Out having a few beers, ye olde Clif didn’t believe me when I said I had a poem published (“You’re full of surprises!”). Well… self-indulgence warning!
Above is the cover of the anthology in which my poem appeared. Buy it here. It was for the 2001 Noise Festival. So many years ago!! I tried taking a photo of the poem but it didn’t really come out. It has been up on my neglected personal site for ages. The poem’s title earned the naming rights for the chapter on love, dig it?
—- —- —- —-
Between the Golden Arches
When I see you
I find it hard to speak and cannot think, like when
I am ordering at drive thru,
And it takes me too long to say
Something spontaneous.
And I send myself away to wait
Away from you
And my desire,
Thinking waiting
By thoughts of when
Will I ever get my order?
—- —- —- —-
The caption that accompanied the poem: “A poem about how I shit myself when I am around this girl I like.”
It came up because we were talking about Cultural Studies academics and how most are outsiders at some point in their respective lives (thus giving them a particular awareness of themselves and the world around them). It made me think of my bio that I wrote for the Anthology and was published towards the back:
“My life?I learnt about fast cars as some mad skip growing up in a mad wog suburb. I learnt to enjoy learning as some big ‘non-rich’ kid going to an affluent private school. I learnt to have fun as some bogan pretending to go to uni. I learnt to have a work ethic as some ‘rich’ kid on a mine construction site. I learnt that I had learnt the above as some nut who chose to do an English degree. Lastly, even though I have always felt like an outsider — when I die, I want to come back as me.”
Nothing much has changed (besides the PhD, couple more ex-girlfriends and move to Sydney;).
Glen – one of the best bios I’ve seen in a long time!
Danny beat me to the punch – that’s fucking excellent.
Cheers! I was a bit amblivalent at that stage about what sort of degree I was doing. I settled on ‘English’ because I was did half creative writing and half cultstuds and I was sure if I was going to try to be a full time writer or what. I still have a novel on the go! Hoping to finish it at about the same time as my PhD.