Robert Adamson - The Flow Through: for the Johns lyrics

We loved the front, your wall of words, and the fact that snatches made sense to the professors. We read The Double Dream Of Spring on a jetty that sloped into Sydney harbour and argued fiercely about whether it was the way to go, as if we could have imitated your logarithms of the soul. We tied knots in your tangles, tendrils of phrases that wound their way around the page. Those were the days we exist in now nothing made sense because living took the the edge off our mental fishing knives, we hacked through time as if it existed. Gaping holes in space, we filled them with sentences stitched together with a grammar that was streetwise, nothing made much sense and your impeccable manners got us through the gates. The mix of sweetness and a ferocity that could burn holes was the quality I learnt from Some Trees, those poems were places I made friends in, I remember Tranter standing in some cla**room reading them, and his laughter that was edged with irony and kindness. Ashbery Days where poets were drunk on codes within codes, where we cracked language open and discovered the power of whimsy and a dark abyss where you could live in the absurd knowledge of d**h.