Category Archives: Adventure

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escape goat

Audio Version

Remember the precious seconds

There is no one

To tie you down

You are only an animal under these trees,

Listening to the cicadas clicking

The two faces you wear

Are an archetypal artifact

You’re the person you hate

Two horns and a dolphin tail

Swimming through shadows

There is no one

Except one

You’re the person you love

Everyone can relax now

Excuses, excuses

Won’t take away bruises

But you fulfil your role

As the bearer of curses

Come, say the spaces

Come to the wild places

Watch the mirror of the moon

Praised in every phase

Oh, Narcissus’ soul-mate

The person you love to hate

Come outside, within

Is a foreign forest of familar feasting

Make me an instrument

Of placid temperament

And elastic sentiment

And ecstatic armament

Remember this precious second

The sheep and the goats are the gate

There is no one to punish

Everyone is an escape

We are animal, vegetable, mineral

Listening, still

by

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…

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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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Curiosity

Was an efficient assassin

That’s not the whole story, she says

Without giving her a timeline

I make my offerings to hope

Without needing a true name

I leave my cave and begin with slow, eager, thankful steps

Back towards your mystery

Going by old trails of birthright and mountain singing

Cool solitary air and visits from hands

Expecting nothing except

Correction

Peace

Pain

Sorrow

Goodness without limits.

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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.

by

Buffalo

 

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Here I am

Striking out for the plains when I hear

Low and lulling from the underground

The call to lay down arms and

Sink into the lavender

 

Nectar of forgetting singing sweet

Earfuls buzzing

Forever can wait

I know that old tune

 

Invisible in the trees,

Currawongs call warnings of never waking

I cannot decipher

if they are addressing me

The ferns are soft underfoot but I am wary

Of the ticks they conceal

Who wait to pierce and pucker my hide

 

In the foothills, I can forget

Myself in thoughts and almost

Overshoot into the slippery slopes

of the lowlands

Where I have been lost for days before

 

What does my map say?

These features are not shown

Where is the sun on a cloudy day?

I only wanted rest,

An easier way down

 

The longest falls are from

Cliffs with the clearest views

So I keep myself from edges

 

But I have dropped backwards into air

A spider on a line,

Moved by only two fingers and a fistful of spun oil

I have tasted abyss

With toe-tips and tingling hips

Lived more through these death-arresting falls

 

Only once safely descended

Unharnessed and relaxed

The call sounds again

The lovely notes pushed from a goat’s horn

Twisting in the air

 

Is it you playing to me?

Or the pretender,

Stealing snatches of your tune?

Is it only the melody that matters,

Or the harmony I am humming?

 

 

I rise, shaking blossoms from my hair

In the hot afternoon sun

The incense of leaves wavers over the hills.

 

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by

Traverse

Audio version

This sheep is a solitary beast.

She likes to wander the blackthorn thickets,

The mugga woodlands

The fragrant, prickly heath

Over shale foothills and sandstone crests

Into gullies made by downcutting

Living water laps the dreaming of old seas

She worms through wallaby tunnels and borrows the footpads of errant goats

Sniffs out the shaded meadows of sweet weeping grass

She goes out, she comes back to her haunts and finds pasture

Drinks from the river and listens to the news of the birds

She knows some of the others are concerned

Think she will stumble into a ravine and end there,

Tangled pitifully in blackberry

And on the way she will starve,

Or choke dead on poisonwood peach

Or forget herself and think she’s a fox

Or worse, be torn apart by dogs

She knows that some of the others don’t understand

They think she avoids them out of spite

In truth, the flocks just make her tired

In the paddocks the hay is delicious but far too rich,

To simple and too same

She doesn’t want to grow old and lazy

Walking over the same ground until it becomes dust

Blindly trampling the murnong out of the earth

In truth, she wishes she were a better sheep

That she could take up less room and be gentler,

Less excitable

In truth, she fears as much as she loves the shepherd

Down in the gorge she hears his voice

Echoes of melody through the canyon;

The wingbeats of startled ducks herald his coming

She has not forgotten

How he held her to him when she was a lamb

Or the quick pinch of the tag that pierced her ear,

Marking her as his

She knows that all of this land belongs to him,

That she can never wander far enough to leave it

She knows he has not forgotten her

Knows that wandering makes her hardy

She drinks deeply from the secret creeks

And tells other wild sheep

They are of the one flock.

by

Pulse

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Stillness draws a line

Hip to heel to patient neck

Motionless as a man contemplating distance

As one beholding haughty peaks,

Empty realms where nothing breathes

Ascends with his eyes

Turns again to another wall

Each step is a continent,

An ice silence.

Granite matriarchs. Vast ochre cratons. Unanswering scrub

Deliberate and condensed

Makes a map with hands and air

Begins

 

 

First grasp

Sudden delight

Sweetness of fresh hands

Fluid-fingered and spider-limbed

Knees new, all co-operating

A joyful vertical swim

I am an instant lemur-like

Leaning into the embrace of

Concrete and corners

Holds my hands as a lover,

Banishing hesitation

Halfway high,

The slow ebb of impulse

Anti gravity reality returns to perch

Buffets my eardrums

Acid fingertip fatigue attacks:

An enforced pause

 

 

Above is

the line out

below

only    slow       regression

Concession to retreat:

Unnecessary.

 

Wired in neuron and muscle grip

My assurance that these things will hold

Knowledge of strength beyond my twitching arms

Reach again

Fingers, skin failing

Loathing letting go. Hating pain and pressure

Falling is not a crime?

A chance for arms waiting to embrace me

 

 

Muscle shake

He is crane-necked, artfully wedged

A chameleon wall statue,

Satellite eyes hunting for holds

The delay is brief

(A trademark, it seems)

Soon lunging swift and pulling upwards again,

Practiced strength

Composed. Intent.

Watching, I wonder at rockfalls and burial

How I can work these pulleys, but did not forge them

Whether we will always agree.

Hands swim backwards to chalk

Shoulders taut, splitting defeat with one last lunge

A quick kick of toes and a slap of palm

It is finished.

An understated feat,

Heart being conquered

I wait

 

 

Now at rest

The line of that gaze contemplates mine

These eyes that pure summits have lit

This face smoothed by thin air and self-survival

 

My blood drums from the climb

I am drawn still.

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by

Arapiles

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Where the falcons roost

We have escaped and will not return

On the underside of the sun’s eye,

Four million years from the sea

We keep one eye on the moon,

Two hands on our pulse

Let the light lead as best we can

While we have it

The world sleeps to the sound of the barn owl screech

We alone rattling in our cages

The cool crags shoulder our stealthy weight

Steady (mostly) under our curses and threats

But better to be shouting out here

Than sleepless and sullen on the inside

Better to be breathing in the lidless dark

Than embalmed by our sweaty sheets

 

Breaking the day into smaller chunks

The marvellous coalesced quartz clasts

The measured tapping of our nut tools

The pause

The sigh and the heave

The scrabbling of skin on stone

The gasp and the grasp

A welcome relief from snoring,

Litters of laconic laughter

Or the tapping onslaught of tentpeg hammers

 

We escape our skin,

Our skulls

Our skeletal jokes

Our dulled delight for our plasticised life

We find our sinews and connect them again

With fingers cramping

 

Still, there is hurry even in this world:

The push-pull of dominion

Callous down-treading

The refusal to look sideways to lizards for advice

Blindness to the ants

Cursing of sun and rain,

The very mothers of our stone playground

 

We pause to find the path.

As always, lingering can become hesitation,

A swoop-down desperation

But calculations can rescue

And love, which requires time,

Conquers all

We lack nothing here.

This kingdom belongs to us,

And all who wish to share

All that entry requires is

The shedding of cynical scales,

Rebirth by renewal

The desire for new sight

Life is for children, for the innocent,

For those of us who have been rescued for recreation

Adventure is not a luxury

It is the only way out

May it find you ready,

May you find the one that calls you

May your heart and limbs arch and arise.