05.05

all my efforts have failed to curb the browning of the peace lily leaves’ tips.

          the tips of your fingers were white

before the thumbs went grey as an elephant on contact

           with the frozen ladder rungs.

the whites of your eyes were not white

next to the crook-armed moon as you forced your body down that frozen slide.

           excessive water goads the leaves

into pantomimes of drowning. thirst turns the flower stems to straw,

           white flowers hidden by browned foliage.

I have tried raising the blinds on fine days, I have tried unrelenting darkness

            but light is neither the question nor

the answer. it is to be another week of misery for me, another week of feeling

            nail butts soldered onto my pupils,

looking at those withered apexes the way one looks at the legs of a burnt spider.

             I return to the soaked back of your dress,

I return to the slivered moon of underwear beaming through the soaked red polyester,

             coat, stilettos strewn across the tanbark.

probably we are too old now to fuck ourselves up and make a clandestine exit

             from the big party to go and play.

I cannot look up at hairy wrists and crosshatched bulging veins on the monkey bars,

              and when I look at your back I see death

and this is how I know I will die a long time from now, alone, repulsed, and hated.

              in all my efforts to curb the decay

I choose not to notice that the leaves, though brown-tipped, grow as never before.

29/04

I run a bath, my first in years.

The cobwebbed exhaust fan is broken.

Behind the locked plaster door

steam settles like dust over mirrors, chrome

draw handles, basin, towel rack

overstuffed with the gaudy blue towels

my mother has always preferred.

I am in the tub

before the water has risen

from puddle to pool, too hot, kneeling, hands

on thighs, legs blooded, shoulders white.

Outside, an electrical storm rages

but there is no rain, only skies

too high up to guess at, imbricated

metals and blue and bone, red

shingles wailing through the air.

I stand up to look out the window

above the vanity, open to the screen,

water reaching barely to the top

of the titanium rod in my fibula –

flood ruler for a man of worry.

While the old oak whose branches I could touch

does not sway, the copse of eucalypts on

the highest hill in the park two streets over

thrashes so madly, I wonder

how the roots stay in the ground.

Then I lie back, sleep away the heat

24/04

Strawberry stem, though poisonous

I pull you from that which you protect –

I cast a grey glass mold of you

to nestle in my sternum, a star

fruit pendant – now you keep me from harm

as the charred debris of

humanness cools and hardens, nomic-

vested, renegade as fire.

Together, we walk to the park

where there are lakelets muscle-bound

by eels, their white-bellied bodies

like the serpents of so many creation myths

thrashing, a million-eyed

monad on the shallow mud bed

I could seize fragments of with my bare hands

to throw into the trees.

Watch the space fill up again

as though flesh were some magic compound

but you are not watching.

In truth, I converse with you just as I do

every single hair upon my head,

every ridged birthmark, every drop of blood –

they are quantum talismans

as you are, but with one difference –

yours is magic believed.

22/04 #2

What is known of it –

almond husks split open and emptied

on the cool loam beneath the almond tree.

Some form of

life has done this. Are these the kernels

feeding the larvae of the Tiger Moths

who proliferate so secretly

then carpet the brightest windows

and choke and burn in the sensors?

In Vodoun

when God comes

to animate the body, it is called white

darkness.

I know of a man’s hands,

knuckles felted with black hair

breaking the wings of a crow

but it is not he who does the breaking

or the drinking of the crow’s blood – rather

what has become him (the sacred

parasitism). His tongue laps every sweet

dew ball from a bluegrass field

like a sick animal, canines excruciating into fangs

faster than bamboo grows,

eyes multiplied by four and gone red.

In the Maze

my brothers

dart to avoid my body, its marked

whiteness.

There the parents of a child

floating in the telic centre – this maze

centre is a perfectly round pool of water –

an unreachable purpose

always with a pair of beautiful, age-lined faces,

one dark, one light – perhaps Finnish –

and the child of the hybrid

colour, disposition, cannot cut through

the tall hedgerow with its soft cuttlebone

teeth. The child has nothing to eat, gaping

holes in both sock heels

to contend with. Imminent night.

22/04

each bite in a leaf
a Canyon of Arun

each ant
an ethno
scientist

each gun a gun

21/04/14

I am going home to see
My Mother and Father.
To reach them
I must cross oceans
Made of more than water.

20/04

Missing for months, the boy’s

red plastic spade is found

by lawn mower blades.

As in all cases, the discovery

demands a terrible noise,

the shriek of the pulverized –

glancing shards see

the father shield his eyes,

returning even to the little he

through an open den window

the cat unscreened.

19/04

Up there – what streams

from the bodiless slackline

parabolas – distance steals

their colour, their music –

strung high above the street on carnival day

between blue glass

and blue steel megaliths?

I believe the answer is

undeterminable.

And because it is the last, always

the last way

I would use my agency if

I could help it, I hurt you

as those fearful of fractures

fall over smooth pavement.

Today, your floodwaters

send me on wild detours, into

solitude, rage without owner.

Unsung land is dead land.

That, of all things, is what you

looking up at the slacklines

say – the songlines keep the land alive.

You believe the proof is

irrefutable.

You wear your hair like someone

destined to be courted

by my kind of suitor, who hopes as ardently

as he despairs. You make love

like an octopus playing the harp.

From what ride have I just

disembarked to feel so dizzy?

Floats move past, slowly.

A crowd of many thousands

turns the national anthem into fugue.

Children loose helium balloons –

they rise through the slacklines

and the song, not touching them

but sometimes coming close.

16/04

A Blue Mountains hermit

looks upon a clear pond, sees

the pulse in his sallow jowls

faint as the last morning fog,

quick as a startled gecko –

sees his clothes, rags now

caught on a nest of bones

and he laughs like Kookaburra

before the clear pond

claims him.

Soon, other isolates

surfing the coastal plains,

Southern Cross-eyed

in the deserts, eating honey

ants out of basin

alluvium, hissing like the winds

in the grasslands, salt

and blood of the mighty plateaus

begin to depart.

Where are they, wasted

and alone, going in unison?

It is almost as though a mass capture

or exposure loomed to be evaded

but no such threat exists,

nothing is staked on these lives of

removal, these non-beings

until one day the city folk follow

in selfsame solitude

but screaming like Black Cockatoo

into the bright, turbid river.

15/04

Ode to Spring

thick as the skin

of an unripe fig

nature – all ideas

of that process.

incremental

conditional

successive

mind –

thus poetry.

(is world pulled in-

to mind

or

is mind

pulled into world?)

rolling

boil of current

wood on

synapse fires

burlap gently

laid on ground

where snow

leeched away

ground-

cover blades.

spring –

pole of love

and hatred –

life as all

life born of

annihilation

touched

again – bare

skin.

14/04

walking down a narrow dirt track

– a disused ranger’s road to the reservoir

– the air feels cool as milk,

leaves carved from shadow

lie long, as though flattened by car tyres,

evening quiet in that evening register.

as my eyes edge into the canopy

above the track, where crowns from

either side compenetrate, forming one ceiling,

beads of liquid caught by my brow

could be the sap of the eucalypts.

I know the gate ahead will be padlocked shut,

blooming with rust. breath

this night comes with a pinch

and a mist. spirit beings

created the skyworld, where emu-footed men

and dog-footed women dwelt

undying, the earthworld of surfaces

where inchoate, huddled foetal mists

waited for those underneath to awake and burst through

and bring with them the sun and the moon,

blades to divide and define the formless,

stories to tell, laws to impart, songs to sing

until they saw fit to resume their sleep

or withdraw into rock, red termite mounds, water,

all things, charged thenceforth with secrets

only to be spoken into the rightful ear.

at the gate, I give up on such thoughts

for the scaling.

I was never a climber – my belly

presses hard on the tousled parapet of wires

unknotted in an attempt to cheat passage,

my legs, at one point, flail behind me

such that I have prostrated myself, half in, half out,

and suddenly I see a human megaphone,

sewn around the ear to an open mouth, two bodies forming

a pistol, bobbing down a busy Melbourne street –

anything whispered

entering the world as scream, and silence

reigning in vacuo between broadcasts.

    

    

    

13/04

uproot completely, go with the dandelions

to where matter matters –

shadows grew and shrank

and grew. still

I went harried through dusk

into darkness of sky, darkness of mind,

desperate to take a cold bath,

imagining my blue lips

sucking milk straight from an udder.

how I wanted a woman’s body

prone over my bare back, her forehead

pillowed in the nape of my neck,

breath of perfume, perfume of peppermint,

cracking my back like ice on a footpath

to find terrain more solid!

I wanted to suck the coloured light from fountain

streams, museumstuffs and the moon

but urban life had numbed me

and the proof of this was

I did nothing but think, speak and write

pursuant to the numbing.

it was what I was.

numb from staring too long at my own reflection –

even the subtlest twitch of eyebrow

struck consciousness like a stone in

a subterranean lake. was it any wonder

terror polluted the drinking water?

the modernists had shown the terror with mangled bodies

and maids who laughed at odd moments

but the trope now was to show things as they were.

I went harried through to morning,

drank a glass of coconut cream and rum,

my body smelling of weevil-ridden flour,

the bathtub fallen through the floor.

11/04 #1

Shindofuji in Urban Gardens

we are told to eat food grown near home.

the rationale is more than environmental –

endemism couples body with soil, and so we become

our path to belonging – land is

the site of the birth, the continuing, the death –

not a moment elapses

when our story is not written in the ink of

minerals and elements at hand – we are, literally, where we live.

and this honey salve tars the body and enters the mind

through the blood. but what we are not told is

the beds are raised, moveable,

itinerant, the stories garbled among the newspaper shreds

hail from everywhere but here –

place of no stories – some other earth

bagged, trucked in, substituting our own, which is ruined,

the coffee grounds began in Africa.

consider, those blue tarpaulin sheets

protect us from the perils of home.

the wooden pallets must originate in

distant forests, now unreadable encryptions in the grain

because this is a treeless city

ornamented with sculptures of swinging fists.

so, what does it mean to partake of nature

that is us, but not us? we are trying

everything, but according to the ancient precepts

what we grow is our own estrangement,

what we dip our nibs in is ink that vanishes

so that the simplest stories require expensive, cold apparatus

just to be read, though birth and death

go unchanged. but do we trust the ancients?

in truth, they are not so old after all, not so old.

better to stand upon toxic ground than to fly.

10/04

my eye sockets are on the middle abdominals,

people in my village compare me to an old juiceless orange –

shrunken, solid as a billiard ball

with a face drawn on its brown snake-

skin belly – and I would happily be burned

(though I think I am a reasonable man),

drowned in potato liquor

to saturate her lips, go in vapours toward her neck

like the spirit of the heart

whose spiked chamber walls are

finding one another, slowly. but night upon night

her cat sits on the bed, licks at the same plot of emptiness

until first light, feeding time.

she is not returning for her things, or her animals.

I know that the hot air balloons

the cat watches through the window as it cracks the sardine skulls,

I know they are hiding her. I know

the emptiness must be where my eyes had been.

08/04

one towel is for the body,

one towel is for the face, a rosebush in rain,

curved leafs all reservoirs

for rain, droplets

rare beetles clear as sea salp,

hungering like abyssal beings

starved of light,

forced to give birth to light

and his fingertips, like his heart,

squared – as a join is squared –

pushing massive brick walls on their tracks

over to where such walls are needed.

alley cats pause a moment

aware of being watched by packs of stray

dogs whose infected mouths

gush teeth like slot machines.

the odour of the dogs makes man-

dogs smell sweet as rosebushes,

quartz ascribed special powers by

absorbing the play-sound of dolphins in its piezoelectric fibres 

as skin pores admit light.

it is Saturday.

at the psychic fair are booths

empty for some powerful fortune tellers’

absences due to unforseen maladies.

mistrust is not the primary mode

and so it is my own name I doubt

as I smash the labelled letterboxes over with a stake

uprooted at a nearby biomass farm,

my drive-by car driving through the quiet suburban streets like a stake,

thinking of so many, many miseries amalgamated

into humour, humour into joy

and the names collapse like the final

out-of-breath cadences of hymns sung at a great aunt’s funeral,

cross upon the altar blessed

by dolphins play-fighting with the current.

07/04

a hand seen

suddenly atop the blue gazing

globe, spruce

a century old, fingernails

black, the porch

bathed in evening sunlight

and myself out of bed, moving to the window

down the body-length of the bed –

white flannel sheets holding

the long hairs of recent lovers like static,

many-coloured memory –

halfway to the window, the storm

pane newly unlatched for spring, speeding cars

near me. sunlight

pouring down the balustrade.

a hand I have never seen before,

a voice speaking through the door to a another woman

whose body I cannot see but whose voice I recognise as

an upstairs tenant’s. as

I hear their plans for the weekend

and their plans for summer

the baseball in the mitt on my windowsill

rolls down onto the floor.

a mausoleum: the thud

conjures death-thoughts

in me, death-fear at the first glimpse of her face, flushed,

radiant. she stretches her hamstrings anyway,

keeping balance with the gazing globe,

black running tights

black fog through the flyscreen, ankles white as bone.

she sends out over the busy road

behind her a motion instinct,

the bare linden trees become rockets.

there is a thud in my room

when the baseball falls.

an echo comes out of it,

rapping, hammering

louder than a drum.

the rapping wills her head to turn

to witness the disgrace,

the hammering never weakens.