Barnaby Smith

blaming my tools

this one was supposed to be like

a Terrence Malick film,

that is, self-help for getting older

& yet it’s still so hard to decide

whether the vibrations of acrid city days, old

humid faeces, soured milk, the hum

of mould, saliva in the sun, the new

droppings that appear in the corner of the room

are less or more of life & indeed,

are age-appropriate

direct poem II

the season ends

& it is mourned—

new sources of light

to hunt avenues to pleasure

& i can make it to the other side

of a drifting & brittle Sunday afternoon

where your brood awaits, like

some divine accident, loose in the dusk

Groundwork

together indexing paddocks

as sites of action

in fallen winter sun

towards a manifesto

of clutter & commune,

the quarter-acre fluxus

event, the laboratory for

land flattening, mystical in the

dark air with elegant foreign

accents & egrets, attentive

agents arranging the scene

for new visitors stopping for a

sunset, assembled as totems on

dry and heavy landlocked hills,

persuaded the view is clean

Barnaby Smith is a poet, critic, journalist and musician living on Darug and Gundungurra land in New South Wales, Australia. Recent work has appeared in journals such as Stand, Blackbox Manifold, 3AM, Erbacce, Orbis, Tentacular, Molly Bloom and Blaze Vox, as well as Cordite, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, Best Australian Poems, and more. He is an award-winning art and music critic, and records music under the name Brigadoon, having released the album, Itch Factor, in 2020: www.brigadoon.bandcamp.com