week of June 21 - 27, 2004

Mark Allinson and Judy L. Brekke

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Bio (auto)

Mark Allinson was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia (1947), where he has spent most of his life. Returning to study as an adult, Mark gained a teaching degree and a Ph.D from Monash University, where he taught English literature for some years. Since leaving Monash, Mark has been teaching literature to adults in his own Adult Education business. Mark now lives in Tomakin, South of Sydney, where he writes.

The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by Mark Allinson and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Get Ready Soon comes a day when the winds of chaos belch hot sulphur down your neck, shivering guts and blowing safety maps of where who what right out beyond how. Then you may find yourself alone between twilight and dread at the wheel of your father’s car (since he had a heart attack and can’t drive the thing) wrong-headed for some power station stinking of death. Lost, you must go on. But you will stop as sulphuric piss drops rain on a badly lit roadhouse, where a jerk on the pump will spill your last dollars on wet cement, just to make more evil- smelling chemical rainbows. And when you enter the Hades of the hot food diner, some hair-flicking harpy will tap her foot while you try to decide between the black-rimmed curl-top pie and the dead-dick chico roll. And you will not be capable of deciding,  nor know the difference between whether you should eat it or beat it. Hungry, you must drive straight into the maw of dark, as the hot breath of chaos buffets and bashes at the grope of your head-lights. Pandemic It was amazing, really. Her face, her face just shimmered and glistened and gleamed with idiocy. You could almost smell waves of it coming off her like wafts from a junk dump. And she was running the little town's Neighborhood Education Centre! And she shone with an imbecile sheen. Lucky for me she always turned her back when I entered the room: a vast-arsed harpy with a hatred of ideas. Why offer a course on the great poets, she snarled, we all know how to read around here! In short - my idiocy is precious to me: Don't you dare threaten to take it away - it is all I have to call my own. She was very happy to offer courses on macrame or doily stitching, but nothing she couldn't feel superior to. I hadn't noticed it before, but one day as I strode off in disgust, I began to realise she was not alone. And now everywhere I look I see the rising rippling quivers of idiocy distorting the faces, like heat waves rising, twisting the features of the granite-faced hills to shimmering, vague, jelly wobble blobs. Lawn Order The lawns around here shine like polished badges of the let's club Nature club. Lines strict as sixteenth- century rule by ruler parterre gardens of life- detesting Paris. Even the worms are forced to endure green plastic hosiery to keep their awful slime from the paths. Yesterday I saw a man on his knees before a dollop of bird poop on his driveway, scrub- bing with detol. Another man collapsed in a faint at curly pubes fuzzing from a crack of virgin concrete. At night you can almost hear the jungle of dreaming being strip-cleared by nembutal dozers. At least once a week they go out wrapped up tight as double-thick garbags with yellow ties. Spring is bad enough, but the filthy autumn war with its mass- acres and dysenteries and choleras of colour is the worst time of year. Just ask  the man in No. 23 swinging his mop at the bloody clots in his maple. No wonder now and again one of them starts sweating and runs through an nicely taut and ordered house with a skull- polished axe.

Quarter Pounder Yes, girls with spit curls and ponytails take their pet roosters to the local "Quarter Pounder" singing and stroking the precious cock's comb as they wait in the front seat of the mustang for the mustached boyfriend and the order of fries Pardon Me pardon me mr. leather jacket sherman placed properly between fingers neatly manicured for strokes upon some sweet smelling woman's breast pardon me your white silk fringed scarf blowing just right over your shoulder brushing your gleaming lips tasting bubble gum kisses that disappear into the softening leather and evaporate in wisps of sherman smoke Bee Bop Laundromat Bee Bop hair tightly wound in pink hair rollers Bee Bop hair rollers covered by torn brown hair net Bee Bop two young men under hair dryers sit outside of laundromat Bee Bop hair nets, head phones hair dryers, laundromat Bee Bop high five lots of jive Bee Bop Wednesday afternoon Piedmont Avenue Bee Bop