Poetry: Selections From Julian Thumm

A voice from the past

For Thuy

 

Scrawled bewilderments

& tangled effigies

stained & smeared

epistles from

long lost

& lovelorn emissaries 

glossy juvenalia 

& vacuous words

from an irredeemable past

leave us picking at 

some densebound 

scar tissue knot

tied by a cryptic hand

that won’t loose

to reveal the topological

mysteries embedded within 

Euclidean loops

& failed loves

 

 

 

The pollution of man

 

My groin is alive 

with junkyard flowersa

witchhazel & jinsome

nettles, nasturtiums

the macadamia’s creamy spray

the devil’s trumpet,

toadstools of violence

& St John’s Wort

fecund, infested

aswarm with curio hunters

& botanists

swollen on their abstract ambitions

to scrape some new 

& obscure form of life 

from the most unlikely 

& heavily tramped

& polluted of ecosystems

 

Ticks & moles

& crabs

their lousy lives

in this untended

garden of depravity 

 

Each man 

to his shame

carries unwashed

& overgrown worlds

somewhere in his 

betrammeled 

& wilted garden

 

 

Arachnophobia

 

Somewhere my name 

must be written in the cobwebs

woven by venomous instinct

with iron-strand inflection

that distorts

what once was

& leaves me hanging 

from rotting rafters

in some deserted dive

 

Century-proof spirits

their banshee ballards

of fallen soldiers

echo forlornly 

to shake the dust

from the load-bearing

web of my dying name

 

 

 

 

 

Julian Thumm is a poet from Melbourne, Australia. He studied literature and professional writing and now works as a corporate shill, selling his corrupted pen to the highest bidder. His poetry is an attempt to make sense of a lifetime of bad choices. His work has been published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Rye Whisky Review, Horror Sleaze Trash, and Fixator Press. His debut chapbook, Gutter Stew, is available through Alien Buddha Press.