Flower (2002)

Written as a message
seeding out of earth
I find you:

you were born
in darkness, a long
& struggling birth.

I who watched
you grow, holding your
colour through grey...

as I lay you down across
my hand I consider
your momentary freedom -

I who can consider
only captivity
and knots.

You will become
dust yet again,
scattered and lost -

the wind will rise
to dance with you,
for the last time.

For now I milk your scent,
memorise your form,
guard you from the wind.

Poseidon

In the dream of the blood-sea,
slowly, slowly, Poseidon
pulling the strands within the ocean night,

Webbing all together
in a dance of lunar light
through the streaks of stars reflected.

Then at dawn Poseidon emerges, ravaged by the oceans,
his hair striated with sticking sands,
the once-proud trident warped and rusted.

His night-blind charioteering through the depths,
their onslaught of saline wet,
has left Poseidon shrivelled, shell-brittle, bloody.

Aye, tis true: he bleeds...

Not even the oceans could whittle such stagnant gore away,
and letting lifeblood was misery for a once unscratchable god;
now glimpsing mortality, crying blood from the eyes...

These eyes had been a miniature for the dance
of his domain across the earth, and the water
through which Olympia was dreamt;

Now even these spectres of memory had deserted -
and only the haul of death remained,
to clutch Poseidon to his final bed.

Said he was back on the smack (1998)

Phoned me up,
said he was back on the smack,
"a release from the pressure"
& he'd headed straight for the door,
wanted to leave it open a crack.

Said he was dispossessed unwanted,
& this was getting louder,
but what'll make the difference
when you're freezing isolated -
said he was back on the smack,
but every other relevant thing was going even;
not calm, but even -
even-matched on every side.

Said he'd been dropping himself in the full-speed,
the crushing, taking it hard from all corners.

Slight wavering of hand in the desolate night; stuck fast,
nothing-doing night & suddenly the needle
is the one directing traffic,
& you're an inflatable, just pump the air in, squeeze it in -
to breathe shining air, clear the traffic, close the road.

Phoned me up,
said he was all shortcoming and stress,
said he was back on the smack;
every other thing, occurred to him, was fine.

Visual

The textbook said that vision was
a serial set of light, phase-shifting
pond of colours volleyed by the retina
and funnelled into a silent-running black
box; in my definition though, I take account
that our inner technology's a slow matter
of choice and fate like rain choosing where
to land. Under creationist magician-theory,
however, you pick up a handicraft from
a market located somewhere in the Old
Testament.

Put simply, when I watch a
movie I want to see it, let it ask me all
the questions it wants to, just like I want
to see this flower up close and that face
of yours as the cutting-edge of cute.

It's only when I rinse my mouth with too many
bottles of cheap gin, that my head spins
stories about vision as a load of turbulence
and cloaking devices. Stand wide so as not
to blow out the picture, but then you can't
make out a fucking thing from that kind of
distance.

What it comes down to is this: if I want to
see myself as a manta ray swooping the water
skywards, then I will see it just fine,
thankyou. No more eyes / lenses / frames of
reference for this flux-fish.

One Kiss

Begin to suspect that all this transient is just warm-up, is someone with a blunt needle, haphazard stitch-up. And sometimes when we're jagged we could slice through to the new floor, the next roof. As Ginsberg Mad Yak himself said, "The call of Time rent out of foot and wing an instant in the universe."

The kind of kiss I have in mind is unadulterated, will not check itself, will not be forced to withdraw. A deep-graved Greek said Time and Space were kept hungry glued by love. Here shuffles the idea with unsteady beat behind it, but definite beat.

Figure that we have been flung dumped pinned in Truth, and this, I kiss, is our only tangible word. I stoop so low, kiss the Earth, but not like John-Paul's cold and dry for the crowds, I go in with tongue, exchange saliva and dust.

Sunburst

From the watchpoint up there
you can see the dawn ignite
in copper and garnet,
lifting up the mountains
for all eyes, with arthritic hand;
and branches, tunnels of sun rotate,
widereach, feeding fire over
coldstone, over dampgrass.

And now, this unblackened land.

The Liquid Mirror (2004)

(When gazing into the liquid mirror, Narcissus tapped into the beauty of symmetry. Form reflected, a soul projected - the mystery of repetition. Yet the most beautiful of all symmetries is not that of form, but of feeling.)

Ode to cruel fate

That woman looks deadset like she'll
attack the next person who gets in her
way with a bunch of geraniums she's
got swaddled in crumpled pink tissue
paper or else she'll drop them unwind
her lipstick and smear sensual pink all
over someone's forehead, someone who is
nodding as she does so as if to say yes
I know you're having a bad day but so am
I so am I and what you're giving me here
is a confirmation, a final godcharged sign
that if you nudge the stylus to break out
of a stuck record then when it falls back
between the grooves the music becomes
alien momentarily and your ears need time
to adjust like eyes to the room when the
lights are flicked off and I will have to
leave my wife because she'll think I've
been kissed by an epilepctic, thankyou.

Ode to the Iris (2004)

For Monica

Pale windblown grass of your eyes
Upon which I would lie,
And embrace the waist of your mind
As in soundless sleep I spy
Waking flower spread divine,
An illumined goldmark in the wine -
All this verdant glow is yours,
Held in glass of love now mine.

the breaking

Door (2003)

I

Tonight the sky plays
a game of worship
and burials.

A door keeps us captive,
safe from the rituals
of starflight and moon.

In this room of crimes
language stoops,
defies, and murders.

Our voices straying loud
beyond the walls,
windows, treefigures.

Despair cries out of me;
I am the one you never
knew, nor guessed.


II

You saw me capable
of broken glass,
bleeding fingers.

The ice, our silence,
was hard - overcrowding
time and movement.

When the door opened
outward, once again
the wind entered us.

I accepted the door then
as my sign of leaving,
my finality, farewell.

And that is to say
we ever so gently
die, and have closed.

hiatus (2003)

your eyes flicker,
(blue) captive butterflies

you have dosed again, tonight, you,
swallowing the bullet, scorching
cerebral cortex, and further -
you are denying yourself access to

fragments (of dream of paper
documents of the sounds you woke
to voices when you were little and
made soft of clay and of...)

we pay our way, enter,
descend via the stairs,

we break circles; halving and
quartering pills like slices of chalk

leaving the night's cold
counterfeit dreams

we are briefly
approaching perfection

Death, I will not touch you (2002)

Dedicated to Bill Wallace, who (inadvertently) inspired this poem.


Death, I will not touch you:
you are yet more flesh
I crave to touch.

You are visionary; you are
looking out from
a dark room.

There is a glint
of light, where
a bullet perforated
the paper wall
of my chamber

(from outside...
all the clamour outside:
the sleepless demanding
to be let in).

I dream
that you
look in
on me.

Business
is slow
in the dead letter office.

And these
cold headstones,
the wind combing grass
in waves;

the sky
a sleeper
never waking.

There is no
customer.

hand (2003)

tell me what
the hand is doing
as it watches
to lift
slide
and touch

and
in sleep
where does it move
locating
open doors
reaching inside

hand can
no longer hold
weight of secrets
damaged hand
tired from argument
scratched by thought

sometimes hand
is the gun
sometimes the bird
startled skyward
by the shot

Haiku (2002)

Far water -------your voice
is heard beneath the silence,
passing through the rocks.


This haiku was 'Highly Commended' by the Consulate-General of Japan, in the City of Perth Library's Haiku Competition for National Poetry Week (September 1-10, 2006).

Coffee haiku (2004)

white browns black, one hit -
eyelids stretch, caffeine drills me
back into the world.

For Kathleen, on her 30th Birthday (2004)

Some see through the lies that bind,
Unstitch the mind to realise
That what you have is yours to find,
Not to hold: and this applies
To the one I see before me here,
A seeking soul who knows no fear
In the face of beauty (this is rare),
Where other souls embrace despair.

She (2004)

She:
a church
vast & quiet,
nearer than
grasped fire


She:
reshapes the surrounding
lights,
flowers
in a flaring now


She:
releases her voices,
speaks free with touch,
no poison secrets
black her passing


She:
her escape from
skin; the heart
of her heart:
the ocean


She:
contains
thought-flight,
outermost glimpse,
dream untravelled


She:
I am one of,
the place where
I awaken, now
inscribed & deciphered

composed: 25/08/2004