Category Archives: Poems

by

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

In side

Audio version

A million soundbites hover

Between you and the sound of the night breeze

Licking the foreign trees outside

Between your eyes and the stars

This flickering, decaying phantom

Interplay of your mathematical curiosity +

Your linguistic addiction

Enough

Was a classical fallacy

The whole system is multiplicity

Our interior worlds,

The inner temple behind our eyes

The garden of our globe,

Our outer sanctuaries beyond our bodies

Let go of this

Meet me in a raindrop

Let the sun unwrite us

a new Decalogue

in dance.

by

Autumnal Infinity

audio version

Edging the night

Obsidian silence

Hot with hush

Solitude and I are long-time lovers

Forget that fact

Savour this sweet second

Autumn ignoring infinity

The hoarse whisper of sea throwing itself at sand

Air chewing the hollow flute

Of my trunk, a blackened slash

A mountain of ash,

Still burning

Remembering snow

From five winters ago.

by

Inner Flight

Audio Version

I saw a satinbird

Wait for a crested pigeon to drink

Perched together on the edge of the dog’s water bowl

Waiting, like my soul

To submerge herself into someone else’s sea

All the crimes of politeness

Scream from inside my cells

Maybe it was easier

Before consciousness decided

What was lawful to give,

And when taking would create a contract

Before we needed to negotiate

Every word,

Every form of contact

I sat at the river

Waiting, like the silver gulls,

For that unscheduled instant

When we would all depart

For the next patch,

The next occurrence

Maybe love only exists

In a multitude of opinions of what it is

Maybe it’s all that exists

Maybe it was easier before ideas

Before ‘easy’ became more than

Movement towards fulfilment

by

Cinderella

Audio version

Slowdance yourself at sunset

In the incense smoke

To the sound of the solar inverter

You found your shoe at last

It was in the back of the cupboard

The pumpkin is in your belly

Sweet as apricot with the chicken

Someone else caught

And killed for you

You were never at home in a palace

What did the prince want from you, anyway?

It was your voice

It was the way you danced

Knowing you only had until midnight

When everything would vanish

It was the energy

That last-day-alive intensity

Slowdance yourself

Stratocumulus forms in the north-west

And the storm sweeps away your unrest.

by

Social Animal

Empathy is an interesting drug

I could have overdosed on anxiety without you

I’m not angry

Just

Acute with old cuttings

Hardwired for sin and soft tips

Our manifest pain-pleasure:

Empathy is an entertaining tug

In your abdomen when you can feel

It’s only a sly explosion of sensation

Released from the need

To shrug off your instincts

To sequester your inner ape

I’m not angry

Just alive

Just a junkie when it comes to

This thing we all do;

See another’s point of view

Empathy could be our God

Understanding we’re all apart together

Undead and ever-evolving

I’m a lioness hearing a car horn

I’m a swamp wallaby smashing through ferns

A fox fleeing a farm hillside

A lyrebird you will never find

Calling, calling, from a cave you can’t reach

Because its Autumn and it’s my duty

To remind you of this strange solution to your unease:

Empathy

Is a forgiving trip

But how sweet it is to feel

You’re not all one.

by

Fallow

Caught in Kether

Hoof high

Roadside

Run or hide

Heatwave

Hot spring

High time

No love, no lime

All alone in your devices

The snare of rhythm

Wild with weeds

Windblown seeds

I’ll elude you

Alluding to

Love language

A silent tongue

Cryptic tryptych

From over the sea

They brought me

For a hunting party

Now I’m free

They brought me

From over the sea

For their tea party

But now I’m free

The western wasteland

All planned

Metallic discourse

Stolen sand

Land swallowed by sea

Ocean engulfed in fiery fury

Void yawning mourning

Magic hidden in a tree

Change takes time

Dream a while and rest with me.

by

(Darug) Ngura

If every hill

of every land was cleared

of timber,

as they would call the

Forests

and every grassland derived therefrom

turned into new fortresses

of rock from other lands

tumbled fossils and old volcanic dandruff

turned into these new caves

would we begin to worship the old beings

of Leaf and Limb,

Bark and Branch

purely for their rarity?

If every tangled family

of Mineral and Vegetable

each oikos assembled out of want for

order

food

safety

appeared to you in all their glory,

burning and not consumed

Would you be reborn with each of them?

Bone

Stone

scarcity making sanctity

by

Kamilaroi Calling

I ran towards space and filled it

With noises of escape

Excuses, excuses

The swelling volume of excess

Carnival squeaks of consternation

Betrayal

Until a storm I called for

Broke the silence with myself

One electric round of applause

You made us

As much as we

Hail

Air sky cracking clay

It’s the lines that make the shape

The eons of echoing void,
The godless seasons

And yearning, the amplification

That makes a voice divine.