Author Archives

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12/12/13

In a paradigm of eyes

Lies paths charted yesterday

By earnest men in boats of words

Restless hearts for those in yokes

To see them broke, and baring pure light,

Aglow from inside. Fields none of us can tread:

Foxglove and feverfew

Febrile dreams, vivid in beds

Of eyebright, for the Lord’s delight

We are bound to these crosses

Hung on them

Drawn and quartered by words opposed

Hoping for an outlook of yeild,

Something unseen

A gleam, buried

Beneath the roots and skeletons of weeds

Thorn upon thorn piled in this rubbled mess

Of the ones who have been pulled up before

We live with our eyes, searching for that horizon

In the sharp smoke of guttering flames

Arching back upon ourselves,

Needing your streams to clear our heads

Your breeze of change, the steadiest gale in this

Storming uncertainty.

We’re yelling for you to wake,

Our rudder. Our oars.



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Simbahan

A tree is a tree is a tree

Concrete is concrete

Dust is as a Bangladeshi street

Motifs are devout, sacrosanct

As in my distant childhood

Yet you persist in my present

Hovering afterimage over green alleys, banana fronds

Taro-supplanted drainage lines

Chasm-high concrete pillars

Planted like hands on hips astride slipping valleys

Coin-coloured stones

A phantom in triplicate,

Ever attendant in dressed stone solemnity

Juxtaposed colourful confession

The confidence splashed over the sides of pedicabs

And sprinkled over food,

Bowed heads making stanzas holy.

A house is a house

Is a home, is a workzone

Is a labour. Is love

Faithfully limping down with slops in hand

Animals and dependants bawling

Vines crawling ceaselessly over food

Waiting for a Day to rest

Home is here

Where humidity rises,

Golden in the close din

Of coconut smoke and roosters roaring.

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Entropy Opposition

In another life I am an ant, picking up crumbs and moving them from place to place.

I maintain entrances and exits. I excavate new chambers and tunnelways. I gather food and bring it back to the pantry. I bury the dead, tend to gardens, take out rubbish.

In another life I am a raven. I calculate time for cars to arrive and solve the puzzles necessary to unlock foodtreasure. I transport golfballs back to my nest.

In another place-time I am a slater, snouting feeler-legged, antennae twitching, making soil from vegetable with my alimentary tubes and tunneling.

In another body I am a mouse, nibbling nocturnal and fastidious, tidying back to the order that I know.

I am a plague-locust, swelling with overflood of food, seeking surplus and never satisfied.

I am an ibis, sway-necked and stately in the rot.

I am putting rubbish into bags. I am leaving the bags here for someone else to deal with. I am wondering who is worse: the ones who are incapable of understanding the echoes of their actions on other life; the ones who judge them; the ones who judge the items as rubbish; the ones who treat them as worthless when everything else is sacred, comes from and returns to perfection and has a use and purpose at every stage, if only it can be found…

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Geminini

How tenuous, this sense of self

How fleeting, between flickers and mirrors

Shades of light from dark

In flight, in fickle introspect and circumstance

Stepping clear of chains I find myself

When unshackled from sorrow’s safe harbour

All at once, cast alarmingly

Further and deeper into joy than depths can sound

Here, clouds blistered apart

By sun – clean, unmasked

A universal holiness, unspeakable

Indefinable delight

To brush the edge of the truth,

Just the hem

Mind grasps, but cannot hold

And measures again, falling achingly short

Back to counting

Minutes, days,

The non-existent future

Exiled here in the bitter dust of

Seconds, ways

Your scarps and unattainable spires, glittering distant

No! You have all of it,

Own me all-

Static in transience, resilience

Iron-legged, willow-armed

Perpetually whole.

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Backswell

Here it is

It’s at this point you remember

You were always a lazy swimmer

The wave is coming

To break you, and all you can think to do is

Stare and make some internal comment

At its voracious inevitability,

Instead of kicking

Feel it dragging you back to powerlessness

While you were half-turned,

Watching your childhood float past

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Your face thrashes the seaweed sand-pit

Tumbled by tidal giants

Sunward and gasping

Don’t look to them for help

You wanted this beach deserted

You wanted this familiar defeat

Welcome the jelly-flesh rashes

The sunburnt tongue,

The scorched eyes

It’s the same argument you love to have with yourself

And lose.

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Desire Love

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Desire is a huntress

Sleek in full-bodied pursuit

Cold-scaled and sinuous

Striking open-mouthed, lock-jawed

Desperate and bold

A silent background calculation

She follows pleasure like a leaf riding a river

Like a raptor diving for a rabbit

An old horse heading for home

Awake until she tangles in her target

Or drops, throttled by exhaustion or rage

Sleeps, quiet as the dead

With her long-nailed hand on your thigh

She follows you through your dreams

Shape-shifting and duck-diving

Emerges in the quiet fog of pre-caffeinated first light

Matches her footsteps to yours,

Waiting to overtake you in some new game

 

 

 

 

Love is a different woman

No-one really remembers her face

She is simply there. No conditions, no predeterminations

No limit to what she can lift

With her community of hydraulics

No false pretenses, no lists of laws

Just her rolled sleeves and flour-dusted hands

Worn as a sun-warmed rock and wrinkled

With the cares she has taken from your own back

And bakes them into bliss

She watches eternity with her eyes on your face,

Her heart beating in your fist

She waits for you to pause in your terror and lust,

To turn towards her and see

Hold her steady gaze

She breathes in your sorrow and exhales hope

Carries you to your friends and calls you by your true name

Walks through the darkened house with her matches

Starts a fire in the old stove

With wood you thought was too damp to burn.

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fitzroy-falls.jpgA living stream, he said

Will burst forth

Like sap-flow

Blood for you

This resin making clean

Pure-burning, resonating

An ember glow

That will not die

This love I have for you.

 

 

The soft wool sky

Warm honey skin

Smooth-armed encircling

Deep water of eyes

Soul-safe harbour

Kept from trespass

Sweet in step

Known beyond words,

The truth of you

The sound perpetual

Triumph of angel-war and everyday

A great submission

Flee fear,

Unneeded here

The dissolving haze

Our sun-seeking gaze.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Diminishing Returns

Starving for space

The ache opens up

The paths the light takes

Through the grey,

Clothed in white

 

I am ready with my lamp

To rip out the wick and pour oil

Onto your flames

Watch them dining on the dark

 

I starve for silence,

The cacophony of climax

When sun swallows night

 

Watching for cracks on the horizon

My pulse dips

The balance slips

Hunger yawns like a lion declaring territory

But this time I will wear it’s skin

 

Still I am only a silo,

Waiting for the swell when the emptiness ruptures

Praying for good reign.