Smoke Encrypted Whispers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  smoke encrypted whispers

  acknowledgments

  of muse, meandering and midnight

  a prelude

  magnesium girl

  after 2a.m.

  back seat driver

  on the river

  waiting for the good man

  raindrops fall in vain

  chloe in the window box

  the postman’s privilege

  musing: the graveyard shift

  new farm is closed

  white stucco dreaming

  the crooked men

  brown water looting

  jetty nights

  carefree

  deadman’s mouth harp

  a verse for the cheated

  the fatal garden

  radio thick blood

  midnight’s boxer

  surgery music

  a bent neck black and flustered feather mallee

  the gloom swans

  a black bird of my mind

  fly-fishing in woolloongabba

  shout-me-a-wine requiem

  crust

  the writer’s suitcase

  midnight’s plague

  labelled

  for the wake and skeleton dance

  the dingo lounge

  valley man

  cheap white-goods at the dreamtime sale

  the mosquito room

  mudflat

  it starts

  1986

  boondall wetlands

  poem 9

  once was a rifle range

  the kabul manifest

  hotel bone

  the job

  hotel bone

  when dogs gamble

  the late shift erupts

  bone yard, south brisbane

  itinerant blues

  cold storage

  the dusk sessions

  kangaroo crossing

  what more

  we’re not truckin’ around

  nil by mouth

  the golden skin of cowgirls

  floodlight sonatas

  abandoned factories

  scenes from a getaway car

  night racing

  3a.m. escape

  pre-flight

  95 cents a litre

  deo optimo maximo

  gasoline

  literary festival bump-out

  itinerant blue

  products of mexico

  gas tank sonnets

  sunday

  the last bullfighter

  back road

  sultry gridlock musings

  brunswick st blues

  ambulance chaser

  talking to the airplanes

  three-legged dogs

  fire

  the night house

  jaded olympic moments

  without regret

  future primitive

  the night train from newcastle

  sortie

  the finder’s fee

  skeletons in the trunk

  the thousand-yard stare

  king

  last exit to brisbane...

  hollow squall

  smoke encrypted whispers

  warning:

  smoke signals

  tigerland

  scared of the dark

  wecker road

  cribb island

  capalaba

  rip

  smoke water

  author’s notes #1

  darkroom

  fisherman islands

  paper trails to midnight

  author’s notes #2

  ghosts of boundary street

  dog tired tune

  when I crossed the ditch...

  author’s notes #3

  the dust company

  from boundary street, west end, to the berlin wall, east germany

  snapshots

  aunty grey smoke

  author’s notes—conclusion

  revolver

  Copyright

  smoke encrypted whispers

  Samuel Wagan Watson, born 1972, is of Bundjalung, BirriGubba, German, Scottish and Irish descent. He lives in his childhood domain of Brisbane, but still feels the lure from time to time of his teenage stomping grounds of the Sunshine Coast. He has worked as a door-to-door salesman, a public relations officer, fraud investigator, graphic artist, law clerk, film technician, actor, and arts bureaucrat.

  His first collection of poetry of muse, meandering and midnight won the 1999 David Unaipon prize for unpublished Indigenous writers. In 2001, he published a collection of ‘road poems’ titled itinerant blues and a chapbook ‘hotel bone’ for Vagabond Press. He is also the co-author of the award-winning website, ‘blackfellas, whitefellas, wetlands’. In 2003 Samuel toured throughout Australia, New Zealand and Berlin.

  acknowledgments

  Several of the poems in the new section, ‘Smoke Encrypted Whispers’, appeared in Heat and Southerly.

  of muse, meandering and midnight

  a prelude

  dropping a knife

  on one’s foot

  is nothing like

  dropping tequila

  on one’s tongue

  yet

  her floral dress

  begged me to...

  whereas the night

  well,

  it just stayed outside

  magnesium girl

  I was kissing the girl

  with magnesium breath,

  all over me

  her burning hot magnesium

  ahh to touch

  the boundaries of delight

  and pain

  for you only hurt those you can love

  when lust becomes a mercenary

  for the weak hearted of humanity

  the magnesium breath

  inviting me to her bowl of splinters

  nothing but the frozen tears of her last love

  picked up in the rain

  and our relationship,

  a shrouded threesome,

  death always being

  that silent partner

  oh that magnesium girl

  with the strawberry hair

  how my black flesh and rye once lingered

  to be one with you

  my magnesium girl

  after 2a.m.

  I wept along with the night

  two

  black

  hideous dimensions—

  myself and 3a.m.

  releasing a crystal tide of bottled insanity

  while the shadows mocked

  our embrace

  and from then on

  I knew that forever

  night

  would be my mistress

  back seat driver

  love me

  oh back seat driver

  love you

  into a state darkest under covers

  and wilful damage of day

  entice me

  oh back seat driver

  to the dove of peace

  maybe your bulldog tomorrow?

  with any luck from yesterday

  save me

  oh back seat driver

  from the bitterness

  of phobia waste

  and packages of human frost

  kill me

  oh back seat driver

  for an older audience at dawn

  and with my blood taken

  make a name for me

  nothing else matters...

  on the river

  it was a drive through the sleeping industrial giants

  and thirty minutes before a flight

  along Brisbane’s vein of union disputes

  to a seclu
ded spot on the river’s edge

  with its cold sea breezes and dead things,

  we kissed

  and said goodbye

  discovering that we both had feelings for deserted factories

  and abandoned mechanical bits

  and for each other

  thirty minutes before a flight

  and two writers can’t find the words

  to ease the tearing of departure

  serenaded by a blow-torch on a rusting iron hulk upon the water

  grey smoke billowing from the old power station

  the landscape studded with electric fences and weeds

  her and I at home amongst it all

  we kissed

  and said goodbye

  waiting for the good man

  we kissed goodbye at the terminal

  and upon seeing you for the last time

  I felt the good man leaving,

  the good man that existed in the hotel room

  the good man that loved you across the table, linen and fine wines

  the good man that appreciated your perfume

  and ran his fingers gently through your hair

  catching in his rings as for you he listened

  for the laughter while resting in your breasts

  I felt the good man leaving

  as if I couldn’t convince him that I’d changed

  that you had made a difference

  and that I could breathe easy in the darkenss of early morning

  I felt the good man leaving

  and now

  I’ll be missing both of you

  raindrops fall in vain

  for Rebecca Edwards

  raindrops fall in vain

  and abuse

  the kindness of my soul

  I hear them landing outside,

  an audience to a short-lived affair

  continuum of vertigo, a song

  soothing,

  yet, absolute

  a spiral dance to an unwelcoming ground

  where they are of little regard

  but slaves and remedy to dry spirits

  that one can envy such courage to fall

  in the open

  and share their end

  alone

  chloe in the window box

  in the darkness

  it’s increasingly difficult to find the corkscrew

  and Chloe in the window box

  with that bottle of pinot noir

  or the memory of her

  that left six months ago

  and light no longer shining through

  her window

  where as a sentimental act

  we clasped and watched the stormbirds

  that no longer cross the shoreline

  Neptune no longer taunting

  peering through his transparent keyhole

  no more 2am’s

  cut out of the darkness with a corkscrew

  and as time stretches on

  a distorted picture of Chloe,

  an empty bottle of pinot noir

  the postman’s privilege

  most typewriters spit out

  that exact decibel

  like the coughing silencer

  of an assassin’s weapon

  or the sound of the postman’s bike

  through the walls of my boardinghouse room

  through the walls

  the postman is my assassin

  blah, blah, blaaaaah, blaaaaah, blaaaaaaah

  the maddest allegro to haunt me,

  I dare not look out

  I am a ghost of my own doing

  waiting

  for the knock-backs from editors

  for the “we’d like to pass your work on to the senior

  literary editor

  before we make a decision”

  for the debt collectors

  and finally

  the letter that says,

  “please come home”

  musing: the graveyard shift

  for Sarah

  as I enter a writers’ graveyard shift

  sheltered by a desk lamp

  a lover is nesting within the covers

  breathing softly

  paper and pen on the window ledge

  third floor

  overlooking the river,

  dark wet stretching leather

  red buoys flicker

  on/off

  signal thoughts to the writer

  on graveyard shift

  looking for inspiration

  in poorly lit boats shuttling past

  the crew all strangers to me

  as I am almost a stranger to the person in my bed

  promises made as solid as the murkiness before us

  where sharks hide amongst it all

  vicious, devouring, still-life anecdotes

  the ideal machine of consequence

  and still, still

  with all this darkness

  no inspiration

  a day of sweet caressing,

  the best of my thoughts

  whispers in the linen

  across her body

  into her eyes

  chases away the dark creations

  filled with something that felt like love a long, long time ago

  hands left shaking

  unable to paint,

  a dark portrait of self

  new farm is closed

  the ex-muse is on her way home for good

  to the walls of stale inspiration

  her little boy in tow

  while a lone figure of the shadows he has cast

  stands in the doorway of an upstairs balcony, waiting

  rain falls of this morning

  cleanse the streets of the valley

  water upon arduous attempts to dream

  this rain is his last witness

  as the car is packed

  typewriter and clothes await the still room across town

  yet, his smell will linger for some time in the halls

  and it has been quiet

  and there will be nothing good to come

  of his presence here

  and there is no love poem preserve,

  goodbye magnesium girl

  the debate has faded

  with the feelings of eternity

  drowned in the misguidings of gringos and dingos

  the typewriter waits, a patient mistress

  he says goodbye finally to the emptiness

  darkness ever and always faithful

  but in the surrendering there is solace

  and the last parody in this passing is conducted

  he locks the door and hangs a sign out-front

  NEW FARM IS CLOSED

  white stucco dreaming

  sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind

  is early childhood and black humour

  white stucco dreaming

  and a black labrador

  an orange and black panel-van

  called the ‘black banana’

  with twenty blackfellas hanging out the back

  blasting through the white stucco umbilical

  of a working class tribe

  front yards studded with old black tyres

  that became mutant swans overnight

  attacked with a cane knife and a bad white paint job

  white stucco dreaming

  and snakes that morphed into nylon hoses at the terror

  of Mum’s scorn

  snakes whose cool venom we sprayed onto the white stucco,

  temporarily blushing it pink

  amid an atmosphere of Saturday morning grass cuttings

  and flirtatious melodies of ice-cream trucks

  that echoed through little black minds

  and sent the labrador insane

  chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraud

  laid across white stucco

  and mud cakes on the camp stove

  that just made Dad see black
/>   no tree safe from treehouse sprawl

  and the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets,

  peering into our white stucco cocoon

  wishing they were with us

  the crooked men

  my Dad straightened out the crooked men

  in the old laundry shed

  above the fishing gear and jars of nuts and bolts

  where on a rack

  their naked, twisted forms did hang

  from the neck

  body hair like pine-needles

  restrained by welded g-clamps

  and steel-trap teeth

  hydraulic arms and pullies

  and a shiny drip-tray on the floor

  to catch the expelled, blackened hate

  sometimes eight sometimes ten

  the crooked men

  with faces like prunes

  tattoos and scars

  and tongues that could no longer work

  but engulfed by obscenities

  as they leaked night and day

  in that old laundry shed

  and they were not grateful

  or ungrateful

  the crooked men

  nor were they in debt to my father

  and his amazing rack

  in these days when their hate

  would trickle through my backyard haven

  drowning the smells of Saturday afternoon

  and freshly cut grass

  and the yap of the labrador

  and innocence lost

  to the crooked men

  brown water looting

  hardly stopping to think

  that adults can hurt you

  we’d wander the mudflats alone—

  brown water looting

  make-shift fishing poles

  and mosquito song

  for hours and hours

  wandering

  away from our parents

  away,

  looking for where the feral pigs slept

  or where swamp wallabies crash through

  and us, never thinking