Audience Please... WA Slam heats start tonight!

audience please
and so the poetry is dead
but the werds in my head
keep tumbling,
tumbling
between us

audience - yet so much depends upon this: check
this microphone as a phallic expression
and with each generic layer of spit-sprayer aggression
we gather in hectic carbon clusters
we breed and muster like polite helicopters
to read and feed and kill each others post-teen angst

audience please - yet so much depends upon this: check
this toxic, clotted bowel movement at the station*
as the words pass around like a joint
at the back of a pub - in my head, this regret
an apparition of these bloated faces in the crowd
red rose petals on a wet, black bough*
a dead wheelbarrow* filled with white chickens and blackened swans
a potential depression glazed with daisy cutter rain
a CGI gesture resonating into the stars and back
at the planet - on the stage here tonight

audience please every
and he says: big bang - big bang - hadron collider- hadron collider*

yet still so much depends upon this: check
this collective battered noun of us all
in this glitter-ball room, speaking at a murder of poets
fully armed and ready to rumble
and here comes the stumble, the stumble, stum-ble, the stum-ble…

and so the poetry is dead
but the werds in my head keep tumbling, tumbling - between us:

audience please every minute
we breathe, breathe, breathe and sigh from geneva to northbridge
to receive a noble prize for my ambiplasmic peace convergence
my economic rastafarian cycle, my sonic puncture repair kit
and at this juncture

she says: they shoot atoms at us, in us - don't they
and he says: big bang - big bang - hadron collider- hadron collider

audience please every minute matters
like children so much depends upon petals and wheelbarrows
to fix fix fix with a rubber hammer
and a letter to queen victoria* and stalin stalin stalin*

but the werds in my head keep tumbling, tumbling… between us

audience please every minute matters

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allan boyd: antipoet - 4 october 2008

this poem was performed as the "sacrificial poet" at the first WA heat of the 2008 australian poetry slam. audience please every minute matters is a line from a FOTL song. I've also played with William Carlos Williams' Red wheelbarrow; Ezra Pound's In a Station at the Metro; Banjo Patterson's Man From Snowy River, and sound poet Jas H Duke.