You tell me who isn't a whore in this town
Who hasn't plucked some hair for the punters?
Poured themselves into straitened pants?
Who hasn't cashed a few chips at the bottom
still hoping for a higher bid
rattled the hips once or twice to entice?
The place is given to deals half struck
The street too narrow for its horns
I myself have a costume for streetcorners
The subtle overt is my style
mustn't let on the swagger's all front
I'm the kind of cop
whose pencil grows blunt
with the weight of their stares
Christopher Kelen is an Australian poet whose first volume of poetry, The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees, won an Anne Elder Award in 1992. Since then, he's been widely published and honored (including a stint as Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting Library in Rome). In 2000, his poetry/art collaboration (with Carol Archer) Tai Mo Shan (Big Hat Mountain) was exhibited at the Montblanc Gallery in Hong Kong's Fringe Club. Another collaboration (essay and watercolour) titled Shui Yi Meng (Sleep to Dream) was shown at the Montblanc Gallery in 2001. In 2005, Kelen's long poem Macao was
shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize and a re-edited version of
Tai Mo Shan appeared in Southerly. Kelen's most recent volume
of poems is Eight Days in Lhasa (VAC, 2006). A new volume of Macao poems, Dredging the
Delta, is forthcoming from Cinnamon Press in the U.K. Kelen is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he serves as the principal investigator in the University of Macau's Poems and Stories of Macao Research Project. He is also the editor of the journal Writing Macao: Creative Text and Teaching .
