Percy Haynes Has A Rare Win
1935
Dressed as a woman
because it made me
feel good about myself,
and anything for a lark,
I went window shopping
in Melbourne
then went to the pictures.
Oh the romance
of being Ginger Rogers
as the dashing Fred Astaire
swept me around the dance floor
in Top Hat.
Ever on the alert
two detectives followed me
home on the tram
and arrested me
at the gate
in front of the neighbours.
The judge, bless him,
threw the case out.
If a woman, he argued,
could wear jodhpurs,
he saw no reason
why a man
couldn’t wear a dress.
I could have kissed him.
A Policeman’s Report
1939
Usually we don’t know the person
whose done themself in,
but this one was different.
Turns out that this bloke
was Jack Dale, the famous
American singer and composer.
We found him dead
in a St. Kilda flat, a suicide note
next to the body.
To whom it may concern
it began, then he mentioned
the three people in his life
who mattered the most, who he’d lost
to death,
to marriage,
to his own unfaithfulness.
But no names, no pronouns.
Without these people, he said,
I have nothing to live for.
‘Truth’ had a field day.
70 Pound A Week Star Whistler’s
Queer Note Before End.
Readers knew what they meant.
BIO
Rob Wallis’s fifth collection, ‘Caught Jesting’, was published by Birdfish Books. His poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies both in Australia and overseas. He has won the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award and the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize. He has been shortlisted twice for the Fish Publishing International Poetry Competition, Dublin, the Bridport Prize, UK, and the ACU Prize for Poetry.
