hulk

your sweet absolution is not my drug of choice baby

nor do I desire the sugary sopor of release in quite the same description,

I find no solace in those tweaks and tricks of light -

the steady progression of your every enamored list sits nearly askew

on a teetering inadequacy of my divine comedy,

the errors I reel off accept my useless virtues -

render me infertile in this barren scribbled land,

I can not write in sand and nor on water shall I remembered be

for this is my decaying life and the husk you love is me.

1988 (Intermezzo)

grasping at the rough spillage of my tongue,

formative distinctions ache out their tense judicial instruction.

thought-pre-thought crushes out the loose bonds of steep association

and carves funeral niches for free descriptions and an allusion to soul -

so this and other inadequacies gain heat and fire,

as steaming deep conversations flitter away into the rambling street

to soak and re-remember Harlem days when nights caught fires unaware

and old dead Lorca grappled with his love and my iniquity

jungle orderlies

distant communications with steep

desire, I move orderlies to bring about

a quiet revolution, not that the

wheel’s shifted per se but at least

some subtle malfeasance crept into

our sad September hold-alls.

I engendered then at least two

passages in which settling nicely meant

giving up the core of all you

wished you’d fought for many long

Æneids ago. That brought freshly

forward sought nonchalance like bilious

deeper notions and I, in my tower,

glaring at the obfuscations and their

kin laughing in the dying jungle

know too much salary is part of

all the malady lain bare like ripe

plums pregnantly sombre in their

bursting skins, baring all the sun and sin.

brevity

reflections on a dimming past
loosely sown teetering histories
a sweet brevity eludes us.

deliveries

knapsack deliveries in an Appalachian

dream, far older than any continent

you know.

given that respectability and hedge-rows

are seeded hand-in-hand,

my short-tempered corroborees no

more ratify a fledgling hate than

cast my dice so hastily in betrayal.

deeper consultations reveal the stars

appear innumerable to the man with

no fingers.

why then should the brevity of kissing

lead my deeper passions past their

squalid remorse and into seething warmth?

what dream-walking takes in effort is

redoubled in dark tellings of unseen

sleeping paths

when I need a code of conduct I’ll be

sure to yell

20-20

Sydney, Aust.

you’re not conducive to writing.

there, I said it

it stand as bleak and drawn out as that accusatory whiteness -

the page it’s own sweet testament to the ignominy of another blank verse.

seeking, as we do, the trappings of familiar writing,

we’ll find nothing hand-in-hand with challenge

as they await their scaffold in the dawn –

laughing children and slippery copulations

plague the loose associations to horror and the taste of oranges,

squeezed just so from the bank of should-be-tolds –

and I’ll laugh at your clumsy assertions that there’s a truth

in all this receivership and reiteration.

Keep greeting the convalescent talents of my interest

and run, my heart pounding in your knees to keep that

moment behind all the great sculptures as I, their remnants

force into my own moulds.

she only shifts

she only shifts the first time
as city whispers claw through your sheets
piece together your delinquent memories
and watch through a window the
leopard print lady drowning weeds in
a bucket
find patterns where they believe to be
and flick a casual glance at the half
past seven last seen glaring through a
dark half day ago
she wavers before rolling gentle warmth
over you and you seep back into
each other’s haziness
her smile breaks through brighter than
the cracked curtain
a heavy breath, a deep push and she’s
off left groaning to your own lesser
mattresses you reach to catch her
and pull her back for one more last time