Starbuck Again

Dear Anthony Lawrence,

I know you are aware of my identity, let's say you are playing with the margins in the conventions of email.  Let's say you know I have decoded the fibres of genetic rip rap along the biopaths of the red analogues, the switching devices, the mirrors on the side of a hairtail, the engrams of taste in a frozen pilchard, the swinging gates in the mind of the Red K as he considers his own broken world. “The Red K” -  as soon as the name is out, Bill Wisley picks up his slime-coated plank and walks down the board-walk of Griffo's cafe, towards the sinking pontoon. The locals have come to know him as Angry Bill over the last year or so. The hyphen in the blood, the unhinging of the beak of a cuttlefish, the ink sac of a Broken Bay squid, face to face with the Red K, looking into the red-rimmed eyes, the unshaven jaw still jabbering about the necessity of vegetation and brown rice. You utter the one hard-bodied word: 'flesh' and turn your back as the Red K rattles away over the vast salt lakes and empty sky of his imagination. It's all a pale sham in the cold twilight of a winter's night on the river. You know who I am, there will be a rapping at your bedroom window before dawn and it will be the blunt end of my new chemically sharpened ABU gaff-hook.

I am sitting at Adamson' computer. Let's say I have dealt with him.

Yours

Frank Starbuck

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Okay Starbuck

this isn't Adam Aitken or Joanne Burns or PiO. It's not Billy Marshall Stoneking or Nigel Roberts. You know me from the faint, midnight hiss that filters through your B&W tweeters like white, sonic, planetary noise from Heavenside. You know me from the piss of the Green Grocers and Orange Mondays you used to climb for. My name is on a hit list longer than a who's who of Motown charters. 

What have you done with Adamson? Driven him to Hornsby in a 1968 Valiant, the wipers sweeping the centre line from the old Pacific Highway? Have you made a coat for him from the ragged feathers of a pool-loving feral duck? Where is he? I'll tell you who I am. I have been in Neil Young's barn and inhaled the electric burn-sheen of ozone from his model train's transformers. I have watched the blue light under a wafer of tin foil as Donald "Duck" Dunn prepared the hashish. I have helped John Prine

negotiate stairs at the Hotel Boulderado after throat surgery. I have seen Townes Van Zandt drinking lighter fluid from Steve Earle's ear. My name is in the liner notes on albums by John Gorka and Drag the River. I have waited for Linda Rondstat to surrender.

Tell me where Adamson is, or I will resurrect Lynyrd Skynyrd and dispatch Ronnie van Zandt with a crossbow and Bowie knife to sculpt your bones into swampwood. I am giving you one hour to tell me. Your death will be drawn-out as a Spector trial.

Daniel (the Hawk) Lanois