Miguel Jacq's Blog

Vintage

into the soil

roots burrow deep,

push dreams up,

see if that sun

really is that far

away at all.

sweet things form

in the heat

like wild teenagers.

soon bigger creatures come

and crash those summer

romances to juice.

dreams get stronger,

concentrated into truth

in those dark places.

I drink these stories

of liquid love,

get softer in that warmth,

soon returning to expel

myself, give back

that living memory

to fuel more dreams

in the dirt.

Harvest

scent is a language

written to the wrong score,

for the wrong organ.

the field is a lit stage

and sweet basil whips

fifty lashes to the conductor’s

face. I inhale whole chapters

of your story

despite the sting.

in the final act

my knife skips a beat.

blood spitting out the stanza,

my story becomes your story.

a papillon dances for the crowd,

figure-eights my forehead

intoxicated, pages deep now,

desperate to know

how it all ends.

repair

after ten ill hours

my wife finds sleep

and finally repairing

itself

my heart

zucchini leaves

lifted

after afternoon sun

The Blue Hour Volume Three is now available

The Blue Hour Volume Three is now available.

empty vessel

and now just smithereens,

this empty vessel

is trying to hurl itself

at itself,

collide like armies

of mad hadrons.

infatuated, intoxicated,

it tries to

glue its glass heart

back together,

just to re-live that bottled

up, deep love:

the one-more-time

weight, vanishing,

red with rage

in the spill

of having poured

out

all its secrets

to me.

— first appeared in PRISM journal Vol #3. I like wine.

politicians

it must be teeming

with life,

this spiderweb of

trapped fly galaxies.

some time from now

we’ll collide with

andromeda, meet

the new neighbours.

for now, though, such

vast beauty intimidates

such gorgeous violence

bruises only ego

and how to monetise

that sort of thing?

on this rocky blue gem

no-one is coming to visit.

when stuck in the web

we must make our own fun.

I guess we’ll send your sons

back to war

ideation

a hole in the heart –

a worm chasing the blood

downstream

down it goes,

down, down the old town’s

rivers

the one-way shit-carrying

streets

to the caravan’s abandoned block.

you dream of holidays

away from   barbed wire

henchmen

and of where things don’t need

to flow through tubes and

veins

and front pages

to get to where they’re going.

no undertow,

flagged nothing,

no sinister thump of machine

kicking you in the chest.

down the old town’s

rivers,

up over the walls to

where half-eaten figs hang

steadily more soft,

and through windows open

or not –

they have forgotten

last year’s frost.

now down, over, and into

the minds of the dreamers:

quickly, quickly now,

then seeping back, back

into the earth,

hiding the infiltrator, the dance,

that incursion of night

from the sun to set fury on

at dawn.

— ‘ideation’, from xor

A fraction of Australian poetic voice

I am sorting my bookshelf and managed to group all Australian poet single-author collections (e.g, excluding anthologies, journals and the like).

Then, annoyingly, I found another few in the shelf that I had missed after I took the photo. So here they all are listed, in no apparent order other than the cold and brutally efficient ‘alphabetically by surname’ method:

Mathew Abbott ‘Wild inaudible’ (2012, Australian Poetry Ltd)

Luke Beesley ‘Balance’ (2012, Whitmore Press Poetry)

Luke Beesley ‘New Works On Paper’ (2013, Giramondo Press)

Julie Beveridge ‘Home{sic}’ (2012, Another Lost Shark Publications)

Lachlan Brown ‘Limited Cities’ (2012, Giramondo)

Andrew Burke ‘{QWERTY} (take my word for it)’ (2011, Mulla Mulla Press)

Andrew Burke ‘Mother waits for Father late’ (1992, Fremantle Arts Centre Press)

Ashley Capes ‘Between giants’ (2012, Ginninderra Press)

Eileen Chong ‘Burning rice’ (2012, Australian Poetry Ltd)

Aidan Coleman ‘Asymmetry’ (2012, Brandl & Schlesinger Poetry)

Jennifer Compton ‘Ungainly’ (2012, Mulla Mulla Press)

Luke Davies ‘Interferon Psalms’ (2011, Allen & Unwin)

Tricia Dearborn ‘The Ringing World’ (2012, Puncher & Wattmann)

Koraly Dimitriadis ‘Love and fuck poems’ (2012, Outside the Box Press)

Benjamin Dodds ‘Regulator’ (2014, Puncher & Wattmann)

Toby Fitch ‘Rawshock’ (2012, Puncher & Wattmann)

John Foulcher ‘The sunset assumption’ (2012, Pitt Street Poetry)

John Foulcher ‘Light pressure’ (2012, Pitt Street Poetry)

Lisa Gorton ‘Hotel Hyperion’ (2013, Giramondo)

Stu Hatton ‘Glitching’ (2014, (outer) publishing)

Andy Jackson ‘The thin bridge’ (2014, Whitmore Press)

Miguel Jacq ‘Magnetics’ (2013, hur, hur… couldn’t resist)

Jean Kent ‘Travelling with the wrong phrasebooks’ (2012, Pitt Street Poetry)

David Malouf ‘Earth Hour’ (2014, University of Queensland Press)

Kate Middleton ‘Ephemeral Waters’ (2013, Giramondo)

Omar Musa ‘Here come the dogs’ (2014, Penguin Books) – OK this isn’t strictly poetry but it blends poetry and prose

Ron Pretty ‘What the afternoon knows’ (2013, Pitt Street Poetry)

Angela Smith ‘The geometry of flight’ (2010, Pulse Publications)

Ben Smith ‘Horror Sleaze Trash’ (2013, Rooster Republic Press)

David ‘Ghostboy’ Stavanger ‘Station to Station’ (2006, ouTsideR Press)

Ed Wright ‘When the sky becomes the space inside your head’ (2012, Puncher & Wattmann)

Ouyang Yu ‘Self Translation’ (2012, Transit Lounge)

Looking at the list, it is obvious that 2012 was the big year for me in terms of Australian poet discovery. I lack a great deal of older works, but have hunted down a few such as that of Andrew Burke.

What am I missing that you have? Or feel free to write your own list (if it doesn’t take too long!) and link back to it in the comments.

dust

all my writings

are like dust

in september space

whirling away

from me to

you, you

who are distant systems

infeasibly

wielding vast

invisibility,

influencing me,

my words

into supermassive

sentence.

or perhaps you are

an immense

nothing

at the core of

everything,

condensing all

my efforts into

silence.

one thing only

is for sure:

that we seem

to travel

on light and pulse –

we are forgotten,

maybe,

we may not burn

brightly,

but we are spun

from dust

and we thus arrive so

brilliantly

the decision

they say you’ll

see red

but all I got

was white

with specks of blue

like gaunt

atmosphere.

I heard no searing

roar

of flame, felt neither

cold

nor heat.

somewhere the faint

tune of a song

echoed, looped back

on itself.

I knew the lyrics

like I know coffee.

I know how to

break

an addiction.

now is the time

to take the white

and that blue mottle

up on the human

breeze, to where

the humidity is

just right,

keeps monsters

from forming

on surface ripened

soul