Issue 22: Corey Wakeling
Brexit and the Nursing Home
He’s smitten to be front of the queue for the exit,
drifts right to left like an Aston Martin.
Scurfy proud cliffs of Dover relinquish terrain
to the constant unyielding wash. Dad never reads.
A slate cottage sunk into the puddles wheezes
after the fire sale, furthering some underworld drift.
A sudden burp bursts from the tarpits as I reposition
selflessness in the face of the recursive settler,
in notes of doom. Gravel clatter.
The fleshiness of stones over all this Irishness.
Some Australian fixes his Pepsi tie at the same time
as he fastens his belt. The miraculousness.
A footpath relents, given the cloud-cover of critique.
Meg Boles should expect many more lodgers, I suspect.
A dying, shimmering VHS subtitle:
Now is the time for harvest, when the precarious
are least content with their rising rents
and diminishing quality of life
This interview with the Misawa Air Base aborts
before it begins. No one saw the Pinter.
And we’re the side act to Okinawa, can you believe it.
The main street’s deserted but for the aircraft.
Alarm, the siren fends off the wind,
they say in the prefectural museum artistic director’s
waiting room, even if he was never there very long,
only to stall the benefactor.
Pacifist digression blurts out of a returning couple’s
surprise reconnaissance, back where they honeymooned,
among the couches of the pastel-pink sphere.
Should you want to know how I feel about this place,
reach your hands into the wet earth and pluck out a worm
Nothing disturbs the 1970s BBC narrator
prophesying environmental liberty, does it.
Honour, he whinges, took a salary once,
and modest audience was simple with the lord.
Obsequious antipodeans might become us,
and lords envied the naturalness when push came
to trench re-enactment, hands in pockets.
These the overdubs of diminishing connections.
A car explodes on the Champs-Élysées
in London dreams,
like a car explodes turned on a lane of Derry
like a car explodes in the dust by the Hume.
One American loves the contemporary reasoning
of lesser-evil fractions especially, his hands treasuring candy.
Yet, still a long queue at Brexit, even from front-row.
Why did she unfold her hands in her lap in that moment
of subterranean epiphany, deflation as much as eruption,
as Gore Vidal interviewed her.
Why did the massive American author
have cornflower wallpaper when really she was a goth,
begs the zeitgeist’s agent as we persist in worry.
In those back alleys of American determination through video
my passport appeases no welted misanthropist.
I conclude drunkenly, I suspect.
In the end, it is they that better know the nursing home,
these combating Old New Worlders.
rend les canailles bêtes
after Jacques Lacan
*
making the bastards mongrels
Puckered mouth of alum serenades a soda stream.
Bonza. Juice of blasé inside a fire. Painful curse.
Uluru booms.
Volga Boatmen sung by analysts, key of thylacine!
*
rendering the dogs fools
Puckered snout of lead regales Kalamunda’s water feature.
Wow. Nectar of indifference inside a blaze. Terrible boo.
Twelve Apostles drone.
O Sacrum Convivium sung by Oktavists, key of chihuahua!
*
fabricating the scoundrels troglodytes
Puckered lips of platinum evangelize a warm stream.
Super. Essence of staidness inside a flame. Hideous moan.
Nambung wax.
Faust sung by medallists, key of blue heeler!
Genetic History of Uncommons, Revision 1
They take some responsibility for your precipices
as a millennial. How much millennium do you fob?
Largely, somehow, obligation, smirking, recoils.
Wanneroo drive-thru of the talking cars.
Trade you my forklift licence.
Lance the autobiography with a rictus audit;
that’ll teach nirvana.
Nearby, though, solipsism heights.
I saw the motorcade dazzle with ribbons that year.
The universe is a miniature, when you ride the apnoeic turn.
Somewhere, somehow, in time.
Should I shake his hand, after all.
Bushfire smoulder stymie. Roleystone, again.
The shaman’s electrolytes wane
when betablockers shriek.
Presence. Plural presents unfolding drafting.
Turn to the zombie fictions for the chronicle
of Western’s final parallelism:
West’s parallelism with West.
Directions to the inner shore.
Whittled ears,
the inversion of peevishness,
the pallor rose –
Chelsea, Balmain, elsewhere.
When the papers put out the hit on his capture,
stentorian intention technology remained taciturn,
even a little coy!
The taxi rank is full of sleepers.
The vanishing point returned rotten
Between the capstones, the bougainvillea;
a trickle which is a tirade.
The Southern Ocean is mostly ongoing
in a forthcoming sort of way.
The world does not actually resemble America.
oh we love you get up
in the paranoid projection of self in fifties and void
hides all of the stag beetles at the biconvex meniscus
the tarp for the sports car, defence against the tirade.
Corey Wakeling is a poet living in Takarazuka City. He is the author of three collections, the most recent being The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo 2018). Corey received a PhD in English and Theatre Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2013. He is an Associate Professor of English at Kobe College.
Copyright © 2019 by Corey Wakeling, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
