its blue but its not sadness
it kills but its not death
its phallic but its not a penis
it smells but its not your armpit shrek
its a less ancient hemlock but its not available in goblets
it gives you perhaps a true sense of security against one of the vagaries of the tropics but not really
its got a bulls eye painted all over it but its not a target practice
it says it wont irritate you but it does
its got a net weight but it loses it fast in the dry season
it puts new holes in the ozone layer but i dont care
its a new generation but whos counting
it gives many authors a god out of the machine but its not a pistol
its metallic blue but whos looking

absolutely dog-tired. look at the french horloge. black pollutants under my fingernails. jakarta looked late afternoon in the ’80s all day today. pollens rained down from trees and hit my neck, exposed under half-face GIVI helmet. cheapest model on the market. the pollens hurt. i imagined them boring into my neck. blood splurting like engine oil from under my vespa when it had its 1000k check up the other day. nothin wrong with it just that i brought her in at 1591k. thats a bit cruel. so said the mechanic. who was a young man in YAMAHA uniform. but The Book is ready. few minor imperfections. annoying as hell, but the hell with it. i feel like steak tonite. like sacrificing an animal to the gods of mestizo lit. aimé fernand césaire, ezra pound for pound my fave of all time, saut situmorang. i felt like killing someone in the past few days. some men can be such boys. some boys can be such boys. some boy. but its been 4 years and not too many months since i sat outside, a few yards from where i am now and realised that i didnt love someone as much as i thought i did. i loved myself more. and the infinite possibilities of my ideal self (R C TM jessie wallace). now im happy. the three of us. the unitary indivisibleness of a kind of walking on air contentedness. one of a kind. i look forward to things. more of me being born into this world. her hands in my jacket pockets. us slicing thru this citys warm night air. not unlike a hot couple thru butter.

around the same time i decided to publish The Book, i bought a new vespa too. and by ‘bought a new vespa’ i meant buying a vespa that is new. 2007 issue. but the newness is not the point. what is the point. off all this shit. the shit is the relationship i had with this city, capital city of oompapa. ive always caught taxis, and other forms of public transport all my life. taxi is not public transport you stupid ass. ive never got my feet on the ground. my heels are shiny and spotless, like my new azzuro lx150 with red italian leather seats (treated with natural wax) and red aluminium handgrips (in my dreams). but now im ready. as never. a wife-in-training for a pillion. a zen still space between a waste disposal truck and a mayasari bakti. P06. get into it. and out as quick. The Book is a sort of Honda Astrea ‘86 in a gallery of New Mios. a couple of Royal Thai Finos thrown in. its a 2-stroke wonder aberration in a world dominated by 4-stroke killing machines. head-check! left. right. crash into yr afterlife. death. thats what im prepared for. preparing for. death by slow whirring of National Library of Australia-approved air-conditioner-cooled air, leaning at 35 degrees on Maïakovskiis magnum opus (whichever one that is), untouched by human hand since its mechanical appropriation by a nit-picking buyer from the Australia Indonesia Institute.

quit whinging.

QUIT WHINGING as the new QUIT SMOKING.

youve had quite a nice life. unlived thats true. but on Tante Sophie* anything, even the examination of an unexamined life is possible. so said not socrates.

drifters are not cool. easy, vesperino.

*Tante Sophie Hortense Cecile Doblijn, née De Pauly, the full unexpurgated name of my standard azzuro LX150 with factory-issue leatherette blue seat, also the name of the sullen matriarch in Breton de Nijs’s Vergeelde portretter: Uit een Indisch familie album.

I should really tell people something(s) about The Book.

The Book is 2 years in the making and another 3 of procrastinating.

I wrote maybe the first third in nether nether land and the rest in oompapa.

Ive gotten over The Book.

Its style, its concern with the Imagist cred(o), its Stevens-y titles.

It contains a lot of aborted take-offs. (This was from when the previous line ended with ‘Stevens-y flights of the Imagination.’)

You see, its hard to tell you anything about The Book, without giving you The Book.

But I want you to buy The Book.

Ive gotten over It but I feel its important that I record what Ive gotten over.

Sort of kinda like having the current WR time/jump/lift hanging off your back like the proverbial literal monkey.

Today I found out its gonna be about 130 pages long.

Thats pretty cool. That makes it 87 pages longer than Sanoesi Panes Puspa Mega and 3 more than John Ashberys Your Name Here.

My name where ?

Theres gonna be Elvis in it.

Theres always Elvis in me.

The King Never Dies, Long Live etc.

Punk Not Dead.

The Book is breathing. Murmuring.

‘that yellow is not shit enough’

‘that shit is not yellow enough’

‘i want the font to look like john ashbery’

‘yes, the man’

‘this epigraph is three pages long, and its better than any of yer poems’

’seppuku is hard to do with a, its just hard to do. apparently. i read it in that mishima bio.’

‘what does the guy whos there to cut yer head off once you plunge the knife in called ?’

‘it means something like santa’s little helper. santa-san’s.’

‘align left.’

‘align right.’

‘i love you.’

‘retarded. and i hate paris.’

‘i hate sylvia beach. sylvia bitch.’

‘dont you think pound wouldve looked good on a vespa ?’

‘u surious ?’

‘do you wanna do the french dressing with herb and garlic ?’

‘no, herb wants to have satays instead.’

‘he cant eat anything deep-fried.’

‘his idea of heaven would be a 24 hour happy hours dimsum place.’

‘it would be called tian.’

‘the winter melon drink would be called the long kiang.’

‘asyhadu alla illa ha ilallah.’

‘really ?’

‘i thought there were many of them fake magis.’

‘ra ra ra.’

‘you always want everything to end in a joke.’

The Book is gonna be designed by unik. It is being designed by unik. Hes sitting right in front of me now. In front of his ancient Acer. Hes using something like the most recent vershun of InDesign (thats a software you luddite softcocks !) he bought at Ratu Plaza. Hes doing revisions for violets book now. Theyre communicating thru Y!M and theyre sitting 50 centimetres apart. What techno-freaks ! The Books design is gonna refer to an old design by a dead artist. Sort of like if you put out a book in England thats got a picture of Penguin at the front. So Im gonna carry a copy each of books that used the dead artists design (same one different colours for a series) and display it at Ubud, at the Readers Dozing Off festival, where Im gonna hold the launch for The Book. Display them next to The Book. Its gonna be a joint launch with violets book. Hers has got a lot empty spaces, The Book is just empty.

today ill work on the tags. in my book. its already got index of titles and index of first lines. but i like to be stupid. i was doing, am still doing, tags for my blog and i was, still am, marvelling at how much the collection of (mostly as it turns out) proper names illuminates the themes of my writing. i write about things with proper names. concrete, flesh & blood & metal & plastic stuffs. places, foodstuffs, people, car makes, motorbike makes, brands; i write a lot about aqua, the brand of mineral water one gets by habit though its not necessarily the best-tasting, in oompapa. my most abstract tag is probably ‘ex-girlfriend‘.

so im gonna do that today. and wait for my bloody designer to call me. its been two months since i last saw him. the bastard. that wouldve been his tag.

the wait. im tryin to publish a book. ive got a publisher. and the book itself. its done. basically. took me 5 years. at least. started with a little poem ‘the sound of mourning after robert lowell died’ that won a stupid award from here in 2003. and its not even in the book. perhaps one thing remains from it, my love of silly puns. so you indie kids are right, i got the title for this book from punning a bright eyes song. google it to work out which one. a lot of things had happened since that first poem. perhaps ill tell you later. perhaps not. they are relevant to the poems in the book of course. yes it is a book of poems. there are poems about australia. sydney where i lived in 2001-2004, jakarta where i am now, various places in jakarta, various places in jakarta that try to be somewhere else, like this thing, some of my favorite movies, dead activists, one dead poet, and at least two of my former girlfriends.

and im now still waiting to find a designer whos not gonna bail on me. ive tried three. in the meantime me and her, ze big bozz of the publishing company im signed to, have checked out a paper store (to work out and buy paper for my book, and hers), visited a printing place thats part of a church/orphanage/convent, and get drunk many times to drown our sorrows at the exorbitant discount that bookstores demand to carry our books on their shelves. bitches.

its a funny thing i guess trying to publish a book in oompapa, this great country of ours. funny as hell. do we really need to, say. both me and her have got regular readers who visit our blogs every day. stalkers. rabid fans. the books are gonna cost us about 30 million rupiahs each to publish, promote, flog, stuff down peoples throats, etc. blogs cost nothing. or perhaps a fraction of the 828 thousand rupiahs that i pay for my slowy each month and of the 400 something that she pays for her veryfuckingfastnet. thats nothing compared to 30 fucking millions each. still theres something nice about books. fetishistic? maybe, i find books more attractive than real dolls, true. but herein lies the conundrum: because paper is so expensive in oompapa (printing is okay-priced), we cant make the beautiful books we first dreamt off anyway.

my book was gonna be called maps. spelled back to front so it reads like spam. like you have to read it in the mirror to realise its actually called maps. it was gonna be in the form of a map. like a standard tourist map one gets from galleries lafayette, say. with real and fake advertisements for starbucks, ooh la la, excelso, in the margins (perhaps well get them to pay for the real ads). but thats gonna cost us like hell. not funny hell. fucking hell. so now my books gonna look like a standard french mini-paperback. have you got a seuil copy of perecs l’infra-ordinaire? like that.

im alright with that i guess. masochistically perhaps, id like to know if the poems can stand on their own. without all my planned fripperies.