The morning scowls
The chrysanthemum face of your disdain
Tightly unfolding, you do not
Much care for poems, or other
Jejune rigamarole
Je ne sais pas non plus
The flint/schist in yours eyes
Has counted days like careful
Sails jibing
I have the numb
lizard tail writhe
Of escape, and offering
In submission, another useless
Fragment of the self
Here too is a sunset
Diminish until
Pinhole bright
You are almost gone
You sleep with overflowing flowers
In mid fall
The stairs pull breath
In hard inhalations
From the rise beneath your feet
There is a shadow, serious, oblique
With the weight
Of immeasurably tall buildings
Suspended by the petard height
Of afternoon, as if gravity were a sundial
Marks long since effaced
Edging gutters and
The wire haunted enfilades
Of birds escaping ledgers
Til no-one knows what time
It tells
New stars about the face of evening
Still, with each careful step
The darkness moves
In slow distress
Around you
1 Skateboard Blues
The day is loose
As old Chuck Taylor’s
Worn thin on the side that scrapes the road
Negligent laces flailing out
With each bent-kneed chasing kick
You will fly
Before you break your bones
Down a mile grade
To a ragged curve
The skeletons of half-constructed houses
Windows vacant with the violence
Of embryonic lives
Watching in centurion stillness
An actinic flare from satellites
Full of esoteric patterns
A distraction glinting in your eyes
At koan speed
The grit bites the polyethylene
With amphetamine vibrato
The swerving car, the looming cliff
A brimstone voice pronounces
On the whipping air
How the sun is roaring
You make a choice and hit
Shouldering the bitumen
Gravity and friction
Tearing you apart
A skipped-stone re-entry
In decaying orbits
All satellites eventually burn
Tumbling in piecemeal deceleration down the road
Forgiving her, her hard and molten surface
Softness just a vagary of time
Stumbling home
She holds you like a mother anyway
2 The Northern Line
We leave at ten
For the northern line
The morning still as hunted birds
Quiet as statues (the inept kind)
That scowl and scowl and scowl
But never make a noise
The glass has shaded imagos
Of others and the self
Peering in as we peer out
Jostled lines of luggage
On parallel lines of shelf
With the Damocles threat
Of unruly boarders
(We cringe and mutter blandishments)
Making statuesque complaints
The day – train long
Crosses roads with crucifixion bells
Jangling off and on, the widows
In their voodoo coiffures, scowling
(Playing mahjong, worn as scrimshaw
in the berth the next along)
The way crows peck and cackle
At desultory bones
Thin as sunset, at the roar
Of elements and intersections
We’re almost there, she turning says
Face hunched, the butterfly, tightly pinned
To the landscape of her hair, in the half-light
Flickering
A shadow passes, (pointing, she scrapes a clumsy wing)
We lurch on again
Spilling tiles like the end of rain
3 God Made A Monster
God broke my rib to make you
Tikanis said, with that mad
Patriarch gleam, of Charlton Heston
Kneeling on the beach
Cursing us from his fruit box pulpit
Disowning his own madness
The luminol on late night murder mysteries
(On channel seventeen)
Speaking in tongues
Of gout expletives
Wondering, then, in the septic glow, who god made
From my broken jaw
That in silence never healed
Or the toes of my left foot
Without that desperate ape dumb purchase
A hobbled curl to walk
The radius just below
The ball joint of the wrist
Grown bat long and turning
From the threatened cliff
With an owl chagrin
At the failure to grasp
The small fleet prayer
Echoing in the concussion
Of skull concaved
By that knot-wood, rabbit-punch fist
Resounding with a brim and lucha sermon
In revelant smoke and fire
What monster in these wounds
God made
4 Lawnmower Song
Mercurochrome leaves a stain
Falling through the lawnmower afternoon
On cotton sheets tied in hard knots
Climbing weary trees
With a droning four stroke threat
The handles lashed with electrical tape
In black bands like mourning
A stone skips, against the dune of rib and arm
As if I were a desert river
Flowing backwards, with the static sound
Of the fraying evening, howls like the birds
Left by slowly eddied blemishes
The water with the algal taint
Of a lost green world
Sucking at the leech of blood
With a chlorine hunger
Gone pale as plasterboard
Broken so the interstice of chalk
Compresses a thousand angry lessons
To the remaining constancies, of a vanished sea
Lapping still;
In a life the human heart
Beats three billion times
Each moment a new strange twist
At the cage, as if escape were possible
Not just a song it sings
Of blusters and frets
Until the thread of all such strings are stretched
Tight around the blade, until the motor stops
Too weak beyond the face
Of recognition
5 Above The Eternal Freeway
In the breath of summer
We fell out of the cat soft night
Looking for stars in jagged edges
I said, Billy there’s siren trouble now
When you threw the stolen typewriter
(Car crash orange, Lettera 32)
From the sway-backed overpass
To the chrome and roar
Of the eternal freeway
To see what kind of poem it wrote
In the maw of scattered keys and broken teeth
It said something like the death of stars
Or (maybe) the birth of universes
Paltry in our humdrum calculations
The pressure released from the scream
Of burning filth and halogen
A scattering impetus
We fled into the argon dark
Bruising the arms of innocence
In percussive corrugations
On our fence-tin cradles
A jaw crack fury that the indecipherable words
In miracles and oracles
From the skewed deceleration
Of tyre punctured lives
Bore only this
6 Car Crash & The Breath Of Stars
I imagine, the interceding years
Gone in the fading glow
Of the taillights of fast departing cars
Insistent and as terrible
As a hand of broken glass
Cupped from the tremorous water
(Leant perilously close)
Burning under bridges
‘Oumuamua rabid in the sky
I suppose, my father is a rail
Where we crashed, chrome wreathed around
In congratulatory laurels
My mother is a tree, somehow shadowed in the road
Somehow gone, the enigmatic objects
In the dark far distance, emitting indecipherable signals
(The squalled, undying hiss
of AM radio)
With causes and with consequences
In the enclosing shroud
(Fragments swathed to the curving edge of dark)
We can never understand
Only that, trees like stars, like the burnt out shells of cars
Deign only speak, in their private languages
In words as bright and lost, as gasping exhalations
Still desperately waiting
For the world to end
The fence pale knock
In a rising morning gust
Not quite a harbinger
But with that frisson
Of things falling out of order
The window almost stuck
In sprawling autumn colours
Barked knuckles when it at last slips
Fist warm iron against your lips
The map an ingrained isthmus
In a glorious kind of burgeoning
I saw an angel in the words
Scratched away til it had fled
Feathers with the weight
Of marble
The uncouth and
Last immortal remainder
This is a trifle
The blood of damson plums
Bleeding to the filigree of sponge
And that quick-frozen, artificed desert
Off the Ross Sea ice shelf
Penguins in the lee
Of waves startled to a surprise
-ing stillness
White as Hiroshima, and
Through an extenuating season
In Nagasaki the cherry blossoms curling
I counted all the dead
It was too many
I counted just the one
It was enough
The fuselage
Between your legs
Whore red
In the photograph
The sky has a fresh-cut perm
From the wedge of door, an ammonia waft
As if Simoni scraped
His fingers through the paint
Of God’s unsatisfactory hair
Hands not quite done
Too desperately outstretched
Then was called away
From these whited palisades
By cattle-truck to attend
His mother’s persistent coiffure
Tall as cumulus and the blue-grey
Of battles everywhere
In an inappropriately shaped box
Laid to rest
I can only imagine
you turned into wood
one of those silvered, slender trees
now quite alone
bent by ragged seasons
shorn of leaves, and, extraneous branches
the fallen, skeletal remains
of life’s importunate sundial
illegible but, in unquiet earth
the marks deeply incised
bark skinned away
bone pale underneath
a sail for a smile
reaching from whence to whenever
with the ruffled sigh
of birds with knots for eyes
on your carefully held limbs
quietly watching
from here, there are
no trains, anymore
from here, there are no trains
no trains anymore, from here
receding telegraph lines
cant with the weight
of messages, unreceived
unsent, crossing
at that infinite point
where perspective fails
as if yellow
became blue
in a haze, a hand’s length
before your eyes
railway tracks across your brow
from here, no trains
the stars grow further apart each year
Could have been lamb
With the rank smell
Of three days out
And lawnmowers, reluctantly choked
Cut to gnurled, embryonic shapes
The diagram, of cross-sectioned bone
With that alien perforation
The enamel still mostly white
Mrs Marsh’s varicose poison blue
Bled out just a little
On the White Christmas rind of fat
A bright pink stamp
Illegible, but with the pellucid
Implication, of a child well behaved
A divided smile
Those big trustful eyes
Still quietly bleating
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
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
