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Tug Dumbly is a satirist-slash-poet-slash-writer-slash-singer-slash-comic who is confused about all the slashes in his job description. Suffice to say he barbeques all manner of sacred cows and undermines pop culture from the inside.
He regularly performs his poetry and comedy in schools, and has twice – 2007, 2010 – won Nimbin’s World Performance Poetry Cup. In 2010/11 he also won the Spirit of Woodford story-telling award at the Woodford Folk Festival.
As well as running one of Australia’s longest standing spoken-word night, Bardflys, at Sydney’s Friend in Hand Hotel for seven years, Tug has performed at numerous festivals, nationally and abroad, including London, Montreal, Edinburgh and New York, where he competed with an Australian Slam team at the legendary Nyuorican Poets’ Café.
He has released two cd’s through the ABC – Junk Culture Lullabies and Idiom Savant – and twice won the Banjo Paterson Prize for comic verse, once for his 8000 word epic ode to meat Barbeque Bill and the Roadkill Cafe. His work also features in both print and audio versions in ‘SHORT FUSE: A Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry’ (Rattapallax, New York, 2002).
Tug’s one-man verse-drama Deadstar has had seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, and he is currently writing a new one-man show, Dumbly Does the Bible, in which he will attempt to perform the entire Bible in one hour. Given a little perseverance he believes he would make a fine game-show host, religious mystic and Shakespearian Actor.
Tug’s Poem
Let us Breathe
The ancient Hebrew word for God was Yahweh.
The original Hebrew spelling of Yahweh
was written without any vowels -
it had a blank A and a blank E.
Scholars surmise that this was so
that when the word was read aloud
the mouth could never close upon it,
thus rendering God’s name unpronouncable
as anything other
than breath…
[breathe in] “Y … H”
[breathe out] “W … H”
God is unpronounceable
Yet every second pronounced,
our first prayer at birth
our last at death,
integral as a heartbeat,
unthinking as blinking.
I am breath
as you are breath
as he is breath
and we all breathe together,
this mantra,
this meditation
of inhalation, exhalation,
this common prayer
of unutterable, ineffable
universal exaltation.
This is a prayer for the pious
and a prayer for the prayerless,
a prayer for the graceful and disgraced,
a prayer for the unformed, the reformed
the born-again and deformed,
a prayer for the broken, the begging
the lacking and the yearning.
This prayer does not discern,
but is so profoundly simple
and simply profound as to
confound the most stubborn of sceptics,
to be omnipresent in every splinter
and every fibre
of every ironclad atheist,
every fruitloop fundamentalist,
every pantheistic freak;
be your god a share,
a stock, a rock, a leaf
you will pray in this way:
[breathe in] “Y … H”
[breathe out] “W … H”
This prayer splices the sacred to the secular
and divines the human in the divine,
no division between,
just the sacramental sanctity
of this breathe prayer -
this black prayer
this gay prayer
this refugee prayer,
this prayer for the victor and vanquished,
this prayer for the tortured and torturing,
this Israel prayer
this Palestine prayer
this chosen people prayer
this disposed of people prayer,
my prayer, my lover’s prayer,
my son’s prayer
your prayer,
our prayer…
[breathe in] “Y … H”
[breathe out] “W … H”
