Next

In latter versions
it was told somewhat
differently

Her following always
the direction in which
her toes pointed

Her disinterest in
recognition leading
to the still belly

Le prochain
Write something
(don’t write something)

Not Enough To Fold

Forgotten like air
without movement

The simple dream
of people talking

Animate with hunger
for the unexpected

While the woman
I used to be
sleeps

What Have You

A lean beast
in a recurring dream
feeding on sound

It wasn’t here
Never even passing
close

It touched me in the way
a lover’s words do
when they talk in their sleep

When their tongues don’t
move

Hulled seeds of truths
Sluggish buds

Before the trap of morning-
the questions of daylight-
the tallying of proof
with dusk closing
around each certainty

Scalloped into my thoughts
by soft arched words
a gentle query arranges itself
in the emptiness of my mouth

The pulse behind my eyes
measures quiet in vowels
quickly swallowed

Three Part Tale Spin

(i)

I’m thinking of a night full of birds
A confusion of wingbeats and soft
collisions that feel like heartbreak

Crowds are gathering on the hill
in their pink masks
to watch the sky which dwarfs us all
It’s the colour of the desert
Stealing our shadows in funnels of dust


(ii)

They’re there to see a poem unfolding
Where words haven’t arrived
A small underscoring of half-slept moments
Of forgetting weakness

Here we are again
Away from them
and your hands are in my hair
My face is in your chest
You smell of cigarettes and solitude
Your voice is close to my ear
in a form I know but don’t understand
This is no story you’re telling
in bare-knuckled braille
It has a narrative I cant follow
back to your mouth

This is the easy eye of beauty
Silence of the planets and falling starlings
in a cosmic tailspin of absurdity

The black stones under my feet are still warm
from when the sun burnt them
in the middle of the day
I wonder where I left my shoes

(iii)

Naked of meanings your face eludes me
Still the words aren’t coming
The patterns are there
lightening then darkening
The sounds amplify
bird cries swell thick
higher now
with throats full of clouds
Caught as they rise
No truth we’ve been
offered corresponds to this
These are feats of the imagination
To feathered applause and closed eyes

My skin is my mind
These are my dreams
they bring it all closer
Sink it in

Crawl up under my sheets
under a blanket of memory
warp and weft of surfaces of things
Woven threads of messages received
from every cell touched, held, imagined
Hold it, touch it again to remember
whisper into it
into the scars
into the dull ache
like a bridge from some place not located in my body

Or write it and I’ll read it to my hands
with my fingertips in a soft slow scrawl

(red)

Little glass pen that I chew on,
wound my expression with
wet closeness of cut lips.
To answer him
with sticky kisses.

Undo the corset of
diminishing faith,
unsigned, unsighed,
unsounded air, that
fills my mouth with gifts.
Sealed and forgotten in pink bows;

the colour of hearts which are
not organs behind our ribs.
Not the liquid which passes
through carrying the
mineral of my will,
beating my submission,
keeping my feelings
and thoughts
pumping together

in a bloody rush of
a tongued faltering that
braves fire.
Lick the cinders
from my white skin,

desires relics are
slipping the leash with disguised teeth,
to announce the beginning is over.

Kiss (A Cinquain)

Your kiss
The dark shadow
between your open lips
or the mouth surrounding it gives
pleasure

Torch Song

“All the secrets a wise heart has
must be more hidden than the Phoenix is
Because concealment in that oyster-shell makes the pearl
From that water drop that comes from the depths of the ocean”

~from The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayam



Putting out candles with my tongue again
and wearing tiny blisters for days.
I can barely taste my food.

Where statements might be invitations
there should be silence.
Little, stitched-up, sewn together
secrets that stay where they are;
rather than bleed from a vein which suffocates with a blackness.
Pushing with backs of cupped hands
a fine layer of powdery tenderness to the periphery.

We knew about this love,
we learned about it in mirrors.
Cold, clear, we decorate ourselves in front of it.
To obscure what we see, to conceal more than a blush
or forked lightning in our eyes at the sound of a name.
Until hiding is habitual. A proud discipline.

The humble portion, still,
inside is held, nurtured, transformed.
To expose it becomes a soft, slow loss, a seeping.
It aches as tears of a little lost girl, alone in a place of bones
and skulls. Telling herself stories, while the wind encloses her
in a relentless lullaby of an emptiness.
This is impossible to wrap in the warm strangeness of words.
This image of a pocket inside a jacket sealed with tiny stitches
which should remain unpicked. Stays and expands,
becoming all.

A Poem To Read In The Dark

To read without breathing
between these fragments of words
find me
with your lips
here, press your finger to them
now and say tongue
nipple waist toe
belly button earlobe
Neck offered
a wrist exposed

These things we hide
to discover
beneath beneath
like crying or dreaming

The laughter we seek
as destination, a drawing-
bodies as bridges
arched spine arm elbow thigh
warm blood coursing
below the surface

The thoughts sent to air
or paper
The perfect wisdom of bodies
creeping into our imagination
to slake this craving
where it’s warm and quiet
to change the way things are
today

Reluctant Cartographers

There are words
that should only be spoken
into the solemn skin of a sleepy lover
In the closeness of an exhausted room

Losing track of time
reluctant cartographers set out
as sighs

Faint tracings over contours
and hidden reefs

Mapping the gentle anchorage
of the palm of a hand
in the small of a back

Placing names beneath gestures
Stripping emblems
from the statuesque calm
of an understanding

Guiding
lips to the cusped arch
of an ear
to speak in whispers

Her Room

Spider spinnerets shroud
the curtainless windows
with shuddering webs

In the diffused light
The chair where days of aching sat
The corners
where shadows darkened
and chased out sound

There a view once extended
to be severed by eyelids
shut

Here the residue of emptiness
drags itself into your lap
to unfold your white hands
curl

As the morning upturns
luminous and gasping

We Entwine

I had an inkling
More than delicate tears
and soft lips

More than a sip
from your golden malice

Unfettered by affection
Surrounded by miser’s smiles

In the aftertaste
of your voracious tongue

The rolling apples
of your words

Beneath
the dimly vanishing

The common language
of selfish flesh

I Write

because my fingers are long and thin
and they can't grasp everything.
A lot of the time I keep them in my pockets.

Instead,
I balance things on the end of this pencil,
skewer them with it,
turn them around to get another view.

I encase them in graphite
so no one else can really see them
but we know they're there
in the shadows.


I can kiss the skin beneath your earlobe.
I can capture a bird and tame it.
Teach it to say your name or recite a poem.
I can make my father a kind man.
I can visit all the houses you ever lived in
or didn't.

I can resurrect the 2am ardour of room 203,
Pinjarra Motel,
and make it resemble the tv static
that lit it.
It dissipates.

I can wander from floor to floor, smiling,
can peer in windows.
I can replace the chattering teeth
with a thick heavy silence.
I can write an ode,
can make my father a kind man,

can swallow broken glass or swords.

I can catch a bullet between my teeth.
I can hold it.

After Your Voice

Your voice is like a telephone ringing in a room with all the doors taken off and windows broken. I am sitting cross-legged and bare-arsed in its centre and it fills me like a sound; which is what it is, your voice, a sound. It is yours and my senses are sharpened by it. Your words fall like small stones and I want to catch every one of them, I would keep them all in my pockets, if I had pockets, always before your voice I am naked and I can’t keep my own words let alone yours. Which aren’t really like stones except that they are round and smooth and perfectly formed by something outside them, or from rubbing against each other. All my answers are too small for your questions, they fall through the comfort of your sounds to land beside me on the hardwood floor in a crack of sun which shows how dusty they are and the sound of your voice blows them away. Then this room which barely exists and contains nothing empties itself again. After your voice stops ringing.

Walking Dialogue

Today, I didn’t think,
I didn’t speak,
I walked.

I walked in atonement,
I walked with limbs seeking clemency,
I walked with the eloquence of feet on dry leaves.

I let my eye become an opening
Today;
I allowed a penetration,
like music into my body,
I walked to clear choking definitions
I walked to erase a separation

I walked to fabricate another distance,
I walked to secure my own form.

I walked to divine my losses,
I walked to shake a shadow
settling on my light-heartedness.

As I walked my compass
was drawing circles
around a small stone
you’ve been keeping
which belongs to me.

Imagined Interiors

The colour came later,
Past the dark cluttered words.

Tonight we spoke like a frequency graph,
Like a landscape without edges,
Extruded strokes of light to my lips like fingers
stretching through the architecture of your words.
To cocoon the sounds in my ear longer

I scavenge images to furnish this room
that holds you in sprawling pieces
with feathered edges that overlap and repel.
I smear the walls with my tender vision.

This passage doesn’t permit complexity.
A blocked aperture half-closed
by the debris left by a fragment fallen
from the frozen eye of the storm.
It obstructs my view of your dislocation.

Someone coughs in the background.
Your voice lowers to a soft tendril,
I hear your body turn in your sheets
As you describe the darkness
that stares back at you.

In these implicit movements I accrue
the inescapable graduation of weightless light
that reaches from me to you under a heavy winter.

Colour will slide in the morning
over the outline of your refuge.
(like an unfinished house)
Like music climbs through those sounds.

The Blinding of Samson

Rembrandt’s careful eyes didn’t betray him
Like he’d always feared in time they would

His painted fascination, drowning pools of umber
With flashes of thin splashed mink-haired white

Mouth, ears, hands, high foreheads, soft necks
All sensed through shared visions of a master

For all but imagined Tobias and his blind father
Healed by smeared fish bile at Raphael’s advice

Tobias’ kind eyes soft muted by pigment’s taboos
That captive guide to the painter’s forfeiture

Witness to his father’s eyesight’s dim demise, he
tinged all his gradients a finely disguised crimson

Hinting at his own corporeality ebbing between
the tint of dark undulations, well lit then lost

This impenetrable darkness of engulfed visions
rendered in such minute detail, sight’s empathy

Each fleshy hue pulled taut to contain a meaning
Lucid skin immersed in a porous wash of stories

All strengths have secret flaws softly concealed
Love’s invisible tug distorting senses like disease

Brightest skies in a defiantly blinding blue a
colossal revolt to Samson’s wide-eyed betrayal

By Delilah’s gaping gaze consumed by wiles, then
A self portrait of shadows pulled across heavy lids

Such accentuation in history’s obscured frailties by
A painter haunted by blind violinists and beggars

Nothing on canvas trembles like that thin fear
Drowned in the infinities of Rembrandt’s shadows

Characters loosely clothed in fabrics detailed creases
Lonely souls exposed without drawing crude realism

The tiny folds of skin grown over his Mother’s eyes
Seen with the forensic precision of delicate prophecy

Blackness growing faster silently as Samson’s hair
Too slowly to gain sought salvation without ridicule

A whispered alert to the spectator’s engaged gaze
Awake to the act of looking where light ends

A clarity recorded in endless perceptions framings
Of a man’s fear governed by his father’s losses

Behind Teeth

In the space which hangs
like a slack rope,
between two thoughts.
You find an inroad,
again.
Armature broken.
Debris spun.
You flop,
you kneel
before me,
As I sit,
a brittle caricature.

I had come,
to leave.

Hidden constants
cocooned.
My resolve buckled.
I try to hold you.
My arms derail,
Encircle myself,
instead.
I am a coil.
A pillar.
A self-antagonistic stack.

Decaying bleak,
before your scavenger hands.
You’ve waited,
blanched
for me,
to be bleached,
by this blinding white
of your secrets,
in shrill circles.
I squint to see,
your raptors cut their throats.
To find no flower’s hearts.

The Right Moment

Can I reveal to you my gestures
through this writing.

I want to show you my hand,
As it rests now in my lap,
Fingers softly curled,
Upturned like a cup.

As the other makes these shapes
Which I will later tap tap type
with two stiff fingers.

Read them now and retrace
That path of meaning, back
through keypad, paper, pen
hands, lap, arms

Back to the point
of its conception

Back to this moment
Which was right.

We can adjust the rest
Later.