She natters
On and on
About her sheep grid
And that violent dog:
The loud Irish girl
Here, on the Bathurst train.
Using a profoundly effective speaker
State of the art
She yells
Like it were a wind up
Bakelite phone:
Disembodied, some Brahms intermezzi play inside my ear.
Layers of sound?
The secret whoosh of silence is nowhere to be found.
Amongst the reeds on the river bed
In the pause between notes
On the late thoughts of Brahms
As that sound world
Edges towards a final reckoning:
Here, temporal reflections abound.
The verbal assault continues apace.
She talks
on and on
Around and around
The same thematic:
“I feel so awful”.
Her dog has killed some sheep
So 19th century in its plausibility.
The riff brings its own unending tension.
Her listener can barely speak:
She is the close up in her own rom com.
This is not dialogue
But confession
Within her muddied verbal stare.
A day is glorified
In its groundhog moments.
Unformed, loud, unending
Each reflection focussed on the perceived self:
So many shimmering likes
In a Facebook sway.
She taps me on the shoulder
Once, twice
No words needed
But a visceral insistence that I rise
And allow her to water the plains:
We are on the Bathurst train.
Soon her low grooved voice
Circular and viscous
Grinds out its cracked refrain:
Would Robbie Burns and papa Haydn
Recognise the soft fetter of spring
In this press of weathered noise
No louder that their 18th century din
Yet mediated – weblike - across the platforms of modernity.
Surely this dogged insistence on talking
Will bury us alive one day.
It is the performative heft
That bludgeons
Like a tsunami wave
Of self-obsession,
With its jagged riff
on the boggish and mundane.
Such temporal reflections abound
Here, on the Bathurst train.
Gar Jones: April 2018
On and on
About her sheep grid
And that violent dog:
The loud Irish girl
Here, on the Bathurst train.
Using a profoundly effective speaker
State of the art
She yells
Like it were a wind up
Bakelite phone:
Disembodied, some Brahms intermezzi play inside my ear.
Layers of sound?
The secret whoosh of silence is nowhere to be found.
Amongst the reeds on the river bed
In the pause between notes
On the late thoughts of Brahms
As that sound world
Edges towards a final reckoning:
Here, temporal reflections abound.
The verbal assault continues apace.
She talks
on and on
Around and around
The same thematic:
“I feel so awful”.
Her dog has killed some sheep
So 19th century in its plausibility.
The riff brings its own unending tension.
Her listener can barely speak:
She is the close up in her own rom com.
This is not dialogue
But confession
Within her muddied verbal stare.
A day is glorified
In its groundhog moments.
Unformed, loud, unending
Each reflection focussed on the perceived self:
So many shimmering likes
In a Facebook sway.
She taps me on the shoulder
Once, twice
No words needed
But a visceral insistence that I rise
And allow her to water the plains:
We are on the Bathurst train.
Soon her low grooved voice
Circular and viscous
Grinds out its cracked refrain:
Would Robbie Burns and papa Haydn
Recognise the soft fetter of spring
In this press of weathered noise
No louder that their 18th century din
Yet mediated – weblike - across the platforms of modernity.
Surely this dogged insistence on talking
Will bury us alive one day.
It is the performative heft
That bludgeons
Like a tsunami wave
Of self-obsession,
With its jagged riff
on the boggish and mundane.
Such temporal reflections abound
Here, on the Bathurst train.
Gar Jones: April 2018