The Perfect Diary is in a week-to-an-opening format, with a work by a contemporary Australasian artist or writer featured every week.

Below you can find the works by our contributors that appeared in the months of April, May and June of The Perfect Diary 2005.

You can see works from previous months and years by using the links at the bottom of this page.

Ben Walker the leaf

I Think I’m Falling in Love With My Tattooist

I keep getting tattoos without letting on to my wife
the artist’s name is Rae, I love that name
also her perfume, mixed with the Bepanthen cream
soap and alcohol, her plaited brown hair
her brown skin scattered with tiny pictures
orange, pink, green, yellow and black
and today she is telling another female artist
she is so hot to see her boyfriend
he’s been in Darwin a month
she’ll bang him in the car
on their way back from the airport
then they’re off down the coast for a week
her kids will be with her mum.
As I go she says the colour in the one before this
hasn’t taken, perhaps it’s my skin
some are better
“Come back in two or three weeks
when this one’s healed
and then I can touch both of them up.”
“I will, I will!” as I move towards the door
trying to think of something more intelligent
to say.

John West

Long weekend
(for M.)

it was a long weekend
but a short relationship
we courted on Thursday night
amongst the yobs at a bar in Bondi
by Friday we’d decided
to live like husband and wife
& were married by the Captain
of a house boat on Sydney Harbour
we spent all Saturday
on our honeymoon in Dulwich Hill
but by Sunday we’d separated
and filed for divorce
& late that night
we moved on with our lives
& by Monday
you’d gone back to your boyfriend
& I just checked the calendar
for the next long weekend

Benito di Fonzo

Sex in a Country Train

It opened its doors
in a wide welcome, enveloped
us in the warm embrace
of a private compartment.
We closed the shutters, remained
blind to the rush of the world beyond.
Our passion burnt, eclipsed
the sun and the moon,
rose and dipped
like the rhythm and rattle
over hill and dale, lulling us
into a dozy oneness.
Later,
we wandered down the corridor, returned
to the cramped compartment
opened the shutters, raised the window.
Mist-grey air freshened our faces.
With narrowed eye
I wondered about the word
shabby.

Dawn Bruce

John Douglas 'Meudon' to Sydney Heads

You
(For Melissa C.)

you with your eyes like a chess set
the eyes of a wise young girl
eyes of two eclipsed suns eyes of an owl
you with your neck like wine
like a river like a peach
you with the hands of a witness
with the hands of a frustrated housewife
the hands of a retired fortune-teller
you with feet of cream feet of a queen
you with breasts of the moon and of clouds and of sparks
you with breasts that dream when i stroke your spine
you with temples like feathers like a new-born baby
and your mouth of berries mouth of a playground
you with your mouth of a disciple
you with your back like basking sand-dunes
you with the throat of doves throat of blood
you with the legs of a bacchic hunter
you with arms like a saucer of milk
with arms like open fields
you with wrists of flowers and of diamonds
you with the waist of an avalanche
you with the sex of darkness of rock of waves
you with the hair of forests and of sleep

micro-climate

for almost a year I’ve listened to your songs
light leaking from your doorway
and I’ve swallowed your moods like pills
as if I could diminish the bruises
it’s cold outside and the sun sinks apologetic and grey
I think of flamingo skies and then
close the door to my room
I don’t want you to look in my direction
I like peeking sideways in our kitchen.

Leanne Hall

MORNING SONG III

The flowers in the vase clench into a gang of fists
in the night, in time with your teeth which despite dog-twitch
and murmuring eyelids hold tight onto dream stuff all night.
                                 Our sleep is a secret

choreography in moon-time; a slow borrowing of arms and legs;
heads usurped from their daylight sovereignty by axis-backs
as we roll like sea rocks in the tide.
                                 Morning comes and the flowers

unfurl in time with your body-knot tied with boy scout skill;
in time with my tea-steaming.
                                 Love is so apparent in the morning.

It is a life-throe like a death-throe; the two-stomached ant
(one for the self and one for sharing);
                                 a whole night's gleaning

of potatoes abandoned by the harvest and misshaped as hearts.


Lu Holt

Bettina Kaiser
Childhood omen, foreboding my future life in Australia acrylic on paper

I love that
          airport-headiness.
That heightened-emotioned
          thickening
          of the airless, too-conditioned air,
that suspendedness.

The departing business men
          buying for their wives
lacy contrition in a C-cup
          in lingerie boutiques;
the arriving business men
          getting knickered-out
with racy, flimsy things
          for mistresses.

The over-stuffed toy koalas
          wielding giant felt gum leaves
          like weapons
the over-sized ken done T-shirts
the over-priced chocolate boxes
          that won't pass through customs anyway.

The bent-backed,
          dragging baggage
          almost bigger than themselves.
The red-faced weeping,
          the hysterical hugs.
Those in-transit,
          groany-limbed and grating-jointed
          on impossibly hard plastic chairs,
flicked-through glossy magazined
          and soft-washed-over walkmanned,
bored brain-dead,
          glass-eyedly inert,
even the children too listless
          to pull at each other's hair
          or ask if they're nearly there-

that waiting,
all that waiting,
time taxiing past
          so slowly by the tarmac,
all that waiting.

The mad mingling-
          the turbans
          the urbanites
          the backpackers
          the briefcases
the strange music
          of muddled-in languages,
that irrelevance
          of origin, and destination,
that suspension.

That suspendedness
          between arriving and departing
in bigger cities
and broader lives-

That all-portending
          airport-headiness
          I love.

Fiona Wright

2003 January February & March, April, May & June, July, August & September, October, November & December,