Free Smoke Encrypted Whispers by Samuel Wagan Watson Page A

cry, reeling us in ... te hongi, te haka and the elders, all waiting to meet us, ‘We knew your spirits were out there ... we’ve known that you’ve always been out there. Welcome home.’
    On my first reading in a Wellington bar, I was caught in a reef of wordplay. Some words jagged, some soft; this poetry of allsorts. And as I floated a multitude of coloured smiles played with me. Smiles like schools of small, beautiful fish. This bartender, with a grin as wide as a semi-trailer, kept me stocked on a good Australian red—‘Your money’s no good here, Bro!’

author’s notes #3
    I remember one of my first jobs. I was published in a magazine with a bunch of established writers, most of them with several novels under their belt, whilst I had a handful of unpublished poems. As contributors to this certain issue, we were all invited to read at an official launch. I’d only read once before, in a small art gallery on the Gold Coast, and there I was, amongst a group of writers with their short stories and articles, about to perform in my first literary cabaret. I had only one poem in the magazine. I had one shot. The stage lights were bright, like I was shooting straight into the sun. I picked my target. He was the biggest, most obnoxious-looking punter in the audience; a man who sipped his Chardonnay with the air of someone well-read and cultured. Each writer before me had read with spirit and arrogance. I breathed easy, and squeezed the poem out gently. I had this punter’s blank face in my cross-hairs and as the poem hit its conclusion, his complexion exploded in sheer appreciation. Applause followed. I hit my target. One message, one story, one stanza.

the dust company
    It was labelled a ‘meteorological anomaly’, a dust cloud red banking the southeast Queensland sky; afternoon a crimson dusk. Inspecting Boundary Street, the air lathered rouge, the view distorted beyond the tunnel’s arch of Dornoch Terrace. While in the house, the television showed similar dust storms: American artillery barrages in the hills of Afghanistan. Presented with the cobble stones and rustic mortar around Boundary Street’s bridge, I am also drawn elsewhere, my mind inspired by Victorian architecture and Jack the Ripper’s dark paved streets shrouded in mist. Through filters of red dust, I imagine his fog-tainted whispers, ‘Catch me if you can?!’ But this is not London, this is far from Afghanistan ... though red dust fills the air that is occupied by Osama Bin Laden’s phantom and George Bush Jnr has got everybody by the tongue.
    our world is clouded,
    the dust smiles evenly,
    who is friend or foe?

from boundary street, west end, to the berlin wall, east germany
0.1
    In East Berlin, I lost my fear of the dark, as easily as someone who might lose their passport or a shade of identity that has defined them for so long. I did not hear any whispers here. I met Nick Cave’s stick-insect babies fingering the grey palette of the streets; every shade of grey was alive! The kill-zones were left bare, these blocks of dirt where the landmines had been removed like an unfinished pock-marked canvas of Western Desert dot-paintings. Boundary Street, West End, was our Berlin Wall, lavish signs depicting the redundancy of ghosts.
0.2
    Concrete sentinels stand to attention on both sides of Karl Marx Allee. The old headquarters of these secrets and those secrets, reminding me of the midden-mounds back home, shell upon shell, where the great chiefs once feasted, discarding the charges of their hunger. In East Berlin, I began to renovate my Dreamtime, stripping the veneer of my engine room and all the skins of my past. A journalist welcomed me home(?) ‘If you have one drop of German blood, you are ALL German!’ And it was as casual and as sure as being black, like I’d never left the placebo of Boundary Street.
0.3
    From Boundary Street, West End, to the Berlin Wall, East