free

you’re the one with a handful of broken twigs

bench’s memorial plaque pressed upon your neck –

that hiss not wind but windblown trees and water

that lowing not a cow but a flash road bike –

Kawasaki Ninja, maybe, or one of the red Italians –

revving out high in a hurry to get somewhere, bound

for somewhere that will, through endless ploys, gainsay the haste –

across the creek a man tops a yellow ball

it lands closer to the sixteenth tee than the divot –

his curses seem to unnerve a rat swimming by

and you, with your six pieces, milky and green, filed

in angst to equal length, are ready to receive it

as it scrabbles slick through the tall weeds towards you

then there isn’t any movement anymore.

she might as well be posing for a portrait – perhaps she is –

portrait of the sheer face of a meaning, of thick black hair

a mien embalmed in her childhood, in agave syrup

diffused like ashes through lexical trenches and shoals

a certain impassiveness not cold, not clement – a scarf

around her neck, her eyes out, a crossing of bare boy’s legs –

becalmed as a woman who knows that she’s loved but still free.

what speaks to us through boredom

a bin on a safestep™ platform

is a giant roll of film

filled with dirty, incriminating photos –

a black plastic bag enfolds it to halfway

craggy like a field tilled inexpertly

craggy like a toy Star Wars™ landscape

and the safestep™ a lustrous egg yolk

hue emboldened by the worms the hen pecks up

hue ennobled by the light of baby grass

hue engineered with resin and pigments in China –

                                  

white walls, shell ceiling, carton carpet –

a healthy egg is holding up a bin in reverence

a trash bin in the centre, shiningly aloft –

why is it there, what’s the deal with the stink

              

                of wet pencil sharpenings –

                            of stockfeed

in this classroom on the fourth floor of an idea?

and the bucolic/bin dialectic, the byroads you’re finding

to the fringes, the darkrooms cajoling you back

with a beauty so unearthly and yet from the earth

all of it saying, nothing is emptied

and cleaning is a chimera

and photos aren't frozen but fugitives on the run.

burying the bird

you as a soft-throated hatchling –

that’s what I thought of as I watched you die

on a tattered towel I’d laid like a drum skin

over a brass-handled wooden wine bucket

as I watched your wings seem to shrink slightly

your animal resolve expire, your wings stiffen – 

where beside me the lettuces, still growing

had toppled with the swiftness of their growth

had toppled with vital exuberance, green stars –

the dill gone to yellow snowflake seed

the jasmine free of its trusses, branching through

vacant, lowly space, the skein used up –

between the weathered planter box

and your death throes I knelt, cast my shadow over you

like a pall, I cried on you, I swept you up uncurtained

into the greediest of bouquets –

clutching body parts forgotten for a time

I thought how human your eyes were.

·       

a pinwheel spinning on the footpath

stepped over without pity by homesick traffic

feathers turned up by gusts of uncaring

a nervous system spin-out, a broken back

markings like, but neither, dove nor pigeon

I noted as I passed you and then stopped

in an iron rictus – looked back, relinquished

all the world but you, in adolescence, poised to go

and a wind that seemed at once like calm and anguish –

and the braid of my own hands against my fingers

soft as good soil – a softening of precepts I didn’t know

had ossified, and with that I took you up –

if I’d dropped you in the struggle – and

the struggle was unbearable at first, maybe

I’d have bit my tongue and left.

washed my hands with laundry soap

washed my hands of lifecycles, or put you out

to Elysian pastures with my boot heel –

you bucked like a tidal river dammed

but I held on, even managed to scrounge

for my house keys in a docile moment –

when I brought you in it had stopped raining

the fridge motor uttered corrective groans

the kitchen floor was littered with dead leaves –

·       

I searched among my music for a lullaby –

all my lullabies were electronic dance music

which I thought would frighten you (though perhaps

no more than other music would have) – I deferred

to the silence of the empty courtyard - there

I found my compassion waning, and wept for it.

you twisted into the shapes of my nightmares

only for me to re-pose you, like an angel, on your back –

I was behind you – as you spun your head around

and looked at me, I thought of arterial cracks

in the egg I might have outgrown and broken

in another life, in the egg you outgrew and broke

in what would soon be another life –

your breathing slowed to the rate of a sleeping boy’s

your eyelids didn’t open anymore

(although I wouldn’t dig your grave till morning)

and yet still in my despair I couldn’t shake

a different sadness – that no-one would see me bury you.

the centennial light

in a gravelly arbour of the world

near foothills and fault lines, subbasins

and Silicon Valley, the Golden Gate

and eighty thousand glints of aurora

a light bulb’s candy-wrapper glow, its

carbon swirls have shone across eons –

a light bulb’s meek incandescence

you call, in your present malady

                           an event horizon.

·       

because, blind

               in its inanimateness to forms

               of darkness – those it’s barred

               those it’s left to flood for fathomless years

               the Centennial Light is a point of no return

beyond which nothing escapes

endures for a sanctioned time

in diminution, dies a dismal death

in the void, and thus deceased, is forgotten –

·       

but the piles of antimatter that stink

that threaten to consume all tracts of space

that gorge on growth and grow in vast black holes

on outskirts and reclaimed dead zones, that reach

                                                            the final line

                                                     

on sweeping winds

                     of love primed for swift expiry

                     aren’t all loveless when sequestered.

                     loveless and outmoded aren’t the same

                     loveless and superseded aren’t the same –

·       

love, function – always interlaced, but

when the Bay Area light bulb is dead

when the event horizon, that glimmer of evidence

sole signage to the darkness is lost, they will be one –

smeared like a daub on the rim before your eyes

then sucked into material oneness

and you, you’ll fall in and out of love

too many times to count, and you’ll be helpless.

happenings

your fingers open like petals, or a single petal flayed

it’s a mass transit greenhouse

it’s the hottest summer on record

you’re the most foreign flower native to Australia – 

milkshake seat patterns – topographic

fishtails of desert tracts

of slate escarpments

thumbnails of pudgy mountain range

you puff up the dust to pitch into, you fart soundlessly into

playing eyes

playing with the eyes

of some ravishing tourists who speak gruff Quebec French

and unfold and unfold a map, hand of a different girl

at every dog-eared corner

ease their cotton shoulders

from the straps on their bulging Quechua backpacks –

read the map and the Reflections of Herman Hesse

and L'Avalée des avalés

do you think they think conterminously

of swallowing you? fucking you? watering/their waters breaking with you?

toes squinted closed like eagle beaks, mongoose claws

you note that of all passengers

you are both the calmest

and the most unhinged – it gnaws at you, that weird dialectic

all you get is calmer – South Melbourne corrugated iron

ribbed like the roof of a mouth

so far from the Fitzroy seabeds

so far from all that warms you, so far from warming notions

you’re cold you can’t feel yourself – think of the bay winds

baying and be present

think of sand in groinal clefts

think of sand grabbed in slants to punish, of sea spray sandy

like half mixed dough – think of green water, vast bays of ill faces – 

all the rockslides happening

all the Kevlar braiding happening

all the kitten drowning happening

all the gold mining happening

all the doilies being ripped

from ‘Awesome Orange’ jam –

all the movies being ripped from DVD

all the absenteeism at Movieland

all the intellect conventions

matinees in far-off time zones

all the chicken salt eaux de parfum

wafting through KFC air vents

and in variety buckets through homes –

all the master signifiers, nervous tics round nervous animal eyes

happening.

·       

six stops until the end of the line – you’ve only just passed Langridge

and yet you feel the line has ended, that it ended while you looked

at other things – and this motion, an ersatz motion, only you

being passed on all sides

above and below

at breakneck speed, only you catching whiplash in weed-like growth –

the woman wiggling her nose like Sabrina the teenage witch

dislodges a booger and eats it

your jealousy almost euphoric

next to her an old man with a rice paddy hat, next to both of them

the ceiling and then cabling and then ceiling and then power lines

and then pollution and then sky – limpid as a creature of the abyss.

gardening

in forfeiture to the pretty undergrowth

bury your head – breathe in

trace elements, fertility, decay –

to those faces made of printer toner resin

someone drew when they ran out of canvas

blow back to the antique mirrors underneath

the mirrors that gift the moonlight to the garden

roll up your jean legs to the end

of the calves – end or beginning –

denim static pulls at the weed-like hair –

now make tears

in the sides of the garbage bag for handles –

hope that they hold out long enough –

mirrors, moonlight, gardens

resin – what is happening here?

My God My God, My God, My God, My God

are you taking out the green waste or going crazy?

the eggshells are all so pale

the earthworms so endless

the chocolate all sugar bloomed

three whole rockmelons indented

by time, too misshapen even to roll –

whatever was unreachable once

is now inexistent, turned over and so

cradled by elegy, dirge – weeds

parted like balding hair by the pulled

and ripping denim framing your ice cold skin

weeds seem to capture what is happening here –

kinesis in stasis – the bag goes no further

the smell of the compost too much

your legs can’t cross

your eyes can’t cross

the crows are circling

the sums don’t square

the hutches don’t lock

live chemical catalysts

stain the polymer sunset green

green like the tussocks you squint through, scared

and the clouds are distended bruises

vessels filled with the juice of purple carrots –

everything isn’t ruined

but irreparably askew

all faces are that way from your bower and angle

from the undergrowth, all photographs are faces

from the undergrowth, all things in the world are faces

tomorrow when you wake, body thick with soil

a form of obscurity will dawn

the ultimate form, and will not stop rising, not even

for the mirrored moon – until it too has become obscure.

http://youtu.be/G7LKyYTdNbc

the paradox

the paradox

beneath the acetate dinosaurs

stuck in technicolour herds on a woman’s back –

spiny as though misdirected tree roots

are set to burst through a boardwalk

pale, abysmally pale, with desert dust –

the adhesive ointment – probably pawpaw –

loses its emulsion in the butane sun

bleeds out unbecomingly and runs

in snail tracks

in city grids

in prison bars

in forgotten tears –

the skin around them burns – the air

smells of skin on fire and petrichor

and her black hair a reflection of the storm clouds

and her bamboo dress a windsock

and her boyfriend naked to his corkboard sandals –

but the dinosaurs, I know, will soon be lost

flicked, licked or oozed unstuck – a long

voyage from their place of origin

(a factory in Zhejiang, or Guandong)

an even longer layover on pristine land

and in the air as party to the Great Poisoning.

you can't go

it nearly gave way – the in-ground trampoline

when with my hands I turned your head, weightless

with willing, like an orb of dew encased in curls and skin

towards a distant mob of kangaroos, your first

and you leapt and your English flew off in the sparks –

when with my hands I held onto the springs

after falling, and morning reigned so kingly in my stomach –

who was it then that covered your eyes

blue as a kitten’s, with cardboard, spun you and spun you

sick and sat you spinning beneath the sunrise

a molten marshmallow oozing over a rockslide –

was the cardboard waxed – my French too crude to ask

but what you smelt, what you tasted folded through my thoughts

like the whitest meringue through fast-deflating dough –

the first of the barbed wire fences, that’s where the roos

had bounded to from the high grass in the valley – the valley

that seemed to stretch, at least, from St Andrews to Eltham

and, your sight rescued, your share of the world again

unmoving, they looked at you, all seven Big Reds –

nonplussed, as though you’d asked a difficult question of them

and you looked back, fingernails scraping the heavy nylon, and shook –

meantime, Sean killed the turntables for dawn

and after a moment of screeching static, the speakers too –

only the fires, loud and lambent in their oil drums

and the birds and the far-off rustle of Yarra rapids

and the ringing of ears could be heard – but how would you have known?

now cross-legged, a well-fed and gorgeous yogi

un-ironed clothes so windless as to look like warped plastic

your mouth so agape you couldn’t help but yawn –

half in terror, half in thrall – how would you have known

                  about anything at all except that light-

refracting animism

                                         – union of souls, let’s say –

and how could you go back to Europe now?

could you be anywhere but where the roos are and call it living?

It’s not a question you’ll ever ask yourself.

But, asleep in the car as it teases out the hills, I could swear

you flinched when I said, as if to a piece of silk gauze on a spurting wound

you can’t go.                                            

writing exercise - micro narrative of the kitchen

what looked, at first, to be a vanilla bean

is the inside of an old permanent marker

an inky black sponge encased in acetate

an inky pipe half buried in a bowl of anise

and cloves - what looked to be a Kandinsky

print next to the pantry is a high school original -


why's a marker's guts in that bowl, I ask her

she takes her tongue between her lips and beams

outside, the limpid white isn't overcast

but a sky too light to be blue

and her answer is too honest to be true.

to parley with her in the morning

horse shoes beneath her eyes

whale caviar irises

shoulders like sinking islands

an ironmonger’s mouth

a yawning cave –

an inverse stalagmite –

her voice a wan abutment

bite marks on a zephyr

blood on the muslin sheets –

her head hard by mine

she cries

charlatanry, charlatanry –

we string up lurid blankets

for our illusionist’s assistants

and their every outstayed costume –

in broad daylight they change

in spangled concrete stairwells

in apple orchards just past season

they change in narrow night –

we’re strung-up venetians

admitting light, turning light away

at a gentle pull – we’re marionettes

that tell lies (but only when we’re lying)

these are the things she cries

and I know that in her tiredness

she’s unsure quite what they mean

just as I can’t be certain

whether she is or isn’t beautiful.