Garth Dutton

Night Without Moon, Then With Moon – A Poem

“Night Without Moon, Then With Moon” is the opening poem in “A Day In Melbourne” a book of poetry written in a 24 hour period while at a conference in Melbourne.

Night Without Moon, Then With Moon
© Garth Dutton 2004

Beyond Tailem Bend,
seen through the window of
the night bus to Melbourne,
stars hang suspended,
bright, clear,
in a very black sky.
If the stars were music,
they’d be up-front in the mix.
But at Bordertown,
a half-moon comes up,
its bright side
pointing east to the morning sun.
When I was a child,
it took years
to work that one out…
Before full moon
the lighted part points west
to the setting sun.
After full moon,
the lighted part points east
to the rising sun.
Weird, even now…
Like how,
at full moon,
as the sun goes down
the moon comes up.
As I say,
weird, even now…
The blackness of night has gone.
The half-moon
now fills the sky
with silvery-creamness.
Only the brightest stars
survive.

Tags: adelaide, garth dutton, melbourne, poem, poet, Poetry, verse

A Sign Of The Times (Parts 1-3) – A Poem

In November 2004, I went to Melbourne for an ‘alternative economics’ conference. I went by night bus from Adelaide, and arrived at 8.00 a.m. in the morning. The conference didn’t start till 7.30 p.m., so I had all day to do sightseeing by bus and train and I documented the day as poems.

The book was published in May 2005.

A Sign Of The Times (Part 1)
© 2004 Garth Dutton

At Frankston Shopping Centre
a sign of the times.
Three shops in a row…
A St. Vincent de Paul Centre
set between
a shop selling new & used surfboards
& another
marketing virtual reality.

A Sign Of The Times (Part 2)
© 2004 Garth Dutton

At Highett
on the Frankston line,
beyond a graffiti laden
back fence,
women in white
play lawn bowls
on immaculate greens.

A Sign Of The Times (Part 3)
© 2004 Garth Dutton

A sign on a wall says
“FIGHT POWER – NOT EACH OTHER.”
Another says
“BRITISH ARMY OUT OF IRELAND.”
Another says
“EDUCATION?”
Wonder what they mean by that?
All the rest are ‘tags.’
No… Hang on…
Some more slogans come into sight.
“MEAT IS MURDER”,
“MUTATE NOW – AVOID THE RUSH”,
“DESTROY THA SYSTEM”.
(Yes, it was spelled T H A.)
“WORK, CONSUME, BE SILENT, DIE”.
That’s It!
The rest are ‘tags’ like
EPIC…PNO…ZONA…POPS…
“In” messages for the initiated.

Tags: australia, garth dutton, melbourne, poems, poet, Poetry

The Blue Tongue Lizard Diet – Report One

The Blue Tongue Lizard Diet.
(Defeating Permanent Weight Gain Caused By Psychiatric Drugs.)
By Garth Dutton.

Report One.

I was first classified as suffering from a mental illness in mid-1995. The diagnosis was ‘garbage’. I had just released my first book of poems called “A Day In Melbourne”, and I showed it to a psychiatrist. Simple as that. In the previous November, I had managed to write 42 poems in one day, that was all it took.

I had reached Melbourne by overnight bus from Adelaide at 8.00 am, and I had all day to spare before I attended an ‘alternative economics’ conference in the evening at Melbourne University. So I decided to see some of the parts of Melbourne I hadn’t seen before. I also decided to try and write some poems called ‘A Day in Melbourne’ as it might sell well there if I wrote enough for a book of them.

So I went by train to Frankston and wrote a series of poems about what there was at various stations and occasionally what there was to see between stations. It was easy. All the poems were short and the first drafts came out perfectly.

I did snatches of Zen meditation now and again to keep a calm relaxed focus when I was observing, and then writing down. Whilst having morning tea in a café at Frankston, I decided to combine all the short poems written on the train into a long narrative poem that is ‘episodic’. I had a full hour and a half in Frankston so I had time to walk to the beach, where I wrote a few more poems.

I then caught the train back to Melbourne and set out on another journey to Belgrave at the south of the Dandenongs, then up and over that range by bus coming out at Lilydale on the northern line, and then back to Melbourne by train late in the afternoon.

As the number of poems written grew I decided to try to write 42, as I had just finished reading The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the week before. In that book 42 was the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything.’ Once I had set the goal I managed to achieve it without difficulty, as everything I had seen on my journeys was new and interesting, and the conference was very good indeed. So had plenty to write about.

No-one in Adelaide had any interest in a book about Melbourne, but it did do quite well there.

With the book I made one catastrophic mistake I am still paying for. I showed a copy of my newly published book to a psychiatrist I had to see once every six months to keep my Public Service pension going. I showed it to him because I was proud of it, and I explained in full about how I had written it.

To my horror, he didn’t believe a word I said. He flicked through the book without actually reading a single poem, then announced,

“It is inconceivable that anyone could write 42 poems in one day unless they were on a ‘manic high’. Bi-polar disorder. Mental illness!”

He put me into a psychiatric hospital, where I was forcibly put onto Lithium Carbonate. I had been 75 kgs for twenty years till then, but on that drug I went up to 106 kgs in 18 months. As of 30th April 2008 I still weighed 106 kgs, and the prospects of ever finding a partner for the rest of my life seemed zero.

All sorts of diets and even a ‘gutbusters’ course had failed.

I decided to use my own way of reducing the weight, based on the annual slow but steady weight loss of the blue tongue lizard, my totem animal in Australia. They semi-hibernate for some of the year in Adelaide’s climate. I decided to do the same.

The results so far have been very good. My G.P. Dr. Dianne Walker is supervising my diet and I got the following information on my weight loss from her on 4th November 2008.

30/4/08 – 106 kgs
6/6/08 – 103 kgs
16/7/08 – 100 kgs
13/8/08 – 99 kgs
10/10/08 – 95 kgs
4/11/08 – 93 kgs

Weight loss so far = 13 kgs in six months.

The diet works! Yippee! More reports will follow. I am now working on my first ‘diet book’. I have 18 kgs of weight loss to go to get back to 75 kgs. At the present rate I should make it in 8 or 9 months. Then I’ll publish my‘diet book’.

So many people are affected by permanent weight gain caused by psychiatric drugs that it should be a best seller.

Tags: Diet, garth dutton, melbourne, mental illness