Five Poems by Ben Adams

the feline canon 

 

cat creeping  

footpath bitumen 

 

jumps the fence 

& rustles leaf 

 

as soft fur falls like a muffled 

gunshot into the garden 

 

& we stop our discussion 

—of King Lear 

 

& Fournier’s lost domain 

Bukowski’s detached self 

 

& how Carson McCullers  

really died 

 

—lean back & look over  

to see the disturbance 

 

gather itself 

lick their paws 

 

& trot off 

oblivious

 

 

fool me 

 

I come back that afternoon 

to her lounging 

in the backyard, smoking  

Kents in the sun 

 

since I left, she’s done  

and hung the washing out  

in tumble dry wind 

and been for a run along the river 

 

undoing all my hard work 

she says, inhaling slowly 

do you ever cycle? I ask 

no, she says 

 

bikes don’t work my arms 

and my legs  

are already too big  

for the rest of me 

 

I think—glancing down  

at my hands against her thighs 

stretching their smooth  

weight across my lap 

 

—could have fooled me

 

Galaxy brain 

 

Supermassive black holes and holiday income. 

You don’t get a lot of either at the edges  

of things: the gig economy, structures of star  

 

systems and societies spinning around absent  

centers that anchor, yes, but also refract.  

Gravitational lensing bends all light and energy  

 

into solitary inhuman singularities of attrition  

and then, a double feature, of capture and  

consumption: late capitalism. So, don’t miss  

 

the show, mate. It’s playing tonight. A retro vibe  

at the re-opened drive-in. The event horizon, fall  

into it. Loose facts and faculty and none of it  

 

matters anyway, all false flags and fake news  

narratives. So, que ‘em up. Biden lost, bro  

do your own research: the vaccine’s shot  

 

and masks don’t work. Let ‘em echo  

edgy, from the center of your universe. 

That galactic, grinning self.

 

 

A synaesthetic history 

 

The colour of my condition  

is Crayola apricot. Paler than 

 

its namesake, the Armenian  

apple: familiar and ancient— 

 

hardier than some delicate peach  

yet also sickly, glazed-sweet 

 

poison stone with maudlin dreams  

of dried out flesh and desert winds 

 

—but representation never quite  

lived up to life now, did it? And 

  

perhaps it’s not a colour, but  

an inkblot that keeps us up 

  

these nights. Circling the Caucasus 

comparing notes—and searching 

  

for the centre of it. Looking  

for the meaning  

 

of hard 

bitter things.

  

rattle it 

 

when the bone orchestra decamped  

once more, marching off to sift through  

old rubble somewhere else, some  

players bedridden and carried on  

makeshift canvas stretchers, still  

clutching horns and percussion  

and stringed instruments into evening 

 

seeing the sky sink low into sunburnt  

ember, night’s half-dark reaching down  

to halt them — they played on, a staccato  

symphony hurled against the grey 

enough to rattle it 

enough to keep its silence  

at bay

Ben Adams is an Adelaide, South Australia-based poet, academic researcher, arts reviewer, and part time servo clerk, currently finalising a PhD on Charles Bukowski and postmodern humanism. 

His poems have appeared in various print, online and other formats, including Australian Love Poems, The Grapple Annual, Gloom Cupboard, Clutching at Straws, Carcinogenic Poetry, Red Fez, Dead Snakes, The Camel Saloon, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Pyrokinection, Poetry Pacific, Tulpa Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, Better Than Starbucks, Eunoia Review, Lite Lit One, Poet’s Corner at In Review, the ‘Raining Poetry’ street-art project, ‘Quart Short’ reading night and ‘Well Versed’ radio poetry series on PBA-FM. 

His first full collection, A Synonym for Sobriety, was published in 2019 after winning that year’s Friendly Street Single Poet Competition, while his personal essay “A Radical Liberalism” appeared the same year in Eclectica Magazine. More recently, he has been a regular arts reviewer for Solstice Media and co-authored several scholarly articles on subjects including ideology and radicalisation, securitised education, masculinities and the incel movement, along with a forthcoming study of vulnerability, extremism and schooling with Lexington Books. 

To find or contact Ben across social media and elsewhere, visit linktr.ee/bts.adams