Barnaby Smith

Barnaby Smith is a poet, critic, journalist and musician living on Darug and Gundungurra land in New South Wales, Australia. Recent work has appeared in journals or anthologies such as Stand, Blackbox Manifold, 3AM, Best Australian Poems, Tentacular and Ranger, as well as Cordite, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, and more. He is an award-winning art and music critic, and records music under the name Brigadoon, having released the album, Itch Factor, in 2020. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

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hearing things

cicadas alive

or transparent dead

audition through obscure hours

clutched by two

maybe three fingers

a drone of springtime music / the om of childhood—

here we’ve given up on illumination

just the breaking churn of diurnal excitement

offers the hint of entropy

which only happens in space

& time

back in the house England’s waking up

with its dim trees that stretch across

distant collapsed motorways—

instead let’s talk more

with the afternoon’s

edgeless industrial

noise, by now

in the folds of flesh

then i urge you to go on in

before our relationship with time evolves,

beds in—

why risk it all withdrawing

into mere landscape, instead of

primal, blurry curvatures &

spontaneous nothing

the day’s already antiquated

by the time that miracle

of anarchic simplicity

cuts out with a leap—in a space between oblivious scrub

& Northamptonshire—

leading to questions about maps

& early separations

                       this may be a close, flutterless night

shallow & ghostless for a while

                       but a journey nonetheless

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Tangier rumbles

         often it doesn’t feel like a moment   

watching foreign news all day

         splayed out

under the chant of AV                           

         instead of thirty minutes on the pavements      

            with those same sounds refracted         

                     from ceramic houses—

nothing is walled in

                     & time’s distension

                                            stalls

the chant of AV / the same sounds

are slowing

half-built hotels on wasteland

outskirts—

mortars & blocks

specimens of some black market

existing uninterrupted, invulnerable

         so i climbed out of the ocean

for this: patient cities that just carry on

         once you’ve left them—

                 it’s worth going south apparently

         where some scattered world remains

              away from all these theories

                        & their common hunger

i think now

walking is the extent of things—

        time to know the crowd’s intricacies,

                to disturb the Strait’s grand gesture

        with directionless adrenaline,

& let it drain eventually

to new dregs

            so the drone of a place

            can build again

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