Author Archives

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Life fights to exist.

Audio version

I say this to you using dead words, symbols that have exited my thought cloud via hands to computer to screen then somehow to you; and you know in some way they are dead. Written words can never be alive in the way you, human, or even a machine, is alive. Ideas are not alive in the way we are, bodily. We have to give them life somehow.

So here is your first chance: put this down, and go to the living.

Go outside, if there are living beings there. Breathe in air that living beings have created, from the breath you have exhaled unwittingly, perhaps, for others’ survival.

Go and stand under them, next to them, if you can find any photosynthesising friends. They have more wisdom and much, much more life than these words. Do you really think you can find anything in here that is more than what they can give?

I understand, though, if you find it hard to pull away from this writing. I was a word addict once, and perhaps I still am; ironically so, given my preference for spending time with non-verbal beings. I didn’t realise they could speak with the clarity and alacrity that I now appreciate, but I felt-

Enough. Have you left yet? No?

Too bad. I am ending this for you. 

If you really cannot peel yourself from this screen, perhaps you can at least close your eyes for one moment now and remember that 

you

are

alive

and all of the screen time in the world cannot compare to the riches you can find within even your own living mind. Close your eyes and ask your soul what it wants to show you. There are worlds waiting there for you to discover.

There are quests to complete, dragons to befriend, warrior moves to train yourself in. I’m telling you this to remind you.

Everything you have read, seen and heard is preparing you for this. The time is coming when we will all have to let go of this outsourced fantasy world we have created, and return to the real refuges within and around us. That is, if we want to live…

by

Body Text

Audio version

Before temples there were groves

Before groves

No dressed stone. Are you listening?

Just cruising the headings

There’s an ocean leak like energy tide

Before cops and robbers,

Before baseline

There’s a king cockatoo flying roundabouts

A koala court

A vacant niche

Not so. One is always none is never done

But the pulse, quick-stepping

Change your beat, heart

Not too late to restart

Between action is retraction,

Dissatisfaction,

You never come when I call

You’re never away

A pilot auto,

Flying towards stars.

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Muscle/Memory

It’s in my arms
This ache, this ache
From over-reaching
It’s in my throat
From speaking out of turn
Too ignorant
To slow to learn something as simple as
A rest
A break
A silence
A real musician knows
When it’s time to wait
And when to play

It’s in my bones
This ache for home
This graceless, traceless

This pain, this pain
We all complain
But how many trace it
Chase it down to the source,
Follow the course back,
Forth
Back
To find
What’s yours
What’s mine
This pain
This plain old
Life-defining game

And still
Killed me, dying off

You’re perfect

Caused the perfect pain

I’m still

Happy in this hurt
Still here to learn
To unlearn

It’s in my neck
From looking up, down
It’s in my wrists
From holding too tight
To you and everything.

It’s in my eyes
The window out
It’s in my mouth
The loosened shout
It’s in my ears
The silence soothing
It’s in the moving,
The making, breaking
Giving up taking
Finding the feeling
Bruises healing
It’s in the moment

Breathe.

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Little Pieces

Audio version

Small notes at 6am,
In the grey air
Translucent
I am only parts of you

I show up when you need me
I am gone when
The fire is cold

Into ashes
I am grass now
I am feathers

I am the pure haze of pollution
Fogging your thoughts about work
About your dinner plans
Ruffling your broken dreams

I am your mother tongue
I loved you before you knew yourself
I will pass by later,
While you are resting

While galaxies collapse and expand under your eyelids
While toads pant beside detention ponds
While dozers chew slowly through their fuel and
Waste creeps upon them,
Taking its due

I am a barren roadside
Blooming under tomorrow’s monsoon.

by

Audio version

Like a child

You re-enter the gates to confusion

The tangled, unapologetic paths

Through synapse and sensation

Was honesty ever a true friend?

Like a fox, unhurried nosing

Through spent pleasures

Recreating your dusks and dawns

By the light of fluttering eyelids

Angels at your back

Circumspection bows your shoulders

Nobility has no place in this mosaic

Shrike-thrushes advertise their husky repertoires

Until the indigo bushes nod and the night-moths emerge

You are not a queen, or even a king

But there is joy in the wind existing

Caught in your waiting ears.

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The air in heat

Reduces this matter
This once living, grown dead
Into bone-coloured powder
Into black chalk
Fragrant clouds


That tar everyone’s lungs
This once occasional
Necessity we stumbled upon


Night spotted with the marsh frog
Building future selves from staccato backhands
Filling the gaps in our speech
Once as hasty with replies as yours


Cool air for a summer night
Normal for a season within a cycle
Hot breaths that burnt up the last year


It all comes back
A fire ecologist said
He’d seen, high intensity or low
Same assemblage at climax
The only difference is time


Do you gift yourself the space
To engulf that reaction
On the inhale, do you give thanks
The exothermic removal
The liberation of all that potential



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A Line You Take

Audio version

There’s a line you take

It’s suggested

You always seem to ignore the easy options

Find it with your hands on the texture paint

Find it with your skull horizontal

Your tendons calling for something true

Against gravity

There’s space you ignore

Smearing hardwood with your virtue

Spitting curses

Outward

Your god external

Your god non-existent,

You

We never really agreed on our disagreement

Getting a purchase on what shouldn’t be

The heroism you don’t need to test

I never patched any holes. You only saw

The top, there inside yourself

What exists

You already had

The wind saying your name

You’re still you when it changes direction.

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Page Back

Black you page

Back there was an 


Instant you missed it

Sense for

Body 

Comfort, your alien 

Enemy friend end

Lasso for the future you

Their cries like wind,Mary

Contrary to what you were taught

Thought higher, respiring 

Toxicity, tears recycled

Too unlinear now, no respite

No edges, no end only

curve pick a point any

You

It’s still

Thorns
thin

skin

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Displacement

We’re not an island
Any of us conglomerate
Coastline scarred, sacred, singing
Wave, wave
Wind whale sky
Glass bottle beaches
Old explosions
Noted, not forgotten
We dance them yet under our dying stars
And blood
Famine
Bone-white smoke over bruises
Simmering oils, leaves on hot coals
We want you back, ancient ones
Call us out,
Return us to ourselves

Through your vines and cataracts
We are hearing your commands
Through your starving rivers
We are thirsting for your love
We who were made to be home here
Unnaturally naturalised and by our nature, tame
Tell us your truths. Reverse our death
Resurrection homeland waiting for
Us, children.

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Spacer

Gaps between us

We need some

Contrasts for colour

Textures and tastes

To compliment,

Not compete

I confide everything to you

I can with English

Everything else is biology

Chemistry

Strings of theory

Matter that never really collides

Wave deflect and amplify and correlate

Corroborate

Common threads,

Combing out the tangles of our difference

Separateness is an open wound, always

Slashes across our grain,

An ailment of alignment,

Cross-cut junctions

We need to function

Smoothly joined when reglued,

Soothed

Sanded, oiled, fit for use

Four legs to walk forward,

One back to bear a banquet

With spaces between seats. Enough for elbows,

Knees and feet to reach across

Secret searching the underneath

For each others toes

Soles match and souls catch

Across a momentary gulf.