gums in headlights 
mum drives home 
after many wines
and one coffee 
empty country roads
swerving for fun
cassette up loud
searching for mopoke 
every silver tree 
cold backseat wearing 
her big jumper
maybe we will
never get home

this was the year i changed my bio from writer to poet

this could be our year we said

id won a prize and youd come into form

so we submitted two poems each to the anthology

best australian poems 2022

there had been an open call

three poems each was the limit but we were being humble

we waited to hear back

we were chill about it

the top 100 poems in the land

a big deal

but no big deal

we are just upstarts

we really want to get in tho

someone said theyd received 5000 submissions

thank u editors for your labour

5000! G-WHIZ

either poetry is back! again

or a malicious state-based actor launched a cyber attack

on australianpoetrys servers

laugh all you want BUT

some regimes, those with long memories, know that

poetry is a weapon

know that the revolution is linguistic

know that poetry fractures regimes

plato knew

and the despots know too

i often think of

turkeys national poet nazim hikmet

a communist in a nato country

he died in soviet exile

turkey used him up for the secular revolution then jailed him and jailed him and drove him away

revoked his citizenship then restored it after hed died

fifty years later

i sat and wrote in a cultural centre named in his honour made of stone and timber

there was a drama school

a tea garden under tall trees

they sold books in turkish, russian and spanish

people were always writing there, studying, pondering, speaking and listening with their whole

bodies, wielding big ideas everyday

they talk now of journalists in jail

but no one mentions the poets anymore

remember Lorca, Neruda and others

somewhere poets still go to jail, get killed

here they send poets to university

poets as tinkerers and bureaucrats

poetry as pathology, as ornate junk, poetry not seen at all

since settler capitalism, in its plunder

could not be bothered to take it, to absorb it

to list it on the exchange

and so WE pick it up, use it, our weaponry

poets as guerillas

waiting for our acceptance emails

i can attest

that the mobilisation is linguistic

riffs poems chants graffiti are the oxygen of revolt

solidarity is sung and punned into minds and lands

it happens at home, in schools, in work, in publics, tea gardens, mountains

i was there in istanbul at the siege of gezi park

in the crowd that resisted then seized bulldozers

dodged water canons and withstood tear gas

we sung of revolution, we practiced it

a newfangled oneness

that disastered the legitimacy of the government

and opened a horizon of possibility

that ten years later becomes the end of not only a tyrant

but the tyrannical mode

all ours liberations are bound up in one another

when we are not killing we might be healing

believe me when i tell you that i found my voice then

a mass movement refusing the authorities that govern everyday life

saying we can do it ourselves

by the people for the people we the people

i think that

best australian poems 2021 was a bumper year

cos it had that energy

we love that edition

you bought it for my birthday but i already had it

we sung its praises to all

at the bookshop i sold dozens

wrote a shelf-talker saying

‘to everyone who reads or wants to read poetry

this is the place to start

100 poems from all walks of the continent

theres radical stuff going on’

i say this now because i felt proud for poetry!

for us

strange to say it but honest

no document i can imagine would speak to the state of this troubled nation better

and so when you were in melb housesitting my place

and i was at the salvos in alice springs

i lit up when i found 2009 and 2013 for two bucks each

leni shilton written in blue ink on the first page

i read them right away, loved them

thought of leni, thank u leni

ill buy your book too

there was something special about encountering 2021

dedicated to my friend and teacher the great Ania Walwicz

the editors did an excellent job

the poets of course did too

and maybe it came at the right time for me, morale was high

or maybe poetry is the technology that generates joys and agonies most freely and directly now

the marginalised poet can storm the top 100

difference in the charts

in a way that the sculptor, the film director, the musician

might not

we feel like were in permanent crisis

its post-truth and plato changed his mind

called us back

the social body exhausted

the earth in arrears

poetry is needed

a jolt straight in the vein

poetry, my friend

poetry

‘a moment’s unrecoverable banishment of self’—Evelyn Lau

In whatever era this finds you—I am out of my depth. The more
I say I write poetry, the less I express it, and so in a container
of salted water, I saturate my pages for tomorrow’s absence.
Inside the mist of living without death there is the accumulation
of living with death and the lure of drama, barbed assumptions,
the only way it goes—is drama. Natural versus man-made injuries—
as if tragedy allows for transferable roles and the glorious thrill
of gorging on the banquet that is your own body. No one has ever
wanted to consume me like this, and one must be composed
when both guest and host. Heritage-listed façades in the foreground,
assemblies in the background. The common areas of the complex,
in order of appearance—the entrance, the hallways, several
outdoor-facing windows, and the laundry. Letters to outline
measures of permitted distances—as if adoration could be restricted.
My account allows for building poems, not a house. Wipe a finger
along the dusty plaster of a wall and rub the powder over your eyelids.
If possible, leave your home during allocated hours, blink
as a reminder you still own secrets and must harness the gift to lie.
A circulated memo updates the limits of imagination before it falls
into predictability or magical thinking. I am cushioned in pursuing
experiences from written scripts as you ache in a pre-arranged room
for a statement to be recorded after the accident—your dry mouth
craving for slippage. The fever of this scene heats—like love, endless
love, rumoured to be as expected as flesh. Since there were no physical
injuries after the collision you must form and sustain a narrative,
a statement for insurance. I sit and visualise the rising and falling of
your chest. My cruelty heaves as I relate such undulations to thoughts.

*Note: This poem was originally commissioned and published by Running Dog in 2021 (https://rundog.art/poetry/to-be-consumed-in-something-rather-than-by-it-autumn-royal/) and the above version was reprinted in The Drama Student, Giramondo, 2023.

I carry water in an earthen vessel. The jug is made from earth beneath the palash. I follow the birth of fire through the wilds. The lacuna is lined with fable and milk. Bone marrow flowers in the howls. There is a white swan by the lacuna. I will barter with the swan. Paramahamsa. The Supreme Swan. In my vessel is volcanic ash, lizard skin and burning cloves. It rains for the first time in this green village. I carry rainwater in an earthen vessel. The painter lines the lacuna with copper and wine. He is doubled over with an arched spine, like an Agnes Varda gleaner. He renders an image of the dictator with the thread from his mouth. The dictator stands under the palash, with Camel cigarettes in his pocket and a crow tattoo on his throat. The dictator weeps into an earthen vessel. The painter changes into a swan to flee the bowels of fictions. I carry the weeping dictator, swan and lacuna in an earthen vessel. The vessel returns to the earth as a thousand centipedes. The centipedes change into seeds for the workers to plant: anjeer, plantain, baobab.

You have to do it badly. If it is poetry, even more so, because there is no because. If you write like you were the best in the world, you are the worst because you pretend too hard. Too harsh, too. Why do you want to be the best? Is that because you are a lack or there is a lack in you that you feel like filling up all the time? Even when you are named the best, does that mean anything? What about those who are not named the best? What about those who are not even called the good? Do we have to be good in order to survive? Survive what? But poetry is freedom. It frees you from all the constraints, restraints and limitations of the world because of good, better, best. It doesn’t work like that in poetry. When you tell yourself to write the best poem in the world now, you will not get anywhere. You won’t even produce a single line. Best is the symbol of the worst oppression and suppression. It stops you from even producing the mediocrest work. Why don’t you say to yourself: I’m not good enough. I’m already bad. From time to time, I feel I have no abilities to do anything well. I am stifled by the competition around me. Everyone is pushed to a choking level. I don’t want to be a president, not even of a company, not even a class, let alone a country. All I ever want to do is a poet. And a bad poet at that. Why? I mean who can be that good without making a huge effort? And the point? Nothing guarantees that you won’t die. In fact everything guarantees that you do. I write without knowing what I write is good or bad. I write without wanting to know. Anything and everything are subject to judgement by other people anyway. Who has the autonomy to do what one likes to the ultimate degree of pleasing oneself? Why does one imprison oneself with the concepts, ideas, ideologies, judgments and confinements of other people? Aren’t there too many prisons already in this world? To be bad is to be free. To be bad is to be creative. To be bad is to be innovative. Marcel Duchamp is bad because he buys a readymade and presents it as art in a museum. Piero Manzoni is bad because he cans his own shit and sells it for millions of dollars after his death. Andres Serrano is bad because he makes ‘Piss Christ.’ Michael Jackson is bad because he makes an album titled, Bad. Maurizio Cattelan is bad because he creates Comedian out of a duck-taped banana. Banksy is bad because he self-destructs his own art. Ouyang Yu is bad because he writes a poem called ‘Bad Writing’. All histories are a continuous process of badness against goodness until it becomes good then badded again. It’s a process of keep saying ‘my bad’, ‘our bad’, ‘their bad’. I love bad. There’s nothing else I love. I only love bad. Let the good rot for all I care.

I sing in languages I cannot speak

a tangle of overlapping tongues

teasing threads of different textures

spun from the same source

I sing in بھاشا
بولی
زبان 

all

sprung from the same soil, 

the same ache, I sing

of داتا
دستگیر
پیر

font of spirit and marrow-deep

desire, path to وجد where all

language is one I sing bells

around a camel’s throat 

as seekers sing while beating 

begging bowls in time

to their ڈاچی’s rolling steps

I sing of broken shackles, leaving

overripened plains for dunes

I sing of devotion, renunciation

so sweet the burning sands turn

supplicant I sing my hands aching

for a ڈھولکی, my feet for dancing bells

golden گھنگرو to sound each step

the song circling to the beginning

where the پیر was always waiting

Transliteration

I Sing 

I sing in languages I cannot speak
a web of overlapping tongues
tantalising threads of different textures
spun from the same source
I sing in bhasha, boli, zabaan all
sprung from the same soil carrying
the same ache I sing
of datah, dastgir, pir,
font of spirit and marrow-deep
desire, path to vajd where all
language is one I sing bells
around a camel’s throat sounding
as seekers sing beating begging bowls
in time to their dachi’s rolling steps
I sing of broken shackles of leaving
the overripened plains for the dunes
I sing of devotion, renunciation
so sweet the burning sands turn
supplicant I sing my hands aching
for a dholki, my feet for dancing bells
golden ghungroo to sound each step
the song circling back to the beginning
where the pir was always waiting

Glossary

bhasha, boli, zabaan: ‘Language’ in Bhraj Bhasha, Hindustani, and Urdu, respectively, though all are understood in Urdu.

datah, dastgir, pir: Words used almost interchangeably when referring to Sufi spiritual teachers, derived from different languages. Datah is one who is revered and loved, dastgir is literally someone who holds one’s hand, and pir is guide/saint/master/teacher

vajd: spiritual ecstasy

dachi: female camel

dholki: two-headed skin drum

ghungroo: a string or strap of bells tied around a dancer’s ankles. Seen mostly in Indian Classical dance.