Cryptographs – Philip Salom

[1950–current, Australian]

The air moves on you like a naked woman.
The night’s made the shape of a shop.
You’ve been offered one and stolen from the other 
and glad it was that way about.

Avoid people who bore you,
nothing’s so dull as your wrists
when your blood beats like some rock and roll
you couldn’t even stand as a kid.

A risk’s not a short-cut but a new way 
home, as home’s not the same river twice.
Swim in the art like a lover comes, or 
risk to – the windows lift up like a gasp.

Sunk into language you can swim 
without moving. The currents sway you 
as much as the sharks.

Or sit there in its armchair
as it stares coolly from the fireplace 
and you go up in flames. 

Looking for a title
then seeing what the hunger is 
and what all art is: 
feeding the ghost. 

And having fed it I 
in choosing words for what
did not at the time exist
make it our illusion.

The poem pretends to exist 
like a fact before the title
but all the emptiness is 
named by this. Paradigm.

The wall remembers everything,
staying on when you should have left, 
saying yes when you really meant no
and all such shameful vacuums.

Source: Salom, P 1993, Feeding the ghost, Penguin Books London.

Blind Date. Bees – Philip Salom

[1950–current, Australian]

When he mentions the Right Names
she begins to think of bees.

When his Conquests get an airing
she feels like being elsewhere.

By the time he gets around to the First Million
her head is a swarm.

Shocked he thinks her face is Distressed
but closer, it is a complete intensity.

And then the queen streaks into the sky
and her face takes flight, is gone.

A few last workers trailing off
where once had been her arms.

Her clothes collapse, empty as his mouth
about to say: ‘Honey?’


Source: Salom, P 1993, Feeding the ghost, Penguin Books, London.

Computer Games -- Philip Salom

 [1950-current, Australian]

— you’ve come halfway through the matinee,
have to carry dames, or slap guys’ faces
— it’s either platinum or sharp moustaches.
Which means you’re too soon or thirty years
too late to make the moves convincingly.
Her nose is thin and Streepish, his is not
Latin American, more Latin Ahollywood,
down to virtuoso later scenes, without make-up,

when love’s gone looking for another Oscar.

You spend a day in bed, her legs always
brown and way apart for quivering bum-shots of him
but that’s not what you press there for.
You can be him, or you can be her. You can
press for Bond and Pinochet, one phone call away
people like pale wires fed by a magneto
until the wires fairly scream.
By six o’clock you will too. You press:
a shower scene gothic with groovy breasts
and lower down, there’s lots of fluids, male
and shiny nozzles — desire’s like hotel soap,
show many times you can use it.

You press — it’s raining streets at night, water
from the ultimate of roses, water is drinking light
from bleeding and bleeping neons. Her head
shifts against your shoulder as you gasp relief
hoping, in a way you hope for Glass on soundtrack,
this will keep on, the easy, melancholy fall
upon the cars, rain enough to keep the peace
in ways the law-men and the daytime can’t.

You hear yourself saying to another bloke
you’re in on this too and he: been at it for years.
Looking for one chance, that’s all.
Then his eyes: Know what I’ve just found?
Funny how you never find out what, and how
like the laziest schizophrenic ever seen
your head’s a TV set with channels
no flicking back on the remote can find again.

The older bloke, tanned, fiftyish, a little
overweight, but strong. But he dies.
And the woman who simmered in the car
beside him, staring at her fingernails
as if she longed to be elsewhere…
She’s dead too. They looked so well.
But they’re gone. This happens all your life.
Who are these people? Where do they come from?

You press ‘custard’ by mistake, get
children, two boys and a girl, who look just
like Dustin Hoffman. Everything too smiley, too earnest.
You press — sunlight in Mexico, mescal, you press
alcoholic dazes, fumbling in the cupboards
for the next. You press lawyers, divorce,
the afternoon falls on you like a salesman.

There are people roaming and why do they roam
and why does this new love who seems so real
let you down, even as she leaves now
through the rain, and you turn away hurting
plainly, in a way no one will notice,
hurting not only to find this so, but how
thoroughly the public dreams are trash, computed.

How slow or fast, the speed’s irrelevant
when all of it’s confusing. Which is often now,
unless you drift, not pressing but dumbly
being pressed, knowing at least how quite
alone you are. There is no Hollywood in Heaven,
it must at best be Limbo, tilting to Escape
or Reconciliation, two states the demagogues
forgot to postulate, and both like cars
you can’t afford — repossessed.

Playing on, you have to answer:
Why is AIDS real? Are books worth writing? Do you feel?
You merge still shots, each face joyous, serious, aghast.
War breaks out but twice as kinky, voyeuristic
like prisoners or diseases, or the mad.
Who are all these people? Where do they come from?
Are they still inside you? Ending painfully
as kidney stones, or Stallones (Rocky 1 to 5)
— you press to pass.

Source: Salom, P  1998, 'Computer Games', New and Selected Poems, Fremantle Arts Centre Press Retrieved 25 February 2013, poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/salom-philip/computer-games-0076102