Geoff Lemon is a busy kid. He organised and hosted Wordplay’s gigs from late 2006 until the end of 2009, and founded Wordplay Collective with Steve Smart in 2008. He was poetry editor of Australia’s prettiest literary mag, harvest, for its first two years. Geoff also works as a freelance music journalist for MTV, Beat magazine, Citysearch, and Wireless Bollinger. His poems and stories have been widely published in the likes of Best Australian Stories, Blue Dog, HEAT, Island, Etchings and Going Down Swinging, and broadcast a number of times on ABC774 and on Radio National’s Book Show.
Geoff started writing poetry and going to readings after a chance meeting with Australian poet Jordie Albiston in 2003. Combining his new interest with his existing love of hip-hop, his distinctive performance style was formed, culminating in his first major slam win at the 2006 New South Wales State comp, the last year before it became a national competition. He kept up with academic poetry as well, writing a verse Honours thesis with a range of classical influences, supervised by Chris Wallace-Crabbe. This was called Wind and Blood-Warm Air, and focused on the experience of Australian POWs in Asia during World War II. Early in 2007 he became the first Poetry Editor of Voiceworks (after telling them that they needed one). In August he won the inaugural Poetry Idol slam at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
In 2008 Geoff joined harvest for its first issue onwards, and received an Australia Council grant to produce a Wordplay mini-magazine and the website that you’re reading now. (The magazine is still available for free online.) He travelled to a number of interstate writers festivals, and was commissioned with Anthony O’Sullivan to write two pieces for ABC radio in the Northern Territory. He hosted and organised nine separate events across the Melbourne Writers Festivals of 2008 and 2009, including Wordplay events, and began to push poetry to a wider audience by playing a sold-out East Brunswick Club show with Melbourne hip-hop group TZU, and later touring with them to play Sydney’s Metro. In late 2008 he published his first book of poems, Sunblind, which is currently on sale. In 2009, he’s now moved Wordplay to a new and bigger venue at the Dan O’Connell, and the success of the move was immediate. Wordplay’s average audience leapt from 50 or 60 a month to about 120 with several peaks of 150 or more. A number of high-profile rappers and comedians began to appear at Wordplay shows.
At the end of 2009 Geoff called a halt to Wordplay in order to disappear overseas. He’s currently in Buenos Aires, the weather is warm, and it seems like a good decision. He still blogs regularly, and will probably come home one day.
The Commandments
1. When writing commandments, do not feel compelled to use Biblical language. ‘Thou shalt’ has been very much overplayed as a phrase. Let it die with Charlton Heston.
2. Never fall in love with the promiscuous. When they leave you, they will take sleep with them.
3. Remove the thorns from your commandments. They should look safe and approachable. Try inscribing them on tablets. This can make them easier to swallow.
4. Never trust your friends. They will fuck you in the eye for a dollar or a wet spot. The closer the friend, the more likely that someday they’ll be there when you fall asleep.
5. Blame anything you can on nearby animals, plants, appliances. Always remember that the Nature of Monkey was irrepressible.
6. Always go down on women. Imagine you’re eating a mango – enjoy it. If you’re a gay man or a straight woman, do it anyway. It’s hardly going to make the world a worse place.
7. When eating a real mango, start from the stone and work outwards. As you split its skin and emerge, you will have the element of surprise, and the blankness of the newly baptised.
8. When walking, try to use left and right feet in equal measure. Horizons can be relied upon to be ahead of you. If you can’t see one, remember that your feet are drumbeats and the earth is a skin. Play one into existence.
9. Mock anybody who is different to you. Do this quickly, before they realise that you are different to them, and mock you for it.
14. Do not feel compelled to use sequential numbers, or multiples of ten. Some of the best numbers are palindromic. Others spell humorous words when turned upside down. Some have no distinguishing features at all. All of these are available to you. Which leads us to commandment
12. Explore the possibilities, in any arena. Remember that you are a hound, hunting infinite rabbits. Don’t forget to stop and sniff the air for signs.
Three Things are Certain
So they’ve told us, in words that enfold us
like the opening of a curtain,
the things that are certain.
Just death, and taxes. But that’s not it –
there’s the sweat on your lip when you flip into action.
Taxes, and death –
and the wet on your skin with each quickening breath, so,
sweat, death and taxes
are our minimums and maxes
and while it’s septic, we accept it
and live our lives believing nothing more should be expected.
Sweat, death and taxes.
If there’s more then we’re anxious,
we think that this world has been hurled off its axis.
Just sweat, death and taxes
so we strain like tractors
on and on for just the odd mention in dispatches.
Sweat, death and taxes,
blood, sweat and blunt-force fractures
bearing the unsought scratches,
the slits where their claws have scored hits
the hisses and spit from a horde of detractors.
Sweat, death and taxes.
Punctures and patches.
Plasters are pasted
on scars that have cratered,
the furrows created by
blood, sweat and tears.
The steady drip
of man-made paint
and with one fingertip we strike
and feint
and strike again,
smear a casual hex on wasted years,
a curse on casual sex and fairground fears
but it’s time to leave clowns
and circus folk behind
to drown in the quite unheeded
and no longer needed corners of your mind.
Carnies – they’re nomads, you know.
So let’s hit the road.
We’re promised nothing but sweat, death and taxes.
That’s why I’m armed like a cactus,
arms upraised and unafraid
unswayed by external factors.
I wish that were accurate.
Of course the stoic tradition is venerable
but these days I just feel vulnerable,
naked and exposed to the sky,
a rabbit who knows he’s reflected in a hawk’s eye,
stripped bare,
a fox without a handy lair,
a Dalek outfoxed by a set of stairs,
halted and exposed in its quest for domination.
I’m shakin’, frail like an undressed crustacean –
y’know, a shellfish with its outer crustacea smashed
or like the English ref in that Croatia match
or a drug lord who’s whored his whole paper stash.
So give me three yellow cards and send me off already –
I’ve had enough of this fuckin’ rock anyway.
Yellow cards to match my yellow shoes,
yellow hearts and the power to abuse,
but even with these size sixteens I was never steady,
and now I’m running flat like an Eveready.
Because the saline circuits in this circus
are only powered by exertions of workers –
all the Sherpas and Ghurkhas and women in burqas
who stitch up our shoes and bottle our gherkins.
Their bosses are jerks who just smirk and desert us,
self-satisfied merchants
who try to immerse us
in Five Year Plans
and their endless demands.
They envisage a land
filled with men made of sand who will work like berserkers
and fires that are fuelled with the bodies of shirkers.
Sweat, death and taxes,
and violent reactions
to health and to rights
and industrial action,
strike-breakers
who break and strike the strikers,
flaring like lighters,
flailing and sightless.
Strike-breakers
who strike and rape
the rights of labour,
so that one man might savour
a bottle of wine of exceptional flavour.
There is death, sweat and taxes,
No heroes, no saviour.
So we’re fighting a war against sweat, death and taxes.
Cos there’s more. There are things to be felt,
there are arts to be practiced.
There’s more. There’s a world record score,
there’s sliding in socks on a polished wood floor.
We’re fighting a war against sweat, death and taxes.
There’s more. There’s a beach and a shore,
there’s the wink of a whore who you’ve found … satisfactious?
There’s the arc of the sun that needs expert describing,
there’s drink for imbibing,
there’s climbing of vines and the passion-fruit rising
like funk
and the smell of fresh skunk
and your friends for high-fiving.
There’s music for musing and dances for dancing
and colours and views, and cute little shoes
and drugs to abuse
and some chances for chancing.
There’s life there for living. There’s taking and giving
in so many ways, there are deeds to be done,
there are hearts to be won, there are condoms and ribbing
and shivering timbers and making her come.
So we’re fighting a war against sweat, death and taxes.
Cos there’s more to be done,
there’s a war to be won,
and there’s more to be done
so don’t let them distract us.
We’re fighting a war against sweat, death and taxes,
and there’s more to be done,
so don’t let them distract us.
first published (in audio form) in Going Down Swinging
Albatross
I’ve lost my poetic licence. I was caught reading the collected works of Coleridge
after nine beers and a shot of chartreuse. The police were pleased.
“Thought you’d dodge us on the back streets, didja matey?†said one. “Well, you
can’t hide from us. We got you, matey.â€
I wanted to tell him to stop calling me ‘matey’. I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t
a pirate captain. He wasn’t even a police captain. Just a constable. But a pirate
captain is a very romantic image, and I didn’t have the licence to invoke it, any
more. The best that I could do was “Your head looks like…a head. One that’s really
ugly.†The best that I could do was emphasise the first syllable in ‘constable’.
Repeatedly.
I denied everything, but he could smell the albatross on my breath. He said I should
be ashamed, that my alcohol reading was point-one-six and my poetry reading was
incoherent. He said I’d put innocent infinitives at risk of being split, and could have left prepositions hanging dangerously at the end of sentences. I wanted to tell him I was
sorry. As sorry as a prison cell, as sorry as empty bottles at four a.m. I was sorrier
than a dying fire, or dinner for one, or a broken bike. I was as sorry as a three-foot
coffin. But I couldn’t use illegal similes in front of a cop. So I just said them quietly to
myself when I got home, drunk, and sure I was alone.
Published in Best Australian Stories 2007.
Poetic Emetic
For Neil McCarthy
The poets arise like an Irish rebellion
The poets preparing a devilish brew
I’m hiding in holes where I chat with a chap
Who says ‘I am the Walrus’ and ‘Goo-goo-ga-choo’
Loud colours are screaming in streams across ceilings
Like etherised patients reclined on the sky
It’s difficult Pynchon these Eliot verses
When Gravity’s Rainbow is stuck in your eye
The poets are raising a raging Inferno
It’s burning, our Wednesdays are covered with Ash
I’m screaming that devils are live on the town and
I’m drowning in buckets of Sylvia Plath
Then there’s Keats and there’s Yeats and then Beats in all states
Of profound toxication, both inward and out
And a stout for ol’ Hughes that’s as dark as a bruise
As he spews out his words like a storm on a drought
And we’re all eating oysters but oysters are smelly –
Remind us of Shelley washed up on the Shaw
Our beer’s in a Stein, but we find that it’s Gertrude
Not Franken, and Mary’s still lost on the moor
‘Oh, don’t be a poet’, they think while they drink
And I know what they’re saying to put me to shame:
‘Oh, his diction is sloppy. I hope he writes copy.
At least then he might have a Pound to his name!’
But the poems are clawing and bleating and roaring
They dance like a zoo through the grease of my brain
And a piece of the drain is dislodged that was storing
The fluids that stop me from going insane
We never get better. It’s like a Beretta
Unfettered is blasting us out at the seams
And the Muse sits apart on the ledge where we set her –
She can’t get a Wordsworth in edgeways, it seems
The fever entrancing, the fever we’re high on
We’ve blown all our money on adverbs and nouns
We don’t want to work a straight job to get Byron
We want to drink absinthe and dance in the towns
But we’re stabbed in the eyes by the poems we’re reading
Our books are all bleeding, we’re covered with dirt
It leaves us pathetic. I stink of poetics
And can’t get this Coleridge stain off my shirt
Published in Paradise Anthology, 2007.
The Emperor’s Toast
Flags flying, flanks curving through the waves
his ships spun away in daisy-chains
from Honshu’s sheltering elbow.
The frost of Japan’s north
turned to ever-present summer further south.
While Hirohito wore his winter coat
his soldiers sweated, equatorial.
Sweat comes from effort; theirs could not be checked.
For every victory they drank a toast
facing the Imperial Palace,
compass bearings a thread to home
across the gaping hollows of maps.
A bow, and the health of the Emperor:
a compound of devotion, salutation, prayer.
But toasting, voices raised with glasses
in sake-shredded hoarseness – they missed.
So often, they missed
lining up their toasts in haste
and hurling prayers across Siberia,
the distant coasts of Mexico,
the Mongol north.
The biggest was the toast in Singapore:
Yamashita, Kawamura, men with an unlikely prize.
The Emperor deeply approved of this –
he told them so, withholding all his private reservations.
They bowed as deeply in return.
Clustered, faces flushed with wine, exhilaration
these brief heroes (villains in another press)
felt tremors run from them to Melbourne
Darwin, San Diego, Guam,
tapping out a telegraph of fear and apprehension.
They themselves felt none, save His Imperial Majesty,
and Yamamoto on a distant ship.
Thumb greasy on his glass, hands trembling
Yamashita led the cheer to Tokyo.
And missed.
Lined up incorrectly by a few degrees
their toast flew past the Emperor’s palace
through the desolation of the Kuriles
over the steel and froth of northern oceans
until it faltered, slowed, dropped
into Alaska’s frozen universe.
Buried in snow. Deadened by cold.
Prisoned in ice
that not even the Rising Sun
in a glorious Empire’s Thousand Years
could hope to thaw.
Published in an earlier form in Blue Dog, 2008
da Vinci
When we flew in over Melbourne that night, it was lit up like all the Christmases in history were making out with each other between the mountains and the bay. When we flew in over Melbourne everyone but me and my two boys was sleeping or watching TV. Ungrateful, I thought. What would Leonardo da Vinci have given for one ride in a plane?
When we got home I started building a time machine and signed up for Italian lessons. The Italian lessons were much harder. After nine months, I went back in time nine months, killed my former self, and took his place for his second Italian class. The teacher was amazed at his progress. After another nine months, I went back 400 years to a Milanese summer. I threw a note through Leonardo’s window, on the back of one his drawings I’d downloaded off the Internet. You know, the tank thingy. Meet me in the orchard at midnight, it said, to learn more secrets about the world than you thought you’d ever know.
I went back to the future to take the boys home from school, then back to Milan. There were blossoms falling from trees; the night was like a warm bath after Melbourne’s frigid fingers. Leonardo came to meet me. I told him I was from the future. I told him I could show him more in a day than he’d otherwise learn in his lifetime. I told him he could stay in the spare room. He came with me.
I didn’t want to blow his mind, so at first we stayed in the house. My Italian was stretched but I told him the basics, showed him phones and movies and mp3 players. Then we spent a couple of days on cars – he loved cars. Actually, he loved everything. Must have driven him over the West Gate about sixty times, and spent a whole day standing underneath it.
Leonardo was comfy in the spare room. I gave him all my old stuff – the pillowcase with the train on it, and the doona cover with Mr. T and the A-Team. He liked to copy the boys, wrapping Mr. T around himself to watch Bananas in Pyjamas. He was stoked when I showed him my electric razor – it was funny watching him plough his beard off, until he fed the bits into the toaster. After we got a new toaster, he developed a taste for Marmite.
I took him to the Rialto observation deck with a couple of stubbies stashed in my coat, and he ate a hot dog while I explained top-fermentation brewing. At Gervasi Foodworks he spat rapid-fire Italian at the deli ladies. They gave us the good prosciutto. I took him out to dinner on Lygon Street, and he was pretty taken with a slicked-up Commodore VT. On the way home he kept practising the word spoiler.
Eventually I found a physics lecturer who spoke Italian, and left them to an afternoon together. Leo came out looking like he was about to tear the universe to pieces. At first, the planes overhead used to make him flinch. So I took him and some notes from the lecturer to the RAAF Museum, spent an afternoon wandering under the planes. There was just one thing he wanted to know. Can men really ride inside these things?
Well. We flew from Melbourne to Sydney and back nine times that week – four of them on Friday alone. Then to Fiji so he could see the ocean from the air. In Nadi, we got really drunk on coconut rum and passed out spooning in the same bed. I was embarrassed. He laughed it off. I’m pretty sure nothing happened.
The physics and chemistry books I’d ordered from the Italian Education Board finally arrived and he devoured them, late into the nights with a cup of Milo in his left hand. There was that look in his eyes again, like he was so full of thoughts they were going to rip out through his skin. I knew he needed to get back, needed to get to work.
We had a goodbye barbeque for him, and when everyone had gone he and I sat out talking in the warm late spring air. We made a deal that he couldn’t make any weapons – it seemed important. I gave him six jars of Marmite. He gave me a hug. We arrived back in that Milan orchard about ten minutes after we’d first left it. There were blossoms falling from trees; their night was almost as warm as ours. He left with a quick squeeze of my hand, walking softly to avoid the watchmen.
Back in the future, my world was still there. Leo had said he would write me a letter and bury it under a certain stone of the manor walls. I did other things for a couple of weeks – figured it had been there so long already there was no point rushing. Then I flew to Milan and dug it up. I knew it was from him: the envelope said I pity the fool.
The letter told me what had happened. He got back fine. No-one noticed. Well, he’d only been gone ten minutes. The next morning, bursting with everything he’d seen, he told Ludovico and the courtiers his stories. Said a man had taken him in an incredible machine to an incredible land. A land where men hurled themselves into the sky as though fired from catapults and came down softly as shooting stars. A land where men could float as high as God in perfect comfort. A land where they could compress the spirit of a thousand horses into a single snorting block of steel. Where they could fit all the fires of the world into a metal tube, where they could snatch music out of the air itself and carry it in their fists. Where a man could speak to another at the furthest end of the earth without raising his voice above a whisper.
Ludovico said, You’re a marvel, Leonardo. Isn’t he a marvel? Whew. Check out those stories. What an imagination.
He said, You’re amazing, Leonardo. All those crazy ideas. How about that.
He said, No, seriously, you’re amazing… Just remember that crazy ideas can make people uncomfortable. Remember that when people get uncomfortable, all kinds of things can happen.
He said, You’re a smart man, Leonardo. Maybe a genius, but you’re a smart man too. Now why don’t you make nice and finish the fucking statue.
First published in Herding Kites, 2008.
Photos by Michael Reynolds.