Beginning At Basheer's Coffee Shop

I talk to Basheer briefly
How-did-the-launch-go?
etcetera.
The anarchists enter
—at least, three guys with beards,
glasses, one steel-rimmed, tech
teachers, I think.

They always sit there.
I sit here, or here.

The women
from the Arts Dept sit there, always
but their numbers
require it

a deal is stitched up
much laughter.

  I read the poems
Tranter has sent.
I like them, tho I know    nothing
of the sources
I think I’ve never read Ern Malley even,
in his entirety
  or Biggles
  Lyn! I hear
John call out,
       he has really read nothing except   Frank O’Hara!

“And Ted Berrigan, John,”
Lyn’s moderating tones
“and you, & Pam, & Forbes & Laurie.” Sometimes I
wonder, I hear John subsiding.

It’s true tho,
isn’t it?

Joyce I am reading at the moment,
playing catch-up.

Am I taking it in?

“My point
entirely,” I hear John again,
an imaginary John

Are all my friends imaginary?

The women
laugh again, loudly.

My vision of John is cartoon
John stands by
a pool
back to me, pretty much
  — chinos? not
cargo pants! —
a striped shirt,
sipping a daiquiri
watching the
pool cleaner chug back & forth
against the tiles
dreaming of a machine that would write the
terminals for him   (The Terminals)

automatically.

“Automatically”
  it’s beginning to seem a word
you don’t hear anymore
the past’s dream of the
future
—we’re there now—
  like my dream of JT

tho do they happen automatically

— like everything else
these days?
so it “goes without saying”? —

The real John I saw
a few weeks ago

and now I have his book

where

Biggles meets Ern Malley
as does Louisa May Alcott
“They spoke so frankly in the past” — is one effect
via John’s coupling of the texts
or “lingos”
if I may
permit myself an Australianism

I guess I am an Australian?

& a wistful, unrepentant modernist
‘of some stripe or order’
with the old-fashioned ideas of modernity
(tail fins?)

the anarchists,

I reflect,
resemble the Marx Brothers

                 as, bearded, they
arrive in America
  with identical long
beards
  — I remember a beard coming unstuck
as Chico or Harpo drinks water—

this is not quite modernity
  or it’s the joke
of one part catching up with the other:
  Europe
—Eastern Europe—
(smelly, bearded, un-cool
  unsophisticated)
arriving in America

the ‘New’ world, ha ha

America &
‘the Other’

& here my essay begins

the Lars von Trier
vision
of crew-cuts versus the Arab headgear
or, How
could America
become so dumb

after the arrival of the

Marx Bros

tho the bros. could see, then & there, how it
very likely would

We dreamed?

we slept?

I like the bleak romance of your poem on
Sydney —
‘The Romans’,
is that what it’s called? —
calm

pitiless

taking amusement

— yet careful not to disad-
vantage
the hard done by
victim —

the men in pants with cuffs
(not jeans)
hats, braces,
the pigeons, Hyde Park, St James Station

evoked there—

the Sydney of my past, as if

I age

& witness the passing of something

just before I pass myself.

In one sense. Yes, RIP, pal.

If I did pass myself

                                        one of me twenty seven
the other sixty two & staring at a drunk in
the park
or reading ‘The Romans’
     & looking up at the sky
what would ‘I’ say
  — hey dad?

Hey son.

Ern Malley:

something of an anarchist

‘himself’

ha ha, aren’t those quote marks ‘funny’?

—like the past.

The generations telling each other jokes they don’t get.

Hey, dad.

Here are the cartoon versions of my friends

:—

[slide show]

interspersed with quotes from Ern Malley;

& my enemies :—

[slide show]

quotes from Frank O’Hara

it’s a plan, I guess

tho where does that leave me

a cartoon in the mind of someone, surely?

a little loved?

or not at all?

dozing

one foot visible, say,
one limb, very quiet,

poking out from the dumpster of history

a very quiet limb

—to quote the past.

Inter island trade begins?