In the corner of my mouth, the long road from forever

A bit overdressed
I thought, it would be cold up here
Green parrots and pink galahs 


On the lawn, amongst bare-shouldered trees 
Each fossicked seed a new returning soul
Borne into uncanny blue
In startled opal fire


Coins in my pocket (for you know who)
The weight of unpaid debts
That lock of hair the colour of the dead
Swollen gums we used to hide behind


Full of street cornered threats and invocations


Some broke sticks of chalk to write
On the footpaths and the walls
Nothing particularly legible 
Sad and lost and proud held lines
With that difficult kind of joy
You get in wreaths of disarranged native flowers


Coming down, high and desolate ways
A cattle truck swagger
The blind menace of hungry chrome
Eating every crow-crookèd road
The hills old dog dun and brindle backed
Swaying like a mercy


Scythed my mourning face
In another town
Faraway
Nowhere to the sea


Through the rust stained eye
(Thought of) hurricanes and
Carelessly dropped ice-creams
Fragments laved away


A new day’s shining face 
An endless broken promise
Never going back


Got those old commissure scars again
From too much hard smiling

Beautiful, beautiful

Clothes are all wrong

Cut a thistle from my hair

Fed it to the morning fire

Took a ripple from a pond

In your hands it came alive

Startled, let it slip

In that starry colour, fled

An unseemly display of public disaffection

A wreath around you
As if I mistook
A sapling for a mountain


Teeth of glass
With that diseased opacity
Of expelled liquorice


An aeon’s season
Of scree and debris


The draggled hem
Of summer’s discarded dress


Red dust in your veins


In your eyes
Autumn’s evening amber

I didn’t cry
Til they played
that stupid song again

Kept spelling everything wrong
In the innocuous text message

With unwilling, clumsied fingers

Easter’s discounted chocolates 
In cartoon disaffection 
From serried array
Numbly watching

The lights in stars
A linoleum sheen

Wrote a few disconsolate lines
Found in them
Little consolation
Published
Categorized as Poems Tagged