February 2012
2 posts
“The slow arrow of beauty”
– Nietzsche
January 2012
8 posts
In two years dynamic bed time poses have
grown more in lunar cycle’s soil.
beauty dreams reading written legs’ scaffold letters, crossed,
outlined on the canvas of white sheets,
meaning collapses. bent yew knees to cup elbows and drinks.
our toxic selves commiserate and admire red fruit
eight white flesh-wells of bare
light prickling unfelt in a bone forrest base. stars watch...
Botticelli’s eyes stare out of bus stops in Estella
they sit in these tin sheds of outer Wagga Wagga
listening to rain meet land and mud streams paint thick a kind
of springtime full fume of P plates colliding with engine utes.
I met Botticelli in a stranger’s room; a B&B in North Melbourne
staring straight back I saw him winking at
eternity; a faded...
there is an elm tree dying and living still, spreading its shadow skirt,
making now a million new late connections with the earth.
lowing with an urged on heavy echo, spilling to the next
life, beware: here there is a death bird calling.
He tried to friend the death bird with a killer call
an undecided hunter feeling out his murder throat.
Mimicry or otherwise, its wings could not bring it...
The sky begins to itch jets’ cesarean scars
and lightning makes no sound for a mile or two
a wake is not remorse but escape
say the white birth marks minnowing unsure
this surgeon growing going grey and achieving the impossible
by fading more.
Her skin is like the surface of a lake
with the soft scratch recording
of ripples sounding out the delicate
that looks but will not...
“I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old”
– Charles Baudelaire
December 2011
12 posts
I met the blue light
Again this time full-eyed
Like a friend And the wren kept
Breathing song and having this
Lone moment too.
When thoughts are ice
So clear and still and death
The nearest in the day
Or night they come
When spheres have turned
Their backs in trading places.
World I am one of many princes
Fashioned as a student by many hands
At these times I miss their finger tips
In...
In the river running black with crisp waves
of suits timed under all our known
world built to touch,
a fluorescent sign illuminates a new cross
and a loose why.
It reads, “I want your money.”
A little further oh
the endless stream
a busker politely sings
from the cavities beneath
his tattoo sweatened back
“I want your money, please.”
The two men take turns caressing each others’ beard
with bored drunk eyes touching light and dark
thick and fair separated by a blue plastic limb
these neo-bush heads turn like confused used show clowns
synchronised lolling from left window one moment
attuned to turning right reading body language warning
behind thrillers and art history books a groin scratch
the clearning of trees in...
“the meaning is nothing other than the quest itself”
– Tzretan Todorov
he’s returned
to hear the song frail as glass falling from gallahs
a refrain battling heat’s weight they sit atop
silos echo full of watching calls’ shatter laughing.
poplars mark the outer rim of a nest, by way of alien introduction
to make a town and clouds drop heavy,
dark shadows at his feet their coolest offering.
windmills watch this now stranger wander into town
...
“I give my soul one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If...”
– Michel de Montaigne
November 2011
13 posts
niece
you are a spirit loose
crawling out the moving frame of new life
the car window doesn’t understand your need
to be in the scene
where responsibility’s wind is free.
my palms send gusts when light squalls are called
and young Semele unafraid this second time goes eye to eye
with burning myth.
“sunset” I say meaning less, bereft of faith but you’re youth game
...
“and the snake in hiding feels the sunlight’s finger.
The snake, the fang...”
– The Cedars, Judith Wright
We call with skins’
wet crease cloth pegged for drying
aiming the underside of knees
like bows taut with expectation We call with hums
using chambers owned within us
music halls we’re renting of mouths and dry noses’ reverberation
but two lungs cannot keep afloat the city’s ibis We call after your gifting
hours of heady stillness to oceans
but its on one of those...
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose...”
– Soren Kierkegaard
elegy
the storms are missing you by having me
they’re roughing out an absence through dying
henchman sun, parting clouds advancing million palms
mounting bruises on coy surface of the bay. these hands though deftly weave more royal Jacaranda
carpets where praying is upon
is where praying the gods of sea were lost
our watery bodies no longer know the way. warm baths confuse the crazed...
we turn bird corners
our bodies arcing outside evolution
formation an undiscovered letter
and the wind sings welded
through metal bodies;
delight in saccharin extension
made for us
for our collisions
pre-recorded and destined
tape’s wheels unwind
fluttering,
tearing in speed’s one-time-lover
slipstream.
pedestrian dead eyes
pull heads: birth somersaults
parted blood...
“Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic...”
– Charles Baudelaire
“All the inhabitants of this planet are made of meat. And most of them are...”
– Francis Bacon
October 2011
12 posts
Idol
My stomach forges
Through the night, aches a new gold you.
Fever brand new
Are the shells
Of moths left, who took themselves to the light too.
Forever seven locks lay in the bathroom bin, some rope I tried around you;
So I offer my wrist
Vestiges of tooth hole Stonehenge darken the skin, hard stones make hard flesh
And the gilding
The gold gilding begins.
There. I return to the bed...
You’ve cast net over fruit trees to catch highland sun. Kiln afternoons bring warmth on alternate winds; So we sit shivering, then moaning. A feeling beat: one, two. Three being empty. You’ve tried to catch time in the kitchen Nailed there so it makes use of the hours With its left arm a hammer: Bang bang. Arranged to look menacing by fifth generation farmers, Conifers dare you to...
To bed
The cave’s insatiable hunger
Makes darkness its saliva
Unhinging appearance
We regress
Until democracy of the light;
Casts a toenail, a finger, out.
Celestial bodies play favourites with our own
A game of trust in the rise and fall of admiration
For skin.
I roll a sleeve, offering limb to the sun
So well-wooded men can have the night Again
darkness your beauty is
nothing
“Come, dear great soul.
We await you; we desire you.”
“Through the world’s wilderness long-wandered man”
“we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between...”
“I’m dying, Egypt, dying.”
On the third floor
I tell her, there’s no oxygen
And she asks about the sandstone
Breathing possibilities we’ve already mined. The city ends at a circle
Fingertips skipping the hewn spires of the gates;
Four children jumping, innocently making past past. Indian Myna’s remind me,
Our kin is our skull.
A man with no beak, who cannot go where he wants. They taunt the man by teetering
Before...
September 2011
22 posts
Of the deep
The eye of the storm brought mermaids to the door asking The dripping, black pupil to a kitchen seat. Elbow to scale; Opal coins come off in handshakes Fish hooks their grin adornments.
The front advances down the hall, spilling mist Filling hidden sinks with drains I hair plugged and adulthood. Falling red light on the afternoon front-line smoke screen Illuminates; I’ve met these myths...
“I have been seeing dragons again.
Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,
one...”
– Michael Ondaatje, Dragon