#toby fitch

SOd Special Editions

‘inversions’ of some poems by Arthur Rimbaud Antsy the second his left leg moves be tween her thighs night zips doubled sex heartbeat in belly armed blonde zither of a ribcage jangle fangs gleam hollow cheek & shoulders grown spherical their precious berry sleep crowned in wine & cork screwed into flowering dawn eyeballs wide to a grace ful panning sun ________________________________ Beaut Just Being ashen face from cookies & cream hurled over a cannon such a melée on Sydney Harbour helps to keep me regular my guns crystal clean she lips me three times our bones rattling off covers like skins rising & drooping amid the hiss & thunderclaps her mum look weirds me out but only for a sec before the dark bursting colours of our lives dance on & off like a TV’s tongue magnetically damaged meat our bodies tremble open spewing forth ghosts into circulation deaf to the swelling muzak Death’s got the sniffles it’s beaut just being like snow what or whoever we are ________________________________ Can’t musical savant w/ a loss of desire the poor ponce died in lace in the most ungenerous way annihilated by the essence of parted cheeks not a health problem as his genius would later attest but how did she die unspeakable joy granted by the promise of love apparently witch came from her men tenants of a multiple & complex sham(e) unfuckability no one appeared one evening which proudly flew off to mediate their pro blames for others to murmur about & administer their destruction for the way IT rejuvenated her animal effigies to him: inflated codpieces burst by hecklers in the golden ether he followed all those that Mordered him as if it was a game of online libation to flower upon women’s backs he bid on new items blessed by his lightsaber in that brutal woman’s beautiful garden he’d pillaged at least once claiming to be the larger human weather or not it was a kind of piety those who sought to see the truth decorated suspected that his complicit foreskin was a luxury yanked back to satisfy himself that genderosity was too vulgar re volted by the love in his imagination the ponce was upset not to heave always hard perfection ________________________________ Vices 1 Without paranoia, there’s nothing. My know ledge of homeland trivia is nothing if not chaotic, historically inaccurate, helps white hole literatures. In my dreams of scarlet pigeons whirling, I sit above my t errors. Fight or flight? Assault and pepper brain is in continent. For my next holiday, I plan to be exiled, standing on my lovers’ shoulders. So much sunshine and money on the roof tops! pent-up in my capital city penthouse. I remember hours blasting proverbs at barmen, thinking they were brahmin, then being eclipsed on ground zero. Hey, it’s nothing! The terraced holey land is up here, streaming. 2 I hope to become a well adjusted crazy now that doubt can be applied— I’m even more committed to a knew disorder. Joyrides through the hideous cool air of skepticism allow my divine hand to shift old memories of knocking back sour champagne and marriage proposals. I don’t regret my fever pitch for polemical sex with widows. Twas a heady childhood apprenticeship, dissed under a sober sky of rock stars who thought they’d found the keys… To the lovemobile! Because I’m the original inventor of desertion. 3 No more commissions, please. I is an udder and beyond the grave, having waived my blood, my duty to procreate. What should also be taken in to consideration is that I’m spent on beautiful Orientals. I have no super, no oeuvre to get me back to Paris. I went all in on the classical science of painting (or was it petting) my old friends’ wives so I could sleep with them in the dark above the city, playing out my carnivorous inversions of human comedy. Confined to this world, I should shut myself up in de basement for the next twelve eras. ________________________________ Aneurythm you always leave me arriving wherever’s or else the future kids is awash & singing in ultra sound of a plague on both our lots w/ no substance my head clots at the idea of new love & Christmas turns into the season we detain each other’s other up our selves in arms & one step away from drifting out or in to the cliffs of the no -man’s-land you drum on about how shot my hand is re leasing us from disharmony ________________________________ [Figments] now see/hear girls i may be   a low-light chandelier     but i still like to be thrown toward darkness       on the bed & powdered         w/ vigilante rain         the taste of ink & pink fire       cloud my ability to be a bright spark w/ bells on     public money flows into the frat party   where white people pool in a witch hunt smoking till sunrise   i dance out from the window smashed     star upon star extend into space       ropes of sunshine & why not         everyone’s steeped yet no one seems to care         it’s drizzling toys & the Flower Channel’s on       a rampage rutting     sweat in my stove-pipes   ash thru the air i’ve spent & i am on this covert July moaning ________________________________ Louvres i used to watch graphic & ex pensively made pictures w/ a hardened arm behind my back from the back row of a country compromised another orphaned summer spent far from me i thought a tremendous amount of force & fate had psycho analysts despairing at how an unfortunate childhood event kept reminding our house thru the shutters was split in two shade & light dream & gleam of the Great Southern Land as the city gloom followed us into a noisy office in the Feral Court my wife wouldn’t stop pointing at me my eyes like tiny fish in a puddle of last month’s flood excited the odours of the garden our devastated lawn when we talked the weather’s been windy cloudy we toured the periphery it was a sad game old hat w/ ribbon & silk hanky last century had to be taken in Henrika’s brown & white tiled skirt went south with absurd ease we were suitably inappropriate on that hot February morning in memory of our mazing youth ________________________________ Village i am a permanent & frustrated civilian of the global village thought to be post-everything because every known taste is voided across the furnishings interior becomes exterior my house like an unplanned city from above one would point to this monumentally obvious & superstitious morality w/ the expressive language of a simpleton indeed these millions of people online who seem to feel the need to know each other’s avatar experience weird hellucidations occupied from a young age by algorithms which determine the shortening attention- & elongating life -spans we each might have before incontinence just as when i open new windows & see the same old spectres flickering but seemingly w/out those thick fuming coal fires who brought these shadows forth from the woods this high summer night modern-day Furies surround my cottage my country my heart yet nothing re assembles itself like the death-drive my daughter has for despairing love not even the servile tears i commit myself for petty crime whimpering in the deep shit fields of the superhighway ________________________________ Sold’em Seldom does the Commish not get bent On immense opulence, Tripping the crowd in doubt to become sold out Scaredy cats who delight In unsense and vice, especially when they are The ones not being turned in For perp-etuating the mad and infinite momentum out Wards of the free-range market: SOLD!—incredible apps for computing Adoption and eHarmony, unheard-of possession: Occupy the sky! SOLD!—all homes, Futures and migrations, Accompanied by comforting poetry, perfectly pitched: As alliterative national sport. SOLD!—faithful love and irrepressible satisfaction, ex Cruciating death, amateurisation: Pseudo-anarchy for the masses! Obese Diamonds are out of control, corpses gush about the priceless Corporate values of progeny, sex and race, Having disengaged a sense or two. What a eunuch opportunity to infantalise eternity And spruik vocals with auto-tune. Apply online and the orchestra will have you Weakened away       on a coral island! SOLD!—what cannot be Sold! There is neither time nor science to recog Nice—the people, ignorant Of gravity have listed Soul doubt, criminal, and no(a)bility On their CVs, cursed love as their favourite juice. Who hasn’t been duped? ________________________________ Sir Risqué Histamine His magic will continue to have an inflammatory effect on the gnomes and the Bible belts that secure the Minotaur—especially after the angry earth’s had its way via the ocean. Our time in the oven. Already found suffering topical climes, and much preferring in dividual airs, we revert and convert into fog the basic physics of opinion— it’s the same bourgeois hood that winks to where “someone else” buried the trunk of bodies ’neath our otherwise boring little world flats. Even so, Risqué’s curveball melodies can still be heard sneezing from the heathens above, echoing down through his kingdom of queens, his urban windows             wide to the moonlit wormwoods of Africa, the Occident, certain odd bods Down Under, and to anyone accidentally awake in their dreams. A vulnerable kind of uprising, we hordes shudder in embarrassment at our funny bones which de Volvo into a dance of witch hats. Red-nosed, Sir Histamine’s screen memes can lead us naive day trippers away from the United States’ eco gnomic horrors. Tonight, for example, we play exquisite corpse at the bottom of a billabong, harpsichord burbling along as we gaze back up to the heathens, our reflections in lurid chroma, wet and sweet and knowing full well how our legendary games will live on in dis harmony with the West. ________________________________ Toby Fitch is the author ofRawshock (Puncher & Wattmann), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012, plus two chapbooks,Quarrels (Stale Objects dePress 2013) and Everyday Static (Vagabond Press 2010). He has two new collections of poetry on the way: Jerilderieswith Vagabond Press in late 2014; and, a book of ‘inversions’. He lives in Sydney, Australia.