fairytale

fairytale is from my forthcoming poetry collection Gil Scott Heron is On Parole and can be listened to here.


the teacher reads snow white
in our fairytale
my daughter will scar herself
with household bleach tonight
crying mirror on the wall
erase this face as black as night
the beast is the head of the militia
beauty wz an african child
he had her circumcised at five
& she wept in their honeymoon bed

i /don’t want to kiss a frog prince
or hope i turn to swan
wanna be like goldilocks
& help myself
don’t tell me that it’s wrong
call it colonisation
& the bears i shoot
aren’t civilised anyway
i’ll grab the biggest porridge bowl & fire
once upon a time
in a fairytale
a goose that layed a golden egg
wz called a pregnant slave
the kings horses &
the kings men /sold children
down the mississip—away
no matter how hard mama cried
no handsome prince or pumpkin coach came

i put the brothers in the grimm
in the grade three reading room
i / cut my little library card in two
& said / thankyou miss librarian
but black kids don’t do
hans christian anderson
we are the hunted wolves
cowered down in grandma’s room
hiding from white hoods
that stain red while riding
through the wood / black life
is not a children’s book

disney says / every little girl
would like to be either sleeping
beauty or cinderella / well
i missed the tribal ball
slept for five hundred years
& woke to find my prince
had been lynched / rap
was king / & the continent
was dying

i am the match girl left
out in the cold / if i don’t
burn this fiction down / it’s
not for want of trying
because these tales
come for our young / like
rumpelstiltzkin
till they believe they can
spin straw / into record deals
slay a dragon
& claim the kingdom
hands up / who volunteers
to teach my child
that happily ever after / may
not include the servants
in the kitchen

Pen and Paper

You’re probably used to my shameless plugs on this blog by now, but this event’s well worth checking out. I really should have posted on it earlier.

Tonight (Saturday), I’m donating a half hour set of my patois and hip hop poetry to Pen & Paper, a charity organisation which raises money for Pens and Paper to be provided to thousands of refugees in east Sudan. There will be African food stalls (can taste it now…) and a number of other performances. If you're in Melbourne, please come along. I will hit the stage sometime between 6pm and 8pm.

It’s too difficult for most of us to even imagine being displaced by war or famine. Perhaps we can start by thinking about what it might be like to be without Pen & Paper.

Dishonourable Discharge: Malik Nadal Hasan

fucking arabs
man / are they crazy
yeah / okay we know hasan
wz born in virginia
& american bred
bt the real truth
wz there in his blood:
jordanian

& before you say racist
lemme just say
september eleven
before you jump on that
lemme throw at you
seven seven
mean anything to you
how long before we learn
to lock the fucking gates
& save our children
close the fucking borders
send the brown skins back
freeloading boaters or even
if they're fucking born here
who cares
twelve real americans died
at last count
& he injured thirty one

they were sending him to counsel soldiers
to shoot his mother / the army
wz shipping malik to afghanistan
probably / when he couldn/t deal with this
an american born soldier became un-american

they were sending him to ease the guilt
of those who killed his sisters / the army
wz shipping him to afghanistan
& probably his objections just
didn’t go down too well

today / malik nadal hasan
dishonourably discharged himself
the army spilled american blood
bt somehow the news on cnn is
a desperate brown man
army trained / born & bred
who no longer is the slightest bit
american

Page Seventeen Launch

Getting to that gig-crazy time of year again for me. On Saturday I'm hoping to get a chance to read at the Page Seventeen Issue 7 launch in Upwey. It'll be my first time ever reading prose in public (from the section of my novel which is being published in the book)...I'm actually a little nervous.

Also very much looking forward to hearing Sean M Whelan and his new musical collaborators, The Interim Lovers. I've been reading his poetry book, Tattooing the Surface of the Moon the last few days, with the notion to review it in comparison to his performance work as part of a larger commissioned article on Spoken Word v Page. Also have never heard my friend Alec Patric read, despite reading a lot of his stuff on the page, so I'm looking forward to that.

I'll have Boy with me on Saturday though - he's almost four, and not good with sitting down listening to readings. His instinct is to rush the stage, yelling "I want to do a show, please can I do a show, why I can't have a turn? I can do poetry!" And well can he. His version of :

hum dee dum
hum humpty dumpty

i said hum hum humpty yeaaaah

Are we ready? Break it down!

(seriously I kid you not) is totally rockin. I have absolutely no idea where the little attention-seeker gets it from. Anyway, Boy and I will have to have a chat on Saturday morning and see whether or not we give it a try. Fingers crossed.

Ruby Slippers in Peril

My poem Ruby Slippers will be published in the December edition of Peril, which will be launched by AsiaLink in early December at Melbourne University. I'll keep you posted on the launch, but I do know that LOCA (the three beautiful, brave, brown women of the Ladies of Colour Agency Australia) will be performing some burlesque. And I'll be reading Ruby Slippers and several other poems on theme.

Peril is an online literary magazine with an Asian-Australian focus. The poem Ruby Slippers was written in the aftermaths of attacks here in Melbourne on several Indian students. It's exciting to see publications springing up around Australia which are specifically concerned with matters of interest to non-Anglo Australians. I'm also writing sporadically for the up-and-coming African-Australian publication Marula Online, which is still in it's infant stage at present. I'm finally starting to feel that these are hopeful writing times.

mother tongue

auuuuugh is not my language

english is not my language

english is not my language

they whipped it / from me

english is not my language

english is not my language

english is not my language

bt now / i sell it to back to them

these coins / won't buy

a mother tongue

bt maybe one day / i

cd afford a drum
some sayer man might

teach me to throat hum

only language i have

is not my
english is
be bappa do wup
english is not
shoo wap shoo
bt hell i make the best of

say what

english wz got

from the auction block

my language sold

in lots

english is not
& i remember
that continent's clap
be dappa wap wap

english is not
bt i will buy

mine back

(per rum pah pum

whack!)

mandatory refuge (poetic wordplay)

boat people
asylum seekers
boat people
asylum seekers
boat people
asylum seekers

refugees
boat people
refugees
boat people
refugees
boat people

refugees
refuge
refugees
refuge
asylum seekers
asylum
asylum seekers

detention
asylum
detention
asylum seekers
detention
detain
detain
asylum seekers

detention
jail
centre / facility
jail
detain
jail
centre / facility
jail
mandatory
bail
mandatory
bail

detention centre:
mandatory jail

asylum seeker
mandatory jail
refugee
mandatory jail
refuge
mandatory jail
solution: bail
solution: bail

solution: mandatory bail

problem: detention

solution
problem
solution
problem

pacific solution:
mandatory problem

asylum seeker
jail

boat people
seek mandatory
refuge
solution: bail

skin (ii)

some nights
i try to claw my way
out of this skin

but pull and scratch and bruise
seems i'm locked tight in

only ugly fat keloid
where my fingernails have been


from my chapbook Original Skin (Picaro Press, 2008)