Duncan Bruce Hose: poet, essayist and visual artist.

About

Duncan’s poetry collections include  The Jewelled Shillelagh (Puncher and Wattman 2019), Bunratty (Puncher 2015),  One Under Bacchus (Inken Publisch 2011) and Rathaus (Inken 2007), and the chapbooks Testacles Gone Walkabout (Slow Loris 2021), and  Duncan Hose’s Book of Sea-Shanty (Bulky News Press 2014).

His first critical monograph, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes: Prick'd by Charm (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.

Duncan was awarded the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2010, and made the shortlist for the prize in 2021. He was runner-up for the Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets in 2009. He holds a PhD. in Literary Studies from the University of Melbourne.

Lumpen Aristocrats (Paris)                                                   

 

Liberty relieved is having a cigar on a smoking heap

 her breasts still bared as though ‘at work’  

             little red phrygian caps

Of the Revolutionaries littering the Place du mouton enragé but where is everyone?

 

Got a real bad buzz in my plague-balloons

& my guts’re as happy as a wild boar loose in Nîmes

Double punch the clutch Dangle-bitty

you’ve got the day hot           in your Traveller’s Tongs

How far d’y’ think yell get in those

                                  Superb Convict Booties?  Let me surpriz ye

                                                                        cuntypikelet.

 

 

I don’t think I want ‘a kiss from dead Maggie’s lips’         howlong’s she been dead?

          Even crossing the carpark’s a lusty experience

If yeave the frisking wind and a mollycoddler

Angel at each armpit liftin ye                 

                                      o rubor sanguinis                blush me by

                                                                                    and by

 

 

   M.often mistaken for a Bourbon     despite this champeen gap in m. peasant teeth  

just Saturday night I lost five knuckles in a duel with Captain Aubrey Wood … handsome thug

 Son of Coventry’s Pikey Queen and noted necromancer but despair

                                                     not lovers of the Dauphin

 lovers of the spidery Louis IX      lovers of Karen Blixen      lovers of Romy Schneider

                                      the blood feud will continue    

 

 

Which of the ballerina dine on cigarettes and twisties after endless practice ..

                                                                         All of them Darling

 

I have I think the melancholy of a Dictator known only by other Dictators

Done in a medieval palette where every colour requires certain parts blood

 Candy-bacon, immaculate conception blue, tar of Bunratty Black etcetery etcetera

 

Tiny winking red eyes along the dark

Rue St Denis               prowling the tenderloin

Ambient violence of the criminal milieu I carry

        a feint medallion of Saint Lemonade Eupene

  the minicult that follows me everywhere

I would like to proceed skippingly but it’s really more trippingly or rippishly

 

Check the Major expressions in the softskull from the too-hard blowing of the hunting horns

The little borer holes and squiggles which are the cruel limericks written by syphilis

The world being so beautiful damaged well go out into it

 

The Lumpen Aristocrats that’s us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Lumpen Aristocrats (Carlton)

 

Flirted with anyone worthwhile lately asks the Demon Plotcock

As you shamble in your Earthling’s shoes past the Mercat Cross

The Monagles and McGunnigles are at it again up off and over the hill

A turf war that started when the universe juiced itself

                                                Into existence

 

Grey-eyed schoolgirls of Melbourne who can kill with a glance Moloch

if ye think it’ll salve Satan’s irrits I’ll say thirty karen murphys

                      November Blistering azure     whae threatens

               To swallow everything  the beauty actually sinister

                         ultraviolet appetite     scintillant hellhaze of the Tierra

when the earth gets cross she’ll crush you in miraclous song

 

I keep spotting Older Sister Autumn at Summer’s debutante ball

Just one of many freckled prodigies naturally forbidden

The bowel like the brain like the balls like the belfry

 Ruled by magical contractions

 

Mother crept off to heaven, leaving us with our prehistoric love of reality

  excessive, violent, irrational, violent then subtil in its complications, violent

It was on the Flaminian Way, you understand, the road that connected Rome and Rimini

 Via Carlton

somewhere between the clam broth house, the mean fiddler and mcfeely’s

     I got a devil biting hard on each butt cheek

 

Now nostalgic for a slightly older order of bastardry

Darling don’t you know you are the Judy Davis of my phantom set

Fiercely glamorous                    Gorgeous psycho-poppet from Perth  

    intelligence preternatural and      such a bitch

 

They all fall in love with Judy

 The Gods crowd around to take their vicarious pleasure

Does it matter that we invented them?    They are here ..

“too much?”   “Yes”   “Not enough?”                      

                                    “Absolutely”   *****************

 

 

 

 

 

 Lumpen Aristocrats (Charlotte Street)

 

Caligula kept a satyr in salt I too have kept little fragments of eternity

WOODEN PHALLOS STUDDED with bronze clovers

Scratched there the names of our Heroes! Covered aye

                                   In live spunkys

             ‘Sacred calligraphy

Going at the speed of tings and one day you shall DIE Dinglebitty

 

The morning I wake up inside of you

                  My testypegs on your teats

The purplest extreme bits we call ‘percy devlins’

Your triple coif sending signals everywhere the nerves

The skin the eyeball meat th’brain overthrown it’s not fair!!

 

Your spread-eagling hair buff, beige or butterscotch

shuga  shuga  shuga

                               Cane baby

M.tongue also burning I know I don’t want to be

The Count or the Duke or the Marquis or the Queen

But the Dizzybortenburg of Charlotte Street

 

Pet blue-tongue lizard with plenty of charisma lolls

 On the coffeetable with his hand on the pizza menu from papa’s funeral

Rambunctious hungry always his pancreas was ‘stinking large’

 

Top mob of spunks and little spunks seeing the sun go down at Eagle Junction

The whole came off with a plenitude of spook

The ghastly interior does so well we are only learning now to commoditize

         Still bodgied though

          & bungled

Like the almost-face of a Bubble o Bill melted into the bitumen

Covered in damsel flies and bastard mites

Violently Australian

 

Wake up early on St Briggita’s feast day

    O spry and freckled Bega rabbit

   Busting with oestrogen

You’re not a tattoo parlour I don’t care

Whether your machinery of encryption is clean or dirty

Willn’t ye come to the buttabone factory dances with me?  It’s

                                          A dancing country.

 

 

 

 

 Bunratteen.

 

Bless yes the steamin’ blasphemers whaeve been busy since before the dawn

Colonial pokerheads

Baronial speculators                      maggot excelsior

\ Deliver me asecret name to be saying in sing sing’s electric chair

Riding old sparky

                              Only our belated criminal career will set us free   ..lordy

 

I got my Nips caught in the Lipple of the Soft-serve Machine

‘Jersusalem the Golden!’ was the worst of Paddy Hartnett’s swears

Why not ‘Lim’rick the Golden’?                     that blashphemy

                                                           Would be too great

Your eyeshadow like your attitude a shade too smokey

     You shape-shiftin’ little beauty

Yeave tastebuds all the way to the asshole my friend

Vive la vie gastronomique!

 

 

T’only took a week to get my headbone back from the pawnbrokers

Now replaced on the shoulders’ mantle it looks a bit RABBIDY, driven like it was stolen

The instinct of course is to blame someone else: mindies, terrifying fairies

                                                         Fleish-hackers           tumblebugs

  The brothel madame capitalism

Blood sports and rambling go hand in hand like it’s the nineteenth century

O won’t you be my Bunratty District Bitch?

 

Your paramour has a mean streak the size and shape of the Diamantina River

 Or is it the Finke

                             Abalone shells for eyes or are they ovaries

                             Crossing the dancefloor toward you in that old shimmy fertility

Sunset perpetual of the gorgeous human flea

 

Hearing the complaint of a complex parasite

 You smile the smile of the parasite supreme

 

 

 

 

 

 Gloria Infame

 

Me ma’s head pops out of the turf

Spewing dainty lines of satanic verse

 

I still want to buy a set of spurs obviously & if they previously

     Belonged to George Gordon Lord Byron all to the good

 

Many still do not appreciate the asshole as charm

Just as they don’t want a wink from the Gorgoneion

 

Yet here ‘I’ am: a simple brain attached to a coupla

Dougal Beattys- the one Baroque th’other Rococo

 

Lookin to unload some languid coal into the Belpaire Firebox

It’s not fair to be anything other than everywhere

 

Three is the number of hundreds of Dollars

I’d gave some juicy thug to persuade the smile straight offyer face

 

All dandies are ‘Regency’ darling just as the guillotine

Belongs to the sensations of Parisian street fashions

 

Madame Stepping Lightning appears in those superb pants

Whose design thrills through massive elocutions of dream-lace

 

AI like your rat-bagged teen-aged daughter Coco started early

Making her own decisions: some cheeky some quiet some catastrophic

 

The winkles the periwinkles bastard clams and sea

-cramps    start sucking up their terrifying shanty

 

Those legendary creeps of the intertidal zone should all

Be buttr’d    garlic’d   n  eat’n by            MOI

 

I wants to offend .. wait.. I want to spend my fiftieth astride

The she-wolf at midnite under the blackvelvet sky of the forum

 ROMA  SPQR

 

The cat loves it when we sing Yves Montand

The dog loves it when we stab her in the corker

 

& both    my bonny cretins

Are the staves of civilisation

 

‘the worlds beyond this world’s perplexing waste

 Had more of her existence’ saith our noted brat of metaphysics

 

S’was worth it now to hang around for the ripening subbtleties

Th’intricacies of the Horns of Pan        the dark calm of the perfect cherry

 

The brassy breezes of the south across ma pubes

The kind of cult I’m dreaming of when you mention    Dopamining

 

Being feminism’s Trident Bitch you are condemned to a rhetoric

that is roundly prickly to skewer each encumbent Prick

 

Venom wants to fly out of these fangs, a condition called

      Blueballs of the Rattlesnake bags

                                                           

 

What acheth and acheth to cry    delambis, Soft feminine, a little masculine

                     This floats on the lips

‘It’ has no choice due to the cheeky ministering of the daemon at your front door

                 We danced in every way frolicsomely..

 

The industrial sacrament of the zincworks looks as fine

As any other votive offering I’ve seen monsieur ‘balls on the rampage’

Fight-fucking or fuck-fighting yea it’s ‘good’ Friday

                                                    Again

 

 

 

 Ye goat-suckers

                                                                                          

Write me an email: dbhose@gmail.com

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