Poems from 2018
Several poems written in 2018 by Mingji Liu.
1 horrible poem by 1 horrible poet
2018 · Mingji Liu
There’s this boy you’re
suppose to be babysitting,
in some whited cul-de-sac.
The parents have gone off
and left him to spoil like
milk in a blackout.
H. Christ, what a menace!
how he fights his sister and the
cat and throws tantrums like an
iblis. well, let me give you some
square advice: smack him over
the head and tell him that
getting into fights and punching
girls makes him a homo. a gay.
No, I really don’t really
care about the politics of it all
and neither should you.
It’ll shut him up in a bewildered
no time - trust me
the longitudinal damage
will be minimal
and the extra pocket money will
ease the millstone on your soul.
A Drop of Pastries
2018 · Mingji Liu
You did not intend to drop fresh pastries
On the kitchen tiles—somnambulant fingers
To vice gravity. Nature obliterates that toiled
Crust, that pregnant cream. Who betrays
Fragile sweetness or regret? Who sobs
Into cotton mitts? The Moirai sing to slices.
An ant, that zetetic, lowliest of wayfinders,
Is ensorcelled by full and sudden ruins:
Obelisk sugar; a scarred frieze of dough;
Treasure made treasure from trembling fault.
Her sisters colonise the carnage—pixel
Black trails of deconstruction. This is victory!
The birth of a new feast day! This is a dismal
Denouement for your oven prised heart.
An unencumbered summer morning
2018 · Mingji Liu
An unencumbered summer morning
on an unencumbered warming street.
The asphalt is sun-drunk on a reservoir
of heat. The roses waver by the fence;
tugging at the dry humus ditch.
I see it all through the milky wedding veil
of my bedroom curtains.
The floodlit day fades, and a tide
of cricket song rises with the half-cut
moon. I feel sadness, too apparent
in my lineaments. The night is so warm
from the heat rising off the asphalt
like an invisible incandescence.
August 30th
2018 · Mingji Liu
It’s one of those mornings when damns punctuate
The pee-tee-vee delay announcements
On this drizzle footed platform.
Damn! this late again loitering and damn! my
Trouser legs are thin; damn you! freeze assed Flemington
And god damn! this wind is a grind on my cheek.
A wind so pure and pious cold
It whips up parking lot flags; turns supermarket banners
Into barquentine sails across the matitudinal gray.
Yet the piebald eucalypt across the rails
Refuses to yield before the wind.
A lean trunk and chair pose outstretched;
Its antler’s crown barely shivers.
Yes – a flex here, a leaf chime there,
But strangely anchored in the flow.
Instead, it reaches earthward into memories
Of mantle green and dry rush.
Wait. Was that a spring lightness just now?
Or do I ask too much of August?
Ah. Patience must be bliss for
Old gumnut trees who have lived it all before.
Bad dream - true story
2018 · Mingji Liu
I chased the fathomless pools of your eyes
in a dismembered dream.
I mistakenly dreamt of you in undisciplined slumber
(Could throttle my REM, bastard)
At a music festival
In heartland Victoria,
So far away that you had to take a plane
To get there.
I was too late, he had got you first.
But in my madness
I bought a train ticket and chased you
Down by rail.
Some event. I was with a gay bloke
From a defunct writing circle. (Eh.)
Glitter on doeskin.
Sanskrit lashes.
It was not for me
or me for thine.
Yet I wanted you you You
The I Ching warned me of this:
Darkness. A pelican calling.
Then another hexagram –
Slight excess:
A bird rising and a bird sinking.
I sank so low for you.
So low.
(Lets not get coffee together on Tuesday.)
Candescence
2018 · Mingji Liu
I did not know. I did not know.
How fierce the steel of our past could glow.
A past I’d buried beneath stiff dirt,
Imprisoned in stone, unmarked and inert.
Yet a trembling call, an errant encounter,
Was all it took to stir the fire,
A pulse of desire like an organ of magma
From the heaving earth.
It rose through the dirt, a searing white coal.
It pierced straight through the crown of my soul.
. . . . .
No one dares hold a sword lashed in flames.
No hand could plunge that furnace of pain.
Yet I forgot that even removed,
Steel from that forge can take years to cool,
And all that time, suppressed in the black,
It’s heart was candescent with a longing
That always came back. It always comes back.
Cascade
2018 · Mingji Liu
That rush of white-blue,
Deep-veined and livid cold -
It jumps from the jaws of land
Into the hollows of time itself.
A river forced through the needle’s eye
Will emerge a brilliant cascade.
Each drop a part of the chorus,
Every pulse a bow in harmony.
A heaving roar.
A thundering white.
An endless surge of crystal blue.
A single flow polishing
The stones of a single planet.
Exegesis on the Wasp
2018 · Mingji Liu
Whistling across sear fields of anointed conjecture,
Some scholars speculate that the infernal fruit,
Viper-plump and Eden-bane, was no rosy apple
But in fact grape, citron, or pomegranate
(Some claim psilocybin, but those
Sages are admittedly orthogonal).
For what it’s worth, I blame the fig,
Ficus carica with her lapsarian buds of sweetness.
For Adam & Eve were vegans in their wild nudity.
Lambs napped with lions and there was whole grain for all.
They stood primus inter pares among the flesh of creation,
Too busy naming all under heaven to wonder
What they tasted like, you see.
Their veganity was their godliness.
Put fig and man together, and you get Homo plummetus.
The taste of fig stripped them of their vegan ways —
For fig is wasp flesh. It is the
Succulent sugars of dead insects.
A fig orchard is a holocaust of anthropoids.
Nature’s a fucking bastard, I tell you.
The fig wasp is truly a demented machine –
The female, heavy with eggs, squeezes
Her way into the yonis of the nascent fruit,
Mutilating herself as she crawls.
Wingless, antennaeless, good mama
Lays her eggs – male and female both.
Once hatched, the brothers and sisters
Fornicate with each other like Hapsburg royalty.
All this carnal action fertilizes the fruit,
Then the pregnant daughters leave Gomorroah
To continue the cycle of incest,
While men and mother die and are absorbed
By the fruit in a chemical soup.
Point is, we should rename it an Adam’s fig and
Next time you bite into one,
Remember that it is sweet, juicy
Inbred insect orgy murder sauce.
Fairy lights
2018 · Mingji Liu
My housemate, before she left
Hung fairy lights on the passion fruit
Vines. Solar powered, they blinked
On every night since. She is gone
(Melbourne was too cold, she said)
But the lights, which reminded her
Of the fire flies on the Mae Klong
Remain. That’s the thing about
Us, us who stay and us who go.
We think we are rebooted in this
Country, but when the sun flicks
Off, it all bull rushes back to us
Like the phosphorous heart beat
Of insects in the dark.
Fun Darwin trivia
2018 · Mingji Liu
Contrary to popular belief, the famous British naturalist Charles Darwin never visited the city. Instead, Darwin was founded in 1869 by his cousin, Chuck Darwin, an overweight beagle breeder who discovered the harbour after making a 2,100 nautical mile wrong turn at the Strait of Malacca.
For a brief period, between 1990-1994, the Northern Territory legislature was suspended and replaced by a large boab tree (Adansonia gregorii), making the Territory the first ever dendrocracy in recorded history.
You may be familiar with ‘The NT News’ headlines (e.g. “Horny roo stalks NT women”). But did you know that no human actually writes them? The headlines are, in fact, the product of a malfunctioning mechanical haiku generator – “Basho Gone Troppo” as it’s affectionately called by locals.
If you squint really hard, you can actually see Indonesia on the horizon.
When walking through the George Brown Darwin Botanic Gardens, you may notice signs warning you not to pick up chunks of asbestos on the ground. This is because asbestos is used as a nesting material by the rare and endangered Australian white ibis, who require it for successful egg incubation.
In July of 2017, in an innovative attempt to stimulate the slumping Darwin property market, Chief Minister Michael Gunner offered free Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) F/A-18 Hornets for first-time homebuyers.
Common wifi passwords in Darwin: box_jellies, buffalo3, croc0dile, salt!water, kAkadu
I’ll never be a hard livin’ poet
2018 · Mingji Liu
(Fuck you, Bukowski and all the others)
I’ll never be a hard livin’ poet
all apostrophe and no g,
the drawl of the rooming house life
and the bourbon slipstream.
alas! My weakness is for a cushy
Bungalow and too much time
Spent with women who will
Never sleep with me.
Dream nightly, of the grizzled
Jowl I’ll never cultivate.
Roughest thing I’ve
Use words, use identity, use those
Snappy remark – go on,
But it’s true.
I wish for a monastic order of
Toxic, intoxicating masculinity
I am too lazy to observe
Through my creature comforts.
I fear I’m not much of anything
Poetical,
Not privileged enough, not oppressed enough
Either.
Not gay enough to
Twisting and writhing of a rope
Which brings volition, unconscious volition
From trauma.
Kamakura study trip
2018 · Mingji Liu
By the time we arrived in Kamakura by minibus,
I was a foul, pauper’s bed mood.
We had parted on such sour knees,
I, a whimpering fool begging in your dorm.
I raged at lilypads, who did not care.
I stumbled up holy steps,
The lantern wall rolled their eyes.
When the gay American tried to lecture me
On how to purify my hands from the temple trough,
I snapped. My god.
I thought about cheating on you in Miyajima.
Curse the iron Buddha in his thronehold,
All the buddhas, all screwed.
My brain half-screwed, full of holes.
Everyone gave me such a wide berth.
They ate sweet potato ice cream instead
And sipped the ‘Pocari Sweat’.
When I knocked that dutch woman on
The nose with a wooden spoon, that was the
Last straw of the giant’s shoes.
A sign at the lookout said simply,
‘Beware of Kite’
‘They’ll aim for your food, fly from behind.’
‘Their sharp claws will injure you.’
‘Please be careful!’
What right did I have to be so angry?
My trip to Japan in
2011
Ruined me. I cannot hide this
Anymore.
kingdom
2018 · Mingji Liu
survey our kingdom:
plastic-coated and particle-bored,
these furniture dissolving margins
and budget bunning blooms,
eczema walls, a nature strip ignored,
the strong swoon of grey-blue
grains on soft dead lamps.
no force, none, can displace this.
adore this sunburnt davenport -
a hulk of cross-splashed foam,
scavved from a hard rubbish curb
outside a white-framed home.
remember? how we saddled her
for yellow tailed nights, netflickering
with wide brown bags of ubermeals.
core of our corpus, this halfway
hut to unkempt suburbia.
no force of market or terroir can
strip off its rental chemise.
rattle the knick knacks of starry
tenancy, if you must, but no force can
repaint a piecemeal orbit.
a beak strikes steel
in the backyard concavity,
the swoop of a junker ju magpie.
the neighbour’s cur is a casualty.
on green bin day, a girl
in a blue windbreaker floats
the last plastic bag on earth
as if a kite, or so you can imagine.
concrete-hearted postcode.
wilful, solipsistic manse.
all who have not lived her
will not understand -
though these holes hold many detours,
wherever blood flows, we know
no force can disgrace us,
because there’s nowhere left to go.
moon of moon
2018 · Mingji Liu
I read in New Scientist that if a moon is full enough
estranged enough from its host planet,
she can catch her own moon in the celestial dancehall of things;
think about that! servant for a servant, pet of a pet,
a pendant strung around another
—at least, that’s what the uranologists theorise
(having never spyglassed such phenomena in reality).
‘moonmoon’ they proclaimed this maybe moon,
to the Internet’s fleeting delight.
they’re tireless minds, these earth-class astrogators,
spitballing a cosmic bestiary of
nomad worlds and strange stars
a million, billion light beats away.
that same week, a biopsy came out from the IPCC:
it said we’re converting this cradle into a crucible.
it carved into the sarcoma of human industry
and charted a course away from end times.
yet the voyage fee was swiftly scorned—
‘We admire the Carboniferous too much’,
opined Canberra. ‘We’ll take our chances with smokestacks.’
I read that in a single generation
there might be dengue in Townsville,
a Great Barrier Undercroft,
and everyone settling Hobart, eating bread from Russia.
already, my friend laments on Twitter that it’s
twenty-five C in London
in mid-October. this world isn’t real anymore.
I wake up at two AM in naked sweats. I gather my skin for a rinse
but the showerhead has a weak pulse.
I peer out the frosted casement, and remember
that the metropole blinds all possibility
for stargazing in a vinous canopy of light.
a half-thought lurches: if other earths exist, do they too
speculate on supernal maybes in the stellar ink?
do they too wonder
on stray and feverish nights,
whether they’ll live to cash out their mathematics?
to confirm with their own oracular eyes
a moon embracing another?
Night sounds
2018 · Mingji Liu
At night the letterbox groans
rolls and bounces with a
painted shell.
He wants to be let inside,
the worst again.
A morning light, cold
overcast interloper
nuzzles my Chin.
Thump on the winter,
a curl of temperature.
I roll over but to no avail,
The stirring house shifting
determines who is walker who is waker
pry these night sounds
– a cistern pipe hum,
a pedantic breath, peri-urban hiss.
Alright house. You win,
you tug at my sheets, so I protest
by finally falling asleep.
Think what it depends on –
The wind, really.
Nine views of farming leviathan
2018 · Mingji Liu
i.
canst thou draw out Her Belly with a hook?
press down Her Tongue with a cord?
ii.
Boreholes the size of empire
Charnel-breathing traction-forms
All hail all hail
+9.20 on ASX 200
Another sunburnt country lost
iii.
Young girl in blue windbreaker,
Floats a plastic bag as if a kite.
One of the few left in the world
—or so you can imagine.
iv.
Junkers Ju magpies,
Each one has its place in the concavity of grasses.
They strike steel as they
Shift haltingly across the
Depression green.
v.
Is this the biggest ghost net you’ve ever caught?
It certainly was mine.
vi.
The drug is Efficentyl-
Ask your policymaker if Efficently is right for oyu.
Not recommended for pregnancy, breastfeeding or labour unions
Side effects may include dizziness, swelling
Privitisation, and economism.
vii.
Some black
Impossible swan waddles
With gray
Impossible children.
viii.
the unsustainable beauty of this world.
Cling to it.
ix.
I yawn by do not wipe away the tears
Which cling like tired mandalas on my eyes.
I hope the diffident warmth of my skin
Will whittle them to salt and glimmer.
Parallel
2018 · Mingji Liu
There’s been a snarl in the clime,
the warp dissolving into weft,
a lolling November ambushed by hail burst
in this young, unbalanced city.
They say that’s just Melbourne,
confluence incarnate,
just another torrid affair that
barely entertains the afternoon.
Yet everyone’s still stunned by the
bamboo spike in humidity, the sticky rice air,
the equatorial haze rubbing
glass-hearted towers together.
A tram rumbles the tropics and one might
be forgiven for thinking we’ve been swept
to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore,
and not a laneway in the hook grip of Port Philip Bay,
sharing the 38th parallel with Patagonia.
Revel in this hybridity while you can,
before the fantasy rapidly dries itself,
before we hit a crucible in January
so ferocious, so unprecedented,
that you realise just how tangled it’s all become.
Pillow stone
2018 · Mingji Liu
When it came my turn in the circle
To hold Julia’s newborn, my nerves betrayed roughness.
No, I didn’t drop the babe—are you kidding?*
*But when I tried to nest her softness against my chest,
My graceless motions could not soothe.
Her pinkness whimpered into crimson, and
Mother promptly made a repossession.
(Like half-broken horses, I think they know
A nervous rider by heartbeat.)
Dismay coursed within. The shame of
Lacking a pastel touch and soft-hue limbs;
Forearms inflexible, embrace non-compliant;
Synapses unable to balance
The cradle of breath and new eyes.
I wish I could be hewn. A font of smoothness.
A warmth, a drey, the low flightpath of birds.
I wish my sandstone slab could be
Polished with a thousand lines,
Until its mineral hardness was scoured complete,
Until it could serve as a pillow for your tired head.
Pumpkin 1
2018 · Mingji Liu
In the pantry, the pumpkin rots. A corruption seeps
through abandoned space.
The autumn globe is scarred by a green-blue
crater, ringed by shockwaves of hairy, cataract
white. Some mindless force has turned neglect into moist and
unventilated life.
Yet this genesis is no miracle.
This waste is no miracle.
I write from my office, as I do when I try to impress
or burn time with women.
I compose a floweret of plastic words and phrases,
too easily plucked from that crooked larder,
from that spence — scullery — store — in my skull.
A gift built on the fallacy of spontaneous life.
Don’t look or touch or taste.
Just more sad waste.
This gift was first made in a childhood shed, a dim
sepulchral tin, where rags and
mushrooms grew. Hansons Lane, I think,
back in the bad old days. Or maybe Blair Ave,
a cold house with crooked fire bricks and moaning cats.
Rough place number four.
‘What are you doing over the weekend?’
she asks politely.
‘Remembering my childhood
and struggling to throw old vegetables out.’
Pumpkin 2
2018 · Mingji Liu
‘Lucy, hallow eve’d, on the porch, the old pumpkin
passes again…’
I write from my desk
as I always do
when I try to impress or waste time with
women,
procrastinating
with words plucked
from that pail bucket skull,
Like the one that grew
mushrooms, sepulchral white,
in a childhood shed.
Hansons Lane, I think,
back in the bad days.
Or maybe Blair Ave,
a cold house with crooked fire bricks.
Rough place. Number four.
‘What are you doing over the weekend?’
she asks.
‘Remembering my childhood’
I reply,
‘and struggling to throw out
old vegetables’.
Seance
2018 · Mingji Liu
A child mourns on the sand edge,
Standing around planchette driftwood
What do they divine?
The ghost nets gloom
over a chaparral of dead seabed
where only holothurians graze.
Garbled latin, —…., hippoglossus
Hippoglossus, caretta caretta,
Huso huso. To stir the sediment.
In the agon of all thing,
There is ectoplasm in microbeads.
A glass float on the hill.
The seabeasts have broken backs,
They’ll soon need mediums of there own.
SEGMENTS
2018 · Mingji Liu
At the end
You too are at the end of this
pool of vermouth
Its silverback cube will not
fit through your gate
You rest it in a bowl of pekoe
steeping by your side
Raw deal
Body
threaded with sanguine flavours
lost to a
cuss
‘well done’
Grip
Beneath the pronated and supinated
lies
a damaged iron
dismembered lift
Wonderland
what is less
than rain hitting
the bassinet of a rental car?
Mouldywarp
Soil-wells the size of empire
Vermi-breathing nightforms
All hail all hail
The hunt’s—
Another good crew lost
senior education improvement. a sonnet
2018 · Mingji Liu
circles within circles – a wild, slick race
of flowcharts that poor Mr. Prin can’t stand,
let alone understand. watch how his face
blanches as he wades through the demi-planned
zoo of barking SEILs and slippery EILs.
he must learn, report, network and gather
a star-field of data for small appeals.
on some heavy nights (when he would rather
sleep a century) good CoP/bad CoP raps
his desk to ensure there are zero gaps
in his regional, poly-disciplined
world. no wonder poor Prin is so chagrined!
and to make matters worse: he’s just been rung
by consultants who sounded far too young.
Sumner Beach
2018 · Mingji Liu
I made these lines for you;
They sit saint-like on the seabed,
Bleeding ink into the strand.
They’re weightless in the calm,
Or float for a gram at most.
I promised these lines to you:
The way providence promised us
The dunes and the white waves
And the signal mast
Standing atop Sumner’s rock.
We are worlds and oceans apart,
But I hope my letters arrive safely,
As certain as the dew that pools
In the creases of your windowsill.
The Address
2018 · Mingji Liu
Each man is an island entire,
said the Nation to the United.
Every man should be sundered, a virtous clod.
—and cue global laugh track.
I reject the hymn, said the note
To the harmony.
I reject the seasons, said the day
To the week.
“For I am aeon, I am virtue and aspire to be me”,
said the lone goose, severed from the V.
And the United replied:
We will bury you in truth.
“For we, for we—”
The century said to the minute,
The chorus said to the quaver,
The I you speak of, is not
Some proudling wall. No virtue
Beyond the beyond. ``
A vision yes, but this thronehold is not
A throne unclenched in the palm of a
Small planet.
The horse that broke Turin
2018 · Mingji Liu
First there was Mathilde
Then there was Lou
Then there was the speed of life
Too slow, too slow.
This is the fall
This is the fall.
Thrown things
2018 · Mingji Liu
I’ve thrown thing into rivers and voids,
Rashly tossed matter down hollows
I thought could never be disturbed
beyond the schwarzchild radius.
But my friends still picked them up
Returned them to me in cooled bundles
Apart from my spiteful child carapace.
They picked them up during the hurting
When all I wanted was to run into
The whiskers of night and spit on trees.
No matter what I tossed,
They always seemed to pick it up.
In this cell of contemplation, I pray now
That I have the strength
To do the same for them.
Verses to a she-snake
2018 · Mingji Liu
Girl with the flower name
Paints pointillism, or rather – or
Specifically, rank amateurs a mock
Point splash from photographs.
Such ridiculous trash from such
A ridiculous west coast mind!
Imagine if I walked into your
Gallery and hurled a pail of paint
On your precious art. Imagine if I
Took a kitchen knife and slashed
The canvas, cleaved it in two in an
Act of epileptic surgery. Would the
Shitty, ditty dots on the two halves
Danced with wild delight? Ha ha!
Oh – you want me to calm down – du Fotze?
Walghvogel
2018 · Mingji Liu
It is I, Didus ineptus,
always daydreaming
of travel abroad —
To float from Port Louis
to Saint-Denis,
and maybe even onwards,
to Indian skies and oceans — Ah, imagine!
In my deepest fantasies I have
alighted on some faraway branch
of soft waxed wood —
Yet with wings like dusters,
a squat and spatchcock form,
(and listless vulnerability to sailors,)
such fancies are surely
an affront to Nature’s appellate court —
But friends, friends, have lenity!
I beseech understanding!
I only wish to explode one day
with the mercy of gravity,
like a pheasant, grouse, or condor,
from a seaside cliff, a hill in the wind,
or a banyan tree.
You are not a poet
2018 · Mingji Liu
You are not a poet.
You have not lived a full a life
Loved truly, experienced enough sensuality
Mingji
You are not a poet, with days and days of
Normalcy
Where is the intensity
You have not suffered genuine pain
Only half-pain
The kind of hurt that is self-inflicted, withers
Shadows.
You are not a poet.
Not white enough. Not man enough.
Not poor enough. Not nature enough.
Not urban enough. Not queer enough.
Not oppressed enough.
Yellow is the colour of invisible men
Too model minority
Not broadly ethnic enough
To tell true poetry
You are not a poet,
You unpublished, untouched thing.
You are not—
But between the choosing and
The fulcrum where
I say silent or where I try
Pitiful, paper hearted to
Say something, anything
I still know what I choose,
Even if that is what really hurts.
You can see it from the Moon
2018 · Mingji Liu
They say you can see it from the Moon,
That middle kingdom firewall
With red ramparts and watchtower tall,
A chain of censors burning perfumed smoke
Around one-third of Homo digitalis.
But lo! Look how the muddy grass horses
Graze brazenly beneath its purview;
Watch how the river crabs endure — O Pooh!
It’s wise not roffle at their enclosure,
For we too are as a cage full of birds.
Turn your ISP west and know these chilling words:
Every stroke of datum’s logged and keyed
In prismatic, ice-bound servers in Fort Meade.
We’re trapped with the power out
In the worst snow storm in living memory,
With God’s five eyes upon us.
We were promised freedom in the hyperweb,
Burning chrome, the decentralised sprawl;
Not the balkanised net of a digital thrall,
Dogged by backdoor codes and Ivan bots
Let slip from the vale of silica.
(Good name for a band: Anna Lytica)
Such is the twist to Panopticon,
With Nothing-To-Hide, Done-Nothing-Wrong.
Should we smash the screen? Off the line?
Wear tinfoil hats and go clandestine?
If only it were so easy to execute.
Your cyber-soul might be sold and damned,
Yet still you wonder whether they’ll
Like your most recent on Instagram…