Category Archives: Uncategorized

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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

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Contemplating Freedom

And all of its attendant trappings

The dangers of getting what you want

I’m grateful for shelter

For a bed that’s always warm

Even when I’m not

For small consistencies

From which large salvations are built

I’m grateful for gratitude, when it comes

I made my home here

Willingly and willfully self-domesticated

Like I was born for it

Not least resistance,

This path we walk

Wilderness to city and back again

No master, no slave

We share a vein

Common as blood

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Cart First

Sometimes I miss the old days

When I could just come home and ride,

Or be ridden

Knowing there was always

Sweet hay, clear water

A single horizon, visibly unknown

I’m double-blinded, on foot again

Though I feel the wind sawing,

Always at my back

Parting the tall grass before me

Like a sea, whispering secrets

And sometimes songs come back

Shouting wisdom from a decade ago

Reduced down to a vibration

I call nothing and everything my own

Echoes in my body

This ringing in my bones

Sometimes I seem to be

Just a voice

Inhabiting someone else’s head

Something dreamt

I could live with that, if that’s what this is

Word first, motion second

How thought precedes me,

I can at least relinquish that

Power that came before, that binds me

Pulls me onward with a joy

Only a working animal could understand

Barley, oats

Wild and crafty, woven between wheat

Insinuated themselves into necessity

Willing dispersal onto every distant island

Toast the virtue of mutual meeting of needs

Like the fruit of true vines

Spirits distilled from blood, full-bodied

Quenching thirst and inciting fire

Until every roof proclaims its liberty from decay

Partnership,

Not domestication

This is how new worlds are made.

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Post-Stoning

Audio version

Take the glamour off

Chipped nails,

Cracked coffin lid

I am done with grave-digging

It is finished

He told me there was no going back

If nothing else, I believe what I see

I’ll be your witness

If you make me a reliable one

Now the woman

The sinful one,

Caught in the act

I see the fault-lines slicing her

Into pieces of you, him, them

Hoard of voices bellowing

Warning

She’s a dangerous one

Marked by her desire. You keep away

Cats in heat have nothing on

Her inescapable hunger

Teeth within heart-finger-mesh

She is a net that will swallow you whole and spit out fragments

Owl-coughing wing-swoop death

And lonely

Like the lynx,

Solitary and content to pad the echoing snow-killed slopes

And never lonely

She is a heath-wren in spring

And the honey-bracelet myrtle-leaf

The dagger-tip Hakea pointing outward, and to the sky

She killed me and now I unearth from

My ashes and rain-soaked fields

Repentance

Fire baptism branding

Bark scorch-marks and blackened skin

Survival of the fittest,

The unchosen chance of the leeward

He said go

I am going.

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Drumroll Fear

Thanks for the wake-up

Good games are short ones

Recapitulation

Postulation, proselytisation

Power bank sharp little left

Curve past the drafts

Sometime shakeless

Could be colder,

Take the temperature away

Far here where is the only space right

Caught now finally

Heavy metal trap

I lost less

We gain, growing

Pain only

Sickness for sale

Passed over pale

Perfectionist retail

Re-mail your post to overengineered host

Something will give.

Always gotta you.

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This fucking game

I just don’t want to play,

Sometimes

So here is my hand

Blanks and jokers and an abundance of

Can’t be bothered

I used up all my best anger

On imaginary kings and countering

Small hands and suspected foul plays

Let’s not forget the hearts

Two aces, at least

Diamonds on the inside

Stop pretending to be a lone shark

My partners know my countenances

If nothing else,

I’ll donate a black queen as voodoo collateral

And dance,

Watching them all from the wings.

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Ghost Loss

Perhaps, as they say

Everything is tapestry,

I was simply

Seeing upside-down and making

Faces from lines of trees

Seeing churches in crumpled scenes

From this side, a fool

From another, an invalid

Either way, don’t deny me

Adjustment time

Sudden restoration to right orientation

But still seeing those shapes

Maybe always will

Maybe you can too,

If you want

But who has time to court weakness

It is strength to know

One’s own speed and wisdom

To know how far one can travel

No folly to admit loss

Even of something you were always

Convincing yourself

Was only your imagination.

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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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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.