An announcement: this year, due to long-service leave, the Easter Bunny will be replaced by Frank The Evil Bunny From Donnie Darko

Well, due to much-anticipated long-service leave, the Easter Bunny won't be on duty this year, but don't worry kids! The fun will still continue! Because this year, Frank The Evil Bunny From Donnie Darko will be filling in!

Frank with friends!

Frank The Evil Bunny From Donnie Darko (who prefers to be just known by his first name, Frank) has plenty of previous job experience including Appearing in Donnie's Hallucinations, Showing Donnie Where The Gun Is, and Leading Donnie to Certain Death, and is looking forward to his new role, which will involve mostly Giving Eggs To Children. 

"I really look forward to bringing my experiences to the new role and invigorating it with new life," says Frank. 

Yay!  

THE SEVEN STAGES OF ISOLATION

- Isonation: national quarantine.

- Isostation: the place you choose to be isolated.

- Isocation: attempting to treat your isolation as a holiday.

- Isostration: increasing frustration at being caught up in isolation.

- Isoccasion: attempting to distract yourself from the isostration at your isostation by having a big fancy event. At home. By yourself. Geeze, man, at least put on some fancier underpants!

- Isosperation: HOW LONG WILL THIS GO ON FOR?

- Isoblation: giving in and oblating yourself to the household Gods you discover while in isolation.

The sayings of the socially distanced

You scratch my back, I'll bloody deck ya.

You're going on my toilet roll of honour!

Let's join together in staying apart!

That's so wonderful, I could kiss you - in full HAZMAT gear.

Remember, a bird flu in the hand is worth two in the bush!

I'll have my people speak to your people. Over Zoom. In full body condoms.

Why don't you come over to my place sometime when I'm out and never coming home?

Two's company, three's FUCKING ILLEGAL.

How nice to see your good self.... isolating.

There's a couple of kangaroos loose in your top paddock, and they're breaching all social gathering protocols, WTF, I'm calling the cops now.

Taking a trip to the Great Indoors!

It's been taken out of my hands. With frequent use of an approved soap-based sanitiser.

Girl, this is the night when two become one - while maintaining a 1.5 metres social distance between ourselves at all times.

That's straight from the bat, into the pangolin!

An invitation to a reading

POETRY TO KEEP YOUR BREATH AWAY

There will be a dead poetry reading on Tuesday night in the rubble of the old theatre. Whether you’re a corpse, a few shreds of bone, or still in the act of decomposing, this reading is for you! The night will be deadstreamed at time of performance to the whole graveyard, for anyone, who, for reasons of nescience, putrescence, or just general decay, are unable to attend. But, after all, if you haven’t been to a dead reading, have you truly died at all?

PLUS: Prizes for any reader brave enough to die on stage for the first time!

Country art galleries

A piece of music - something by Ross Edwards, probably his Dawn Mantras - came on the radio last night that suddenly reminded me of all the country art galleries I must have been in. I grew up in a country town, and what you seem to do growing up in country towns, mostly, is visit other country towns. Mum being Mum, with an interest in all things cultural, in all those country towns, we ended up in country town art galleries.

What strange places they were! Often built on money from the time of the Hawke or Keating governments, their architecture was completely out of place with the rest of the town. And they were absolutely nothing like the more homely arts and crafts centres in such towns, where you might go to a local art fair and see paintings of trees, or buy a few bottles of jam, or pass by some plates which look like they wouldn't be out of place in Dame Edna's crockery collection, or cartoons from a local artist, or to see furniture made out of odd bits of lacquered-up redgum. Walking into a country art gallery was an entirely different experience; instead of that cosy clutter you got a bizarre minimalism: a sparse white wall with a tiny abstract work in the middle. A huge room with an installation or a projection at one end and a seat in the middle. Not a seat you'd want to sit in, with a back or anything like that - why don't art gallery seats ever have backs? Just this black leather affair. Who decided this was the look to have in a country town, where the aesthetic is mostly chintz and crockery that rattles and doilies everywhere*?

And there'd be art gallery attendants who seem to come with the art gallery. (They must have! They'd look out of place if they ever ventured out into the town). One often got the impression they were installed in place with the art gallery. They'd sit around behind desks looking all wispy and important and listen to, well, pieces by Ross Edwards.

As for the art - it was mostly landscapes. This was doubly weird: looking at them, you had the experience of standing in a building in a landscape looking at paintings about that same landscape, the only thing being the painting never actually looked like the landscape it was supposed to be about. In those galleries the paintings never looked like the things they were about. In country arts and craft galleries, people painted trees and horses because they wanted their paintings to be about trees and horses. In the country art galleries, if there was ever a picture of a tree or a horse it was probably supposed to represent the disjointed experience of artificial modern living and its disconnect from nature or the repressive effect of the colonialist patriarchy on the Indigenous mythos. Sometimes I don't think the artists were even sure what they wanted their paintings to be about, which did rather lead one to the suspicion that it mightn't have been about anything interesting at all.

That Ross Edwards piece, then, bought it all to mind. For some reason a particular image came to mind of the first floor in a two storey art gallery, with me wandering around looking at the - mostly incomprehensible - abstracts. Where could it have been? Wagga? Griffith? Mildura? Dubbo? And then, I suppose, we all walked out into the heat of the day and drove through hours of yellow grass fields until we got home. That is the Ross Edwards epoch in Australian cultural history, really - that whole courageous attempt by composers to write a music perfectly in tune with these landscapes. It combined didgeridoo and choir in a new agey way, unfolded in a slow, reverential fashion, represented peculiarities of the Australian environment in ways which I had not thought possible.
I have to confess it annoyed me a lot.

And yet, you know what? Earlier last night another Ross Edwards piece had come on: A flight of sunbirds. Two pianos, simple and playable music. It filled the whole room in just the way that music should. Charming and reverential, in all the right ways and places. Not the sort of music you'd get in an art gallery, at all.

I'm not sure what I wanted to say about all this but, just like an abstract artist, I suppose I have anyway. So I'd better end it there.

*I do like a nice doily.

Merry Punctilious Christmas, Everybody!

Ah, isn't it nice to indulge in Christmas traditions at this time of year. Let me share with you one, that jolly old Christmas melody:

The Punctilious Carol

The annual festive observance
Is fast approaching now -
Hang decorative implements
From a dying Abies bough!
But woe betide the pair beneath
Parasitic vegetation -
Our custom of fertility
Demands their salutation!
Take up the proverb now and sing -
Hey ring a ding ding.

The annual festive observance
Is getting very near -
We sing the note arrangements
We sang this time last year.
We mark a birth in Bethlehem,
An Aramaic Jew -
But no-one believes that now or we
Feel awkward if we do.
Therefore take up the words and sing -
Hey ring a ding ding.

The annual festive observance
Is very almost here.
Let yeast infuse your beverage
With ethanolic cheer!
Our mood is positivity,
Or outwardly at least -
So all as one let us join in
The carbohydrate feast.
In polytonal chords now sing
Hey ring a ding ding.

The annual festive observance
Is almost at the station;
We have just passed the maximum
Of solar declination -
Our glands are working overtime,
But half a world away
From what we're told, it's rather cold
Upon this festal day.
And so we sing the thing we sing -
Hey ring a ding ding.

Sprog blog

Well, it’s finally happened. The egg the Baron has been sitting on has hatched at last! I’m just off to fetch some starter crumble, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a picture of this exciting fermentation in progress. Now.... if only I could work out a way to flip her right-side up...

Chunder of wonder

TIPS BY FASHION EXPERT RITA BUTTHOSE

Well girls, the big day is almost here, the one day of the year when you will go to the Melbourne Cup and get shitfaced and then vomit all over everything while some skank from the Herald Sun photographs you. But have you really prepared for this enough? Are you ready for the moment when you vomit all over everything while some skank for the Herald Sun photographs you? Here are four Etiquette Tips for the Fashion Forward you might like to consider before heading out for the big spray, er, I mean big day tomorrow.

1. Remember to vomit in the rubbish bin, not the recycling. 
I mean, really. Let's get the basics out of the way first. This is just basic courtesy.

2. Colour code your vomits. 
I can't tell you how many times I've seen a boring, bland array of beige vomit after beige vomit at this famous affair. Is it really so much trouble to colour code your upchucks? I think not. Remember, basic fashion rules still apply: use contrasting colours (but not too much), and sometimes just the right component - a strategically-placed chunk of carrot, for instance - will really draw the whole ensemble together. Try not to match the colour of your vomit to your boyfriend's outfit (he'll probably do that anyway, in that unconscious way men have).

3. Strategise
Now really - is there any point in getting ready for the day when you're going to get shitfaced and then vomit all over everything while some skank from the Herald Sun photographs you if the skank from the Herald Sun can't even see you properly amongst all the mud and crap and stuff. With that attitude, you probably shouldn't even bother. No, you have to really select the right patch of lawn or the right tent to offset the delicate yet melodious timbres of your cry of Ruth. And if it's a young Arabian prince striding out of the Emirates tent, all the better!

4. Social messages
You've got to think of the messages you're sending out when you vomit all over someone. Sure, you may not mean to make a boy think you like him when you chunder all over his manly chiselled jaw, but might he? Be careful who you chuck up all over, is all I'm saying. Unless it's a young Arabian prince striding out of the Emirates tent, what could possibly go wrong if you chuck up all over him?

Well, that's it, girls - have fun!

Five alternatives to unsolicited dick pics

Men of the World! Instead of sending unsolicited dick pics to the Women of the World, why not try these saucy alternatives?

- Unsolicited duck pics!

- Unsolicited chick pics!
(In case you run out of ducks, baby chickens are always good).

- Unsolicited dock pics.
(Who doesn't love a good pier?)

- Unsolicited ticks!
✔

- Unsolicited brick picks!



(Sample unsolicited duck pic. Because, er, you didn't solicit for it.)

So never say I never do anything nice for you. By the way, here's a previous poem I wrote on the subject, you really should pay me for this, oh wait, you can. 

The Unstoppable Unstoppable

Last week before German class I found myself dreaming about asking my Finnish teacher about the 15 Finnish case systems. I don't even have a Finnish teacher - but there are 15 Finnish case systems, more or less*, so my dream was not completely lying. As a result, I found myself before the German class engaged in the productive activity of researching Finnish declination. Due to the ludicrously high number of grammatical cases in Finnish, as you can imagine, it was a rich and productive and fertile activity.

This week, German class being on tonight, what did I find myself dreaming about last night but Swedish grammar. What is it with my mind and the Far North? I was in fact deeply involved in a dream conversation with the Baron about it all, and even managed to discover a completely new item of grammar: 'unstoppables'. Linguists may quibble and argue that such items do not exist at all, but in my dream we were quite sure about it. Here's how my dream conversation went down:

ME: So, how about after I finish learning German I learn the other Germanic languages Swedish and Norwegian and Icelandic and become an expert in the languages of the far north? 

BARON: Swedish is a hard language to translate into English, though. 

ME: Oh? Why's that? 

BARON: It's because of the unstoppable. The Swedish unstoppable is different to the English unstoppable. 

ME: How's that? 

BARON: Oh, well, it's - you see.... it just is. 

ME: What is an unstoppable, anyway? 

BARON: It's kind of hard to define. 

ME: Hm. Can you give me an example of an unstoppable. 

BARON: I.... um.... well... 

And there the conversation stopped (maybe because we'd forgotten to include an English unstoppable). I however remained convinced that a great and hitherto unrevealed point about world grammar lay just beyond my grasp.

As you can imagine, I'm really looking forward to my dream before next German class. Maybe, having previously invented a Finnish teacher and a new item of Swedish and English grammar, next time I'll invent a whole new language. Who knows? By the way, this blog is apparently my dream journal now. Please notify your local Freudian.

*It depends who you ask. Personally, I think, as a democratic modern language Finnish should remodify its case system so there is one case for every new Finnish speaker. That way nobody feels like they're missing out on anything. I shall be forwarding this proposal to Helsinki University shortly. 

New exciting forms of argument!

Argumentum ad hominem - attacking the person, not the argument.

ad homonym - attacking the person's name.

ad homophone - arguing with a gay telephone.

ad homophony - using music to attempt to bring harmony to our fractured moden world.

ad Eminen - winning arguments rap-battle style.

add M&M - bribing the opposition with chocolate - also, yes please.

Shouting random letters at football fans

Being an old sort of codger now, I've been going to the Dan O'Connell Saturday pub poetry sessions for well nigh on 10 years. It's an impressive stretch of time for any pub poetry session to be going (the Dan poetry's been going for over twice that long, a quarter of a century in fact), but even more impressive is that somehow the old joint keeps this up week after week. Even - to the surprise and bemusement of most Melbourne locals - during the AFL Grand Final, for most of those 25 years at least. This act always seemed a little strange, even sacrilegious - the bar would often be packed with punters there to watch the football and a bunch of poets would turn up. Sometimes, it's true, they put us all in the beer garden. On one memorable occasion, Geoff Lemon was the feature at exactly the same time as his team were playing in the final - consequently, and it has to be admitted rather apologetically on his part, he seemed rather more interested in the events going on on television than the poets around him. Such was the strangeness of this yearly occurrence that once, I even wrote a series of 'Team songs for writing' and found myself shouting them at a pub full of grand final viewers and a motley bunch of poets. I even got them to spell out the name - 'Give me an A! Give me an R! etc' - of an Ancient Greek writer or two. And there were rousing (well, rousing for me at least) odes to punctuation:

Well there she was a writin' in her book

(Singin' semi-colons apostrophes and dots)

Usin' commas hyphens quotation marks full-stops

(Singin' semi-colons apostrophes and dots)

Upper case! (Upper case!)

Lower case! (Lower case!)

Upper case lower case punctuation is so fine!

(Singin' semi-colons apostrophes and dots)

(Those team songs for writing, and a few other footy-related pieces are in my latest book, Hangover Music, by the way. You should totally buy a copy!)

Good times, good times. But all good times must come to an end, and this was no exception. Poetry at the Dan for this week is on a Sunday (weirdly it all feels less sacrilicious than having it on a Grand Final Saturday). It's not quite the same doing it without yelling baffling metaphors at a crowd of indifferent or even hostile footy fans, but life is about change.

In the meantime, living in Melbourne and all, I even adopted a football team, in that way you do. I did it either because they were just about the worst team and not likely to win a final any time soon, or because they had the best song. That team has since had the bad grace to win the grand final twice, one of those occasions being this afternoon. But their song, I am pleased to say, has remained consistently awesome. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the song.

To conclude, and on an unrelated note, here is a poem, of sorts.

Is Tigger the Tigger that's best with the ball? 
Is Tigger the best of them all?
For Eeyore is down, and Pooh Bear is out 
And Christopher Robin is aged and stout - 
Is Tigger the tiggerest Tigger of all? 

See Tigger go tigger all over the hall, 
With vigorous, tiggerous call - 
There can be no doubt, he's winning the bout, 
It's a riot, a rort, an absolute rout - 
Yes, Tigger's the tigger that stands proud and tall - 
For Tiggers the best Tigger out of them all! 

I'm sorry, we're all out of Sturm und Drang, would you care for the lemonade?

Okay, so you're in the audience and sitting down to watch the third scene of Richard Wagner's cool and exciting new opera, Die Walküre. The music strikes up and you already feel as if you have drunken the mead of Valhalla. As the curtain rises, you see the 'Gipfel eines Felsenberges' (the peak of a rocky cliff) right next to a 'Tannenwald' (fir forest). There's a 'Blitzesglanz' (a flash of lightning), and framed in this dramatic tableau you see a Valkyrie on top of the mountain on a HORSE, over which lies 'ein erschlagener Krieger' - a slain warrior. (Because it's the 19th century and nobody's budget extends that far, even Richard Wagner's, the horse is probably made out of wood and creaks as it's drawn here and there on stage, but what the hell - the orchestra just plays a little louder at those moments). The point is - this is just ludicrously romantic! - gigantic mountains next to vast forests, lightning flashes in the clouds, GODDESSES ON HORSIES! This is as cool, as nonsensical, and as utterly necessary as the elephants in Aida.

Just kidding, you're sitting in the audience for a modern production of Walküre and instead of galloping around on the mountain tops out of the clouds, the Valkyries are shifting bodies around in a shabby old pile of rock like so many pieces of furniture in a rental house.

Bring back the horses!



(Post a follow on from a discussion with Steve.)

Excuses for hipsters

Sorry I'm late, I was busy teaching yoga to my goat.

I was crocheting individualised bonnets for my bees' feet. This winter has been cold, you know.

Excuse me, my beard got caught in my fixie.

It was an emergency! My tweed jacket clashed with the Weltanschauung.

My craft brew and I were undergoing an individualised counselling session to help us achieve self-actualisation as a couple.

I was bookbinding a recipe book with twine made out of my cats' fur.

So sorry! I had trouble fitting Buttons, my alpaca, in the train on the way here. Did we miss anything?

My kefir had emotional issues.

I got lost in my beard and couldn't find my way out.

We ran out of kale! It was an emergency!

A little Bildung is a dangerous thing

German cliche poem 

Sehnsucht for Schadenfreude! 

My Weltschmerz smarts today.

Perhaps it's just the Zeitgeist, 

But my Trauma's all tun weh. 

Perhaps I'll learn to like it - 

Go back to Kindergarten, 

Where die Welt is ohne Schmerz, 

All Freude, and no Schaden. 

No, this Klima's not so prima, 

And my Angst has taken fright - 

I think I'll have a Wanderung

In my Waldeinsamkeit. 

Football

So, there's football, football, football and football*.

And when you talk about football, people have got to ask, do you mean football, or football?

And when you say football, they say, nar mate, football's not really football, the only true football is football.

Which it may or it may not be, but you end up arguing about which football is really football, or if football and football can be football also.

But at any rate, we all agree, even if football and football and football are not (or are really) the one true football alongside football, which may not really be football at all, you only call football football. You don't call football anything other than football, any more than you'd call football something different to football. Because if you don't call football, football, football and football football, that way madness lies.

And in the end, isn't the football of football the real football of football? After all, football football football football football football football, doesn't it!

*There's also football, but let's not mention that. 

Laut Lout

'Lautgedicht' is German for 'Sound Poem' (it could also mean 'loud poem' though), in news which may or may not explain anything. 'Lautgesicht', the name of this poem, means 'Loudface'. Oh, come on, it's not like I haven't written a poem based on a stupid pun before, is it?

LAUTGESICHT

Deine Augen krachen, krachen,

Deine Wimpern klingen -

Wie Glocken groß, im Kirche Turm,

Die stark und lustig singen!

Und ach, der Wind von deinem Mund,

Dass immer so fort weht,

Wie Donnerklang, wie Sturm und Drang -

Ich frage mich, was geht?

Und dann, die Wangen! Heftige blasen

Von die Posaune schickt -

Ja, alles klar, ich höre noch

Ein SUPER LAUTGESICHT.

Anyway, now that I've lost your attention, if you're in Melbourne this Sunday, I'll have a poetry feature at The Motley Bauhaus, at their monthly 'P Word Poetry Sessions' - the event starts at 4 pm, I'll be reading later in the day: maybe around 6. Come and say hi!

Pyoetr

An election confection

Labor or Liberal

Laberal lubber

Babble on blabber all

Blobbable blubber

Loobyloo lubbardly

Dullard today

Down to the lullingly

Labial lay

Of the oovidly groovidly 

Foovidly Green

Passionate fashionate 

Keen-to-be-seen 

Vivavug groovishly 

Woowawoog woon

Noogishum soogishum

Wungawip bloon - 

A, B, or C, D, 

E for Economy, 

For G huggermug 

I, J, K-onomy. 

Mama the government

Grants money to some - 

Vote for More Moolah! 

FEE FI FO FUM. 

Consider your awareness raised

Today is Hedgehog Awareness Week, which is a strange span of time for a day, but there you go. Did you know that there is a designated hedgehog for every hedge around the world? I didn't know that either, but it's amazing what facts can tell you when you let them if you let them.

Now to raise your awareness even further, here is a hedgehog.

Wasn't that elevating? So you can see that hedgehogs exist. (Shame on you for disbelieving in the existence of hedgehogs!*)

Here is a list of famous hedgehogs:

- Mrs Tiggy Winkle
- Mr Pricklepants
- Winston Churchill
- Sonic the hedgehog

Consider your awareness of hedgehogs raised, fellow citizens!

*Now Australia, on the other hand, that place definitely doesn't exist. ** 

**Echidnas do, but Australia, definitely not. 

The Other Dirty Thirty

Having just avoided participating in the Dirty Thirty Poetry Month in April (thirty days, thirty writing prompts, one per day) - it's become something of an annual festival with me, avoiding this event - you'd think I'd happily sit back and not think about it. But no! Why should poets have all the fun, after all? A far more common creative form, if you ask me, is the company circular, the monthly business fiscal update, the mundane board report composed by an unimportant mid-level HR drone.

To that end, I have composed the following:

Thirty writing prompts for mundane board reports

1. Discuss a potential rebranding strategy.

2. Outline your acquisitions portfolio.

3. Compare your company's sales on a month-by-month basis with those of other companies.

4. Hey, sales have been up in the third quarter!

5. Hey, sales have been down in the third quarter!

6. Hey, sales have stagnated in the third quarter!

7. Raise the prospect of future mergers.

8. Forecast some developments in the international markets.

9. Fill a page full of obscure acronyms that even your accountancy department will struggle to recognise.

10. Make a pie chart of the different sections of the company.

11. Make a bar graph of the same.

12. Paste a picture of the CEO on the page with the caption "our CEO".

13. Describe a development as "in line with expectations".

14. Write a series of sub-headings for the CFO's report!

15. Write a paragraph containing no rhymes whatsoever!

16. Use the acronym EBITDA 10 times in the one page.

17. Discuss difficulties you have had with your suppliers.

18. Use the words "going forward" on the first page of the report.

19. Chart international sales on a month-by-month basis.

20. Do the same on a year-by-year basis.

21. Discuss specific targets for your company.

22. Compare and contrast taxation and company responses to taxation in different countries.

23. Make a list of corporate responsibilities. Put a tick next to each of them!

24. Outline further opportunities for growth.

25. Discuss risks your productions sector will have to deal with.

26. Make a Venn diagram!

27. List five corporate strategies for the coming financial year. Use bullet points.

28. Use a photo of one of your factories, and come up with a banal caption for it!

29. Discuss the reasons for financial losses in the previous quarter.

30. Make up another graph just because, and colour it in. Use lots of grey!