poem in which synonyms flock like birds

the clouds of this and no other afternoon

sandwich as if in layers of acetate

printed endlessly with a single panorama

the synonym flocks so distant, so perfect

in distance, they move as shoals of tiny fish

never collide, even when dive-bombing low

through crowded streets, writhes of a muscle

through puddles from the surface to the road

ghosts of puddles, when the surface is the road

road the surface, shadows that smell like building

sites like fresh unmaking, sites too mired in mud

and mortar to tell if the structure is rising or falling

from now, bolt by bolt, brick by brick –

if the hammer blows that echo through the places –

under siege and where I am – echo with life or with death.

*

when the only silks in sight are tattered scarves

lassoed over power lines spearing trees –

connected to homes so flimsily – those twinkles

of Melbourne’s one-phase star, and the silks

whisper the discovery of new ways to get high

I run my teeth from the back of my tongue to the front

look around, around, and say, desertion shouldn’t be

so redolent in the air – the Tiger Moth wing-

-velveteen abandonment I feel has no right to be

here in the evening in the dominion of the living –

this is where water flows warm in winter pipes

where blood in winter veins flows warm

where every gnomic grating steams with warmth!

but of all those flocks in the sky, quiet and cold

belong to the same, and they’re the hour’s bombardiers.

*

they’re the strangest of parallels – her startled lips

the little crook in her nose, the impasse leaking

from her mind by way of eyes as yellow as lines

which take a metre from the places people wait

for trains to embark on – making my patience hemorrhage

making me jam up coin slots with foreign currency

shudder for the fate of all warm things

pluck birds from the sky and fish from the sea

strip them of their currency except as signs

that language also moves outside of me

and I it. I see a man that youth no longer visits

deserted by women and good years

but still fucked well occasionally by tears

smiling with surprise at how they manage

to always fuck him harder than before –

*

the bonds and screw-tight safety words he’s got

for joy don’t work with sadness – the dim basement

studio he’s sitting in, filthy, superimposing

all sunrises one by one over themselves

until what appears to be a close-up of rotten salmon

conjures in him its reek from the usual perfumes

of every woman who’s traveled with him to dawn

every woman who’s spit into his hands

and gone sleepless for him, who’s packed bags

and upped and downed and pirouetted to be where he is –

then in his hands his pale face feels interred.

*

so dark and starless an evening, the afternoon clouds

might have passed unnoticed to the horizon

like fists through silent glass, I count myself lucky

to live in a world so rich that cruelty’s mostly self-inflicted

and although words seem not to compliment feelings

but dive-bomb them, mine are deadeyes, mine are coming.

poem on love/memory

what is a room if not a room?

a storage facility?

you know

even those aren’t loveless –

your lows

and sleeplessness search out

its immanence in everything that’s good

its immanence in the smell of lonely air.

nothing is loveless

but us

nothing is loved

except by us –

reconcile yourself to this in time

and you’ll do better, be better –

you loved her last night

you loved her the night before

you loved her the most this morning

a colourless rainbow reanimated at last

only to hate the bedroom you grew up in now?

lead your life on a syllogism’s logic

not a human’s logic

take a whole bunch of drugs

be a whole lot of uncaring about things

worth caring for – you know the fate

you’re signing up to with that awful signature.

reach up and trace the architraves 

with your fingers instead – the ones as high

as Saturn when you were young –

don’t let the hurt

in your belly stop you reaching

don’t let the dust plant death beneath your touch.

give the cat a chance to burrow in

and under your piles of luggage

to the little spaces he longs for –

shoe openings, toiletry bags –

things you think he calls attention to as

a cursed envoy of the force that says, don’t go –

don’t go – people said that at the party

when you were standing on a chair

breath steaming like your speech into the ether

one of the chair legs had lost its plastic cap

siphoning dirt through the hole like sausage meat

cylindrical dirt forced up by your falling body

but you didn’t fall, and the only ones who meant it

didn’t speak, and the roses on the shirt worn by the man

walking by your window with his dog

start to bleed like storming from afar

and her silk bandana falls from the sky’s yawning mouth

and the heater hums and then his arms and legs aren’t –

as something material he isn’t going to make it

and his unmaking celebrates her –

the last page of the notebook he drops

celebrates her and so, soon, will its burning

or evanescence. you watch the world make

room for her water droplet body – name erasure

history without love – name after that state

of being without her, before all the dreams

you had in this orange room for twenty years –

more suffused with your dreams than any other

space outside your mind and outside hers –

reach – the doorknob’s warm, the air full, the dirt sweet.

Four O'clock Sunrise

Four O’clock Sunrise

it’s another room – it’s not a room at all

and sunrise doesn’t come at four o’clock.

solstice moonlight came and is enough to show

pale pigmentation on the walls, blips of white

sound crowning in the lowly black waveform

where duct tape tore the red paint from the plaster –

solstice moonlight came and is enough to show

the opposite, too – where quotes from Proust

and Baghavad Gita delve further into darkness

like permanent marker spiders on the ceiling –

maybe you can see the glue marks from the stars

that crashed to your Milky Way bedspread on hot mornings –

maybe the solstice moon’s not a moon at all

you draw the curtains in a spasm of unreal pain

to find, behind curtains drawn and low enough to touch

a glow which, if photographed, could be titled

poem in which a beautiful girl stokes the fire

who should fetch another floorboard for the fire

but the only girl at this party I’ve never seen

the only girl at this party I’ve ever seen

in that realm of beauty beyond which only shades

of equal share in the accidental bounty –

when she comes back, the starving flames have died

the embers glow morosely

the embers a quiver of arrows at unsanctioned rest

in the midst of how many freezing targets?

then the tapestries, the incense, the whole loveless

harem seems to vanish – in her hands

coconut husk

twigs and an empty cocoon are on the verge –

in unseeable friction – of convergence

of together doing what neither part can alone

and the way she moves them

concentric circles on a puddle after a leaf

and the way she blows on them

seashell that will sing her back her breath

has me dreaming the lesser parts in harmonies

finger-painting her with charcoal

on scrolled-out butcher paper

shuddering as if the morning sun broke free –

has me cross-legged and closer to everybody.

last breaths

even if it is biannual, more and more

people look to be toasting my death –

and their sweat-prints on the wood

come up like bruises, cloudy tendrils

in ice about to bust and I can’t forget them –

I can’t shake the sense that all anecdotes

involving me are eulogised, nor can I shake

the socks of the beautiful women kneeling in that circle

in my empty bedroom – those holy little puffs

that wax and wane with the pressure

the body attached exerts, the sublime body

and it with the pressure exerted by the mind

engaged in something ceremonial

called conversation, drinking Victorian wine –

that wax and wane like my last breaths.

poems written while N.M paints my portrait

we agree to meet at the Merri Creek to write

at an hour perhaps put to simpler use on dreaming

perhaps put to simpler use on being in the arms

of somebody pulling theatrical poses and sounds

like birdsong under lightening blinds, bed sheets

never quite so warm as in those moments

instead of under the cold sky, the wraparound sun

dialoguing with water-sound, vaudeville willows, magpies

and simple is a fiction I’ve read a lot of lately –

when I get there, I wait for twenty-five minutes

in yawning and in vain – my friend never shows.

what would I have written about anyway?

then, too alert to return to bed, I walk.

schools of shadows belly through the water

so near to the turbid surface that I see them outlined

I see them as shadows of carp and not freshwater eels

so near to that painting, in mud, of the nothing sunrise –

gathering flecks of the reeds that look freshly combed

dirt between roots like skin between parted hair

my boots reach a ditch on the banks, where I notice

a bed leg, a wooden, nail-ridden bed leg, golden-

lacquered, doodled on in Henna, identical to

the sceptre on the wall, among notes and pins

of my friend the missing author’s bedroom.

why do the bubbles in the silt now bend what I know?

*******

metal caps on drawstrings come to ground

ground veined with dust like running ink

why is she tearing up all the appendices

to the clothes that keep her body from me now

why is she tobogganing where the snow

is thinnest, where the thinnest footprints of ardour

can blow off like coconut sprinklings into streams

which turn hair as young and red as hers to white

only what we all have can lay claim

in the spool of tactics loosed by a world enraged

in nature, that bookish phenomenon

to the only ardour masquerading as true –

then she trails off while I’m down on all fours

looking for the brass, smelling for it

my footprints run, my knees hurt, my toes slide

my body is as high as it is low –

aware that the thanks I’ll never receive

would only make me laugh, or cry

and either so close to bedtime would be bad –

I find them – I might have found them earlier

flick them under the couch like errant marbles

feel around, feel around, feel around

the air the smell of one too many breaths

no windows good for sun, excessive sleep

whatever those stupid caps are to her

they’re too small for the meaning they house

maybe, I think, it’s just that the ardour is there

and nothing had by one is had by all.

a morning date gone wrong

ash spits from the burning coconut husk

that blows up and shrinks like a shadow

like a head – if God is light

then he is both there and not there

(the same could also be said of another guy)

in a fire pit in the middle of a clearing

bordered by out-of-place palms and a river

flooded last night in a deluge the radars missed

receding a metre for every step she walks

with bloodless hands and hair just-cut that steams –

she can see the steam coming off her hair

she can feel her bamboo socks getting wet

and needs help – help is what the river left

behind – the trash engulfing all things to the flood line

the clandestine filth of urban waters

coughed up and ornamental

consecrates willow trees, sublimates mud

bestows an apocalyptic beauty on the bend

makes the June morning colder – she looks back

no husk anymore but choking smoke – no him –

then leaves the path to wander through the colour

through the technicolour – wanders under cover

of smoke and trees and trash and the early hour

to where the park abuts the street, then crosses over.

running

only when it’s coldest do salt lamps sweat –

no liquid in man or outside makes less sense

than those elemental flashes which appear

when the tears on a face would already have dried

devolved to the chalky mineral inside, never to melt again –

now you’ll watch me sprint until my hamstrings tear

my Achilles tendons blast away from the heel

my agony sacs excoriate each other

my heart want so badly to beat for the last time

I have to turn purple in order to economise breaths

to sprint purple-faced until nothing, no landscape, is left

only rabbit bones and painlessness pasted over

those bleak flatlands – you’ll watch me do that

from high over the city on the rise where you said you lived

but I wasn’t sure, and your urgings didn’t sway me

either way, your binoculars freezing like metal

tools left lying on a worksite through a winter’s night

on your eyes, the plastic smell of the lanyard caustic

the focus wrecked – all you see is a streaking blob

all you can see are the dyes of your old world running.

domestic picturesque

so you can gambol down the domestic garden

paths where the fastest, most combustible

possums in the city, not asleep and yet awake

only for dazed hunger, eyes like gelatine icing

pronged halves of a glass infinity symbol

splay, you exit the subway from the tunnel

that leaks, the tunnel on the other side of the law courts

where yesterday confetti explosions were filmed

and the smell of herbal cigarettes filled the foyer –

the grey-watered grass is tall and apple skin hangs

from trees with Vs cut out to make room for power –

a glint of silver scuds along the tramlines

an old tram motor labours to carry no-one down Latrobe.

apple-coloured shipping crates hurtle towards

the docks on the back of a semi hawking smoke

from the way he held the wheel, you think the driver

is musical somehow, that he doesn’t always drive

and that the breakfasting woman doesn’t always eat

they’re notions that put you down on a broken bench –

then – never eat anything shining brighter than eyes

then – never count constituent parts of asphalt

on the way to work in the city, never look around

not even in gardens teeming with glassy infinities.

poem set in lounge room/kitchen

The hair behind the door is an entreaty

shorter by half than what you’d seen before

her sojourn to the beach, solo, in winter

where all she found was a pair of blunted scissors

and a box of out-of-date ammoniac blonde

and sand as coarse as if the whole world's teeth had crumbled

and a grey sea and thoughts that funked her out of running.

Replete with the eyes and the world-come-at-me

bearing – pinned shoulders, whiplashed hands

keeping time to a song that’s quick and blares

where you don’t hear it, only her, those

turns of phrase you didn’t know minds as riven

by the need for purpose as hers could even make

she calls herself your lover in loveless July –

Anything sounds like anything from the lounge room.

Her floury, flowery sweet potato fingers

still metronomic, unpacking sizeable cloves

from purple-spotted Russian garlic bulbs

the netting they came in stuck to the fridge with magnets

the bag for the netting lining the compost bin

you determine that the size of her body is unclear –

bigger than the soup pot, dwarfed by the archway between you

Dwarfed and warped, unlike the onscreen women –

you’re watching TV for the first time in almost a year –

who swim in a pool that’s proportionate to their bust size

who pull a daring, tightly-filmed escape from the series

of Lucite boxes drowning them, them swan around

like mermaids some more – and you steal a look at the jagged

back of that blonde-streaked blackness, five cent coins

Of pale scalp at her hairline’s labyrinthine junctures

and you turn back to those mermaids under stage lights

under blue lights underwater, peroxide wracked

by chlorine, bikinis painted, bikinis gone – you can’t feign

an even temper anymore, your blood boils and spits

interposed, the two scenes seem to be sea and sky

no more but a middle ground, a sorcerer’s offing

A hall of mirrors – her body is warped like one of those

and so is this dialogue – the blondes, the music, the onions

bouncing around like the light from CD bellies to the walls.

When you arrived you took off a coat, now you put it back on

maybe she’s thinking how short hair unhands time

or how to place the yoghurt on the table without saying too much

or the connotations of straight-cut or angled bread

Because she’s stalling in there, over-thinking her eyes

they won’t blink without conscious effort – the inventory

to which she submits the rest of her visible self

turns the simmer to a boil so hard you hear it and gently ask

Is everything alright? Put the TV on standby and go see

stir the burned parts back into the peaches and cream whole

once reintegrated, no more heat, no more shirking entreaties

she listens later as you count every strand of blonde.

love and poetry on the short drive home

On the Isle of Elba she wrote verse to the mandolin

her teacher played at recess in her classroom

about the ports emptied of fishing boats, and love.

Then your father dabs at something on his cheek

turns down the demister fan but turns the heat to red

and the windscreen wipers speak in groans to the glass.

The way home is short but variable – turn down streets

from Bell to Separation and they’ll take you there

in similar time, only tonight that’s devastating

on this car ride half too cold and half like a furnace

on these tram tracks overexposed and slick with dew

because the radio isn’t on and the flossy winter fog

Encapsulates the two of you and it’s beautiful

and it’s so beautiful – you tell your dad he’s no different

to his mother, in the bloom of her girlhood in his memory

he tells you your own mother is selfless like this fog

and he raises his hands from the steering wheel and says

that if she were any more selfless, she’d disappear

You tell him he’s a poet too, without having penned a line

that a father’s tears are pure poetry, liquid poetry

that a father who cries for beauty is the only inheritance

worth a dime to you, worth everything

because everything else is an orphan in that cradle

because the truest poets are those who never write

And you idle outside your house for another two hours

talk about the latch on your front gate falling off

and the bareness of the trees and the swamping of the gutters

with caramel leaves that an old girlfriend would kick and throw

and whether your little brother ought to grow a ponytail –

when you make to get out, you lock hands and don't talk at all.

The Soldier

From my stool at the window I notice a marble statue

newly erected, of a fellow from the Lighthorse

resting on his rifle butt, feathered hat doffed

as if to offer his brylcreemed scalp to the wind

bayonet to the citadels built at the heart of the earth.

Near the statue, a toddler chases the midday pigeons

a boy with long red hair and mercurial orders

firing to his upstart vocal chords, to his new arms and legs

then he stops and surveys the world that, rightly, he owns

he’s a pyramid bobbing on its point and he owns every bird

I see them flutter through the treasure-filled secret rooms

of his booby-trapped aleph – I can’t see

his mum or dad but know for sure they’re good. I know

the only thing he knows is all things end behind his eyes

which open wide as rivers when he topples on the grass

And gives everything he has to dandelion gazing.

     Meanwhile

          I see a flurry of

               iridescent feathers on

                     locks of my hair.

·       

It’s the music of jacked-up gas jets and onions dicing

that makes this woebegone pizza shop sound like rain

It’s the music they play here that keeps me returning hungry

and the beautiful waitress with blackheads under her lip –

indoor rain and small talk that perfumes the unwashed floor

Because the basil is shrivelled brown on my margherita

and the skirting boards flake and are painted amateurishly

and the flames on the wood in the ovens are trapped and vicious

and the basil bunches arrive in waxed cardboard and plastic

and the corners of that brand new plinth are crumbling away –

Because polystyrene keeps the Italian tomatoes from bruising

silicone paper the cheap roasting trays from charcoal

chemical bleach the water pipe roaches from sallies

straddling both sides the snakes in my heart from sallies –

and I’m rubbing my temples with fingers covered in garlic oil

Thinking that all the revolutions, all the turns around

of this inexhaustible rotary engine of ours

that roars in the helpless faces of physics and love

have become a single soldier now, an enemy we must kill.

But I, whose generation grew up in the Great Decay

Have also decayed, and so I sit and listen to the quasi-rain

and eat my rubbery pizza and wonder: has he ever tasted basil?

If I can break its limbs into shards like a shattered moon

then maybe he, with standby LED hair and paper legs

can cast the last stone. Then I leave, adfrift but, mercifully, full-bellied.