I’d been using tasteless opioid downers for painting abstracts and when they ran out I extracted the poppy from the pain -killer, the power from the -cetamol and the spoon almost stands in the coffee. So when I picked up one of his books, a posthumous reissue from the enviable place of continuous readership it…
Tag: time & memory
Remembering Waste
they came by bus, foot, and taxi, by pram; the celebrators happily in blue sky, oven -baked caucasians in sunshine. a little girl squatting flat-footed on the street outside my apartment lifts her skirt pulls her underpants aside and pisses on the footpath before entering the chapel while the bells tincture lingers and fades like…
3 Poems Which Aren’t Entirely Sure
1 In the slackened-off momentum of a Holy day, the Machine left to idle, I put on someone else’s shoes, wore unfamiliar clothing, styled my hair a way I’m not accustomed, found the walk, in the shoe, and allowed that through, limb and thought. Then put that self to walk, at the rural fringe suburban,…
from Short March Walkabout #2
I’d misread the map and got off at the wrong station. it had an elevation which satisfied my sitting out the morning watching the trains leaving squealing into fog lit spectacularly; a lady crying, a barking dog, a shopping trolly shepherd in a hiViz, humming wires clicking above the tracks bolted into place on cloud-coloured…
Memories Etched
I, too, have journeyed to green and envious, Unknown rocks. In cloaks, boots, and with daggers, So that funerals rung out the sound Of those defeated, rumored armies. Far off in dusk we must in a lonesome past… But where have you gone? Wherefore you go? Will you drop out? Or stick in thick…
from GIBO
5 thoughts of death sit on my mind the snow weight on the beech boughs and the Pine needle arms, dripping white water to the wild roses, you can interpret it, any way, you want the crunch of snow, dissolving under foot, the dormant stumps of bald blade, the old man’s’ beard, and vines, offering,…
After Watching The Jim Jarmusch Movie: Patterson
There were a lot of Boarding House rooms but one came to represent them all. I even knew it while living there, that this place, that room, those stairs would illustrate my 20’s in this city. This large room, on the second floor had superb high ceilings, two tall windows, a small doorless kitchen with…
As Movement Dies
Movement comes alive. The moment need not change. The colour in the sky, new winter light at five. We are the silence of the moment amplified. All action, little talk, but loud, by board and scooter clatter, hard abrasion of the loveable resin wheels negotiating undulating concrete, poised with indomitable bravery at the sheer drop…
The Calling
I heard their mute calling through the fence, a hedge, and the weatherboard wall to my bedroom. I climbed out my window crossed the sealed driveway leading to our motels and pulled myself up then over the corrugated fence that I’d painted for pocket money over three consecutive Saturday mornings before cricket to answer three…
As You & I
Clap your hands and it’s over, I can see that coming, already the guy is one. We go inside the supermarket and stand by the clay pumpkin stack, the carrots and the pale greens, and feel forward into it. The people, pushing by, may take of our stillness and quiet. It is good here, the…
what am I without you
4 [an excerpt] what am I without you telling me? to look upon us, two of us in darkness, with barely enough skin lit to establish our age, the gender or the race unharnessed from your own density, even that against the odds beyond our reach, a some‘thing’ always is and doesn’t offer proof of…
Flotation Devices #1
There’s a poem in this, I’m certain, the memory came while reading the curtains parted into the hearts of other poets: a summer evening sea swim alone below the flower tree of antipodean Christmas’. I’d kicked it . all . drugs and mothers, but the sugar; I’d quit my full-time work making either bread or…