August was poetry month, folks. My piece 13 Ways to Drink Chocolate Milk premiered in the Guardian. and featured in Red Room Poetry’s 30in30. (There’s a video of me reciting it.) In July I dropped a set at MONA as part of a Tasmanian Poetry Showcase.
See 13 Ways to Drink Chocolate Milk poem and video
In lieu of all this stanza shenaniganza, I thought I might articulate an overview of my lifelong verse tendencies.
I wrote my first poem when I was five. It’s called Going Up Hill.
My last piece to be published was The Ballad of Nan and Pop for Cordite Poetry Review in 2023.
In my final year of uni I had a column in the University of Canberra mag Curio called Being Justin Heazlewood. I wrote this leavers poem:
Design by Anthony Calvert.
Thinking is Drilling is lifted from my 2018 book Get Up Mum. It was published in the 2022 anthology Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health.
Thinking is drilling
I’m drilling through the walls
of silence and confusion
looking for clues
looking for answers
looking for Mum.
I have a lot of
work to do.
So I sit and I stare
and I think so hard
I can cut through the moon
because I’m the sun.
Thinking is drilling.
I’m drilling up and out of the rubble.
Thinking is making air for myself.
A space to survive.
I can think into space
into outer space
into inner space.
I can drill inside
deep down and hide.
I can drill around in circles
so fast that everything’s a blur
and I have rings like Saturn.
A drill is a weapon
with a pointy tip.
I leave it running
to rip the black pillows
when they come to smother me.
Thinking is drilling.
My mind is always moving.
There’s work to be done
a maze to be dug
a tunnel of fun
somewhere deep
to bury my time capsule.
I wrote a thing on Valentine’s Day last year for Justin Heazlewood’s f u z z y ⚡ l o g i c.
My latest book Dream Burnie has an original poem called Truganini Street. I performed it on ABC Hobart breakfast in July.
In grade 12 at Hellyer College I was published in a schools poetry anthology edited by Don College’s Shane Wolfe.
Shane wrote in his forward:
“Now that the idea of assessing specific criteria has come to stalk the halls of education, I’ve always thought it rather a shame that there isn’t a criterion eleven anywhere that states ‘Is able to pull off a decent poem that makes you wonder what the person who wrote it looks like and whether that really did happen to them and whether you’d like them if you met them.’”
I was chuffed to get pole position in the gazette. It would be interesting to revisit the headspace that synthesised Journey to the Six Fold Chamber. It’s a psychedelic time. I would be honoured to have a Boags with my eighteen-year-old self.
Last year I happened upon a notebook belonging to my Pop. It contained my first poem Going Up Hill complete in his handwriting. It has quickly become one of my favourite possessions. I’m intrigued by the events that led to Pop writing the piece down. Perhaps I was coming up with it for the first time and sharing it with him. It makes me think of the excellent movie The Kindergarten Teacher starring Maggie Gyllenhaal where she becomes obsessed with a five-year-old who spouts genius poetry.
The rest of Pop’s notebook is made up of shopping lists and Tattslotto numbers. I carbon dated it by putting “Tattslotto Draw 531” into a search engine. Sure enough, it provided the date of late 1985.
I would love nothing more than to share a chocolate milk with my five-year-old self. (And dear Pop.)
Poetry is an excellent emotional time capsule. Why not bury yours today ; )
f u z z y ⚡ l o g i c 