Golden Bogey
By Duncan Hose
I am insuperably lazy and this makes me proud.
Midnight in Derby
a new suburb of Melbourne
Where Fitzleroy used to be
The Bacchae pass by
my window with their paraphernaliac
cocks I wonder
O Succoy Bacchantes, incubus and succubi
Whom
Shall we be tearing apart
Tonight?
Because what elas is there to do?
Anyone can snap the branch of an apple tree I want
To put my juicy tattoo on the breast of the dizzy pulque plant
The mother goddess hirselfe
To tease the wrath of the Gorgone
Whose sap is not flammable but explosive
Whose forgiveness is stinging
Commissioned graffitti never as good as the rough stuff
We like the rough stuff
Sacrificial jingo of the golden bogey
The R(oyal) B(otanical) G(ardens) a giant phantasmagoria of chlorophyll
Blended by a couple of European extremists
A paradise authorized by Count Ferdinand von Mueller
Then updated in taste by William Guile-e-foyle
The satyric art deco garden Melbourne deserves though I must confess
I too have used it as an apparatus of seduction
All the plants have had their teeth removed
The awesome maw of the vegetative gut sewn shut
Gazetted Nupitals and loungey rites of Fertility
the radical absence of stone idols
(No golden bogeys)
Contrapuntally placed apart from the rat laneways
Of Russian Collingkvood, Chelsean Fitzroy and
Carlton/ Edinburgh
You see it is designed to make a little monarch
Out of every Victorian with a threepenny piece
A baloney sandwhich and a wormless
apple