Rosanne's Lounge

For Aveline de Rais Rubinshteyn

she is standing in thrall to the tempest
she has nothing to lose but her hide
she knows all the tricks and she’s seen all the hicks
and she’s secretly crying inside

her skin is a rocking horse palimpsest
she has nothing to give but her throat
the hum of the trees and the buzzing of bees
and a smile like an overblown coat

so she screams when the wireless plays songs from the west
and she throws away needles and pills
she’s done with the dolls and the blonde gangster molls
and she packs up and heads for the hills

This hypertext poem started out as an experiment to show my students you could make compelling content without knowing a lot of HTML. And then I got a little obsessed!

It’s a story of a fire dancer and a mask-maker and a star-gazer — you don’t necessarily meet all of them; it depends which path you take. There are multiple paths through the poem. You choose which stanza will be next based on the words that appeal to you. Sometimes she falls in love with the mask-maker; sometimes with the star-gazer. Sometimes it’s mutual; sometimes it’s unrequited. It’s all chance.

From watching people read it, I suggest you read it more than once, especially if the path you chose is only about five stanzas long. The best paths are around 10 stanzas long. You can also read my favourite paths, below.

• Minstrels and Mischief: hypertext version
• Minstrels and Mischief: love and romance version
• Minstrels and Mischief: jealousy and destruction version

Note, reading the linear paths does not mean you’ve seen all the stanzas. There are many different paths, not just these two. The last link in the linear versions takes you to the beginning of the hypertext version so you can explore.

If there’s a path you think needs work, I’d love to hear about it. Let me know which path you took and where it felt thin.

these pared down, harrowed days
conjured from flame and fervour
spread thin like a cry
drawn from parched lips;
like an ache refracted.

in our cities, bodies drift like sparks
in conflagrations — ash-light;
empty rhetoric falls gnarled as tinder.

what foul seraphs advance in your name,
slouch into excess and devastation?
what futile gestures must be performed
to abase ourselves before this fear,
before this terrible undying stench abates?

justice is a jibbed fool
twisting in the wind like hope deflected.

Ah winter, your vaulted roofs are sandstone
And your halls are chill. Your corridors echo
with a lone brown oak leaf and the south wind.
On the steps, a philosopher dreams civilization,
Smoke curling around his fantasies. Winter,
You are a proud ancient thing, settled
In your lawns, your gothic windows,
Your learning denuded as the trees,
Stark and knowing.

For my Grandmother

She is old and crimped like a pinched-off string
Yesterday was filled with memories of buttercups
She made dolls of mountain devils when they were babes
Tomorrow, a glass of sherry on her own, in her room

Yesterday was filled with memories of buttercups
Lovers laugh and roll down grassed slopes, careless
Tomorrow, a glass of sherry on her own, in her room
Time is something you keep in your pocket for later

Lovers laugh and roll down grassed slopes, careless
He went to war and she raised twin girls like candlesticks
Time is something you keep in your pocket for later
Memory wanders in through cracks in the pavement

He went to war and she raised twin girls like candlesticks
Sydney in the summer is thunderstorms and haze
Memory wanders in through cracks in the pavement
Her grandchildren are voices on the phone and cards at birthdays

Sydney in the summer is thunderstorms and haze
She made dolls of mountain devils when they were babes
Her grandchildren are voices on the phone and cards at birthdays
She is old and crimped like a pinched-off string.

 It’s like this:
You go numb into your silent lunch hours
Into the chill doom of daylight
Are swept streetless down to city libraries
Walk out with China Mieville novels
And Duke Ellington and urban fairytales
Trying to warm your hands and heart
By the heat of salsa and jazz and flamenco.
On the way back, sliding off the world,
You see the patchwork kid and the laughing morrigan
Leap lightly off the tram you are on,
Disappear into the crowd, unaware, observed.
They do not see you. Fleeting intersections,
Trajectories. We are only ever moments to each other.
We glide off each others’ surfaces and veer away.
A thousand sparks.

I half-expect Gitane-smoking men
To flow through the door,
Exclaiming: “the world is here
And demands exultation!
O celebrate, you daughters of justice!
O weep, you children of suspicion!
The ivy has freed the streetlamps.
Statues guard ancient typewriters:
Rejoice in their observances.
Stand back, you fathers of tyranny.
Here are books in all languages,
Lip to lip, sighing together.
O breathe, you framed portraits —
Yours is the burden of history
And the travails of reflection.”

for my grandfather, Sydney Levine, on the night of his death
In the end, his bird-like hands
Clutched to his chest, skin like vellum.
It is on that parchment we write our stories,
On this man we weave our tales.
He is our silent audience, breath shallow,
As we scrawl our ephemera on his brow,
Smooth his forearms with trips to mountains,
Brush his hair with strains of pan flutes
Wet his lips with movies we have seen
Hold his hand and sing to him,
Summertime and blackbirds,

His mouth is open like a chick
And we feed him tidbits we have rehearsed.
This is the ritual of waiting
This is the ritual of incorporation
No time and all time, space and sighing
We create tales of mystics and magic carpets,
Astronomers and mathematicians.
We layer our memories onto this man,
Palimpsest of histories, thirties ditties
And choked-back tears.
He is becoming something other.
And then he is gone.

Now I know how 100,000 bodies look
Buried in soft ground;
or at least I know their shape,
How much land they fill.
I know that grass
Grows greener
with humans as fertiliser.
I am haunted by the curve of souls,
the twist of necks as children land on hundreds of other
Whimpering not-yet-dead terrified horrified ghosts.

It would have been easier if it were packed to the brim.

The angle of the walls and the half-filled horseshoe
Makes it impossible not to calculate depths
And volume. The mind balks at such figures.
The eye stares and stares and hammers it home.

In two days, they shot 34,000 of you. There is a man
Walking his dogs on your bodies now. I am blank.
Tortured stone stands now at the point
Where they pushed you into infinity
I walk slowly around the edge of the ravine,
And as I step onto the pathway up to the centre,
100,000 ghosts step with me and I am overwhelmed
gutwrenched wracked broken punched ripped
by your terror and your dread. I shudder sobs with every step.

I think my great-grandfather might be in here.
I think my great-grandfather might be sleeping here.

My mother says now: these are not your people.
Don’t you understand? They were as bad as the Nazis,
These Ukrainians. Stood by and did nothing.
We are exiles returning, seeking something we don’t understand.
Seeking a people, a meaning, a hope.
I belong nowhere now. All my people are dead.

Coming back I wonder where
Home is. I have official stamps
From thieves to say Enter, Stay.
I want to ask Aunty Sue, how do I
Apply for a passport, from you?

We came from China, from Russia, Ukraine,
Poland, Germany, Czech; from Vietnam,
Kosovo, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq.
We are but the latest squatters,
The latest refugees, in an unbroken line.

My dyedushka, Misha, idealist; refugee.
People in the streets protesting inhuman conditions.
It's easy to blame us for uprisings, we're different.
Retaliate. Persecute. Target the Jews.
His father injured in a pogrom,
Came home one day when Misha was 13,
bleeding from the head.
As soon as he is old enough, he leaves.
Away from camps and the burning stetl,
Away from hatred and hunger.
His parents stayed. Stayed and died.
Doba of hunger in 1933,
A famine imposed by heartlessness.
Iosef in 1941, who knows where —
Babiy Yar? Ukraine was overrun with Nazis,
Building camps, shooting first, and never asking.

Home. Am I home?
Woomera. Baxter. Maribyrnong. Port Hedland.
Now we build camps, breed hate. I do not do enough.
My heritage is one of questioning and tikkun olam:
If not now, when? If not me, who?
Oh Aunty Sue, how do I apply
For a passport, from you?