Sunday is the colour Of black and white TV No signal anymore Just the radiance Gnawing in your ears We still wear Last night’s epitaph In a too bright fervour Of distorted red and green A magnet to the cathode ray As if the laughable geometry Of neat lawns and backyard swimming pools Were the height where with A half-humbled prayer You could, (only sinking slightly through the screen) On that pocked and pristine surface, So easily walk
Category: Poems
Your cicada heart
You are the silk Of the daybreak sky The night’s bruise fading Summer is skintight The ceded shape See-through and splitting Watchful with The shells of yesterday’s eyes The husk of armoured life No longer needed Stretched autumn loose You ask, looking up To see what I see What is there left in the empty blue? I feel the breath of wings We drift far apart As fast approaching winter afternoons
Cummings & the whale
Poems are hard as atom bombs e e cummings said one day at the beach wavelets laurels in your hair when Lowell (et al) decried his couth unstrictured voice your words are gulls and there a whale, beached promethean, slowly dying watching its own death with that naive, ancient eye a heart so slow it measures time in intangibles like love songs still, while you tear at the monster’s side tears like quills hoping for the ambergris of too studied convention I will bend my shoulder to a poem in the returning tide watch it with an evening’s shadow grace descend
Magpie & the dead
From the chapel, a muttered kind Of evensong As if the day, chagrined At prosaic hours Divides The door prows a wave Holds still, splits Along the keel Where one boat capsized Two resurface A tilted line, in reflection The horizon bisecting monuments and earth A magpie, creaking out Gives the evening silver They are not the dead But fly languidly from grave to grave Perching on our arch and glib effacements Graffiti thrown like sticks On the gateway’s Unprepossessing defences Songs to silence, songs to wake A boat so full of holes and binds Of curled and flaked wrought iron You could easily step through To a more pitiable contradiction Of discomfiting formal attire In splashed pretty chiaroscuro Head cocked, listening A magpie reverence Dreaming the quiet dreams Of the dead
The sea, one day
The sea eats glass Til glass itself In repose, reflection Far in the swathe Of polished rip Arm upraised Decrying buoyancy I am fastly turning There are thousands Gulled in lines Eating waffle cones On the esplanade Loudly squawking Laved in oil (Or made filthy by) As if the fatted ungulate In herb and festal truss Prepared itself for sacrifice The sea swallows them up Returns most Turns some Into nubs of glass Lost in gristling sands Small and bright as jellyfish Dying in the oil and ice-cream air Now, far out to sea I start dissolving
Woolloomooloo reverie
The war starts in the way You pass by anchored ships Nary a glance, at the rats on the ropes Departing with that verminous intelligence In swift, prehensile fingers Eyes dawn red Salt on your lips Envied by gulls (unequally envious) You discard the mess They only for a moment Fold an outstretched wing A squall to bite The morning a lament The plane of the horizon Tilting a few uncomfortable degrees Dizziness is relative (you think) To the sea in your inner ear Slowly soughing While from an unknown distance (You are still with me?) In the imagined interstice, stars fading in the bruise The world tilts like a toy on its axis
Still the grey gets through
Oh, thunder, you said In that innocuous mid-distance Where meaning both escapes and evokes The lights in tall buildings Play dominoes Until almost everyone has left Rain makes static Too lacklustre for lightning scars Just the nondescript Evening noise Of cutlery and creaking doors Too late not to notice In the paint-chipped plateau Beyond wet-lipped, quick-torn fingernails Half open is not the same As half closed Though the window jambed Still The grey gets through
Murder town prayer
The plaster has a star where your fist made a prayer this town is as ugly as a trucker’s gutful forearms graffiti blue with the thousand-mile stare the surgeon stitched and excised peacock feather sunsets a dead fish nailed to the wall with the silent accusation of failure’s mockful trophy when you fast approach deceleration frenziedly singing as if freedom were just another word all the houses desperately homeless dumped here in sixty-seven in three parts, nail-gunned together with that executioner’s haphazard, abattoir inelegance a monstrous angularity in the canvas, struts and rails of rank and empty perambulators St Anthony’s bloody knuckles when the bluster changes pews filled soon enough the roses by the crooked gate with that scowl and bloodshed hue of the evening opencut gleaming and abandoned the shining, semi-precious stratification of a half a century’s still unhealing wounds
Icebergs & snowflakes
We are all old now Or naively young I turned the word You gave Like clay, separated To nebulous parts Not quite rejoined again Stretched, affixed, addended Made to serve the hollow shape Of as yet undetermined meanings Under the microscope Tears of anger, tears of grief Tears of your everyday failures Are as unalike as snowflakes Melting in the caveats of your face The ice shelf calves The beast on unsteady feet Circumambulating a subpolar current As if an isthmus masked In cruciform Pierrot markings A tedium’s dissolve Slap away the proffered hand Topsy-turvy islands Far from reach
Pharaoh’s autumn laundry
A leaf-curl sneer As if autumn fish-hooked petulance From the wet corner of your mouth Almost lemons The laundry scent Not quite a Sunday seaside Still muggy with The thick damp cloth Of March wrung out Until your paled hands Annoyedly dripping Slip on the too-tight, criss-cross tap Overcast and Creased as deserts Speaking sideways The cement sarcophagus deep Strands of hair and muck As grim as pharaoh’s echoing Coriolis voice Rictus lips and In the darkly narrow drain, a glint