Tableland Phantoms

A Suite of Poems

Brentley Frazer

Books by Brentley

PostHuman Musings ~ new poems (Digital) 2013 Memories like Angels At A Ball Tripping Over Their Gowns 2007 The Dead Girl Suite ~ poems (Digital) 2006 Major League Philosophy 101 ~ poems (Digital) 2005 Brilliant Future an antinovel (with Fakie Wilde) 2004 A Dark Samadhi ~ poems & microtexts 2003 The Book Of Such ~ a suite of poems (Digital) 1997 Fugue ~ poems 1996 Oneirodynia ~ poems 1995 Blood Psalms ~ poems 1993 Opera of Destruction ~ poems 1991

Ens Causa Sui

Several texts or versions of texts from this collection have previously appeared in LiNQ (Australia).

This collection first published digitally by Retort Books 2013 Copyright: Brentley Frazer 2013

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever [including photocopying, electronic archiving, scanning] without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical or scholarly articles and reviews. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Tableland Phantoms
You walk alone with the Ghost of Time... ~Men at Work

Labor Pains
Winding up the Palmerston into the mists of Milla Milla signs loom out: WARNING HEADLIGHTS ON : HEAVY FOG. And the fuzz comes in long after you realise that the radio has gone. I'm looking for a metaphor, the way the road rolls, like a wet dialogue of tongues; then I come across a caravan twisted in a ditch. A man standing on the edge says he's already called for help. I drive by, curiosity pressed up against the glass; shave twenty off the speedo, you can get nowhere fast. Higher into the Tablelands with a dog and my mother's galah; earlier, on the hands-free she quoted a poem she'd seen in Barcaldine...there's nothing there but eight pubs, a museum and the Tree of Knowledge, poisoned in protest. It goes like this, she said, it's written by a socialist, which, as kids, they taught us to distrust. 'After God made the rattlesnake the toad and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water sogged brain and a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where other people have their hearts he carries a tumour of rotten principles.' You don't vote Labor, do you, Bren? I tell you, they're using the working class agenda to further corporate rule. No, Mum, I laughed, I don't vote at all.

Irukandji Sails
A Ranger found four hundred ghost nets on a seventy kilometre stretch of beach, south of Aurukun. Says the local women, with the subterfuge of moonlight sharks, collect them to make art for tourists. Goes on to mention they've been substituting Pandanas leaves and Flax cactus with the strings. Countless generations of knowledge, an ancestral understanding of flora trapped in a nylon paradox, drowned fish and hundred year old turtles, mere empty shells in days. They drift over from Acheh, down into Southern Indonesia, tumble ashore...as though the ocean tossed up her hair, some of them five k's long, like immense Irukandji, or underwater sails. He'd just come from a conference up The Cape, listened to some bureaucrats act concerned, said he may's well believe a mystic who claims to be cloned from a semen spill on the Shroud of Turin, that, those damn men from Canberra, nothin' but spin-doctors, spectators, a catastrophe of television cameras, and worthless.

King
I'm living in a shed on the banks of Lake Tinaroo. The second night saw me nearly murdered by a Brown. I got up from the desk to smoke a cigarette, opened up a door in the northern wall, swung it wide for fresh air--and the snake reared up, three feet tall alive with a thousand eyes of dew. A sorcerer from the grass it struck as I leapt back, vociferous as a whore, and it fell short, with a slap like someone had dropped a book. From atop the fridge I watched it curse in reptile slang, turn and silently slide out again.

Where Kulara Sleeps

The animus of dead timber-getters reflects in the eyes of raptors from the phantom limbs of Tinaroo. Down where Old Boar Pocket Road becomes a boat-ramp, a triptych of Bush Stone Curlews frozen in grotesque poses, arose as I approached and floated above the lake with eerie screams. Can't decide if I want to drown myself with whiskey or jump from a bridge. I tiptoe like those curious birds along the fence. Below the calm the town of Kulara, overwhelmed in nineteen fifty three, also some heavy machinery the legend says, though no maps exist, and the locals don't know much. I asked an old man in a canoe if he knew where Kulara slept, if he could point me in the right direction but he said he'd never heard of it, but reckoned there are dark shapes beneath the water, toward the falls, and pointed beyond a thicket of dead trees full of hawks; and off he went, the water performing somersaults behind him as he rowed.

Night Tiger
Numb, now. The mountain effervescence, waking in clouds, alone in paradise. Countless King Parrots in a tree right outside this morning. As I rolled up the shed door they set in flight, cries rolling down to the lake. After awhile you lose yourself in the silence, the absence of the world, all the noise and enticements. Run and you will die tired, written in the sky, with an aeroplane. I was sharing with a Night Tiger...I could hear him moving along the beams. Spotted him on the roof, through corrugated fibreglass chasing frogs...counted four skins of varying lengths...worried that he didn't like me moving in. There he was last night, stretched out under the lamp on my desk. I went, fetched my Father, who adores snakes, speaks of them with great fondness in his voice, simply picks them up...but he couldn't, he said, have this one scaring guests, so he got all Al Qaeda, beheaded him, with a shovel. We marvelled how it still slid its head across the cement, fanging the air, wild reptile eyes going out.

With The Wind, Cellphone Reception, And Random Memories

I feel like a terrible Thespian, or maybe a great comedian playing a retarded character, like Freddy Benson. Other-days I feel like that guy who shot himself during The Watchmenlike an octopus in a tank of lobsters. I never meant to write my life into a social satire who was it that said you seek your own Death, and your failed acts are the most successful.i I've written my own Mein Kampf while in the asylum. You must want to live, as I held you under you continued to struggle.ii I want to get a tattoo that says dedicated flesh rebels against the virtual class, a homage, nostalgia for the remaindered entrailsiii --and then I watched myself become like that dead junky we found in a disused hat factory as kids. (If you imagine a tepid green swamp in a tropical forest with crocodiles all round the edges and weird trees pushing up through reeds, sighing as they droop into the water except you're in an old warehouse and there is a dead guy who has rotted, a lot, and hes lying in a pool of stinking gore and because of the heat strange puffs of orange fungus have sprouted up through the floorboards, rats eating the blooms.) Who said the poacher that shoots at rabbits scares big game away? iv Was it Lawrence Jamieson or was it that dancer in the red-light in Amsterdam? I dont remember. What does it matter anyway, she said, in her penthouse suite, dragging her hand along the edge of the broken piano, that look in her eyes the gaze of an animal, a prophet, or an indifferent rockstar getting head from another groupie, shouted something like

dont black lung me bone-horn - and then jumped from the hotel balcony. As Freddy stuck his cock in the mess Lawrence would have said Ruprecht, do you want the genital cuff? She squealed my clitoris does not look like a parrots tongue! Or, at least thats how I imagined it, that French model in the Pijp district, high on fly agaric at fifteen her agent gave her wings, like Angelinav needs another mirror, a million dollar deal with a glossy magazine fell naked still in heels, a last curtain call for the voyeurs on the street. Its all fun and games until someone has to get another skin graft. Occasionally an aspiring Vogue operative stops by in designer jeans to pay her respects, flowers wilted on the desolate empty desk, and the concierge says shes departed has left no addressesvi and they leave with one of the guys who hustle the corner, Freddy I bet And we loved to dance... we wanted to be professionals, isn't that silly? vii He is saying this as they walk away.

Notes

This suite of poems I composed in the last months of 2010 while living in a tin shed on the banks of Lake Tinaroo in the Atherton Tablelands, North Queensland, Australia. Lake Tinaroo is an artificial lake. When the valley was flooded in 1953 an entire town was submerged. The name of this town was Kulara. Labor Pains The 'Palmerston' is a highway. Access to the Atherton Tablelands is via the Palmerston Highway. Milla Milla is a township in the tablelands. My mother inspired this poem when she told me on the telephone that she had just returned from Barcaldine. She actually did read the poem over the phone, which she saw in the museum and wrote down, thinking I'd appreciate it. Barcaldine is a small town in central Queensland. Barcaldine played a significant role in the Australian Labour Movement and is considered the birthplace of the Australian Labor Party. There is/was a tree there called The Tree of Knowledge under which striking workers held their meetings. This tree was poisoned in 2006 by parties unknown. Irukandji Sails Irukandji are deadly box jellyfish which haunt the oceans in North Queensland. This poem was inspired by a conversation I overheard in a pub in the township of Yungarburra. As I understood it, the vocal man I overheard worked as a Ranger in the Cape York Peninsula. By Southern Indonesia I mean Australia.

King For those unfamiliar with Australia, a Brown, or King Brown, is a highly venomous snake. Night Tiger A Night Tiger is a Tiger Snake which hunts at night. This appears to be local vernacular. With The Wind Cellphone Reception And Random Memories This poem later evolved into a longer poem titled Freddy Benson In Amsterdam which is included in my forthcoming collection PostHuman Musings. The lines about the French model falling to her death from a hotel balcony while on hallucinogens is a story that was in the press while I was in Amsterdam in 2009. The original story claimed that the model shouted 'I can fly' and leapt out the window. With The Wind evolved from journal notes written during this trip. i Cf Baudrillard Seduction Death in Samarkand ii Cf - Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live. Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf iii Cf - The Hyper-Texted Body, Or Nietzsche Gets A Modem - Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein iv Lawrence Jamieson a high society con-man, played by Michael Caine. Freddy Benson was played by Steve Martin a lower class conman who believed the sympathy angle of pretending at intellectual disability would win him the competition to extract 50,000 dollars from an apparently innocent and unsuspecting Heiress Dirty Rotten Scoundrels 1988 v For this text, while it does contains several vague post-romantic gestures, (yet does endeavor to purposefully avoid any modernist clich), I have substituted the character Narcissus with the name Angelina. vi The Wasteland T.S Eliot, line 181 vii Freddy Benson Dirty Rotten Scoundrels