I think H has just worked out the things I like to hear. I think he is just faking his transformation and his reconnection with the natural world. I don’t know if he really feels this way about the little pea sprouts or if he is just pissing in my pocket again.
The Sleepers Almanac
David Davis at Coldpigeon Dot Com
Meredi Ortega
There were a lot of people in the world named David Davis but David Davis had got in early, he had snaffled DavidDavis at Coldpigeon dot com before anyone else. Consequently, all the David-come-latelies had to choose names that were not their own but close approximations or name-scrap stews such as davidavis and dddaviddavis and david.daviddavis.davis42 at Coldpigeon dot com. There were countless varieties of David Davis but there was only one David Davis. He was the precursor and when he logged into his mail, he took some comfort in knowing he had not compromised himself, at least in regard to his name. It was something.
As the Coldpigeon webmail service grew, David began receiving emails intended for other Davids. The people who sent them thought they were sending them to their own particular Davids but, in reading the scrawl on the back of a docket or in half remembering the email address they had been given, they omitted the full stops or the extra ds or the numbers which differentiated their Davids from the first one.
To begin with, David Davis blocked these senders and relegated their misdirected mail to his Deleted Items and Junk folders but as time passed he began to read them and even to hold on to them. He didn’t receive many personal emails and when he watched the pigeon icon flapping its wings during Send and Receive and did not perceive the cooing sound which accompanied new messages in his Inbox, he felt a sad emptiness in his stomach. So when a message did appear, though not meant for him, it was easy to pretend it was his, especially as its salutation so often began with ‘Hi David.’
‘Hi David.’ As time passed he not only read and held on to these emails but he began to reply to them. He didn’t reply in a helpful manner in the way that, for instance, a person might inform someone they had dialled the wrong number. When he received an email reminding him about a Christmas party at the home of Pastor John and Debra in Dallas, Texas, from a woman named Carol, he replied, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
From: Carol
Sent: Wednesday, 8 December 2010 9:39 AM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Re: Christmas Party Reminder
What does that mean?
Blessings
Carol
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Monday, 13 December 2010 2:29 PM
To: Carol
Subject: Re: Christmas Party Reminder
It means stop sending me this junk.
David
From: Carol
Sent: Wednesday, 15 December 2010 12:15 AM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Re: Christmas Party Reminder
OK, Mr Davis, are you saying that information regarding the ministry that you work in and the church that you attend is junk?
I hope you are having a truly blessed day!
Carol
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Thursday, 16 December 2010 2:43 PM
To: Carol
Subject: Re: Christmas Party Reminder
That’s right. Christmas parties, churches, Jesus. They are all forms of spam.
David
David didn’t hear back from Carol but the exchange left him wanting more. It gave him a warm, treacly feeling which he hadn’t felt since he was seven, a golden age when he believed he could will lightning storms and electrical blackouts. And again he wanted to see what havoc he could unleash from his fingertips, along the cable, shooting up then down from a satellite in the sky. It was conceivable that he could ruin the life of another David Davis, an inferior copy, on the other side of the world. And why not, if it created a little diversion in the day-to-day minutiae of specifications, calculations, data sheets, vendors and clients, meetings, cup after cup of milky tea? It wasn’t like steaming open envelopes and reading other people’s mail.
For one thing, it was easier. Electric kettles were problematic because they turned themselves off when they had a good jet of steam going and then there were the inevitable little scalds that occurred if you held the envelope at the wrong angle. Also, you didn’t want the ink to run. A tricky business and when you tried to put the flap back as it was, it never really looked as unopened as it had, prior to being opened. Especially not to the person who had opened it, their perspective probably altered by the knowledge that it had in fact been opened. Although his ex-wife had never seemed to notice. And that was the other problem. Christ, it was bor-ing. There was never any illicit love letter containing erotic photos or a statement from a secret bank account in Luxembourg. It was always a reminder for her annual check-up at the dentist or a special discount on tents at a camping shop where she’d bought one white enamel mug last century.
Certainly, he opened his fair share of uninteresting emails intended for other Davids: a tennis academy urging him to come along and burn calories at cardio drills to The Sound of Music and a request for him to bring along his secateurs and trim lilly-pillies at a primary school working bee. Didn’t schools have gardeners anymore and how could anyone work up a sweat to Edelweiss? Sometimes, an email was only humdrum to begin with, until he breathed some life into it. He received a picture of a large vase sitting on a faux column.
From: Julie Brown
Sent: Thursday, 13 January 2011 4:22 AM
Subject: Mum
I got this one.
Julie
Sent from my iPhone
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Thursday, 13 January 2011 6:47 PM
To: Julie Brown
Subject: Re: Mum
Don’t tell me you actually paid money for that. It looks like a spittoon. She will hate it.
David
From: Julie Brown
Sent: Friday, 14 January 2011 4:02 AM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Re: Mum
I paid 4 it but the money is cmng out of the estate. Since U couldn’t B bothered cmng here 4 the funeral I don’t think U have the right 2B choosy about the urn. What would U know about what Mum liked since U always sent her gerberas and she Fking hated gerberas.
Julie
Sent from my iPhone
He looked at the picture again and noticed the vase had a lid. All the same, it sounded as though that David Davis deserved a good kick up the pants for not going to his mum’s funeral, what a piece of low life. Still, he couldn’t resist sending one more mail.
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Friday, 14 January 2011 7:25 PM
To: Julie Brown
Subject: Re: Mum
Just so you know. Mum said I was always her favourite.
David
From: Julie Brown
Sent: Saturday, 15 January 2011 4:47 AM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Re: Mum
Just so U know. Mum always said U were a mistake and yr real dad was Uncle Bob.
Julie
Sent from my iPhone
Yes, he still had lightning in his fingers as he ended friendships, had people sacked, meeting places changed, reputations ruined, the whole while remaining outside it all like a faceless god. Sometimes people would confer in real life and realise they had been deceived and they would send him angry and threatening emails about their imaginary lawyers who they claimed were going to sue his sorry ass off. Americans mainly, but what could they in fact do? They had emailed him, after all and he
had only replied. They didn’t know who he was, only that he was David Davis and there were a lot of them in the world. Too many, it sometimes seemed.
From: Stefanie
Sent: Sunday, 20 February 2011 2:39 PM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: picnic
Hi Dave
OK I will bring blankets to sit on. What food are you bringing?
Cheers
Stef
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Monday, 21 February 2011 10:22 AM
To: Stefanie
Subject: Re: picnic
Stef
I will bring a sheep’s head.
Dave
From: Mathew
Sent: Thursday, 17 March 2011 9:09 PM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Davis Mountain Cottages
Hi David
We have booked a cottage with you in Nov. Is it possible to upgrade it to a deluxe cottage?
thanks
Mathew
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Friday, 18 March 2011 11:18 AM
To: Mathew
Subject: Re: Davis Mountain Cottages
Hi Mathew
That is no problem. I will make sure you have the one with the toilet seat.
David
He smiled when he opened a mail which greeted him with ‘Hey Tiger.’ It was Jessica telling him she thought they could make this whole long distance thing work. She told him that if two people were meant to be together then a two-hour flight was not such a big deal and she was counting down the weeks. She then startled the under-utilised X button by firing off a barrage of kisses. He typed ‘Hey Gorgeous’ and told her how he likewise thought it could work with the proviso that they could still see other people because maybe they were meant to be together but then maybe he was meant to be with Kelly or Angela or Rachel. Oh, he nearly forgot Melissa. He didn’t want to rule anyone out at this stage and he signed off with ‘I love you heaps, too’ and clicked Send. He wondered if he’d changed the future. Perhaps they were going to marry and have children and perhaps, with one click of a button, he’d deleted their prospective children and their children’s lives and all that would have branched from them. If two people were meant to be together, that’s what she’d said. He wasn’t just designing gas platforms and refineries and filling out tag numbers for valves like his colleagues. He was engineering destiny. His fingers tingled at the thought. Another mail deposited in his Inbox.
From: Erasmus Erastus
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 12:47 PM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Poetry Symposium
Hi David
I don’t know if you will remember me but we spoke recently at the Poetry Symposium. You said you would be happy to give me some feedback on my work. Thank you for your generosity. Please find a poem attached. Please feel free to be critical.
Kind regards
Erasmus
Poetry, snorted David. He opened the attachment. It was titled a poem for emergencies and it began, ‘away from the road / cast anchor in a hard place / slide your music box / your well sweep / under the unloved / jester of gilbert.’ Plainly it was poetry because it was complete gibberish. He didn’t finish reading it.
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 1:25 PM
To: Erasmus Erastus
Subject: Re: Poetry Symposium
Erasmus
This poem seems like it was written by a Vogan. Are you from the planet Vogsphere by any chance?
David
From: Erasmus Erastus
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 2:05 PM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Re: Poetry Symposium
David
I confess I am a little bit surprised by the harshness of your response. Would you care to elaborate? Something constructive would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.
Regards
Erasmus
David looked at the poem again, ‘unmask the hub, brace / each honeycomb / left and loose / raise it higher / - release - / that which gyves / the orb to its gyre.’ Seriously, what claptrap. He was annoyed at himself for even reading the second stanza, for wasting his time on this wally with the stupid name. Erasmus Erastus. He’d made that name up. Two similar names like David Davis except anyone could tell David Davis was a real name whereas Erasmus Erastus sounded like a stage name for a second-rate magician. Except the only things he made disappear, apparently, were upper case letters and full stops. What a sad act. David clasped his fingers together, stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles. A blue electrostatic discharge sparked from his fingertips.
From: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 2:15 PM
To: Erasmus Erastus
Subject: Re: Poetry Symposium
Erasmus
The only way this poem could be useful in an emergency is if you were lost in the wilderness and you had a flint and steel but no tinder. In this scenario, your poem could start a cracking good fire.
David
From: Erasmus Erastus
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 3:03 PM
To: DavidDavis@Coldpigeon.com
Subject: Re: Poetry Symposium
David
I had no idea my poem was that bad. I think it must be the medication I’m on. It takes away the lows but it also takes away the highs. Maybe it makes my poetry middling, too. I think I was better without it. Thank you for your time.
Erasmus
So Erasmus Erastus the poet was depressed. How clichéd. But still, David was drawn to look at the poem again. The third and fourth stanzas were nonsense as well, ‘find a notch / on the forbidden fruit / slit a drink-straw hole / sting like a biro bee.’ What was he on about? Why couldn’t Erasmus just say what he wanted to say in plain English like a normal person? David tried to put the strange poem out of his mind but it kept teasing him like a puzzle. Random lines intruded into his thoughts, ‘bring the fifth / to the four.’ What did it mean? The fifth what and why four? He tossed and turned in bed that night with the lines ‘a pen that does not breathe / will need a rekindled heart.’
Perhaps poems came from the same place as dreams because when he awoke, he realised with sudden clarity that the poem contained instructions on how to change a flat tyre and perform an emergency tracheotomy. Of course, if you were changing a flat tyre, the poem was only going to confuse matters if you had left-threaded wheel nuts, more than four or decagon-shaped wheel nuts. No matter, now he wished he’d written something along the lines of, ‘The only way this poem could be useful during a tracheotomy would be if it was rolled into a tube.’ How he wished he’d written that instead of the one about tinder!
*
A week later, it was the name that leapt out at him from an online news site. There it was again, that implausible name, Erasmus Erastus. David winced at the part where he’d jumped off a bridge. A promising undergraduate in creative writing. Really, you could get a degree in that? People got degrees in anything these days, surfing and wine tasting. Nice for some. Except not this time. No, well, you had to have thick skin to be a writer. You couldn’t throw yourself off a bridge every time someone looked at you the wrong way. Hardly his fault. Erasmus had said, hadn’t he, ‘Please feel free to be critical.’ David tried to think about how a poem might be useful in that sort of emergency, the sort where you were jumping from a bridge. He could have written something else to Erasmus, something helpful, ‘The only way this poem could be useful in an emergency is if you held it above your head like an umbrella and held on to it for dear life.’ He’d just needed enough drag to slow his f
all like that barmaid who was saved by her crinoline. But then again he probably hadn’t printed it out, hadn’t made it real. Also, A4 encompassed a fairly small surface area and in any event, Erasmus had jumped from an overpass. It was useless really, the poem. He’d been right all along. He was going to dwell on it some more when he was distracted by the soothing sound of a cooing pigeon. He had mail. Oh look, it was Carol from Dallas again, inviting him to a prayer meeting. All was forgiven.
The Raid on Australian Poetry
Alan Gould
‘Here, Australian poets, I will like you to sleep off your night with the gravestones.’ Branca showed us through their apartment. ‘Then please, I will like it if you come to our big conference and ask the exploding questions. Your name-tags I will arrange, it is easy.’
Honoured, we said, and marvelled at our luck.
Their rooms were peculiarly sumptuous given the austerity common to both poetry and communist regimes. Lofty ceilings were decorated with plaster moldings of swains and maidens. A kitchenette and a narrow balcony above the Rio Santa Moisé both came off the wide parlour, while two bedrooms, each furnished with a double bed of modern wrought metal and spread high with snowy doonas and several scarlet-covered pillows, were placed discreetly on a corridor.
‘I see what you think of us.’ Branca was apologetic. ‘Here are two communist women who enjoy the pretty good fortune with International Poetry.’
‘Good luck to you, I reckon.’
‘Poetry is like the socialism,’ she continued quickly. ‘It has no national borders.’