KneeJerk Productions

A forest of swaying trees

2012-01-22T14:24:00.000+13:00

A forest of swaying trees
leading the eye down to a shore
of threatening sea

swollen and given up to winds
and currents and the saline influences
that uphold the clouds in unbelievable motion

that one day could lift the opening off of time
display the working of our buildings
and make us say or scream

what lies or overblown proverbs fill up
this atmosphere that will not settle
that no storm can clean

Grant Duncan, 15.1.12

Someone called You

2012-01-22T14:17:00.000+13:00

I’d call this distemper
that growls and wrangles on the line

almost canine
And I’m tied up all day

from unspeakable eye opening
until the silent light goes out

And you asked me my secret
so you wouldn’t have to know it

or to see what I do
Stirring words

Running the treadmill
Charming flavours

No need to call
Just inquire inside

and finger the words
They shiver shine and run

So call them up again
and stalk them in the streets

Loiter outside shops
until chance bumps and jumps a track

and labouring metaphors
shuttle jauntily down hills

people settle for trying on
something new

pay up
and wander off

almost forgetting that someone
called You

Grant Duncan, 18.12.11

Viaduct

2011-12-12T22:49:00.002+13:00

Was it worth this
data in the wind?

We saw who counts
and were counted in our turn

to each one weight
as weighing’s all that matters

So gather up down there
Cry for all you’re worth

The trawlers don’t dock here anymore
The old produce hall’s been transformed

And a buzz of souls beckons
from the city that sleeps

to the city that wakes
till all that remains

between us
is data in the wind

Grant Duncan, 9.12.11

Lucky People

2011-02-28T22:14:00.002+13:00

Knowing we were not there
and missed what happened

is the one thing we really share
All of those rooms that

neither of us ever occupied
and the acquaintances we have not made

are the figures making it possible
to live together

And there always was a fertile time
once when conversations overflowed

untrapped from the body of words
when pictures drew whole flourishes

when someone’s touch promised more glow
than you could get in the palm of your hand

Grant Duncan 27.02.11

The birth of pain

2010-11-03T22:29:00.003+13:00

the hunter fallen and
the woman at labour

cried their hurts
in waves

but felt their pains
so differently

being impersonal
only to be suffered

like blows
from a careless god

whose dark face
saw also

that dogs
should copulate

Grant Duncan 18.10.10

That's her

2010-08-21T19:29:00.001+12:00

I asked no-one
to point at me and say

That’s him
That’s the poet

But you are different
You walk right through me

from time to time
And if I hear your footsteps

your handmaidens
are never far behind

on the strand with
sea-breezes in their faces

or by that fountain
where anyone can be inconspicuous

or looking like a mother of two from Howick
at a buffet-breakfast

or supple limbs pulling her through
the clear blue of a swimming pool

They trade upon their special blend
of insecurity and seduction

a touch on the arm
an ambiguous diamond ring

and stories about the father of a child
or one who might father more

in a future that circles gaily
like a merry-go-round

So I sometimes hear your footsteps
as you pass on through

getting lighter and lighter
and further and further on

Grant Duncan 7.8.10

In paradise

2010-08-13T21:07:00.002+12:00

In paradise
even the whores are honest

it’s like the united nations
but without the politics

and no-one understands
and yes the streets are

littered with cigarette butts
and darks things happen in alley-ways

and there is death even
in paradise

Grant Duncan 26.07.10

Amsterdam

2010-06-23T07:34:00.002+12:00

i

There’s no god
but god

who asks us to erase
all those words

But I was made to speak
and to walk along

the great flows of people
to be seen as a stranger

even to be invisible
while tram-bells ring their warning

There is an old church
and there are fancy facades

and the people keep flowing
on foot or bike

so that each body is in danger
of becoming an obstacle to itself

missing the words to ask with
Tongues pressed so expectantly

to their palates
produce no consonant

ii

Rembrandt’s Staalmeesters
look up in surprise

They haven’t yet heard the question
on the lips of the intruders

hundreds of whom interrupt them daily
Each visitor has a new way of looking at them

and a different tongue
to discuss this puzzle

But the masters are masters
for a reason

Time does not soften their tones
The man in the middle is standing

and seems to say At last you’re here
Please come in

But when he stood where I stand
and looked at himself in paint

he was puzzled and said No
This is not the way we were to look

And who was that visitor?
How could he ever leave such company?

Grant Duncan 8.6.10

Bard

2010-04-30T22:57:00.003+12:00

You made it once before we knew it
as the meteor fell

You were good with an illusion
a dance and a laugh

on the edge of that sphere
that turned or on your chair

or on the streets
with your words to the unwise

with your hurt
and your charm

and your love affair
way on down the line

I can’t look at your images now
nor hear you speechless

with your mind in the ashes
and your hair that colour too

What hope for a man
who travels in words

who taught
and got expelled

who loved
and never made it home?

But it was you who saw to it
that we all spoke out

out loud &
out of turn

It was you who looked so hard
and inwardly

as if through a glass
to tell if it’s truly empty

and if on the other side
there’s something still

And down the hill
at Victoria Park

they’re turning up the Earth
after all those late summers’ sports

A new de-generation of winos
has come and gone

gone in the shade of the plane trees
I can see you (not out)

as you ponder their fate
And I too will ask

who it was
Was it you who burned so pure?

Grant Duncan 2/4/10

Flower shop

2009-07-09T21:13:00.002+12:00

That involuted orchid
opens out to be
its own question
and proffers its own beginning

Buy back the terror
of the touching fingertips
of young tulips
that look at themselves

Never ask the roses
what they really want
Never choose them
nor be pricked into actions

the end of which
is not in sight

Grant Duncan 8.7.09

Bad Examples

2009-06-23T10:33:00.001+12:00

The bad examples of obscure philosophers
and the shadows of old session-men
pass fondly through quiet studios
wondering how they held that rhythm
and speech or stopped that thought

Hanging on the wall there’s
an engraving of old Venice that
looks like a beached whale

They all shuffled their talents
as if they were dealers at poker
those ancient merchant seamen
with their eyes always on the opposition

They passed through libraries
caressing spines with embossed titles
but those see-through eyes
couldn’t open a single book

The words stayed stubbornly
in the allotted places
never to share their bitter flavours

Maybe I am a replicant
and so these memories bright as tulips
are really made of plastic?

Grant Duncan 25.5.09

Utopian Drive

2008-08-26T22:27:00.001+12:00

It’s all so new
and so it goes nowhere yet

There’s a roundabout in the middle
that you can go around and around

to your heart’s content
because there’s no-one there to mind

And then you go on to the end
which occurs at an undefined place

from which you view some scrubby ti tree
remains of an imagined forest

But it’s all too strong
like that river that flows amid

the otherwise gentle town of Salzburg
So you may as well stay in your car

where it’s safe
and you can drive on as you please

Grant Duncan, 20.3.08

The Fying Vixen

2008-03-17T00:38:00.001+13:00

The first law

2008-03-09T21:24:00.002+13:00

...for Rajni

According to the first law

of psychodynamics

for all we grieve

nothing's ever lost

So abandon dreams

The fabric of this couch

is what you feel

and all you need

29.11.07

The pool

2008-03-04T20:54:00.002+13:00

So the water
was chlorinated

and impure with
the murk of children

We wrestled for fun
and much more than fun

we held
the compelling touch

of untouched bodies
So we played and

decades on I heard
we could have loved too

had I found a word
to call that play-fight

what it was
and swum with you

Grant Duncan 3.3.8

The PM likes poetry

2008-03-03T20:42:00.002+13:00

What I did in the holidays

2007-12-31T15:51:00.000+13:00

April without her

2007-10-22T20:17:00.000+13:00

How blue-skyed April is
Golden leaves shine like curly hair

Still one cicada’s grating the peace
And a voice next door

or a passing aircraft
gives echo to a world out there

In this blue love
silence moves like a lure

April passes on brightly by day
bitterly by night

15.04.05

The Shoe Project

2007-09-27T21:16:00.000+12:00

Mahlia and Iris

Grant (see poem in posting below this one)

Rachel and Family

Abby and Marilyn

To find more information on the Images here, please see the Global Community Shoe Project website.

For 6,000 war-affected children

2007-08-11T09:59:00.000+12:00

I cannot imagine where you went
The air about you
shuddered a moment

violently

I cannot fix this broken shoe
She who gave you in pain
holds you still

grieving

I cannot write another word
Nothing shelters you now
and no-one can hear you

singing

Grant Duncan
31.05.07

Hope

2007-07-29T22:31:00.000+12:00

Why stay silent
in the face of art?
Why put away that spray-paint?

Between the shelves
of history and religion
someone is vandalising the books

but there are moments
when it’s only right
To level things

as far as the crypt
and build your edifice anew
Some things go

as badly as they possibly could
and then you see hope
scrawled on a ruined wall

Grant Duncan
Padova 6.7.07

For so long

2007-05-06T20:56:00.000+12:00

For so long
words would chatter through
or the clatter and slam

of an old school typewriter
would measure the music
of my rhyming

Even before I could smudge them in my hand
or dissolve them on my tongue
their sounds were fled

and the only sense they left
felt like a receding recollection
of love never quite cut out

No matter
And now I have no time
No ears tune in to this wayward reason

This subliminal song
slow as a house decomposing
sings waking up to god

Grant Duncan 18.03.07

Satan's soliloquy

2007-04-02T22:55:00.000+12:00

Light me another
This one I found wanting

The pitted street needs resealing
and I crave the smell of tar

on a scorching day
The sun at the zenith

zeroes in on all our lives
and I teach the mastery of melancholy

from a shaded spot
seated like an old academician

I show how to struggle
to think and to err

and from all the labour of all the lives
extract an ounce of knowledge

The letter e
of the unlettered millions

the drugged pleasures
the irrational numbers

eternity but how to explain it
to those who have not time

to watch their skins heal?
I embrace those who stumble in the dark

as they reveal their ways
to and from the wrong rooms

and tread sqeaky floorboards
where god would never tread

I snatch their words from air
and cross them out

It is such aimlessness
that flings you into a future

Grant Duncan, March 06

The last century

2006-05-16T11:12:00.000+12:00

1

One hell of a hot summer
in the Dardanelles 1915
and the flies were the winners

Someone born that year
died Melbourne 1998 aged 83
His grieving son I may have passed in the street

2

Go on see
how far-flung memories come down like leaves
even on a tranquil day

A fresh troupe of school-tripping children
disrupts the Age as their voices
trampoline upon the bright air

3

She sits still in the sunshine reading since Renoir
in full view of the city’s towers plane trees and river
reminding me of too much

The power that lasts like those endless ripples
that undo the packets of sunshine
propels one into being

4

The station clock
in its Victorian tower
told us all that time in circles

Now a museum piece it turns
lest we forget
into a wireless world

Grant Duncan Melbourne 2.5.06

Lunch with my father

2006-02-14T05:29:00.000+13:00

At the beach the high water lapped calmly
against the stones of the new retaining wall
But aside from seeing that structure for the first time

the only surprise was just how clear the quietness can be
Later at your place we could at least agree
that over the years certain trees out-grew our expectations

and that the citruses at this season
lend the air a sweet tang
that no-one could mistake

You say you’ve gone off dark beers
and I add that I can’t take much wine these days
but the revels of the past are not forgotten

just called off with a laugh and a shrug
Times we may have shared are only memories
hardly more reliable than dreams

and almost as volatile as the future
Neither of us lays claim to the naming rights
but we build a mechanism for the impossible

and a generator of inventions
with things as flexible as words
Lunch has disappeared from our plates

the cat’s aslumber on one of the deck-chairs
and our eyes say it’s been a long time
The tool-maker and the word-smith

can admire one another’s craft
but the heart functions best in one’s own shop
Two-thirty and we ought to be back at work

Grant Duncan, 1.11.00

Love Poem

2006-02-14T05:26:00.000+13:00

Something says that
you’re my lost and found

and yet not-yet found
So how to secure you fast

boldly and bodily
and talk on through the night

Some elf has spoken
softly so you wouldn’t hear

to say I ingested some sweet of yours
and shared the hand you knead with

And so I’ve tasted
the inner mingling

and felt the hot rising
of your living form

Grant Duncan 4.2.06

Graceful motion

2006-02-14T05:20:00.000+13:00

I could have been borne
on a recently decommissioned DC3

The sun could have refused to rise
or the earth to do another revolution

Living things demand to live
lacking right and reason

they demand to know and to touch each other
to kill and to eat

to absorb atmospheres
set off dangerous reactions

lead down reckless ways
I could have fucked

my way into a prison
or utterly reserved

all my questions for the silence
of thinking alone

I could have obeyed the laws
like the moon obeys hers

saved all my hungers
for one innocent banana

not gone for walks
ignored signs

left words unwritten
callings uncalled

I could have taken risks
and I didn’t

but I sit at a table
and look to other climates

opinions fashions
I could invent cities

watch them be ruined
and disregard the life of each

the life of its own
I could have asked them all

for nothing more
than graceful motion

Grant Duncan 9.12.05

Bodies of transportation

2005-09-11T12:14:00.000+12:00

1

This passage of dark and light
carriage of peaceful rushing
and driver of monotone voice

could all be courtesy of a public body
or even private company
Unthinking faces meditate the way

to a morning revealed
above the ground beneath the sun
as a kind of project

with a dead certainty that more will happen
more stations more bodies will pass
before the eyes more desires

2

Drawn as to a ghost
to a blank page
to mark its face

in the tranquility of Munich’s last Sunday in May
and to reveal the lost expressionism
of vulgar flesh and casual dress

the pungent sprig of rosemary
the need to go on regardless
the beauty of the colours called green

I have invented but haven’t yet
destroyed you
The voices rumble above the café

and the answer isn’t in your name
Instead I adopt only commas
for the necessity of pausing

for brief absences of sound
to aid the understanding
Do you see the mark

for hearing this aspiration?
I never knew I’d reach this table
or get to this point of silence

3

No-one knows the strange spiral
to which want always points
and spins on brief meetings

It attaches to all things
imagined and made
and to precarious freedoms

of persons almost all of whose wants
appear in reach
just to touch

4

Slight irritations like a lawn-mower
a lost pin or lost message
interfere with a fine morning

Thoughts and interruptions to thoughts
pass one by station by station
They crowd the carriage

and then they leave
They share your seat
but are too polite to speak

5

I hear it said that somewhere
is where they want to go
or so the people complain

That somewhere
can’t be found on the map
of underground lines

It won’t be reached
at Münchner Freiheit
or Goetheplatz

it isn’t in the soles of the shoes
or the bikini tops
advertised on walls

it isn’t found in anyone’s face
no matter how compelling
nor how soft the look

Somewhere anywhere
What difference does it make?
It’s where you wanted to go

Munich, May 2005

Why am I a poet?

2005-04-24T15:31:00.000+12:00

because when I was
too young for Poetry
I saw the void behind the soul
where words no longer have uses

and I lived
with no purpose
further than to speak
and not avert the eyes

Grant Duncan 18.01.05

Note for Natasha

2005-03-12T18:31:00.000+13:00

I saw you in a forest
just as a welcome shower of rain began

I couldn’t tell how it was
that you moved like that

between the growing trees
with such animal limbs

Could someone tutor me?
The graces of your soul

translate to gestures
and the gentle way your hand

may have touched
How little do I understand?

The forest gives way to a garden
that you overlook

fresh in gumboots
Your mind is fully at play

the earth gives softly beneath your feet
Could the thought be more vivid?

But just in case you didn’t see
the slip of paper

nailed to your tree
What on earth could it say?

The crude and beautiful word or
not a word nor even art

but just a childish doodle
a drawing of the heart

Grant Duncan, 12.2.05

What governs the soul

2005-01-04T12:01:00.000+13:00

Could we tell what governs the soul
no two being alike?

Do the words that I stumble on
pave the way to any place you knew?

This page being blown in the wind
is picked up in the street

and read by someone
who doesn’t know me

but knows this feeling
what it means and where it leads

This person has fading memories
of loving someone new

then stumbling and not knowing
which way to go

The page is like an empty frame
It has neither views nor guides

The pencil scratches bluntly on
And our reader reads

then gazes down the street
to see some meaning coming

cycling along
in the form of someone familiar

So memories are cruel
It’s an acquaintance who reappears

like a cat at the door
seeking to know what’s new

Grant Duncan 24/12/04

Babbling book

2005-01-04T11:58:00.000+13:00

I need to reorder this book

I am impatient to finish this sentence

Each chapter is an unfinished thought

Your order will arrive soon sir

I can’t wait to get to the end

That’ll take three days

I can’t finish it yet

Grant Duncan

Shelley has practical hands

2004-12-05T17:02:00.000+13:00

Shelley has practical hands
made strong in the milking-shed
and they find out tension
then make it utter

its own tones of release
So touching
she doesn’t like to be touched
and needs to stay in charge

The others’ names are gone now
and she with her navel pierced
remains gently to remind
about the quietly raging storm-waters

Dusk has arrived on Main Street
but with it comes the light
that what I felt was false
and buildings need repair

Grant Duncan 9/10/04

Conductress

2004-12-05T17:01:00.000+13:00

Train the mind
at Rosenheim 11.30 am

with a clear morning sky
held by power cables

The sighting of dark mountains
comes as a surprise

like the sudden idea
that pleasure is permissible

money expendable
and the conductress too

though severely uniformed
in two-tone blue

likes to play with the softer places
So think harder and yet calmly

about your sins and about the door with
Do not enter on it

To be a first-class man
depends on her approval

and the whole train of thought
moves off between green banks

due only to her whistle
She draws on my thoughts

and tries them out
like shawls from an old hope box

Grant Duncan Bavaria, 26.06.04

Horrors of the modern

2004-11-09T11:52:00.000+13:00

All the horrors of the modern were
there in one big building

5.15 pm New Bar Schwabing
and you can now be

alone with a txt
but not with a thought

as another one comes up
and takes the seat beside you

It recollects some other place
and a question takes you indoors

There’s a rack of magazines
colours of consumption

a row of television screens
attracting the eye

and a semi-circle of five
t-shirted people

with tall glasses of amber beer
that stand like sentinels

Eyes drink images of football on TV
admiring exertions of men

Others prefer waitresses’ hips
or following their eyes among

the shifting legions who need
this stimulation

All the horrors of the moderns
stood in silent rows like truth

or dead on the walls
like beauty

Grant Duncan, Munich 25.06.04

Lab rats

2004-11-07T04:31:00.000+13:00

We were conceived in the mind
of another being
and permitted to be
for the benefit of his kind

We were born in this prison
with no purpose but to serve
in the Great Hall of his knowledge
And when that curiosity is sated

we may be sacrificed
displaying our innards
or be rendered and burned
depending on his will

In our cells
our muted mouths
recall no sins
our eyes are wide and blank

Grant Duncan 15.10.04

Unstolen bike

2004-10-24T07:57:00.000+13:00

A wry look over the pleasures
of transport under your own power

the unlocked thing rests there
without an owner

but does not say
Please take me

doesn't invite you to put
your hand through the veneer

That naughty thought is yours
and in that thought you touch

your own struggle
And you can only think how

once you were stolen away
and ridden ruthlessly awry

Grant Duncan, 22.10.04

The war-horses' trifecta

2004-10-17T13:16:00.000+13:00

Now that Johnny Howard has come in first in Australia (lucky country!), will the 3 horseman of the Iraqi apocalypse make it a trifecta? Go Bush. Go Blair.

I predict that they will all ride into victory on the basis of booming economies, political ignorance (of the masses) and the general insecurity created by the very war (on 'terror') that they are creating and prosecuting.

Remember where you read it first.

Poetry Man

2004-10-14T10:38:00.000+13:00

Can anyone tell me why poetry is dead?