at 21:30

84 McEvoy Road.

Show Me The Treasure 21:30 Edit

McEvoy Road

[song for Kate McG]

84 McEvoy Road, two bedroom fibro

we moved in with one double bed

that trebled, for dining, for seating,

centre stage of the living room

with a JVC stereo and a cache of vinyl.

Met you one Saturday in April

you were a lesson, a primer in style

how to splice melody, sing skin-tight harmony

and don’t miss a beat, not moving apart,

somewhere that room’s still the same,

the bed’s still unmade, you say don’t move a thing

we grew wings, we grew wings

In parallel you ran true

it was anna and you,

whole cities, whole states, a whole

life of love climbed — built on solid

and shifting ground

bridge

like indian ink pressed and cut

I was all thumbs and fingers, all think

and I play you again

it’s late but its never too late

for you kate, to sing to me again

You lay your wet bathers, your salt

and your wounds on my floor,

gave me good counsel on southern boys,

shipwrecks and grits, and I speak now direct,

perhaps we’ve never spoken before?

Like good rope, like sweet hope

you sang up whole cities, whole states ,

even then impotent with love and with haste

we grew wings, we grew wings, we grew wings.

I wrote this song last year. It occured to me today, drawing this 4 legged musical pun, just how like life the game of musical chairs really is.

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

84 McEvoy Road.

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