by
Billy Marshall Stoneking

"...one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Australian literature." (24 Hours)

Billy Marshall Stoneking is an Australian/American poet/playwright and author of seven books, including Singing the Snake : Poems from the Western Desert, and the play, Sixteen Words for Water (both published by Harper/Collins). He has written and produced major documentary films detailing his experiences during five years he lived with tribal Aboriginal people in Central Australia. In 1988, he was awarded the prestigious Bill Harney Prize for Poetry.

His poems have been anthologized in Off the Record (ed by Pi O for Penguin Books), The New Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse (ed by Les Murray), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Australian Poetry (ed by John Tranter), and were featured in ABC-TV's groundbreaking documentary film, Call It Poetry. Billy is the current contributing editor of Suite101.com's Performance Poetry. His plays have been produced in England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and his books translated into several languages.




VENTRILOQUIST

I remember that summer
when she’d pull out Charlie -
which was what she affectionately
called my prick -
& being an artist,
she’d draw a face on it.
Then, without moving her lips,
she’d go to work:
"Hello, how’re you?
My name’s Charlie."

The first time, I laughed.
It was like meeting a stranger.
We stared at each other.
"What do you do?
What’s your name?"
I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

After a while,
Charlie started taking over.
He was the center of attention,
the life of the party.
He’d stay up all night.
Next morning, she’d ring me:
"How’s Charlie?
"Are you looking after him?"
Sure... sure, I’d say,
giving him a reassuring pat.
He was the picture of confidence.
He gave me a helluva time.

One day, inexplicably,
she added eyelashes, a beauty spot
& bright-red lipstick.
The transformation was remarkable.
Charlie had changed into a woman.
It called me "big boy" in a squeaky voice;
it pouted & pulled faces.
I blushed.
The rest of me was speechless.

Then it became political.
Overnight I became a total shit;
a chauvinist pig.
It wanted to know
what kind of relationship is this, anyway?
It chastised me for not being able
to see beyond the end of my dick.

Later, the ventriloquist split,
taking her paints, her pens,
her mandolin & clothes.
"You never talk to me anymore,"
she said.
"So long."

She left Charlie behind.
He slept all day;
the old eloquence was gone.
I couldn’t put words in his mouth.
Then his face disappeared
entirely.
It was a shock at first, but
I survived.

Now, taking a piss, sometimes,
I actually smile, remembering
those days & nights of indelible lust
when love was neither deaf nor dumb
nor altogether blind.





ELEPHANT
(for Ed Field)

He liked the monkeys & the hippos,
the polar bears, & even the birds,
of course...
but most of all, he loved the elephants.
The elephants were dependable -
solid and definite as the paperweights
he’d played with on his father’s desk.
You could trust the elephants.
"The elephants," he said,
"the elephants are my friends."

So he learned their stories,
their way of speaking, their private jokes
& what they knew of love and keeping;
& by the time he was nine,
had mastered their vocabulary,
committing to heart their logarithms & astronomy.
He could walk like them, talk like them,
& even recall small facts about
some of the really great ones
who’d made big names for themselves overseas.

On special days,
before he was allowed to travel on his own,
he’d go with his father to the zoo
to say hello to his mates -
the Indian & the African -
waiting for the keeper to come
with leaves of hay,
or brush & bucket to scrub them clean,
transforming their skin
into an ineluctable rubberiness.

By the time he was eleven,
he knew their gestures & their joys,
imagining a life in other countries,
free of cages,
before Loxodonta africanus stumbled
accidentally
into a crowd of peanuts & boys.

As he recalled it,
to touch the eye of his first elephant
he would’ve needed a hook’n’ladder;
it was so high, its grey head
scraped the ceiling in the animal enclosure.
Outside, you would’ve lost it
in a cloud.

Lost - the child grows down into the man.
And year after year, the elephants grow smaller.
The big one - though he searched for it everywhere -
he never saw it again.

Behind the locks that keep us safe,
inside the Sundays of our brains,
hordes of creatures are detained
that can’t be fed & won’t be named.
We play our parts.
The strongest cage: the human heart.
Not good, not bad, not false, not true.
The incomparable comfort of sawdust
contains the fool.





PLAYLAND-BY-THE-SEA
(for Scott)

There is no desire suffering is not heir to.
Every trap the heart makes catches itself in mid-flight.
We fall into each other’s cages so easily;
wingless birds in a gullible principality:
a constituency that understands bread crumbs
but cannot sing.

The arms, the legs, the wizened heads,
the wisps of feather hair gone grey,
flap over collars on a windy day.

The tide goes out,
the tide comes in;
the older we start;
the younger we end.

Pushed from the nest, we learn to fly
then fall to earth.
Memory is no salvation.
Every death begins at birth.
Scavengers with hollow bones
migrate the unmappable.
The vast excursions of summer
must be put to rest
before the humours of winter
are allowed to burn.





CAUGHT
(a found poem)

wellington, dec 10 -

police here are seeking
a person who placed
three steel spikes
pointing upwards
on the judge’s chair
in wellington supreme court.

when mr justice o’regan resumed
a sitting after lunch
the needles pierced him
but did not cause serious injury

the chair was later checked
for fingerprints





INVISIBLE ADDICTION

He called it
his invisible addiction
because,
win or lose,
you’d never catch
the smell of cards
on his breath,
and there weren’t
any dice marks
on his arms.





LEARNING AMERICA, 1951-1969

In America, the Life, the Land, the Law
is not learned sitting on the earth
beside a campfire with smoke
& old people’s voices chanting,
chanting of the Ancestors...
but from the television set; on highways;
from billboards; from a sequence of
Burma Shave signs & barns painted with
"Bull Durham - Born in the Woods - Chewing Tobacco".
From black guys with no names
pushing brooms across checkerboard floors
in dingy waiting rooms.
From waitresses with chewing gum smiles:
high priestesses of swing shift officiating
in the ritual of ice water & patty melt.
"Double your pleasure, double your fun,
with Double-Mint, Double-Mint, Double-Mint..."
Guns -
every boy wants one.
That’s what the Sears-Roebuck catalogue sez.

America -
Diet of image, breakfast of metaphor.

From the absolute salesmen of ragged souls
darker than sunglasses outside the Alamo;
on accordion street corners where talent goes begging
& men with sandwich boards praise the Lord,
aching for a bottle of lunch;
where little boys lose their Moms & don’t want
to grow old and die, but vote for the Bomb instead,
like it was the secret of eternal youth.
And find success with blond instead of Erector Set.
Oceans of love, definite
as the sound of a sea-shell.

I learned to tie my shoelaces
in the back of a green ’51 Oldsmobile summer vacation;
past mechanical bellboys with light-bulb thumbs, waving:
"VACANCY", "VACANCY"...;
past wrestling posters obscuring circus:
Pepper Gomez kissing the crucifix
in the black trunks on Saturday nights
in a one-fall match with Mr Fuji.
I learned America from the inside, out.

America –

A river that starts with Huck Finn
& ends with Springsteen’s Greatest Hits.
A postcard collection of motels & cafes.
A prize at the bottom of the cereal box.
A little dab’ll do ya.

At Wonder Cave in San Marcos, Texas,
a nickel bought one minute of dancing chicken -
the caged bird high-stepping it
to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy
as the hot-plate heated up under its feet.

In 1956, "Davvvvy... Daaaavy Crockett,
the king of the wild frontier..."
In buckskin jackets and coon-skin caps
we kept the neighborhood safe
from the Indians & Mexicans.
Walt Disney taught us social Darwinism -
all those poor animals torn apart
while the cameras kept on rolling.
The Living Desert gave way to
the Dying Jungle of Vietnam;
the survival of the fittest,
& the richest...
all those poor animals torn apart
while the cameras kept on rolling...
& rolling...

America -

Where everything is gigantic, amazing,
incredible, symbolic, &
having a nice day, obligatory.
A sagebrush vista in a Saturday morning
picture theatre, tie yippy yie yea!
Before the film, we voted in a kiddie straw poll -
the 1956 Presidential race.
Most of us stuffed our tickets into Eisenhower’s box
because he had a kind face, &
cos we’d heard our mothers say
Ike would make a nice grandfather.
I suspect that’s still how Americans vote today.
Burn Ethyl,
Burn Julius... burn, burn!

America -

From the pages of the Wall Street Journal
to another cliché;
as real as the beatniks of Time.
And evil was personified as black,
as red, & blind.
We learned the wisdom of the tribe,
not from ancient song cycles
but from the Top 40, & a hospital
that turned into a parking lot in 1959.
From crossings and re-crossings
of the continent; from two-headed calves
in Mississippi; and pralines in Louisiana;
from tornado warnings in the heart o’ Texas
to hot beer & lousy food outside Tucson
with its adobe gas stations & totem pole pumps.

America -

In Triple-A-approved motels where
a quarter got you thirty minutes of TV
& Ronald Reagan on Sunday nights
appearing for G.E., selling toasters &
washing machines:
"At General Electric, progress is
our most important product."

Diet of image, breakfast of metaphor.
America -

Heading for the top
or slumping toward the weekend,
we learned its myths and legends;
from baseball trading cards
to the Pledge of Allegiance:
"One nation, under God, indivisible..."
I can remember when they added "God".
I can remember Sputnik, looking up
at the stars over Texas a coupla weeks
before Halloween.
I remember Elvis;
I remember when "rock’n’rock" became
part of the language;
I can remember Bobby Thomson’s home-run
that won the Giants the pennant; &
my parents remembered Lou Gehrig -
first baseman for the New York Yankees -
dying of a nerve disorder. His farewell
speech to 50,000 fans, featured on
a Columbia “Masterworks” - KL5000 -
his voice echoing over the ballpark:

"Today (Today)
I consider myself (I consider myself)
the luckiest man (the luckiest man)
on the face of the earth (on the face of the earth)."

America -

From the eyes of Lombard
to the timing of Keaton;
from Kansas City jazz & hip-flask blues;
Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me :
finding the pitch in the key of "me"-
Almost everybody remembers the words;
almost no-one remembers the tune,
& already the song is ending.

Ending with Benny "Kid" Parrett
dying under the glove Emile Griffith,
coast-to-coast;

America -

Ending on Elm Street in Dallas
near the umbrella man;
ending in Chicago
with the whole world watching;
ending in Holly’s plane,
in Joplin’s veins;
in a motherless bar outside Spokane
with the idiot box tuned to the football game
a century after the gold rush;
ending in Australia with nobody home...
I learned the myths, the legends,
the hype, the symbols,
happy-ever-afters...

America -
Diet of image, breakfast of metaphor.

---

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Links to other Billy Marshall Stoneking sites:

SINGING THE SNAKE

WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

THE OLD LIES - new & selected poems

BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING in Woodstock

EZRA POUND MEETS THE ABORIGINES

EISENSTEIN IN MEXICO

BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING


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