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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

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.

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.

Discern, he said

Don’t judge

With the measure you use

It will be given back to you

Tenfold, running over

Out of your arms and back to into them

You are doves delivering news of dry land

You are serpents making a path through sand

You are Shamayim, everything contained

Chaos within limits within oceans within coasts

Love yourself as others do.

Love others more

Everything is perfect in moderation,

Including excess

Everything has time, a speed,

A point, departure, entry, regress

A place. A space

Even reason has its own season

Let me ingest my own advice first

See if it is worth dispensing.

Carpentry

Strip me bare and polish me

Smooth-grained

Stained

Warm wood under your fingers

Twisted from a wild living thing

Fate selected

To fall and be carried in sections,

Mauled by screaming saw-blade

Laid out in the heat to cure

In quiet darkness, kept forever

Ministered by you in silence

Warm daylight of your shed

Shavings curl to the wood-dust floor,

Soundless

Your hands deft on the plane

Eyes soft, lips parted

Working me

Seeing my curves before they appear

From the edge of possibilities

Satisfied before you began

To let me take shape according to

My knots and your fluid design

Each adjusting in turn,

Bonded by the interplay

Movement, stillness

Liminal

Use your edges

Don’t shave them off,

Slice by slice

To please your neighbour

Don’t erode your boundaries

For the sake of saving face

For a false promise of peace

Keep wilderness at your edges

Sanctuary at your core

Value your margins

Life is greatest at the interface

A bifacial blade cuts two ways at once

Value your margins,

The marginal ones

Use them,

Don’t abuse them

Dead Horse Flogging

Not much else to say.

Was right to stop then

Most recent exercise

Bracing confirmation

Problem is always acceptance

Damned both ways

Problem is a solution

Winner is all

It’s me. It always was.

And you

Could look at this as a racetrack

Circular

Or a binary issue

1 vs 0

Winner vs loser

I want to break out sideways

Make my own steeplechase,

Smash the barriers

Escape to the highlands

Where I might belong,

One millenium

But they turn those ones into glue,

Once they’ve run them down

Black Beauty had a good life,

After the abuse

It’s not like that

It’s just a matter of temperament, breeding, training,

And who you get sold to.

Brushcut

Dear Bursaria,

I’m sorry I killed so many of you today.

I started gently

Then he said

‘They regrow better when you slash them’

Just doing my job

I believe in you

I know how it feels

I know so little

Chipped you back to stumps

To get to the weeds

Woody, canopy-climbing, seeding multitudes

Even into your splendid thorny thickets they push themselves

Crowding out your blossoms and rattling fruits

Kerwon

I’m sorry

This is temporary

Has to be or how else can I live with this mulched destruction

Taste bitter zinc-sweat dripping from under visor

Blinding mid-morning sun

I apologise to each one

If I pause, listen carefully

I imagine I can hear you

Can feel your whispered, spiky presence in my mind

Perhaps not all lies

Your thorns are imbedded in me,

Engulfed by my skin

I see you everywhere

Can never forget your face

Even if you hate me

I wait to be sent back here,

Want to watch you rise up and dominate this light gap

All mornos I lie prone

Arms aching from my penance

Nothing like what you must feel

But I am you. Somehow

I feel it too.

Plotlines

Around my neck

Hooked in eyelids open before

Breathing down fire escapes into

Future tense

Melodramatic nonsense

Threads pull on my mouth, the valves

Of my veins,

We’re arguing again

Me and I

Somebody pulls another punchline out of

Thin air I’m never going to be breathing

This off-world non-existence

Snarling at rescue

Undressing from the tangle of

Past expense

Running my hands down

You in whatever body

Adorn us with

Suspense