[R. Nemo Hill]

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Know Where


A toothache, slight. A dog. These seem
my sole companions here this year.
Constant, they loiter through sleep, through dream,
and I wake to find them both still near:
the dog still outside in my chair,
the toothache still inside my mouth.

My tongue explores—there’s nothing there,
no crack, no cave. A shrewder scout,
my ear detects the chair frame creak
beneath the stray dog’s shifting weight
as dawn’s light just begins to sneak
in through the garden’s ragged gate.

I had a bad day yesterday,
and so I pulled the final stake.
Orphaned now, a castaway,
just one more stray, an ache
unanchored—I could be pleased, I guess.
Such days will be. And this one’s done,

its vagrant wave of loneliness
already come, already gone.
I didn’t eat (too busy wallowing)
till dusk, past hunger, I had some bread,
went through some motions, chewing, swallowing,
then slid straight down the chute to bed.

I wake this morning, a grateful outcast,
in the haven of this alien heaven
far from all the maudlin bombast
commodifying ‘nine-eleven’
on that Isle of Media I call home.
This being an election year,

they’ll cue the anguished metronome,
re-animate the pamphleteer.
Let them—! I’m here, beyond their law,
with this dog in my bamboo chair,
with this faithful toothache haunting my jaw,
in the garden of this other worldly know where—.


(11 September, 2006—Petulu, Bali)
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