A Stunning Result for Bart Brassica

You may recollect that the last time we saw Bart Brassica he was head-high in his Daffodil Crop, suspended not by his britches but masking tape to a bamboo pole. Hetty Egg had been watching Bart through what all her family call her Spy Glass, which is a $45 brass and faux woodgrain SkyMaster telescope she bought from the Innovare Catalogue. She has told some of her younger and more naive great nieces this telescope belonged to her Great Grandfather who was a Ship's Captain sailing cod boats out of Boston. Mavis Eggwhistle, on hearing this while making up poesies, says CodsWallop. Anyway, Hettie had completely forgotten her vow to make Bart get down from his pole by 4pm sharp the day she had noticed him taped up to the bamboo pole. Not that her cherry picker would have started. as the ignition went in it about six years ago. She was telling Mavis this on the phone about 6pm that evening, adding that in any case Bart had dissappeared. Mavis could not figure how Bart got taped up there and went straight over, found him head down in the Daffs, and, well, stunned may overstate it but maybe slightly daffy. What happened next neither of them is saying. As Mavis hid Hetty's SpyGlass, she can't either.

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

A Stunning Result for Bart Brassica

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