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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                 #12/thyla12k-aj AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 12 The Poetry of Andy Jackson Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Andy Jackson by Sean M. Whelan, 2004. I 9/10/1973 M3 I Among the regulars I Amputation I A passing thought I Quasimodo I Youth group camp I 9/10/1973 M3 Knowing only your earth-gripped body can accept this wreath of questions, I call the Cemetary Trust.  I get the date and a grid position, more than ever before. The gates are held open by sleepless weeds, their shadows unseen, locked inside by the sun. I squint and sweat, remove another layer, scan the crunch of dry earth for sympathy in the sound, some hint at how I'll feel when finally face-to-stone, though I know every echo is open to interpretation. When I reach your section, I find it barren, abandoned by flowers and rain. So many unmarked plots in this desert, no oasis. The gardeners drive past, trailing boredom and dust.  I walk the aisles until I become just one more sigh in a crowd of upper-case names. Grief is not a hand but an absence - it flies in the breeze which echoes in the curves of my ears and reveals as much of what the grave knows as that magpie eyeing me from its perch on another mute monument. Published in Snorkel (Australia). Among the regulars Spillage prompts the expected response from the singleted boys at the bar.  It's just a sip I've lost, so there's more than attempted humour behind this sort of call.  The only other time they'd use the word taxi is in whispers to the fatherly barman while their mates are off losing their last wickets.  Why I shake is not from clumsiness or the DTs, though no-one asks. I sift myself through the smoke and noise to find a vacant space at the edge of a world, let the office block shadows stretch across streets, while I watch and drink and settle for this. In the distance, a busker is squeezing Cats in the Cradle bone dry.  Outside, the tide dumps bodies on the shore of platform six, as if each drop could be swapped for the next. In here, the script is written in piss, improvised around fear.  The building tilts only slowly, yet the men are beginning to sway.  They hold each other up, slap backs.  I count my dimensions alone and reach three, my desires many more. In the only body I have, I push back through the crowd with an empty pot wavering in my grip like my will to live among the regulars.  Are they afraid a version of me lies dormant in their own bones? I would find a pub that's more me, but they're rare, and this place - like everywhere - needs an exception. Amputation Trolleys wobble past us, oblivious.  She is so close the curve of her chest almost presses against my arm. Soft under the fluorescent light, her pale bronze skin, round wide eyes.  Tiny scented wings tickle my mind. The call for a clean-up on aisle nine fades away. Her first words to me are a question few dare ask - her hand moving around my back, curious, as if I'm an interactive exhibit. I shrink and tighten.  I want her face to disappear as she holds me. A million things are hidden in this bass clef shape.  What can I possibly offer? That breast I smuggled in my schoolbag in a teenage dream?  Its shape is buried in my flesh, humming like a seed under shit and shards of bone. What stirs beneath this hill of pills, this lumbering heart?  The only light here is from X-ray machines which clings to my ribs like splinters to skin. Under a confusion of music, before a wall of soups, one can dinted and leaning towards the exit, I give her the smallest factual package, spare her the thrust of honesty - how typical this body really is, how it thinks in a grammar of amputation, how it thirsts and hides, and how I'll leave with her fingerprints burnt into my side. An earlier version of 'Amputation' was published in Hutt (Australia). A passing thought The place is packed - even the ceiling drips sweat, proof having a good time is hard work.  I've met a few new faces, lost names in the smoke as I pushed through the room, felt this mood threaten to lift.  But the body can't be argued with. First, I find the laundry, then a cupboard, finally the toilet.  I baulk as I sit down to piss, think myself soft, but where else can I relax like this? I try to hush the rhubarb of men in my head, touch the warmth of flesh and remember it's just me, a few tiny spiders, an ageing Astor poster and the curves of an antique green basin in here.  A chance to drift. Until the knock at the door I forgot to lock. Cursing the workings of nerves, I blurt out a wait ..., count the words on the wall, try in vain not to try, zip up, flush and slink back to the crush, still full. Another stage fright, rabbit in the headlights of men or the idea of them.  Is it that difficult? I've seen guys whip it out mid-footpath, flood the gutter with a steady stream while they strike up conversations with passers-by. Yet I've always walked the furthest distance from the tent, can't remember the last urinal I wet.  I leave the party to get more beer and so I can go to a loo with no queue. Strange - it's this complete relief, this simple ecstasy, which drags me out of the flow of thought I had tried to ride away from this plastic, porcelain, steel and skin - that in the midst of conscription, the meek retreat into our own bodies, but it's there the war is fought and won, before we can even decide which side we'd rather be on. Quasimodo I am twelve when they tease you into me, name-first. With your fist around my spine as I try to grow up into my own upright self, I am quiet, think you small, like you might climb out while I yawn or piss or sleep. Your nest of collected sticks grows in this belfry chest. Afraid and facing away, I blur mirrors with spit and hide behind excuses not to take off my shirt at the beach. Schoolgirls call out in a voice my skin throws, their thin white frames rising like lighthouses. No-one is saved.  Through my eyes, the flickering fires you fuel are signs.  Men begin to close in, waving their torches of word and fist.  I fix a rope to my mouth and lower myself down inside. These bones enclose a flapping of echoes, what darkness can't silence.  Tendrils grope and cling, memories beg to be fed, but at last I clutch your throat and haul you out.  Your face is white and wet, your bottom lip trembling with the weight of our shape. You smell of the filth and luck of cul-de-sacs, your home, my flesh. My arms reach around your swollen bulk before I can think or flinch.  We are two halves of a heart stitched together with myth.  Over my shoulder you stare out to where the sun re-enacts its death. Against your hump, my soft skin sweats and breathes. An earlier version of 'Quasimodo' was published in Space New Writing (Australia). Youth group camp Our spotlight eclipses the huge mute moon, the truck rattling over paddock hills, skin of dust. In the back all the boys grip the bars in a fever. God, where are we?  I'm cold. The earth clings to our city-kid soles.  Beneath us, an engine cuts the throats of foxes and rabbits. We scan the darkness, eyes wide and dry as gun barrels.  A flash of fur, and for the boy who yells out a time as an angle for the shooter an honour silently gathers.  The gun cracks an amen, the truck lurches toward the blood it expects. There is a crucifix around my soft neck. The final tally is one grey feral cat, shot and dumped on the truck tray that makes our swaying floor. Its open jaw drools a small black pool. My face follows my fists into white and cold. Something is banging its head against the bars of my chest, a morse signal as strong as the shrinking heat beneath the fur - God, won't you stop it from scratching at my ankles? Around the bonfire, stories are kneaded and swell to fit the shape of a hole carved into the land. The wood breathes its last into a mouth without end. While we try to sleep, the coals glow and sigh. God, when will this be over? Twenty years of decomposition, and these jigsaw shapes - decaying bones, stained pelt - spread out now on my mind's desk, still don't fit. Published in Salt-Lick New Poetry (Australia). About the Poet Andy Jackson Andy Jackson was born in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1971, and currently lives in Coburg, Melbourne. Having grown up physically unusual, he has written poetry, fiction and criticism which reflects on the body, memory, sexuality, power, identity and spirituality. He became a visible presence in the Melbourne live poetry scene in the mid 1990s, and since then has been a featured reader at dozens of events and a number of festivals, including La Mama Poetica, The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival and Overload Poetry Festival. He has self-published three books of poetry and short prose - Carpet Insomnia (1997, with Mandi Ashcroft), Hymns of Doubt (2000), and Aperture (2003). His writing has been published in established and obscure journals, both print and on-line. He has also appeared on radio (3RRR-FM) and television (Channel 31's Red Lobster). Andy was awarded a New Work grant by the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Working with Klare Lanson, he curated and hosted the opening night of the 2006 Overload Poetry Festival, Takin It To The Streets. He has also collaborated with various sound artists and musicians - Aperture included a CD of poems set to music and he has performed live with North Atlantic. He is currently working on a collection of poems called Among the Regulars, due out in 2008.    [Above] Photo of Andy Jackson by Sean M. Whelan, 2004. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007)