rave sketch - the dialectics in two scenes

apaurusheya

proclaims the floral tag

in henna-style font

overtopping her low

rave cargo pants – five-pocketed, blue as

Archimedes’ orb is blue

midriff skin brown and mole-mottled

as the wooden plank poised on

its fulcrum to tip all people to Patagonia

and build anew

the dance-around wool mountains.

it’s true, the t-shirt’s for sale

a few stores further into market

and her tag, which

he with Archimedes levers back and forth

to be near her sacred globes

as they lie in their sutra love pose

says on its underside

‘NOT COLOURFAST’.

many perfumes

mask many sweeter odours.

bad Californian accents

betting on who gets the girl with corvettes and

Aspen penthouses pass. Being shivers.

leaks ecstasy - Being is

urinating under the moon in a dew-glossed meadow.

clouds like sweetbreads part

granting views of hidden hills

as though Usas were opening

only now the multi-hinged

doors of night so the sun could resume

his courtship. ghost hills, in whose gullies

birdsong answers itself in echo

only louder, the cries of a panicked lost lover

drawing arrows in red dirt

drawing blood on straightened arms pointing dead ahead

etching into barkless trees

grace lines – then a truck, and

hay the only perfume.

rave sketch - forbidden pond

should the notched leather chain

unlink or come loose overnight

the pond she

bled from her ears

to fill will brighten dotted with

lilies, which she’ll later see as lizards

bloated in gruesome death, their eyes like

shallow tattoos of Brahman depths.

her too-small bra’s hook

will poke out at her sternum

under his hand, skin around her thigh bones

too taut for movement

and she’ll fall unaided to ground

hardened by dearth, she won’t move all day.

should the bottom bolt rake through

earth the rabbit shit red carpet

sheep will enter

curious, lame themselves slipping

into the pond where they’ll drown and slowly melt –

next year, let naked swimmers find them

formed like a swathing

membrane on

their newborn porcupine skin. fleece

clumped and caramelised, a gummy shrunken carcass

loose bones jutting like broken stain glass

from mud made of every baby’s first defecation.

and let the screams carry

in fugue over four ancient hills.

on the fifth hill, let a scream prime be created

and on the sixth hill, the last before meditation village

let only the diamond flash

of sage oil vapours hint at human life.

should the garbage bag fasteners

unsheathe like yellow

lightning rods, and the keep out

sign topple

into a stinking wallow

statuary genitals will be sinkers tied to lines

girdling rancid steak meat

paling after so many hours in the water.

the biggest yabbies –

the yabbies with blood-red pincers

closed like thumb and index

around a guitar pick, circle

uncaring. she dives headfirst

for the meat. she takes the marble phallus.

by mistake? bubbles eking from the bone-spiked

mud sometimes play perfect A-chords.

substitutes

moon addicts

use turpentine when

clear ocean sky

turns from end to means

and mind is

the trajectory of a bullet –

Jupiter

followers fuck

everywhere and even

sometimes

have the feeling

they could do more

when the Great Planet hides –

river heads

look at the infinite

mirth in a sleeper’s grin

the mouths they worship

ate their faces’ eyes

all the tears long digested –

earth

fiends forage

for moon rocks hollowed

by the worms that

make them glow when

earth's got no more hits.

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.