dance floor sketch: part 1

circular breathing. pyramids

age and in lifelike time lapse

fall to decay on composite

meshed luminescent panels.

river salt moon. time lapse

wave trains, inhabitation, abandonment

corroboree. red light carries on

blinking at the base of the didgeridoo

by the chord running over to an amplifier

kick drum, reverb-drowning

sweeps cry like solar winds

woken by nightmares

walls of Resolutions drink the rite

pass the rite through

air already seething with

rhythms, parchment

particulate with versets stomped from dust

clove cigarettes, sweat flares, syncopated

questions – flying? flying? see

monochromatic, oceans, distance?

we, creators, we, numina

to you I wiggle all my fingers and say

your spine is a water blade. I offer you

a little sip, this gourd of holy water.

move in hula hoop, move with crystal ball

when the fire spits rainbows

back from the times of the pharaohs.

come, move inside, yellow spandex netting

our heads not noumenon

our heads honeycomb.

poem in which speaker tries to sleep

if on nice nights

when the moon

is waxed enough, I

lie on my belly in bed

chin angled a way that

I find comfortable

and shut my eyes

the spear of pale light

shyly streaming in

from the side of the blinds

on the window at my

seven o’clock is recast

but brighter, like

a neon tibia.

I think I could have a heart

attack for the force of that after-

image at the seven o’clock inside me.

it’s a war on

nature, ripening

endlessly

and the pale spear

a weapon I think I could claw out and use.

would tape

to keep the blinds down

be reactive?

what is it in my nature

I can fix, I ask her, always while

she’s sleeping.

rave sketch - teepee

in the tepee

they stoke a fire

with glossy

magazines

and Lynx Accellerate –

sing commercial

jingle fugues, two-part harmonized

with guttural prayer and

war noises

channelled from the depths

as odes to fish fingers

and shampoo. what

could be holier

than this? assent

beams from all the pale

faces

except

hers

which is over

on a Melbourne sidewalk

where frescoes of lobed

leaf stains

pretty the greased cement

outside a

mechanic’s, leaves themselves

long since

ushered down

the drains and

out to sea –

what could be more beautiful than the body
art of the departed

leaves?

and

except

his

which is only

watching faces

watching

her.

rave sketch - toilets

Lily, who sidled away from the bubbling beacon

at the middle-left of the progressive stage

stands on a sawdust island in a sea of

mud, spot-dancing

in swansong darkness or signet morning –

no stars, aurora’s iced confection  

or town with its LEDs, that windowless room.

to pummel her

there’s no pneumatic heartbeat so she’s numb

she’s light as a feather – taut strings keep twanging

where see can hear them, even see them. even to

hold out her hands to hold them like

               mana or fireflies. even to

               note the soundlessness

as if all the noise in the world got suckered to the dance floors

in the long queue full of costumed antecedents

in the long queue full of costumed forerunners

in the long queue full of costumed super-temporals –

the smell of shit is

the smell of sewage now. deeper, wind-flared

corporeal. quarantined – everyone quarantined

by kissing their addled failure

to engage, by the sense that they

and they alone are blameless.

humiliated – everyone humiliated by the urge

to shit eclipsing all cosmologies, all care –

plots on a sprawling timeline

collapsed in, swept over an event horizon

swept over the downturned side of a moebius strip

waiting for one of the fifteen plywood doors

to unlock, the half-random sites of

isolation worth the isolation.

universal law has ceased to apply – nothing’s moving, my door

flaps open and shut someplace different

someplace further afield, and Lily travels there

before simultaneously

three are empty, three await her.

how to choose between them? maybe the integrity of

the lock, maybe the dearth or profusion of the

paper, maybe the height of the pile beneath the commode.

maybe the seat’s uncomfortably cold

or warm in such a way that she feels watched.

are people watching her deliberate now? and she’ll need

to take her whole outfit off to go!  Lily doubles back and

sidles away again,  abhorring the high and the human.

rave sketch - morning after first night

unfurling like an ox tongue from waxed paper

across their heads, her torso, his mangled toes

the Bolivian rug flings sand

onto the tent floor soiled from when last it was packed

after a testing riverside

new year saw him naked in a thornbush

while she – desperate to leave – undid things

phlegmatically. neither can recall how the rug got sandy.

she’s a bare mantelshelf, she’s an open wardrobe

full of magnetised asteroid crumbs

she’s fresh bed sheets paled by former washes

flushed by former tumbles –

impending catastrophe, even impending death

still resinous on the silence

after they clean down the vestibule and blow up

the queen-sized mattress they couldn’t work last night

slip toothpaste and condoms into the siding pockets

flashlight into the slip above her pillow, and

in the fleeting cool of the morning

lie with their feet intertwined

poking from the front entrance like a forked tongue.

sand clings to skin and the colour of the rug

chisels at eyes – the look in his, the look in hers says

I don’t want to do what I’m going to do today.

there’s no life left in me to suck out anymore

I’m antimatter, I’m not anything.

what if we could zip up the fly

open a window slightly and never come out?

he breathes in more astringent drugs

with globs of hard mucus – he doesn’t get higher.

serotonin, some cheese and bacon shapes –

I’ll kiss your feet if you can find me those, I’ll kiss your feet

anyway, and she’s spun around and cherished, nylon blowing

hard against the poles, car after car pulling up

to park within the gum branch confines of their pop-up

universe, music blaring, phones reading 9:01-9:05

phones with no reception, nearly time for opening ceremony

nearly time for the astral travel workshop – still holding

one of her feet, he takes a swing of water lying down

coughs it everywhere, spills the rest. they’re ready.

sketch of first poem from rave collection

each glued ochroma wall

of phantasm castle’s keep

wobbles – as it nears capacity –

like par-set panacotta –

people have climbed the slide

or rigged up netting ladders

traced a kind of hardwood keel across to the viewing post

where a spider-

                      eyed

                           collective

sanctified and hoarse in two-dollar incense

whorls, can see a filmic carnage being wrought

at the final parallel

of tents before the fence line, fence line

monochromatic paddocks, moonlike granite nodes

monochromatic paddocks, moonlike granite nodes

cratered

uprising

cratered

uprising

shock

escarpment, shock escarpment hillside

horizon

hillside

horizon

the tenor of

nightly projections.

ideologically naked, carnage

from afar takes the form of theatre

a tragicomedy in which things die

things, things, things, stage props

from earlier performances

or matinees yet to be staged –

dolls die, beacons die, tampons, perfume and g-strings die gruesomely

for a liquid-

                  soaked

                       visionary

his collarbone tattooed with a vedic wheel

in larger wheels, blurred by the distance of phantasm’s keep

destroys all he sees

uproots tents, upends their contents,  human contents

carnivalesque effects, five days’ packed food

carnivalesque effects, five days’ packed food

costed

highs

costed

highs

hidden

five-hundred bags, hidden five-hundred bags beauty

secrets

beauty

secrets

the tenor of

nightly obsessions.

wreck - post-workshop retune

wreck

drink the lukewarm ocean as you dive

only to surface to sink again, with scarcely

the aftertaste of a pool of dewdrop

tears lapped from the blade of an upper lip –

surface and sight the snowbound peaks

beyond Vancouver, a frosted mirage

beneath a sunlit cellulose half moon,

to turn and face a bloom of petal-like

kites handled expertly by white-haired

white-skinned nudists, feet lost in whiskery

sand, lean muscles flushed, toddlers gyrating

to djembe jazz, newborn-naked like their parents,

platters passed around with wedges of water-

melon, weed, mushrooms, tiny liquid vials,

to see grid-like aisles of tapestries for sale,

geometric as brainwaves from acid-distance

fluttering om shanti  mainsails on lukewarm

winds no longer atrophied by the inlet, a

liberty also shared by the whitewashed breaks

whose peaks wade with you crumbled on sand-

bars that seem to span from shore to horizon,

to turn and face the ‘clothing optional’ signs

and staircase spiralling up through the radial

forest – the tree log seats on which women

meditate, men sunbathe – human huckleberries

ripening on their bush, prickly with bark, to see

beaks of gulls thrice the size of those at home,

the corners of Eckhart Tolle books buried like

joyous children in the leathery thicket

of dreadlocks and breasts that powers

have deigned to allow, like poisonous

fish, to flourish in a pond so as not to infest

the nearby ocean – to slosh through the shin-deep

swale behind the dreaming, where men are lost

in laughter, a little girl between two foursomes.

all that’s true is just as

true reversed –

wouldn’t that be what all the people here

have stuck up on their eco-friendly fridges

and gas-guzzling kombi vans of the higher cosmos?

do those mountains, say, make you

shiver when you see them, or are you

warmer inside for no longer being up there?

climb the stairs, you’ll see dumb bumper stickers

and the University of British Columbia.