MFreeZone: Ian Irvine
Four Poems From 'Facing the Demon of Noontide'
Copyright , 1998, Ian Irvine all rights reserved.
New Age Quacks:
Old man into reincarnation
who’ll swallow that with the best of intentions
he said, ‘See man, see if a past life interferes,’
well I don’t need no more misery
got quite enough just follows me
this time around ...
So take what I give you
‘Thirty dollars sounds great.’
and with the best of intentions
and a whole whole heap of civilised inventions
You can stuff it where it fits!
Well man it’s the new Fundamentals
seen rattling their kettles,
Liberals in shackles
Hari’s with rattles
just stop and choose one
supermarket sale on
mind-float drugs to maintain
every put on.
‘Who man, needs divine intervention?’
‘Nirvana extension?’
‘Religious injection?’ moribund
clap trap, horse fat,
loony bin, sex is sin,
Astrology is in,
a mystical some- thing
Not Me.
So take what I give you
‘Thirty dollars sounds great’
and with whole, whole heap of civilised inventions
you can stuff it where it fits!
‘X’: Administered to Death.
‘At the beginning of the modern period, all the prerogatives of the continental states accumulated in the hands of those princes who most relentlessly took the course of administrative bureaucratisation. It is obvious that technically the great modern state is absolutely dependent upon a bureaucratic basis.’ [Max Weber.]
The year is turning circles
and man has more papers
to imprison him,
to provoke judgement and
assess worth.
If you get ‘x’ number of
bearded permissions
you can exchange them for a passport
to get medical advice
and thus earn more units of ‘x’
which means you get a
tax file
and one day a call up to fight in
and wars against communist dictators
who came to power because of
world bank meddling
There will be ‘x’ numbers of casualties
you have an ‘x’ percent chance
of being one of them.
Even so the right to earn,
ensures you will consume ‘x’
units of compulsory fall apart commodities
planned in accordance with
gold-millennium Progress
Sales are tipped to rise at
‘x’ percent per year.
and apple trees only last seven years
after ‘x’ numbers of scientists
have messed about with them
and they die after five years!
kak-it, there are,
‘X’ numbers of research workers
trying to find out why.
(1988)
They wanna jab her full of drugs:
In using the term ‘petrification,’ one can exploit a number of the meanings embedded in this word:
1. A particular form of terror, whereby one is petrified, i.e. turned to stone.
2. The dread of this happening: the dread, that is, of the possibility of turning, or being turned, from a live person into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot, an automaton, without personal autonomy of action, an it without subjectivity.
(R.D. Laing, The Divided Self.)
They call her crazy and jab her full of drugs,
‘coz of the suicide attempt with 22 tranquillisers
in a sweltering caravan
picture: pinks and violet-greys
and vomit on the sheets
Mother and child.
They wanna put her in a psychiatric ward, ‘Group,’
And eternity sleep, ‘Just like her sister.’
but only sixteen and strewn helter-po
among the pots and pans
with bloated limbs
and angular fears
She’s only sixteen and she’d love to die
got slash marks, whitely on her wrists
after schooldays and the last
sugar-book rejection, hero-
triggered despair, dark hold,
we all know
hate her
for showing it so.
She has folded shoulders, frail chest,
face ivory-white, terror’s paint,
Remembers tiled corridors -
mostly reds and filtered whites -
buzz-bombs of the brain
and moth’s wings across the T.V. sets
of infancy ...
Look at this place
This place in which she lives
this cramped hovel -
This place where
spectres hang like posters
at the foot of her bed.
And she’s sitting here with us
and when she talks about men,
leaving
her,
like her daddy did when she was three
about three years before her mother tried to kill
her sister with a knife, about ten years before
her mother saw trains full of maggots
and put a freshly cut pigs leg - wet with salty blood -
under the blankets of her daughter’s bed
about thirteen years after her dad,
whom she can’t remember, started beating her,
grey morning sun, blood-stained moon,
after, or during, the torment of her birth
In Caesars hands ...
They wanna jab her full of drugs
make her attend group, then, maybe, give her
SHOCK TREATMENT
at age twenty three.
They wanna jab her full of drugs.
Womb Decay:
Most adults cannot comprehend the agony that a newborn is in, even though he may be crying and screaming his heart out. But because he cannot speak, we act as though he hasn’t ‘said’ anything. Because he cannot explain himself we discount his pain as harmless. We expect newborns to writhe and scream ... [Arthur Janov, Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience.]
I can hold clockwise onto you,
lie still in your calamities,
your cool curtained flesh.
And I can lie earthbound,
your vocals from the highest
concrete floor,
Holding fast with shattered glass,
screaming, ‘Don’t fall!’
into the dizzy lightening
night.
But I have fallen,
flown, already,
mother ...
and fleshless,
but for the sweet anticipation
of concrete and glass and
a scream-razor cry
carving up the body of our lies.
Ian Irvine, is an Australian who has lived in NZ, the US, and the UK. He has a great deal of poetry and short stories and essays published about the place, most recently by the Canadian Journal 'The Antigonish review', Lotus magazine. The Age (newspaper, Melbourne) and Parabola. My reviews and poetry appear regularly at Australia's major literary literaray net site 'Ozlit. He is also editor of 'The Animist' http://www.diskotech.com.au/asphodel which is, we like to think, one of Australia's leading literary e-journals.The Animist is archived by the Australian National Library as a journal of national cultural significance.
Ian Irvine Post Office Box 309 |
