacks.

Oh she had the most beautiful hands (in her
day) they said, used for commercials in the
Womens Weekly & Booths the Chemist