the home page of david prater

the human ear is a barrier between us & the world of sound once its lost then we have no need to tell birds apart in effect eternal sounds erased an inverted dome the brain sets in like a permaculture pond sucks the earth it can hear your blood & your heart's a rising crescendo of comepressed air the syringe of wax stuck inside there to make plugs that keep the oceans out sharp pincers ripping a dried glob cram a cotton bud or ball then gauze crackle a scabs drum goes pop release pressure falls barometers beneath hiss & spin about no sounds come out lying flat in that recovery room i felt brittle eardrums now lanced in a dumb zone shielding eyes from sounds of a mime recurring thatched straw piles of mats slats improbably white rooms hearing the bright lights i cried out at no-one listening hearing myself talking inside while making out that single external sound a code memory stacked like the crackle of a soft page at your ear like thirty ta

if velo wears a cardboard crown then surely vera appears draped in green. her streets lean lovingly into nature strips, storm drains and kerbs. through electric streets traffic whirs as through a blender, anti-clockwise, in unsprawled packets. and the ever insisting mosquito, its visa due to expire momentarily then mysteriously validated, like a light switch turned on and then off. the corner's perspective affords an uninterrupted miasma of melaleukas, dreaming the next layer of sky. vera the mosquito virus, planes of insistence, blood for eggs. wings like torn curtains, legs a spangle of sticks above a fireplace, teepee supports, the trail of my breath steps on which she climbs, seeking skin hosts. vera, city of the guarded woman behind electricity grids. skin, the steps on which shadows climb seeking fruit and the drip's amnesia. erotic phone cards and the leopard's skin pass outs, shingles on a sparsely-lit shore, etcetera of the intact glycerine dawn. vera the night p

stripes of dry land trapped beneath a pale halogen daymurk, the cities of pau teem with anchors of all persuasions, latching onto protruding rusted vehicle parts and the hind treads of mopeds, vine-like and all-pervasive, the innards of the sea's communication channels clamped fast to a series of dry wharves and makeshift station platforms, interconnecting with the steel rain. pau station mainline midway between palmerston sprawl and the nominal city, terminus of the now-extinct east-west line, pigmented sunshades and the abundance of tarpaulins, corrugated iron huts and the humanity of a hawker at the invisible entrance. one's only reminder a faint nagging at consciousness, feeding straight into the cerebral cortex, its dreams. snapshot memory of a shadow that was missing, when you looked down that street and saw instead a long, empty plane perpendicular, beyond it the rustling of animated leaves. pau is rearriving and leaving simultaneously, climbing overpasses to nowhere,

velo city, the velvet night trips me, i can't see jack via fistlight. this causeway's all gone soupy, overpasses to nowhere, streetlights disappearing like forests or an empty highway. how they thought they'd inhabit this sprawl of a mountain, i don't know. thirty five ke-los from one end to the other, grand population: zero. even after they blew the place apart four times in a single century, it remains a planner's daymare. space, trace, place. velo city, a case in point. built on the shingled remains of a night market, down on mindil beach, the hawker continuum taken to the nth degree - box atop bento box, this site once thrashed with movement, speed, colour. mostly asia - a continent built on momentum, fast tripping, pixillated shotgun terminals, tantric tofu. a night bizarre, a conflagration of wok-heated histories, five cents a plate. velo city, a case in redundancy. no shouts have marred its laneways for a neon now. that's no mistake: a neon, an eternity

The way cool Guide Horse Foundation website features a whole bunch of pictures of our furry friends. This is my favourite: Cuddles, on the first flight of a horse on a commercial flight!

enjambement breaks into sunshine like a dog upon a pond reflections collide in the state forests full of green ukrainians built a big square pool a private lesiure centre up past anglesea beware the great ocean roads corrugation wonder tyres love the earths drains some shattered morning a koala a chainsaw australian dreams of horizontal views of empty posession of a level plane up past angahook beyond the loggers canvas camps desolation sounds like yesterday bitterness as currency some velvent yawning too little dreaming empty materialist non-conformity worn like a warning batteries silent missiles on the old fritz time for thermals time to hit whats left of tomorrow helling all the day another petrol tank to fill time for dreaming to commence your wish will now begin take a deep breath begin to walk enjambement

So this is how you all find me. tigers guernsey for the wizard cup 2005 an exampel of a haiku poem *dont stare screensaver* he sails tonight lyrics recovery tram budgie smuggler photo invention of marzipan slowdive karappo fourth reich roger federer feel the touch farnham youre the voice mid cordite asthma neo mp3 music shoe gazers funny melbourne weather prediction rosanna davison profile discussion on private sex orgies in sydney bondi road slowdive joy division screen saver pirate patch budgie smuggler greatest speed garage tracks ever slowdive avalyn harry snotter gravity's rainbow mp3 budgie smuggler v8 blog gravity's rainbow harry snotter latest speed garage mp3 We are not alone.

Don�t listen to anyone who tells you that there are ten secrets to good poetry. That person is more likely to be a salesperson than a poet. There are in fact eleven. Good poems resist time Language is a fluid Your idealised inner poetic space may be quite irrelevant in the end Even free verse is a form Speech and punctuation and grammar imply rhythm Randomness creates rhythm and harmony Irony is not always funny Remain auto-conscious Poetics Community One word is enough to summarise an entire generation St Kilda Writers Festival, Saturday February 5 2005

Dusk. The freeway's haze; Green Australian gum trees Soak up the spectrum. Sparrows in the elms: Fans dressed for a football match Scale autumn's ladder. Australian icon: Southern Cross windmill, rusted By the passing cars. Siamese cats scan The corrugated iron Roof for a sparrow. Old kiln-works chimney, You burn the earth into walls Made of white moon bricks. Red light makes silence. A tram turns under the moon. Green light makes more noise. TV antenna picking up beams like a glass filled with week-old wine. When the rosellas fly Over my apartment block, I love the country. An art gallery. A Mercedes parked outside. I'm missing something. A gigantic moon Drowns out the traffic's tide. Hear my balcony. First published in Ginyu (Troubadour), Japan, 2004.

As you'll see, this blog has gone through another carnation, this time a kind of cherry tomato red. Welcome to [d/dn] v9, which will hopefully grow into a more sophisticated beast over time. I'll be archiving these posts over the next few days (I think there's exactly one hundred here!), so that we can all move on. Thanks for your comments, everyone. Looking forward to the new us!