spell it out again

the real parties are over on the brown side

(west of the city, part II)


not exclusively
bt still / when school lets out
the white people / mostly
head to yarraville / where
working class hz been “reclaimed”
by friends of the earth
& collectives / so named
certifiably organic fruit & veg
fair-trade coffee shops / with
home-made vegan banana bread
when it is a white ghetto
it hz been gentrified / when
it’s a brown ghetto / it is
disadvantaged
*sigh*

bt the real parties
good food / & folks
who dance undrunk
happen over / on the brown side
i say / bring yarraville over here to us
& we will show them
who their neighbours are
& what the real ghetto-gentry does
turn the music up
& hoist me to the goddamn fence
cut the quiet monday night / i
am gonna boom-box our other-side friends
jungle-beat those sub-woofers
to the maribyrnong sky / sisters
we are gonna decolonise
the airways / over
geelong road / tonight

cz history speaks
of berlin & palestine
bt in this country
suburban highways
cn be race dividing lines:
vicious voting clusters
for anti-immigration lies

to some where you live
is not where you are
bt who you are / it
is sad / i know / bt true
& one suburb over
an extra hundred thou
cn ensure the neighbour’s hue

bt we run fast
& there is no escaping that
there is no escaping that
there is no escaping / that
no matter what suburb
in no matter what city
west of the city
always gets a bad rap

west of the city

no matter what city

west of the city
always gets a bad rap

they say the streets are littered with
rubbish / brown bodies
headscarfs / no-good
good for nothing playing hooky teens
from what the hell kind of public high school
out there cd even teach them
the seven days of the week

beat-sneakers
strung from power lines
shopkeepers / who refuse
to speak english
making it ironic even calling it / the west
is / abu dhabi dumpling
sweet pork bun / made from
fat stray cats / white trash bogan
out-of-their minders on crack
cz white people who choose
to live west / they
have got to be absolutely whacked
blue eyes is like
finding a syringe
in a bayside cafe` pancake stack

what is up with that?

no matter what city
west of the city
always gets a bad rap

Poemography

Writers who 'Write Everything'

As a prose writer and poetry, I know I do people well. I am always watching, without even thinking: in cafe’s, school playgrounds, at bus stops, over cash registers. My character may be twenty-five and living in a Black Panther squat in 1960’s London, but I know exactly the way his hips swing when he crosses the road – how low his pants are slung and what he had for breakfast this morning. I know what his mother thought the first time she saw him, and how he’d catch a football if it happened to come careening toward him.

Outdoor landscapes I’m okay with. Interiors I have to work at, but I'm getting better. I don’t particularly give a fuck whether the rug on which he spilt the red wine when he confessed the crime to his wife was red, or orange, or mottled brown, but I’m starting to realise that sometimes specific details do actually matter that much. If the rug was red, then wine won’t show, and maybe the bloodstain is actually hidden underfoot, right there while he is talking.
I’m a kick-arse public reader, a fierce poet, a good, but all too often lazy prose-writer, a great conversational journalist, a rubbish investigative journalist, a half-decent interviewer, a crappy academic essayist and a confident and exact auto-biographer. Increasingly though, I know my limits as a writer. That doesn’t mean I don’t push myself, it just means I know the areas, and circumstances where I need to put in a little, or a lot more research, or focus or effort. And I know which kinds of writing I have no talent, passion or interest for.

I like Maya Angelou’s non-fiction waaay better than her poetry. I like Nikki Giovanni’s poetry waaay better than her non-fiction. Roald Dahl’s adult stories don’t do much for me, but many of his kids stories are still, on re-re-reading them, a delight.

I am wary, and often scathing, of writers who claim they can ‘write everything’. Mostly, they can't. The fact is, there are very few writers who write every genre well enough to warrant publication (and I certainly am not one of them).

Why are we afraid to specialise, as writers? Name a track and field star as good at the 200 metres as they are at marathon?

Is it out of ego, delusion, or economic necessity that writers increasingly try to dabble in everything?

Are we are all J.K. Rowling, quietly panicking over that promise of a first adult novel?

Just because you can write everything, doesn't mean you should, or that it will actually be any good.