"Supersix"

Streets lie with street lights
Between red bricks and geraniums
Dogs piss endlessly whilst masters piss up and push the bash
Coiled inside the grey domes of five oclock shadows old serpents dream
Awakening for the call of the last at Rose Hill

She's tattered like old calico frocks
Wailing the retreat with cigarette lips
A smell of spoof, and smoke stained sheets
Flap on the line where shunts the suction train
Lighting the way beyond the supersix sprayed with sex

Sentinels stand upright on the kitchen table
Stuck with brewjuice, spit, blood, tears
Brown light waiting to stab the the sorry
From dreamless slumber and tight teeth eyes
Stiff till tomorrow's therapy mix hits the rafters
Like fruitbat shit

No unbled flesh crawled past ten 'tween these walls
Seeds planted, convulsed in sabbath's spew
From daddy's balls, wet pillows keep her cool
Poison pins scrape the plaster from 'neath teen nails
Coughing atmospheric polyglug back into the bag
Zip her up mate
She's a stat

David Burge 2002

"Amphetamine"

Conrod sluts hang off the back fence like sirens wailing on a Friday night
Wiping gutter-gripe and bra-ash from blonde hair cut short
Saturday's barefoot brides tramp the tiles at Coles
Casting amphetamine smiles with dogs inside
Grinning teethgrinders bound bitter on one leg
Pulling the shadow of the pillbox behind
Skinpins sucking,
Lapping on the striptease jube
Lips lick razor threads, the bedsheet gloss
Lies with truth
Tastes so good

David Burge 2005


These next two poems were written whilst on a restful holiday in Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia

"South"

Steel rust clatterbox
Scraped ash with cold gray guts sits
On the inside with it's slate and cup-of-tea magazines
Hmmm Rather be outside this little man

Yes, here at the bottom of the world
Amphibians howling out a checkered flag night
Under starless, endless clouds, somewhere south
Can you hop no further little snapfrog?

Near and north Karri columned curtains hang with fake assurance
A façade that lines the tourist trek
Our membrane, a green cell-wall to protect
Our eggshell from the northern atom dust-maul desert

How we long to embrace our muse, our acid-rain bombs and brown car deaths
Things across that dead sea, carcase strewn
Yet here before the senses lies cold, the gray horizon with naught but ice and sea
Clear and clean, the saviour of the earth
Sleeps blue and green
Cuttlefish and toothfish, Japanese and whale
A rather more vital fight, a franic tale

David Burge 2007

"Seabirds"

Silent on gray feathered planes
Tip this way and that
Over the soft shimmering glass
The choir still humming last night's monotonous hum
Some seek with slender beak in the brown left-behinds
Strutting in reflections
Some just sit with folded wings
Perched atop their albion castles
Waiting, listening, clucking
Expectant of some great clatter-clap

Will it come?
Does it ever change?
Is this eternity?
Are these the Angels of the Lord awaiting some trump beneath this pale dusk sky?
In this ash soft air
Where the unperturbed forever in peace
Tip this way and that
Soaring on silent unseen radiation
O'er cracked mud and clams?


David Burge 2007


About Alex Kanevski Paintings, Jan 2008

It is the "Progress" photographs that prompted me to ask the question. I have been thinking about it for several days now.
At this point I'm thinking these photographs of the paintings are like photographs of anything in motion.
There is no fixed state to anything.
Any point of focus is temporary and that which is caught at any given moment is but a record of when a tangent occured a given point in the universe.
The tangent is eternal but the point of contact is just a refernece to an event past, never to repeat, the imprint is all we see.
Solidity is transitory. I get the feeling you have treated these paintings as if they were the period that exists whilst people look into each others eyes.
There is a moment when to look for too long is inappropriate. We know that moment by cultural instinct.
Rather than being trapped by reference to the camera Alex has engulfed the concept of the camera and subjugated it into his ideas. Whether captured by camera, or eye, the illusion of presence is an ellusive subject for an artist weilding something as primative as a brush with sticky stuff on the end of it. All power to Kanevsky.


<