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The Many Hands of Captain Hook
2008
Published in Spare P(art)s, Journal of the (art) Society, University of Sydney, 2008

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Yo ho, me mates, let’s have a look
at the many hands of Captain Hook

The many hands of Captain Hook
The steely hands of Captain Hook

A sharpened claw for making cuts
A blunted claw for slashing guts

A silver claw for scratching names
A rusty claw for playing games

The vicious hands of Captain Hook
The polished hands of Captain Hook

A mechanical hand for shooting his gun
A hand with sharp nails for scratching his bum

A glass in hand for sipping gin
A hand for tucking the kiddies in

The lovely hands of Captain Hook
The loving hands of Captain Hook

A spyglass, a hammer, a fork and a spoon
A duster, a hairbrush, a pen, a spittoon

A compass, a snuff box, a tissue, a file
A hand for hunting crocodile

The secret hands of Captain Hook
Give a hand for Captain Hook

With a rapier on he’ll run you through
Turn the blade in your belly, that’s it for you

A chopping knife at the top of your wrist
He’ll cut it right off from finger to fist

Give a hand for Captain Hook
Spare a hand for Captain Hook!

Way Up
2008

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Our island is small as a postage stamp,
my Mamma laughs,
our island could fit in the palm of one hand.
We have one tree and one field, a little house, a harbor
ringed with granite stones.
Our island clings to the green coast,
clings like meat to a mussel shell.

On Saturday morning my Daddy drives the old, white speedboat out,
way out to Halfway Rock
where the edge of the ocean drops away.
It is so far, my Daddy says
that the only ones who live there
are sea monsters, mermaids, and birds.
He stays all day and brings back fish
with musical names,
striper bass with yellow bellies.

Saturday noon my brother Danny and me go down to the cellar,
way down in the coal and pinewood dark.
We load our arms with white cloth bundles
and bring up ordinary things,
a loaf of bread, potatoes.
Mamma chops basil for pesto
and the smell creeps out into the sunlight.

At dusk from our front door to the field
Danny and I follow the fireflies.
We go up, way up
to the tip top of our one tree.
We mix up the fireflies and the evening stars.
We pretend we are up in a hot air balloon,
on a high-wire tight rope,
up on a tall bridge,
up, way up on a cloud.

We stay in the tree until Daddy comes back,
night falls, the fish sizzles,
and Mamma comes to the door.

Come back to the house for dinner,
she cries,
Come back, come back, come in.

Written
2008
Enquiries for full text welcome.

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In the House of Prospectives, the future was a game of dreams and chance. The administration took a new attitude toward work: the basics of the educational process must be observed, of course, but it was a well documented fact that dreamers Write the best books. The rare ones, whose novels sold a million copies in the first two weeks, were always the laziest children, the ones who spent their time at school staring out the windows, drawing hieroglyphics in their food.

One spring the whisper filtered down from the Agency that horses novels were popular; the children were all given riding lessons. The next season it was shoot-em-up pulp, gun-toting battalions in metal and leather covered with purply, bruised blood. The House attendants took all the boys out shooting in the range during the day. At night the older boys would sneak the younger ones out into the alleys to shoot at cats and trash cans. The House looked the other way. It was good for their Writing.

It wasn’t the work ethic that was important, it was the richness of the unconscious, dreaming. And also practical things, like the shape and circumference of the inner ear canal, how close the veins of the arm were to the skin, to make the machine’s probing injections easier. It stuck one needle here, and another there, a pinprick and a thimbleful of green juice in your sleep, and a thin laser etched across the paper in neat, computerized shorthand. A great big novel tapped from each child’s unconscious and sprawled out across the screen.

When the child woke up they would get a diploma with a gold stamp, a check for their novel rights, and a plastic mortarboard, a pathetic parody of a graduation ceremony. People called the machine the Writer Thing.

The House was a wonderful place for children.

Oceans
2007
Published in ARNA, Journal of The University of Sydney Arts Students Society, 2008
1st Prize Winner, The University of Sydney PALM Awards in Literature
Enquiries for full text welcome.

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“Once I caught a fish that could talk,” my father declared to me.

“You did not!” We were in the new furnace room of our new house, stacking old books into new plastic tubs we bought at Wal-Mart, to stop the water damage. Max was sitting in the hallway. The light from the bay windows of the first floor was blue in his hair. He was seven. I was ten.

“Yes, yes I did.” He set a tub marked “Crafts” in sharpie marker on top of another marked “Children.” The tubs were nearing the ceiling now. “Six summers ago, on the Nancy Anne before we sold her. With Clyde.”

“Clyde?”

“Yes indeed, you can ask him when he comes for Christmas Eve. It’s late one night, and we’re heading back to Sitka, that’s in southeast Alaska, dawdling because the sea’s like blue glass and the stars are coming out. The nets are packed, no more big hauls for the day, everything stowed, and for some reason Clyde just gets the urge to drop a line in the water, just for fun.” He picked Robinson Crusoe from where I’d put it in another box marked “Children” and moved it to “Adventure.”

“Except, Clyde’s at the helm and he’s supposed to be on it until we’re back in. He asked me to switch with him, but I said no. So he asked me to drop a line in for him, and he’d get to it later on. I pulled up his old pole from behind the head door, strung it with a bit of herring I was cooking, and tossed it over, and I was going to walk away. But just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “the line’s tight and it felt like the whole boat’d jumped over. Almost pulled the thing right out of my hands, but I held on and I got the line back in, and it was crackling like a sea dragon was on the other end.”

“What’s a sea dragon?” My brother had moved from the hallway and was sitting on one of my teetering stacks of books.

“Big thing. Lots of scales. Breathes bubbles. Anyway, finally I fight this fish onto deck, and I was expecting it to be a tuna as big as one of you, but it’s not. It’s a little thing, silver bellied salmon no bigger than my forearm. I scoop it up with the net and plop it in a bucket, but it jumps right out again, so I go after it again and manage to stick it between the net and my hand, and that’s when it talked!”

“It did not!”

“Yes it did. It sounded all rushy, like it was very very tired, and it said, ‘Let me up.’ And I was so startled I jumped right back, but it was still all tangled up in the net and it lay there, looking at me, and it kept talking. ‘Put me back over the side,’ it said, ‘and I’ll give you something.’ By then I was thinking I’d been hit on the head with a flying oar, but I came over to it, and I picked up the net it was curled in, so that it untangled and lay easy. ‘Thanks,’ it said. ‘Now throw me over.’ But I was thinking, this could be a good chance for me to learn a little something about ocean life, so I asked it where it was from. It just kept looking at me, and then it made a little bubbling noise like a sigh. And it said ‘Tomorrow you will go beyond the second reef to the point where the rocks form a star, and there you will make a great catch. And now, you will put your hand under my right gill, and you will find a present there for your wife.’”

“What -” but he put up a hand, and my brother hushed.

“So I did, and I felt something cold, and out dropped a heavy gold bracelet. I figured, that was good enough for me, so I took him to the side and flipped him over, and he sank like a little silver stone. That’s when Clyde hit the gap in the breakwater, and he came down to check the line, but I told him I’d caught a little baby salmon and threw it back just then. And when I came back at the end of the summer, I gave that bracelet to your mom, and she still wears it every day.”

“Did you go back to the star rock place the next day?”

He smiled at me, and began stacking tubs again. “You know, we did, but we didn’t catch a thing. Totally dead day. I figure that fish was a liar.”

Everywhere I go in Sydney, I see New York. 

It’s not just that all cities share bits of skyline and street, although there are pieces of Sydney, corners in Chinatown or alleyways in the CBD, that ring of the other Chinatown, of Wall Street, of the Lower East Side. It’s not just that I’m homesick, although I am. Painfully, like things are ripping where they shouldn’t.

It’s that I’d forgotten, as I suspect all New Yorkers forget, just what our city looks like to the rest of the world. The glamour and complexity, that feeling of being the center of the world. Of being a destination. Coveted. Daydreamed.

When I introduced myself in one of my classes as from New York, I heard actual gasps. I have lost count of how many young folks here are wearing New York t-shirts, and of how many times I’ve seen New York vacations advertised, and of how many people have told me they’d “love to go there one day.”

That was me, once. I remember how enormous the city was when I moved there. I remember thinking I could plunge into it and be lost forever. I never really learned how to navigate exactly, but eventually I grew used to being lost again, found again, lost, found, from street to street. I remember the first time I got on the 2 instead of the 1 and ended up in Harlem, and couldn’t get back because I didn’t have change for the buses, didn’t know the subway lines.

I remember being obsessed with the way the sidewalks glittered. I remember the little-known reason I went to school in New York: to see shows on Broadway. I remember the first time I felt like I lived there, that surreal, frozen moment when I leaned out my window to see the smoke pouring from the gap in the skyline, 10 am on my fifth day of classes.

From the outside New York is all wrapped up in smoke and mirrored sheen. It glimmers; in the minds of the world it is practically shellacked.

The New York I know isn’t that mythical construct of neon lights and ultra-urban America. It’s much simpler and infinitely more welcoming. I have to wonder which of those two cities is still real to me, or if living outside the bubble will force me to mix the two ideas up in my head, to create a New New York. Glamorous bodegas, glittering side streets, a pithy, mishmashed mess.

Maybe it is just the homesickness. Acute nostalgia brought about by tshirt logos and misconceptions. I don’t know.

I miss New York.