the home page of david prater

They're back. Meet Grisby, Tilda and Joey. Hoi!

Past Buddha in a green waterfall making music from the falling drops. Spinning on a small rock, talking to a turtle. Red doves pecking at grains of sand on the little beach. That effortless river flowing backwards through stillness and fire. Gauze of the waterfall's spray in the surrounding air, a song whose chorus fades out just before completion, the refreshing loop and gurgle of memories floating away. Leaf boats on the surface of the water, the honey-coloured rocks lending the stream a sheen of treacle or molasses, reeds shimmying in the submarine breeze. Present Buddha sitting in a glade for several seconds, then gone to perch like a ladybird on a wet leaf. An eyedrop rolling down the chasm of the upturned leaf, a pinball in the fern's erratic machine. Watching loneliness float away like a trail of smoke in the glade. Buddha was just there. The scent of sugarcane burning through the night. The manic energy of that desire in the dark. Candles of skin. Miniature whirlpools...

I'm not usually one to go for publicity, prferring instead to slave anonymously over my poetry, honing my arcane craft in the desloate silence of my eyrie, but when I got a call from uber-poet and drop-dead spunk alicia sometimes asking if I'd like to come and talk to her writing students at Chisholm TAFE today, I spied a self-promotional opportunity. All of yesterday was spent formatting documents, photocopying images and wrestling with staplers and yes, it was a tricky thing but I did manage to put together ten copies of my chapbook Abendland , my first since The Happy Farang way back in 2000. The chabook contains poems I wrote during a two month holiday in Europe and the US last year. You can read all of the poems online here , but I should mention that these are early drafts of the poems, some of which have changed radically since being written. Plus, I mean, a chapbook is a pretty cool thing to have with you when you're on the tram, or hanging with your poetry peeps....

And I saw a field of Buddhas and there you were, running fast up a hill, laughing. And I saw you laughing and my heart burst, like a small block of granite beneath a sculptor's chisel, a million shards of myself flying through the air. And my heart burst and I saw us running down a hill, towards another field, into the exploding afternoon. And I saw us running and I saw that we were laughing, trying to hold hands as we ran, falling over each other in the grass. And we were falling over each other like we were on the moon, in exquisite slow motion and full colour. And then I felt the long ache of our addiction and the tingling of you in my veins and I was crying. And the tingling of you in my veins made me run as fast as I could towards the moon. And I ran as fast as I could and you were there, breathing in the lunar dew. And you were there, holding out your arms, laughing at the faraway earth with long and bursting laughs. And the earth was as faraway as old sadnesses, a photo we ...

Hello, possum. I'm trying to write a story that'll take you a day to read, or just less than four weeks. The kind of story that's full of description, dialogue, character development and unexpected polka dots . Benny grabbed the knife. I'm trying to write an untold story. Sounds hard, doesn't it? The kind of story I used to go to bookshops to find, until they made me want to start smoking crack. That's the opposite of untold, ie, told. I'd blame it on Beck but you're not really into him. The kind of story you know has been written just for you and nobody else. Gucci . The kind of story that's hard to continue believing in, real world, when you're in a bookshop lining up for that special book that you alone understand along with all the other people who feel like that. No, forget it. Bookshops bad. Stories on a screen, good. You see, I'd like to get you sacked from your job for reading my stories during working hours. I want them to be that go...