Aposematic

Lonely Maths

2010-03-31T19:17:00.000-07:00

the mouth of the season is on us;
i stand at the stove, my hands pinked by onions,
shiny by oil, the heat all around me,
a haze; a fugue plays

the night pours in at the window;
the canary song rests. the clothes-line rests.
somewhere in the house there is
breathing i cannot sit close to.
they are a dislocated bone.
this too, is a kind of resting, for them.

but i am busy in the kitchen,
busy in my skin, lamenting.
pulling the knife through the fiber of
eggplant, counting my losses.
adding up sums in my head of my griefs.
i am a master mathematician, i know in what column
we can tally each cut.
i can show you the tables, i can
show you equations.

i am sorrowful as only
the indulged
the rich
the western
can be.

i will never know hunger like
it can be known.
but i will know, for longer than i can bear
the shock of a heart
clapped shut, shut out, out-cast.

your joyful agitation is a strange calculus.
my formulas fall silent, stare at me.

we have no work here.

Fisher

2010-03-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

His hands always smelt of fish.
The ropes would run out through his fingers, their fray
Splintery quick.
The boat falling away into dark water as though
His body on the shore propelled it.
He didn’t think of high things, of nature’s accents but of
Pipe stuffing and the hefty bread his wife’s thighs were.
His hands knotted in them,
his big knuckles like chunks
Of sea stone. Her tangled mane like foam he
Grasped at.
Wanting.

His hands always smelt of fish.
By the fire, at night, she would place herself beside
His work-broken body, his shirt off, the red of his beard
threaded with ember in the hearth’s churning thrum on their faces.
It curled around his ears.
Her fingers would go there to tease the strands straight
And he would growl like a young dog.
Snap at her fingers.

Their laughter lit the thatched hut with
An unintelligible, old mirth that the sea knew well.
It moved against its rocks, moaning.
Identities written on it, afloat.

at the traffic lights

2010-03-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

at the traffic lights, i will stop with you and wait.
the amber and the green will hang, unstuck in time.
the dirty city whirring everywhere we stand
and through us, too.

a crooked man will try to sell you flowers
pulled in handfuls from
some cheated housewife’s garden.
this will be awkward, for
a month ago you would have gingerly smiled
sideways at me and pressed a five dollar note
into his hand

and then, wiping the foil that they are wrapped in
you’d have given them
to me.
i’d have made a show of being shy.
though, not really bashful but proud as a hen,
my tail feathers bristling and rocking
because you loved me.
because i was arrogant in the brine.

but now we’ll wave the man away.
my phone will ring, and we’ll both startle like
pond herons with their silence ruptured by a truck because
my phone still bears the hallmarks of court-ship.
a shared song.
we shouted it from the floor of our lungs,
in the early hours.
our faces smudged with joy,
our bodies bent around each other on
your lumpy mattress.
temporary vessels housing something useless.
something transcribing across us
our teeth ripping at the throat of giddiness.

the lights will take too long to change.
finally we’ll surge forward.

i’ll wonder what we shed
onto the concrete as our bodies move
out of the smirking past.

Did you really want?

2010-03-17T04:00:00.000-07:00

The membrane pulls back, bursts.
I shout through the mess.
My mouth overflowing.

All this time I have been
walking in gore and plasma
and nobody told me.

I sicken.

This will all fall under the concrete;
I will fall.
Bones buried in fucking.

As unimportant as my paycheque
under the weight of my excuses.
Broken china in the morning
my empty eyes sweeping the shards across
the slicker.
Mesmerised.

Did we really have a chance when
the machines came?

The simple answer is no.

Disparity.

2010-02-13T05:35:00.000-08:00

sun so hot, even when not on our skin.
we lay far apart.

disparate satellites burnt from whirring through
our weeks.

the light waters in once the night passes; the cool's come on.
a 3am chill, created a cave around us and like
there was elastic between our bodies
we snap back together.

your murmur at the relief, the mumbling a low tremor
in the hairs at the nape of my neck.

i want to make ownership of this pretty moment;
but no matter how close i pull the shell
to my ear
i can't hear the sea.

everything's blocked out, filled in with sand.
every grain named and placed there by
the death of love
spent poorly and foolishly and savagely.

echoes that call in my cells, loudly.

Somewhere

2010-02-13T05:29:00.000-08:00

the cornices of the facades on King st
are gray with soot and mold and dust;
the citys leavings.

the traffic is an endless pull and strum.
a woman with a snake around her neck
swings along the street, her hips tightly budded
in jeans.

the sky peels open, parts of its white flesh showing.
translucent lace.

the salt of the air is heaviness. a tangy flowing down
on me.

you are somewhere in the city. i wait.
your friday night kisses undelivered, your promises
delayed by the mundane failures of transportation.

all i wish is to be held and held and held.

and now comes the rain;
i wait this through, too.

Grip

2010-02-13T05:26:00.000-08:00

There is no way of holding a pillow
to make it feel as flesh does.
in the night, my arms search and find only
hollow spaces.
my fingers push into a rift.

and in the moments when i am waking
and you are sleeping elsewhere
i remember
how you lay behind me
after making love.

the knit together slate of your hands
resting just below my belly, cupping.
your touch more tender for
the loss, the losing.
the heat leaving our bodies,
our heaving chests
slowing.

your cock would brush me -
a gentle creature, delicate as crepe paper,
resting shyly near my back;
my breasts naked to the window's
diminutive sheaf of air;
and shivers in my spine.
the unity of breath, the foggy
scent we owned together.

all this comes in, over me; tidal
and sometimes as
a dark tsunami curved towards me.
wanting to dash my life out.

a stone for each memory,
heavy in the foam.

Cat

2010-01-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

somewhere on the edge of the street's lamp
a cat skitters away, a mouse snapped in jaws.
it hears my footfall, stops.

the eyes it casts on me fall inward. their blackening fury
a depth like whale's belly, like grief's first days.
awestruck, i hold my place.

cat, you look at me like he did. if only he had known
a way to find a place for us where this dirty seed
could not grow and ruin all the wallpaper.

a filthy killing vine, gripping at the neck of love.
and i, resistant, and he too: but his failure to steer
made for us dashed all over the hillsides.

the cat moves off to pull apart the mouse.
and this is all we have power for now.
pick over sorry remnants and lament or pretend.

i catch a glance of the cat each night after,
or superimpose it: blood on it's fur, gore on it's nose, a grim detachment
mocking the entrails i am coveting.

Sickening

2009-12-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

Four days in a sick-bed;
the tissues mounting up like cloying snow,
missals pitched into anonymity and digit-soup.
Impossibly tiny cogs.

Red flags pop up, electrons;
diorama of affection
that I hoard and gulp to interrupt the aches
and chills and feverish searching for
employment.

The every-day is rude and base.
The mundane and terrible;
microscopic horrors and slights that
pull at our wits are
lifted just enough by
tiny mirrors of interaction.
So scaffolded, we soldier on, shoulders
more at right angles with the world.

Four days in a sick-bed;
the ginger cat sneers from the window-sill -
secretly, he knows it isn't flu
but you
that has me ailing.

Ardent

2009-10-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

Densely, I contort to hide and mask
the extent of how this joy springs;
though like mossy ground the moisture will
seep up and round your shoes
and you will notice me.
I am conspicuous.

I try indifference instead.
I look as awkward as a heron in this
suit of with-held glances, passed days without
communicating.

I want you to think
I won't check for you constantly;
a manic bird collecting sticks for an imprudent nest.
I want you to think
I won't pat your
empty spaces for the shape of you and yet
we both know, I think, this is a lie.

Little shy lies are good.
Face-conserving lies told from the need to appear
more bold, more sans desire than reality speaks.
They're the only kind mistakes of love.

The truth is:
I did not need you six months ago;
you were not a known quantity.
But now knowing as I do,
there are tiny pinholes forced in me.
Very small.
Shaped perfectly to fit you, and only you.

Wharf

2009-05-16T18:53:00.000-07:00

wind skirts the wharf
locks me up in whirling
circles, circles.

lost as I am, girl, speck
a sugared dot on earth
the dirt rises

two soft eyes blink out,
a head of curled fur.
nesting leaves, thoughts.

travelling through the glass
I push my hands out.
the air. oh the air.

paper songs, brief singing.
your poems fall silent;
all I hear is flat
flattered notes.

Repentance

2009-05-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

Scales fell from Saul's eyes when
he repented his transgressions.
Not for me, the knee-bent
sucking up.

My eyes are scaled over thickly
by my own hand.
The wombs I move in are dark but I see
with the keen eye of a guarded mind

my logic always cocked.

Regrets

2009-05-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

Memories toss and spill across
my clattering tongue as I open
us again.

It still feels wet -
the paint on the rooms of those last moments
when you almost kissed me,
your mouth along the air but past me
and I recoiled like a shy sun into clouds.

My face dusky, my breath damp,
a catch and your pleas a hinge to hang on it.

Sometimes our conversations feel
like old notes pulled loose from
a journal;
Shoved there in haste, stolen
minutes dreamed into their husks.

I want a vessel to our past;
I want to cross the taut second to your kiss
and see what it looks like
when we travel in our words, further
than we did.

The Morning After

2009-05-16T15:17:00.001-07:00

I used to write love poems
the morning after.

Filled with good intent,
a curious, creeping
delusion of having grasped something
intangible
unknowable till then
would beat my heart
to pulp until I had to grab
the sticky organ and daub the words in,
indelible.
Make something lasting.

It was some time before
I gave this habit up.

It took a few leavers to squeeze the
need out of me.
Or not the need, but the compulsion;
dulled and muddied by the inevitable
renege, apology, pall of
backing slowly off.
As though I were a corpse
they'd brought to life
in the night's light, but in the morning
their realisation at the loathesome tint of grey
around the mouth they kissed
threw them backwards with a shock
they could not let me see
in full, just yet.

Last night, there was a little opening made
in me.
I am scared to see it there;
it looks so tender and new, a winter bud
and the world's cold.
I am drinking tea at your computer
while you sleep, my hands alight with the
fire of fear. My keystrokes falter.
I wonder if your hand flexes, if it grips
the upswing of another shoe
dropping.

This is not a love poem.
No, this is not.

Bathing Night

2009-03-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

There were half-lit fuses never
quite arrived at anger so we skipped aside
the fracas skirted and held back
a tide with plaster-of-paris poured in.

Our tense faces waiting.

We were drying ourselves at the open flat mask
of the stove, our long flesh licked
by the hot dusk of fire.

The light brightly thrown up like
old water shouldering a fallen rock.
Our feeding of it;
bare.
brave.
recklessly alive.

The main key I grip memory with.

Our unswaddled bodies carping at the
hearthstone
for a fixed redemptive presence.

We never got there; our hopes windowed out
as poor matchstick girls drank
the sputtering light of a dying coal
in our guts.

Unexpected Goodbye

2009-03-04T22:20:00.000-08:00

Overall it isn't the eye-clutching
the tut-tutting of a not stopping throat
I fear most;
that close, hungry keening
so climactic for my mother and father.

That knack they have
of pushing the pendulum away
and not expecting the backswing.

My owned dread is the rapid
suspicion coming down like evening
that you have collected
incognito
like raindrops on a scarf, so tiny
and undetected.
I may not see you, I may
shake you out, not feeling
the slow focused point
of memory in my skull's hull.

You might go like a tea-rinse
brushed from threads of
wide-arcing hair, flicked carelessly

your loved body released
and me, so unaware
so unaware
thinking your patter still inside me.

Not exposed,
inside and safe.

Distance Between Lovers

2009-03-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

Like lying in a still small pool of water.

Ice water, the veneer of me
pulled back and the flesh
my breasts and stomach
heart and entrails
placed like lapis lazuli upon
the tinder block.

Then
turn, turn, turn;
the buff and shine making
the day dip deeper into me.
The blade curve rounding
thoughts out, 'till they spring
a gleam, a glamour
I can wear to see you;

if it fits.

The rigging of my knuckles, long bones
fingers and rings
at your knotty neck:

whispering this.

When You Left

2009-03-04T22:16:00.000-08:00

you were quiet as a guest -
polite, unswerving tact upon exit.
you left certain small gifts.
these provoked our intimate press
when i had them.

one - a new ranging curve
to the heft of my breasts
still like pocked winter pears
loose and low on the bough.

two - secret, delicate parcels of blood.
a thin sac, thin as a moth's wing,
the stretched seat of your bed
this centre now seen
as an empty yawned O.

the yolk dropping through me
as a heavy duck's egg.
drab washing cast over
from your short, wriggling tenure.

my small vanished visitor.

absence beats heavy,
like a heart's drum;
the flat of my feet pat and rise to it.

Spinning Time

2009-01-16T05:47:00.000-08:00

Here, hold the end of this line.
I want you to.
I know you do.

See how thin and fine it is?
Hold that line.

It feels thick sometimes, it feels large
and robust with codes of glowing and
I could twine it up into my hair
and wear it like a tangled web of gems
and whispers.

I see it wind around trees and buildings as I let
it unfurl.
Look, there!
It knows where to go,
it is
coming to you.

Some days the line feels vague and small
and I hold on tighter
and wait until we speak what it needs and it
widens and breathes and stretches again.

But even when I'm not holding on as tight as I should
and I know that you can't
because all the dark marching
has flattened you out
it seems to stand on its own...

...waiting.
Singing and winding
and spinning on pause
on a loom we know to find
when we can.

A Cry From the Pond

2009-01-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

You keep telling me in silence
in your nonchalant non-response that
I left you unrefined
your light fallen out of the socket
and the track you were walking on kept pulling
and rustling.

Well I couldn't have fixed that.
My needle and thread were built from
the worst leftover steel
and I needed that for patching my own
ripped skin up.

You were the worst cliche of teenage notebooks;
you were a scribbled-in-margins adjective
and never around long enough
to break out in a rash of sentences.
I feel now that I read you on a bus
and somehow smeared the fine print
and mistook your little wave
for a kindness.

I mistook your little wave for an invitation
to give you some words,
when all you wanted
was the cheap trick of delivery
and an easy saunter back for seconds.

I could be wrong;
there's always that.
But I bet every girl you've eaten breakfast with
says those same words
right before she's staring at your crumbs
and an empty chair.

Crush

2008-11-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

Dawn is dim and all I think in the new light

is where my mouth burns from yours.

The furnace beneath the skin you sparked

is burning up my lungs.

Your ribs are the earth; your secrets are pressed

under the sand of your skin like shells.

I want to kiss you, dig with my hands

and find you out.

My cunt hungers for yours,

wolfish and sharp and wild.

The Arid Inland

2008-07-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

There were vast shelves of water spilling out
and now they putrify.
A hand, a rod, a fist of silt
has been thrust as a stopper and now the inland lays
arid and stripped.

The canker will be cut out.
It must, and so with fine precision I train my eye
on the inner bruise and slice it from me.
Cut, cut, cut.
I loosen the rut, find the pained place
and plane it smooth with one deft flick.

And now I breathe again;
the infection turned out like a cheap thrill should be.
I return to the spring, kneel beside the water,
pull on the coat of Shaman, Healer....
and touch it with my own two hands.

This was the original yen,
the ignored lyric of the heart:
my own two hands.

The original sin:
to let strange mouths drink from the water.

Faces of Strangers

2008-07-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

Each line about strangers jars me,
hardly softer than a crash,
a traffic smash.

I feel I steal something about them,
pin their struggling wings against my board
of collared soliloquy and practice
words in acid on their backs

sloughing bloody layers off.

I steal their faces, limbs
and thin them, smooth them out
and tweak their features for
my textual collection.

Bad fetishist, word and rhythm rapist
I take and take and for their labour give

bastardisation
unpaid anonymity.

The wish well

2008-07-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

I am stilled in tongues, stopped
like a grabbed clapper.

The emptiness rings between my teeth,
pealing away into an oily well.
A solid well, constructed from a year of grit.

There may have been clean nests of
delicate comment once but I
have lost the air of remembrance.

All the entrances and exits were
silted up with coarse despair
when I began to wander in the wishpool

my ankles cooling for too long.

You cannot lose your heat
without extinguishing your fire.

Two Children

2008-06-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

I: the child

the aura of a fossil is an oscillation,
a speaking upwards of colour and light that
runs into waves of whispering.
this throbs from her small white knuckles,
gripping, owning, closed.
her hat trailing from the other hand,
the ribbons: pink papyrus, thin in the wind.
her hair a sheaf of taffeta palely battered
in the hot november.

I open, I close my mouth. the sound
of my love is a beaten hoof, a struck
red sheath of forming steel.
it rings, it clangs, it is ugly and hot in the world.
for her, I must will myself
useful and fierce.

II: the miscarriage

the glass is a vase, may as well be.
it is a lost crystal boat on the varnished
immensity of mantle and wall.
the mildew chases the shadows,
the blacknesses tussling for place.
the canvases stare flatly -
all moving beauty reduced to line.

I bleed, my womb an opening eye
of unexpected biological candour.

I would have let her lie beside me;
I would have hounded fevers down.
I would have stood between her door
and the advancing crowded neon earth.

Despite all my weaponry,
I bleed.

Oh stopper me up, stopper me up
at the centre and third eye.

The Rebellion of Mrs Jones

2008-06-21T19:54:00.001-07:00

Bright leaf-fall, rusted sky:
the morning rims the lip of earth's
arched and wanton hip.

The force of curing you nips
my mouth shut,
pinches me closed
so I become tight and rackish,
blackening and puckish
keeping joy silent.

So, you won't see me darting
around the city,
collecting bus-stops
names and places like tatty parcels
stuffed into my brain.

You think I'm folding starched linen;
you imagine my perfect hush
lying still against your ironed out air,
unmoved, unmoving.
My shadow a pristine projection
caught between the paste of
wallpaper and world.

I see what really lives where I should:
years of sooty hate,
damp, mildewing ambition.

Bright and brazen leaf-fall, rusted sky;
the morning lathes the question mark
of dense tree-line and day
with my shut-stuck
secret tongue.

Under the Loam

2008-06-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

O come to my crown of palms
salacious light
and saint them;

fall
tipped and plentiful,
a bucket of loam
burying ill-gotten claims.

O come and sprawl over and over...
a smug lady
sullied.

A bent back for hurried flurries.

The full burst of horizon light
in the keen cock of the whip

and pain about the temples
like motes of touch, like thrips.

Born as I am in the scope
of your incendiary grasp

burnt as I am, down to ashen alder

rising as I am, glorious phoenix:

manifest of your will.

Emotional Algebra

2008-06-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

Unsure how I am led
to this juncture of illogic
I simply marinate in the
impossibilities
the ability to dissemble.

I can't, shan't ease away from this;
I'll rush to it, like water to the seam.
You do not know.
You are a man made of
wires
wood
and algorithymic calm.

I rise to my nature
like a taut miniscus,
my hair in my hands, your words
a dancing play of scent;
a heady show of
boronia,
correa stars
of swept up ideas.

I agree without being asked.
Without being motioned forwards.
I acknowledge the virus;
I catalogue the sincere parts of my gut
and calculate the mean I can preserve.

Unembarked upon memories;
memories not even halfway to the squall.

If I emerge again, I'll fly them
high high high
as kites.
Defy the champing mouth
of the advancing human grave.

The Grace

2008-06-12T00:09:00.000-07:00

By your grace, my bound tongue loosens;
you unfurl your closed fist and there:
my animal eyes swallowing tears
and dilating for the seam of light.

We can reconfigure, you whisper;
your voice a thread of rational love.
It sews an opening for me to pass through.
We can let go and hold on, you whisper;
your voice a glimmering aqueous faith.

Oh see, you say, all that you need
is alive and living in the world.

I am not your completed self.
I am not your working out.
I am not your closed circuit.
I can be your jumping off,
your reaching out,
your open growth,
your tendril charged to the sun.

All of me releases you, so you shall return.
Your skin will become a pyre
of living parchment,
of sainted joy,
that I will burn to touch.

A Transcontinental Note

2008-05-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

Cold antipodean world;
You hold a thread in your mouth
a bloody hook pinned in your visceral self.
It draws me like a slim railway
across dial-tone and high-way and
through the dessicating, panicking folds
of your homeland.

Then pulled through the sea;
a snake with a sly flick
in the outer-most crimp of its tail.
When I am closer, the sound tenses us
(a taut miniscus of desire)
and we moan and billow to it, pressed.

My hands, two pockets of given love.
Your hands, two trembling triangles distilled.

Would that I could take ocean as paper
and bring the edges shut, thin as lips:
an oyster jealously swallowing a pearl.
Oh and us then entangled;
your hair a tickle, not a pixel -
your tongue a wetness, not a tone.

Assembling the Spirit

2008-05-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

The spirit can spread open again, in a circus of heat.
Assembling at night with the rhythm
of gathering and eating within a known circle
(like a folk song, a well-worn idiom).
I can feel it pull away from the cold lake
and start to relish the delicate force of the light.

The moths tap the glass, the sky a brushed velvet
dropped over them.
It folds and relaxes as a muscle of water,
and arrives at horizon's mouth like a dark
banked knot of grit.

The paper-white window frames a lantern of play
and occassional stops;
In this, stillness thickens.
The slow end of glass, a sound pulled as thin
as elastic
camouflaged as silence.

My hands wrap and grip, pull and push
slide and trace the contours of fiber and grain.
Each pulse is a brilliant world.
I measure and ladle with processional calm;
converting whispers to touches.
Bright lemons, nubbed olives lash like thorns
from their brine -
plucked and speaking.

The spirit puckers and throbs in this.
The mantle of purpose glows heavily down
and insists - come forth, come fully forth,
spring forth into heat.

The Carnal Light

2008-05-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

the prescience is a dread-lust;
this still small violence of grief
and hidden breath is as dark a stain
as month-blood.

the abdomen pitches sickly, brightly.
the gut abandons and the chest becomes
a rattling crushed hull
of lost, half-remembered creatures
and wrong-strung wires.

what have I done, become, becoming?
only the truly created stone
that I ever was.

In essence, the question is not
'what will this be?' but, instead
'what prosecution of the self was ever
right at all?'

the carnal light is honed and through
the fog of robbing voices
it is the only light of reason.
reason, reason,
rational life.

posess me and dig the wound out
with your claws, your teeth,
your bared bitter bones.
own me, make me translucent
still.

The Accuser and The Womb

2008-04-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

I am here buried deep, horizontal in silt
of your calls and your crying out loud -
and I saw, by the lick of the moon's shining throw,
a question hook out from your mouth.
It rushed at me quickly, imperative force
springing out like a child's eager legs;
I did nought but clutch at the crest of my womb -
nought but point to the hollowed out space.
My eyes are like ivy, they clutch and they curl
searching for similar fear -
but your features are jigsaws with pieces left out,
with leaping and jittering feet.
I will leave, I will go, I will run from your house
free of the glare of this sun
and rock with my womb - curled asleep in my hand -
empty and useless and grey.

Sorry

2008-02-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

Pierce the membrane of this country
and joy flows out with salt and blood.

Once we floated sickly, limply tossed around.
A bag of gelatinous politick,
greyed miserly sloth presuming
to supress terrors charred and seething
in the dim-lit misted past.
The glance of silver as our eyes alit on truth
was too much to bear;
the hustle of the massacres
the come-from-gut screaming
the marrow-curdling gene bleaching
and all of us, for all of us,
a reaching for a relief
not coming.

Yet now, look!
What are these wonders startling out
like starlings in the new light?
Change thrums in us, pulses and quickens
and suddenly a nova of life crashes forth
calloo, callaying
demanding to be heard and smashing
the Jericho we never wanted built.

Sweet relief, release.
Pierce the membrane of this country
and joy flows out with salt and blood.

Owl

2008-01-28T15:50:00.005-08:00

I veer from the light;
pupils, dark drops of hot pitch
burning in the night.

Rubber Head

2008-01-28T15:50:00.001-08:00

and like a rubber head my brain is settled
in a jar of filth and floats among debris
of love. And precious memories rot now;
not so much alive as they are kicking
my insides

fragile? not a word, I say. At least
it's not for me when you see how I dissemble -
full of trembling hate for skin and
temptations of the carnal kind; my body
bathed in tar

yes, like a rubber head my brain is settled
in a jar (ignored) and waiting for the cork
to pull and vent the waiting fumes into the air.
Alone, alone, the jar will sit, awaiting
studying eyes.

Reimbursement

2007-12-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

Birth is tantamount to a promise, a well wish
from a weeping cock and an opening womb.
The inspectors should have come,
with iron bars for your brain
to bang you into shape
and a writ for your life as tight as a frame-up.
That would have made it right.
But they missed the blood over the door;
your clever tongue licked the jamb clean.

Let me back in to her, this is my petition;
you loom too large with architecture -
already breaking my toes for the bandages.

None of my colleagues heard me yelp the air in;
I didn't hear them, then.
When we writhe out in your slick mess
we're at a loss, a panicked loss;
genesis grabs the roots of the senses
and yanks the strands out in a rush.
(Later they came with tulips,
the gasps banging them together like pins.)

I promised you curtsies, too young
and consented in complicity to hold back
the landslide of flint these flesh walls kept bound up.
But quick, look up! A hush falls.
Now the beams have broken
and we burn, embracing, our claws alike;
we fall arranged around each other,
a nick running a tide along my back
deftly
neatly
opening the clear seam...

...at last.

The Hunter's Wife

2007-10-20T15:57:00.000-07:00

Cords of wind erase his fits
of movement from the hills.
The hunter is untied,
like a careless knot.
Her purchases of bread and cheese
await his scrubbed, pocked
lead-weight fists.

The milk-jug - empty.
The paper-wrapped fish -
hastily thrown to the dogs.

She will not bother to oil or
wrap his axe in rags.

Let it rust,
let it rust.

Heritage

2007-10-04T16:06:00.001-07:00

Heritage seems as much about
Going as staying.

I'm from a vagrant line.
We don't waver in history
like muscled pioneers,
we drip
in, out of years and
leave our tree with missing branches.
Now I'm picking up sticks

and budding into
a foreign air like
a nipple
nosing out of a savvy bra.

It's a bit disappointing,
this forging ahead.
I like the thought of empty pockets
and rebellious daughters
on creaking battered ships;
maybe walking the plank,
maybe building a bank.

The coins in my pockets
collide, a tongue-less clatter
making good any lead to chase.

Regardless of doings,
I'm short on heroism -
Which I expect
will bore
spectacled academes
and great-grandchildren.

Sucker Punch

2007-10-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

His eyes colour in streams
of borscht blood, the slight
flecks of marshmallow froth
starting to form at the nooks
of his toothy grin.

He doesn't smile for joy;
he smiles at tiny, tiny him -
a small soldier holding arms against
the crawling pace of
armour girt worms inside,
who triumph as his mercury
quickens.

He's off his meds;
and as Mum tracks the car in
on tacky candy gravel
he throws a spot-on punch
with a white-knuckled fist
into his pale
eight-year-old forehead.

Portrait

2007-10-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

The trees have become thick pixels
because we are the foreground,
huge in the taut eye of aperture.

I'm small and glad .
I'm pressed to your brow
your arms rounding me like a bear.

The grin is relieved, we laugh into
each other's make-up and sweat
and proper dress;
we cradle ourselves
without grip or purpose
but with the same tender sling
that will draw a baby.

I trust you not to let go;
you trust me to stay, like the persistent
scent of jasmine.

We stand like that now, I think.
When we play and fight and cry and break
down to our very carbon
our very marrow
to the ground dust that made me your rib
and I feel we are still learning
to lean
upon each other like that.

Loose, but tight and still
inside our embrace.

Porch Light

2007-10-04T15:51:00.000-07:00

The night moves around us like toffee.
It is setting, it is setting, mynahs scatter
from the porch as you posess the space.
Your hard body moves as it means, means
when it moves.

I crawl on you;
you aren't aware of the shifts you make
in me.
Little thrills, tectonic as your finger
slopes along my nape, to my lips.

O god. O god. You wan god.

I suck it in, in the flickerflickerflicker
of the curtain's shimmy.
Light falls through.
Inside white, outside black,
the pretty night binary hugging us roundly.

All is treacle sweet to me: but most?
The way you wake in my palm,
downsoft in my hand.

Shy, fragile life in my hand,
the drumming heart of a bird.

The Assent

2007-10-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, methodically, I opened up
a black trash bag
and emptied my life into the void of it
a grin thickening my lips.
I was as drunk on this carthasis
as a clown on laughs.

I won't powder my face, I won't
colour my mouth.
I won't shave my pussy, I won't
cut my hair.
I won't wear clothes.

I wear rope now. It is my colour.
It is my entire attire

and who needs makeup
when you hold my face?

Blue House - by an anonymous friend

2007-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

-THE BLUE HOUSE-

Little blue house

On a green hill

Wrapped in grey clouds

That refuse to rain

In the valley below

Where the lake bed

Lies desiccated, sucked dry

By a magnetic force

On the flipside of the world

The lake is full

Little blue house

Anchor me against

This magnetic pull

Withdrawal

2007-09-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

The trolleys move as thunder;
dirty rubber on the glaze
makes lines of ants.

A white slip falls
like a slapped child;
tut, tut, pick it up.

Usssshhhhh.
A curtain hisses into life.
I am surrounded.

I shall die inside my cupped hands.
No-one need know;
I will prop my muscles carefully
with sticks of smiles.

Clepsydra

2007-09-07T19:59:00.000-07:00

I am planting weeds
instead of flowers
to tip the balance on
each tiring hour you seeded,
cultivating me.

My eyes are raw
my fists are cut through
and snails commune like rubies
in my mouth
as I govern this windy garden
of rancour and bile.

The swinging lamp is smashed
upon the littered path.
I edge my elbows past
the hedge you grew.
I plaster up the holes
where once you drew
plasma from my smacked vein.

The hounds are in, the time has flown,
the cats are calmly drinking you.
I am in the night, my shoulders up
my legs askew.

I plant nettle.
I turn my spade.
I screw the screw.

The Echo

2007-09-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

Remember this sequence, remember
this pattern.
Crush - conversation.
Running, flashing,
bird-of-you alighting
in the light of the iris.
We come to speak,
leave to heaving
- mouths agog.

Blushing.
Glowing.
Hushing.

Aye. Aye. We connect at knee and hip.
Stars fall as heavy apricots from
the torn string parcel of the sky.
All upon us, weighted fruit and
I can barely swallow this.
Resin's running through us,
the mat of river reed's our bed.
The stones are straining patterns
on my breasts and thighs.

When you're weeping, own this
memory.
Roll it over, under your thick
lost tongue.
For when I'm gone
you'll be alone, so I insist
you think of sticky palms on backs
(not pallid lands of washed flesh
or funeral masks).
Think of murmuring laughing,
of the cold heft of rain
thudding the window
of our skulls.
Stars scarring our skin.

Rescue

2007-07-19T04:47:00.000-07:00

If you descend,
I will drag you up by the knots of your hair.
I will tear, from your scalp, the clods of your grave
until dirt stains my skin like parchment ink.
I will draw the heaviness from your lolling neck
until I stiffen enough to lift you.
Asp-like, I will wreath myself around the auditors of the tombs,
blind them with kisses
and rush from the seam of their jail with you
bundled around me;

never looking back.
Not glancing, not thinking
of ever looking back.

2007-07-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

Testing, testing...

Oh Mr Thumper, run!
The men with traps come for you
their backs afire with love for you
for what pricked eyes and bunny screams
can lead them to.

In death, Mr Thumper, death!
You keep in store a gruesome treat
for the lab-child in his collared coat
(his coat of many contradictions):
a monster grips his dreams.

Cave Hunter

2007-06-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

There are folds that fit us without trying;
earth, cliff, eiderdown.
We must remember every one.

Tongues of easy sediment rolled down
from under clumsy mammals, pawing at
the mountain face for shelter.
What benign darkness of the womb was lost
was found again in the weeping forests
of the mountain's curved abdomen.
Women teetered in that abstruse swart
of hollow calling and quickening dreams
with babes in the crooks of their arms,
their bare breasts alight with splendour
and springing blackly on the walls.
Bold bison gods dripped richly from their
fingers and their tongues
and all the brilliance of oblivion
flowed like slow slurry
in each proud coupling.
Our flesh is stone, our hair is lichen;
our sex is a cool cave pond.

Yes! Remember it like an unguent
and transform.
Your bed – the cavern floor
you have carried here from birth.

Roll

2007-06-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

Climb upon the hill and open your empty eye.
There is nothing there to fall on, there is nothing there
that can stand your impact; that can stand to be a net.

The landscape is all sweat and dirt and animals with
mouths to rip your limbs free, if pressed close.
Hear, hear the whisper of their child voices.

You don't regard them soon enough, the crush
cups you forward, moves your legs, flies you over and then
you see: porcelain visages, blood behind the masks.

See? You thought too late. So we begin again. I wipe your hair
clean of gore and you, you roll up the hill once more.
The lemon sun burns on your neck. Cycle, cycle through this.

You behind your heavy stone, clambering up the hill:
how many times must we do this?

On the Eve of Divorce

2007-05-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

You, tiny you.
Sweet, fat nephew.
Milk slips to your chin and you
shuffle me, make me snuggly,
your elbows and fists
kneading
like insistent kitten mittens.

You and me, we are We;
struggling, in the folds of dark,
blinking, peeping.
Stunned bats.
Cane chair criss-crosses
litter my arms and I cringe
but don't shift.

As you fight sleep
I twist kiss curls
'round my ring finger and weep.

Life is about to run into this room,
put on the mask of your parents,
grab your small skull
and dash it on the walls,
goring the beach balls, teddy bears

and all the years unspun.

Culvert Space

2007-05-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

I meditate the road above;
a humble coat of needles for a cushion.
Cached, supine, by ragged boughs.
The broken willows are in careless piles -
last month's collection by windy fingers.

I wonder at the cool of this shade;
a full fathom less than
April's throttling white light.

Hidden eyes slide around
the highway fliers, tasting their speed.
I dig fingers in their brains to find
where and why they speed away.

Then, flash!
My prying stare cracks.
A formation of bold wrens wheels and
turns like a mass of mad barons
and I spill backwards, blanching.

Their chests are tooth ivory, their wings:
perfect charcoal points.

Brachia

2007-05-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

I chose this arm for you.
Woman, you married it.
A small party of priests
marked the gift
and pushed you forward,
stumbling
to grasp the blueing fingers.
I pushed a scalpel in for measure
(the sinew should tear
upon inauguration,
right on dotted lines).
Ah, woman, such contrition.
You will adore
the sound!
A rotten chicken wing cracking
from a scared breast.

Caveat emptor!
What for, this remorse?
Did you not practice your steps
daily
just like I told you?
What, what, your survival kit
of cliches, pulp and Bible
are in the bottom drawer?
Well, what can you ask for?
You are all tears and apple cores
and bitten bitter mouth.

Little woman, come now.
Convention is a confection
if you know how to wash it down.

Panic

2007-05-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

Manic panic is
punching through a canvas
that is painted with my fists.
There are mirrors singing of mirrors
and all eyes are on
the kaleidoscope girl who shifts
in and out of frame.

Go on, gulp and tug
with butterhands at the hem.
You can, if you try, you can hide
the hem of your lie.
They won't know
They won't know
They won't guess at all
That the working fracture
conceals a leopard.

Twilight

2007-05-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Finally, twilight comes.

Days of icicles and gags
have seized my jelly heart into
a tough, belligerent bloc.

Now I can't hear you.
Your cajoling insight
and loveless legalese is useless
against the pendulum swing
of sleep.

Judiciously it falls
to knock your hands
from 'round my throat.

Death of the Animists

2007-03-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

Spit, spit, spit.
You mad group of prophets,
you leaders with sticks,
you came with your hungry mouths
hung open and groaning for
a solitary love, a Mono,
an El without end.

Mother's shadow is hung
where she stood;
strung low,
huddled between the flayed
hide of the goats.
Father is crisped,
the fire of your fury
has licked his fists clean.
They rattle, jars of bone.

The wind was kept out by the work
of their hands.
They prayed to the rocks,
to the whistle and scatter
of bark and of wind,
to the thrusting of springs.

You, bastard son. You did them in.

Spit, spit, spit.
You split the red sea but
bludgeoned the life out of it.

Marriage: One

2007-03-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

I can walk, talk, eat cake,
balance our accounts,
sip tea you make for me
and laugh, laugh, laugh
all with a broken arm,
three fractured ribs
and gangrene in my fists.

Oh, I've seen you do the same.
I've heard your chest pain
down the line as you call
to say you'll be late.
I've heard your throat close
with cancer as you smile
through the buzz and snow.

You didn't snap my bones
and I haven't torn your muscles
with my teeth.
It was wasn't us, it wasn't them,
it wasn't anyone I can see
or you can see.
I'm sure of just one thing:

it happened before we were We.

Not that I should fix you, you think.

You could not be more right
and wrong.

A Memory of Her

2007-02-20T02:19:00.000-08:00

Sprinkled leaves leaped and spun and
gently spattered out Morse messages
for me, for you. Little love letters.

Your hand in mine. My hand trailing
loosely through the sun and thousand
vagrant breaths of strangers.

Gininderra on our left, twinkling.
Stark crow crowned hills of dust
and pine shouldering boulders on our right.

This was our day; this is how I hold it
gently in my mind still. You, sweet girl,
your shaking hand in mine.

Fear had thumbed shut your eyes and
made me transparent. It could have been acid.
It would have made no difference.

I knew and drank your tremor in;
trying to spread you
trying to stretch the little
the stinging meagre little I had garnered
and subsist.

My intestines screaming, neck as stiff
as your resolve -

Your resolve to love me with
a cupped palm, full of spilling hours.

Upon meeting Him Who Will Be Your Husband

2007-02-04T06:21:00.001-08:00

Wake. The clothes, starched, pressed, smooth
against the bed were still, said still words to me
(calm calm calm yourself woman, be still like us).
Assent.

Prepare. The shatter of water and
squeezed-tight-eyes and shampoo everywhere
and shit, shit, where is the towel?
Hands stumbled like kindergarten children
clutching, fumbling, grabbing.
Relief.

Mistake. The plan is askew, you
are behind a deadlock without a key.
Trapped here while he waits,
what to do? Set your jaw, become a reverse burglar
and break out. Later you will worry about
the dislodged screen, hanging like a
dead open palm. No time, no time!
Rush.

The rest flows around you.
You are in the stream, you see the minute
motes and strings of experience above, beside you.
His pale face, his hair in puckered curls,
his tight body hugging you, reluctantly releasing you
(he wanted to hold me longer, I think, did I imagine that?).
His mother pouring tea into bone cups and clattering
about weather and university and you both
nervously staring across the room
not hearing a word;
only eyes and hands are working today.

Yes, you are still.

Turning, I see...

2007-02-04T06:17:00.001-08:00

Night is tight on the tracks of the crow
that are scattered 'round my lids
and I sigh, stretch, sigh
ribs fall and rise
and all is still close and thick and dark.
I clasp it in my fists, I curl my jaws
around the evening to keep it
just a moment longer.
I want this to last
just a moment longer.

a slight, waifish piano score floats
from the shamble of next door.
Washed in this I wait for the clench
of energy to come to me, to summon me
from this soft ethereal head

and turning I see He
like the Gods have scattered Him there
and I afford all my focus, all my vision to these:

a heft of endless curls
a turned down mouth
a blitz of sun-spit
a beard of pitch for nesting birds
a chest leaping with swords and Newton
and all about him the world turns
unaware that He is here
unaware that He defines
unaware that His hands can unmake time

can unmake me, at least.

Innerscape

2007-02-04T06:16:00.000-08:00

Fry of noon belts her head.
She's dam running, setting to one side
the glare of an angry father.

She can throw it away,
flicking out elbows and chin
bounding and scrambling
and clawing over the bare cheeks
of granite.

Shining calves
run with sweat as they pump and push
through un-named scrub and un-tamed bush and
you are all invited to watch, to see
as she breathes deep,
inhales her curdling self
as the melt of her
falls
frees
pauses and drips
from freckles to mouth.

She trips.
Blood surprises spring from
both knee and lip but they're
soon fixed with a thumbful of mud
and a gumleaf.

Ten years old, she cocks her head
and stands with fists upon
her fatless hips.
Apple breasts
and ambitions small enough to cup
between her grubby fingers...

So many seasons run away,
Yet still I linger, hunger in
Acacia stands and granite screes
To find bravery.

gardening at the women's hospice

2007-02-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

Her nails are smooth like the curve of apples
and their delicate passage from plate to mouth
mark almost visible lines of plaintive grace in the air;
bent knuckles hide strong, thin, Wedgewood bone
that do not crack or pop or creak like mine.

Mine are op-shop tack and kitsch and revel in
the brassy nagging of the dirt;
gaudy printed gloves, two dollar whore's enamel and
giant mugs splashed by sunflower patterns.
I am a candle, she is a chandelier

and yet, there is something democratic
in the tea, the flowers
and in the dying.

Ashes To Ashes

2007-01-24T03:55:00.000-08:00

Summer careens with cicada trills
all 'round my thick head and heart.

Solitary on a fire trail,
a map and half a biscuit in my hands.
Just me, the sun leaping beneath my breasts,
the tankers on the sliver of horizon
(I can erase them with my thumb, I squint and say
to no-one and nothing)
I arrived here on feet, I will leave here on feet.
I'll take a leaf and a flower.
I toy with the flower, I twist it through my hair.

***

the flower is toxic
my heart shuts down
I crawl to the bathroom
and make desperate calls
to a husband at work
to a father screening calls
to a friend on a dancefloor

the chill of fingertips on the plastic keypad is too cold
like a spy's vodka
and cools even further, stills my face into a glue
into a taxidermy grimace.
The final leap of the sun under my breasts hangs,
hangs like a minor note strung between choruses.

***

They spread my ash
from a mediocre outcrop
thinking a sea bed will mean something
profound.

I burrow into their pores and make them each
a fine suit of armor.
I give them my blue lips, my hung heart
as a gift.

The Village

2007-01-23T05:26:00.000-08:00

Every foot shuffles slower with each turn of the curb;
there's much to know from feet. They tell us when we stop.

I look into the screen some call a mirror, some call a child,
and laugh myself away from death.
(but father, there's a fracture line around my scalp, and the skin is
peeling, the head no longer marries the hair, and I am ugly
in the village, with my slowing feet)

I have a pot of cream. The top is green, the sides are green, and
only a thousand babies must be crushed to have it.
Don't worry for their blood, they are like angels, they are like lotus:
they float into death with upturned bliss at the wonder
of giving me youth. Bless them, curse them, bless them.

(but father, the cream has melted in the sun and now my slip
is thick with it. The silk, the cream, the fucking green!
I'm not convinced, I'm covered in it, I'm caving in,
I'm in the village and now my ugly feet have stuck)

Old men spit and slur against the walls.
They smell like booze, they piss-reek and their mouths
are full of bullet holes.
But somehow, unlike me,
their clothes seem clean;
their feet are dancing.

Edible

2007-01-23T02:34:00.000-08:00

I have you in my mouth
and I'd like to fit in more of
your little bones, your shining shoulders
your cocked head and thumbs up and tender laugh.

Oh, oh oh.
I am not a noir, I am not a shadow
in a doorway of a hotel room.
I don't pin up.

Yet, I'd like to eat you.
Your little bones, your casual nods,
your knuckle raps, your rhythm.

I'd like to snake up your hallway like a housefire
and roast you alive,
you little treat.

The Two Women

2007-01-22T05:33:00.000-08:00

In the woman there is not one, but two. Two women. Do not mistake this. Yes, ropes are around her, but they are only ropes. Look instead for the spectacle she is; the something-much-more-vivid they become as soon as she is in them. In a pile, the bonds are fibre. Fibre decays. But she won't wither - she is eternal, she is what fills the rigging and makes it live and s t r e t c h and strain. Her calls are deep as one bereaved and they give these ties purpose. In this woman, there is not one, but two. Do not mistake this. One is flesh, dispensable like ropes. One lives forever, her epic bonds delicious, snapped between the jaws of aperture.

The Lovers

2007-01-22T05:32:00.000-08:00

A picked path home;
I see
framed amber in the jam
of the neighbours
tilting window.
They are arching like parabola.
their hefts of thigh are
a white gracelessness;
the covers tossed – thwump –
against the floorboards.
He is knotted, she is pressed.
her plaintive voice
is a small white bell,
a trembling note hanging
on the eaves of
the night.
I turn and blush
quicken my step
to push away
from a scene so naked
in ways
other than flesh.
I was cool
but now I am feverish with
the scarlet swoop
of the belly-burn.
I refuse tea
and he probes for the cause
of my suckering nature
and I say
the night, the night;
(just here, you see, I touch and show).

Entrails

2007-01-13T03:10:00.000-08:00

It is the never ending God Problem that brings
the students to the classroom
in white and red and cotton shreds
and no-one knowing which is blood and which is bleach.
Whole families crush at the door, their mouths agog,
their fingers jamming into sockets
and the preacher telling them to fry, fry, fry

Someone's at the back playing discordantly;
their head is cocked, they're crooning
about Lord Lord Lord cometh, Maranatha.
One man stands atop a desk and sets himself on fire.
Well now, students, what shall we prescribe for him?
Third degree burns, a splintered heart, broken cogs
and there's too much grey between his ears
God's love? God's ire?

I'm taking notes, don't you see?
I have a thesis, a phil OH so? Fee.
And here it is, this once, for free:

perhaps we aren't dealing in madness
perhaps we aren't dealing in psychology

perhaps we are just dealing in weapons of mass distraction
from the Man Problem

Along the Top of Hedges

2007-01-03T04:20:00.000-08:00

She's a rougher touch than I am.
She talks with ease; her voice is
a hollow aching breeze you lean around
and listen for, screening associates for
deceit, screening us for lies or kindness.
Oh, you know, I can see her head and follow
along the tops of hedges, if I
stand on tiptoe, my tiny tiptoes, my
little calves straining, my heels arching,
my fingers pointing straighter, straighter,
straight at her earth.
She doesn't know how she owns
the whole holy world with each omission;
in the dry pauses, leaves hang in midair
and raindrops pause to collect their bustle.
And yes? yes? we hold our breath.
Only they and little lowly me know
that when she speaks again
it is as flint to flint, or bone on bone.
Sharp delightful life!

Mother, mother, in the snippets
of your mumbles or shouts
I see how you live.
You're both kinds of Mary.

The Persona

2007-01-03T04:05:00.000-08:00

At my back I feel you grow,
your bristle changing speed from
fast to slow, slow to fast,
your hands quick to cast aside my
buckles and lace, my well-made face
full of false confidence I can't hope
you won't see through.

Tiny pins, miniscule needles,
my skin at your clench and rake
begins to smart, to start to take
the colour of your seamless move
from sweet to firm, from firm to
heated slamming
and a running of the octaves.

Please, please, please.
I have no words but these.

Brazen

2007-01-03T04:01:00.000-08:00

Fingertip to fingertip for a first course;
the general mumble of lips, a spin of your hair
around my knuckles.
I'm leaning, I'm doe-eyes, I'm sap in your hand.

Then twist! Grab! Pull!
We're laughing, we're reeling, we're
snatching at each other's feelings as they
fall from the air.

Call me from across the room;
I'm mocking you with my cocked hips,
so come on, come on! Come play.
Eat your fear and come.

A Meal At The Moon's Table

2007-01-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

She saw her across the park at night
sitting underneath a half dead pine;
her tongue was flicking out and licking
the slim finger of her panatella.

Her skirt was navy, it looked like
a chemist-girl's uniform and she had
hiked it to her hips; she curled her legs
and sat like the lotus.

Later, when she had the girl's skirt
scrunched under her hands
she thought about the shapes the boughs
of that roiling old tree
had made against that skin, all thrilled shadows -
the moon pushing in, in, as though it too
wanted to dig fingernails across the girl's back
and take some of that common beauty
as a last meal.

Aubade for John

2006-12-12T07:19:00.000-08:00

When I rise before the sun
and leave you,
the sheet falling from me
easily, a snake's shed skin,
I glance down once.
Pale and freckled, scattered handfuls
of curls framing your face,
you sleep like an ashen Christ.
Your mouth hangs slightly ajar;
your breath is the rustle of leaves.
Your hands tuck up, under the pillow
like they clasp a secret.

I carry myself through the house;
bustling and moving,
always, always moving.
Hands work, the mind covets
ideas and images that flit
as a bee between flowers,
legs pollen-heavy.
The tea is a ritual
to cleanse a tight throat;
a shower to wake
an unfurling body.

On my return, you're awake.
One hand is cocked to hold your head,
the other rests at your leg.
You smile, watch me dress
and all the time, behind your eyes
I see the turning cogs.
The divine fire has spit the first flame;
your day has begun.
The child asleep, the man awake.

Rinse

2006-12-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

Cleaning out the fireplace
after Christmas day
he flicked some hair from her face,
left some ash and the smudge looked
just like a heart shape.
She laughed, her dark eyes flashed
and soon they were a tangle
of limbs and linen.

Flat on the tiles
and listening to the scatter
of water all around them
he watched her rising from him
and falling back down
and he saw the way the light
reflected from her teeth
when she pulled back her lips
to shriek

and he thought
ah, ah, this will all be the same
in two years or sixty
when she is limping and when I
can't remember her name,
we have derailed time's inertia -
It will all be the same.

The Visitation

2006-12-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

Ringing your doorbell
I was a jumble of keys and tissues
with papers falling from my bag as I
searched for mints and hairspray
and you came to the door at last;
you turned the deadbolt
grinning through the glass

and as the door opened, a wind swept through
tumbling from the hallway
and rushing to the pathway
collecting me like mail and sorting
the junk from the value

and by the time I was upon you
the metamorphosis had come to pass -
you moistly somersaulting, caterwauling,
calling for me;
and I this tiger-moth,
a boudoir butterfly with her wing-span
outstretched.

Rainy

2006-12-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

If the rain lasts, and the sky keeps on
gathering and clotting and hailing,
well that's okay...

We can go under,
under the doona.
The cotton is crisp and it'll crumple
around the angles of your
shivering body.

If the rain lasts, and we're driven inside
we can fall asleep, puffing and clinging
to each other's rough skin.

If I wake before you
my fingertips will walk over your temples
and I'll tell you, through your eyelashes
stories about the weather.

If the rain lasts, right until night comes
well that's okay...
you'll keep me warm.

Roadtrip Lullaby

2006-12-12T07:09:00.000-08:00

Squinting and humming;
the radio's on, the bass rattles like there are
old moths in the dashboard,
a little hive unsettled.

Squinting and humming;
I flip down the visor, curl my hand under yours
and together we bump over hills -
quietly.

Hearts

2006-12-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

You have a cigar mouth, the teeth are
perfectly sharp to snap at the tip and grip
the paper like a cunt

and you hold me
you hold me like that in the cup of your lips.
The tip of your tongue rolls me up.

Dart a finger through the mist and please,
do a little strip with those eyes of yours;
I shiver down to my quick.

You have card shark hands, your fingers
call my bluff, my front, my puff and blow
every time, every time.

Valproate

2006-11-24T17:47:00.000-08:00

At first, your body glides with
a clockwork surety.
Did I forget? Did I forget?

Then
time clots;
it forms foggy balls, cloying sods
sticking to your limbs, your ears, your mouth.

You can float!
Tilting above yourself,
watching the increase of
stumbling mumbling movement.

Soon, you're drunk with it.
It could be giddily fun, you know.
A carnival.
But there are these monkeys
eating your eyes
and a ringleader
whipping the soles of your feet.

The sadist apothecary knows, he knows
how this powder touch
holds all this meshed rotting,
flashing and spinning.

Physics, physics - irrelevant!

Just as I begin to imagine
I am above your gravity,
your quaint Newtonian ways,
I reach for the blister pack.

Light, colour.
Diffuse.

Aunty Joy

2006-11-23T19:35:00.000-08:00

Never repressible;
even now, your cocked finger
poised on your laughing jaw
is a rebellion.

You do not eat what we eat, no;
instead you lay out a feast
and preside like Nefertiti.
Overturning all the precedents
to treat us with a cracking laugh
and a clamping wit
that no-one wriggles free from.

You eat life with both eyes open.
You make Greer look like a girl guide,
with bad hair.

Skinless

2006-11-23T19:15:00.000-08:00

I am not watching waves;
I become them.

In every knuckle of white and in
the dark falling caverns of tight water -
I am.

I am taking off the walked steps in sand,
the work worry, world worry, wife worry,
taking it off, off like a sheath.

I look back at this intangible skin I have shed
and I see the poor spirit,
the weave and the heft of it,
the condescending consciousness of self.

It falls;
from underneath these tonnes and tonnes
of pent up, locked in grit and grief
I emerge.

Now the water holds me in a thumping eye.
It doesn't fawn over my
light, light self, it simply calls me in a bass rumble.
So I go to it.

A finger and foot and hair uncombed -
they all join the sea.
And I am not watching waves, I am them.

I am tall and bold like them; I am fierce.
I sluice and drift like them,
I am the water reed,
I am the wren fishing,
I have no name.

I am a pulse, under a headwind.

Holy Orders

2006-11-23T19:06:00.000-08:00

Your kindness poured out
is fragrant, is brilliant
it stings my sense of where you are
and you at a window becomes
an unreal thing
the night backing you solidly
the light pushing your silhouette
forcefully on my iris, my eye

until you're not a cutout
but a relief
raised on my mind like the
awareness of a skipped period,
patently there, crushingly full
and huge and unswerving.

Your hands frame my head
like a baptism
and your kisses
make the sign of the cross.

Waif

2006-11-23T18:48:00.000-08:00

Waif

A coquettish dart will fly from you,
You facsimile of an ingenue.
Here it comes, across the air, the flat wide air
that opens out this rural room
like a sigh.

Your eyes? Sunk ships that loom
from a pale depth eddied only
by faint, faint lines not yet
allied with time.

Lovely mummer with a sour mouth
and lids that hate me;
their pits are punctures, awl rounds,
as though
the cultureless violence in your glare
was threaded there.

You click your heels to turn in
a derision you can't quite summon.
The clickclickclick like the steel
of a man's finger ring
on the butt
of his gun.

Boxed Girls

2006-11-12T01:54:00.000-08:00

Boxed Girls

Girls are boxed in vellum and cedar;
spiced and salted and crumpled.
A knitted hat, an illegible letter,
a dropped feather treasured and kept.
Lever the lid and dig down a hand
and your keen grabbing fist might
clutch on a button, snag on the threads
of a cloth jewel roll.

Lay it out flat, for they keep their secrets
in the small ripples of silk.
Rub a thumb hard on the seam,
rub a thumb hard on the seam.

The Glass Snail

2006-11-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

The Glass Snail

Strappado face
you can haul me up with the hiss
from between your teeth
outing the remembrance of each line we traced
with nervous fingertips and shall never forget

I hold you secret like a snail
your black shell uncrushable and hazardous as glass
warning me -you'd break, embed and spread,
slow, slow, slithering intravenously again
into my very cells.

I won't cry out, I won't.

Letterbox

2006-11-11T05:41:00.000-08:00

Letterbox

When the sky opens like a grieving eye
I squeeze my hand.
Reflex.
The grip is empty,
the palm not finding wart or line to press;
the fingernails ragged and chopped.

Without an umbrella we get all painted in drops
and you wonder aloud
why all my words are for other people.

You'll never know that I keep them
tied with wire in tight bundles in the hush,
hush of my little heart, the letterbox.
My words are dulled there.

They don't need to speak.
You make enough sense.

Seamless

2006-11-11T05:26:00.000-08:00

Seamless

Ceaseless angry engines crank and shudder
up the hill, owning it, stamping it, clamping their
mechanical teeth into the flesh of it and wresting off bits.
I reject them. I reject them.
My metaphors become mechanical,
even mypsyche is drowned in the candy fumes
of petroleum.

Lovely petroleum, sweeter than sex
for the gurgling, churning, gorged horde.
Hundreds of years cannot bring them up
from the mine shaft, cannot bring them into a home of themselves.
They are still sitting as sentry dogs, waiting for orders.
Who approaches? Who comes to straighten up?
Icons and rock-stars, thrusting phallus and pen;
both run dry at the mouth.

I will myself apart from them, I will some
organic splitting at the seam of the womb
that makes me a pup of this litter.
I reject my oneness with you, I reject the
boots and the cigarettes, the self-conscious patter;
the beige twin-set set, lunching and preening.
Time congeals around me, but not you.
You are your grandfather, he was his.

I will myself far, far off,
to hear your voices and machines become the same hum.