fiction

Melbourne

love is the best sensation I remember

lying for

those eaten-up degrees

each bruise a bite too far

scented oils say the water’s

there to hurt you – love is

a dream you render when you

best remember lying

Mumma

Melbourne

mumma don’t worry I’ve got some

dreams I caught in my sleep.

mumma remember it’s only

the son bringing hope to the forgotten.

mumma don’t worry they’re birds

I’ve taken broken up to the mountain.

mumma I’m sorry there’s hail

here and I’m not all covered.

mother don’t worry I’ve got a

dial tone and some cash in my pocket.

mother remember the night you

cried all blood till the morning.

mother, son’s are like birds

flying over the mountain

don’t worry to remember

tell me

Melbourne, Australia

tell me baby did you fall into step

when the windows closed?

on a street, on a beach

to the places we used to go.

did you keep up with light

on a rainy day?

to meet and know

now I see love’s no date

there on the side of my

empty neck, there’s

a place you pinched me

and I took followers to

bathe and they called my

name in the river’s crisp

current -

did you see me then,

all hair-shirt and pious

depths? maybe lift

your head cause you can’t sleep,

deep down the devil’s rain

knows better than to trust

fate to love and an

altruist’s heart can turn ink

black in the sun these days -

did you see my love, that

windy dawn – I stole your

song to end up here

and that’s okay for now,

I’ll play you back a copy

like it might work again.

Oxbows

Sydney to Melbourne





At night I see oxbows,

water drops whipping their way
back & forth along
land shorn of trees
in neat edged farms
and rural salt-etched
dreams -
mine is not this place,
wrapped in dusty promises
they’re strips
of puzzle pieces, brown
amongst hazy green,
pock-marked by failed
subsidies and fire-trails
that lead nowhere.
dotted with clouds and
mercury dams, the
parched land flies by
under steel and
a sliding aquamarine
but I can still see
houses on the
table-cloth below

and I’ll still dream
of dust-bowls,
clouds like ak-ak
bursts as far as
the eye can’t see,
where virgin trees dot
a jig-saw land

wracking up

I list a long line of failed friends,

racked up like blow

to be taken at dark parties

with white-collar jackals and their

laugh-a-dime dandies.

I talk to America,

One’s left –

Huh?

and it seems it’s me this time

who takes the opportunity to live

beyond Sanskrit chants and back-read

poetics

I would have guessed my

last guess that he’d be more

thief than liar

A lover’s paradise rolls quietly by

windows stained with chalk-glyphs

- mathematical alphabets as whirling

and unknowable as the stars

I watch beetle-broad men duke and tourney

in the bespoke comfort of a new bear-pit –

slinging Shakespeare and maudlin elegies

around as rougher men fists and dust

Be less afraid –

Now? – he laughs

Time’s ripe for funeral summers run for profit

in times less ordinary when a single scroll

can’t hold the generation to ransom, as if creating

was enough momentum anymore

America, it’s time to go home –

Hosanna in excelsis! he growls

We’ll shout down evangelical bell-hops

and skip-jump up to Lorca’s Harlem dreams,

left dusty in the grey snow banks

He taught me to row there in that park,

like meeting Sondheim and hearing him compose

for you, a different meeting

I ask one more question

of my dark buzz-cut compatriot

Where in this dark sea are you my friend?

He looks at me all side-long, anxious to find his light,

a nod to his square-jaw – through cigar smoke and

that pale grin he finishes his syrup

and throws me a bundle of rags -

Here, enjoy.

They smell of deer - stiff fretful death

and a skinning too real to forget.

They’ll cut off your arm next time –

that angry fix is yours alone

I talked to myself once, asking more and more

for no refrain

sing my Gloria Gloria and laugh no further

at white-collar fiends and their oil-slick eyes

or Boroughs will find you and we’ll slip-slide

into coke-numb elegies and you

Good night -

Take off

felix

thinking of you Cat, puts

a distance between our joints

makes silences strained and

casts a muslin over our cheery

cajoling and playful stares.

she lies between us, hurt and

panting, our love for one for all

teetering on her short breaths

fluttering like her chest, a rapid

up and down much faster than

my heart’s own palpitations

I cuddle her and you – a low growl, a

low moan. When the surgeon

calls, there’s better news and

veils lifted, we embrace

but in the end, I’m still thinking about cats

sms

she's rubbing half the road
against her thigh

riverkeeper

the river will keep this friend

in somebody’s bed the warmth began

again

I couldn’t help but overhear her

lungs cry out for air

I couldn’t help but steer

Whip off the lid, pull out the stuffing -

it’s raining polystyrene and all I can

do is hunt for cereal-box toys and

crafty dolls – ingeniously suggestive

of realer men

this hand will not be taught

to catch thought-bubble ideas

on butcher’s paper nights

all I could do was sing.

while I was all away singing

Nero burned and her dark fiddling

came crashing to an end –

not on a bridge or behind some grand

orchestral surge – but in an

ambulance she drove

stale and crisp and scared

till the water took her and

the Riverkeeper got his friend

pulse

slipping through my hands

I press a pulse-bar and my

fingers light-up, charged now they

glow faintly, electric purple

snakes in a dark metallic hallway

packing

Those missiles you bubble-wrap

18

An invisible sion,
Judea Icarii - fallen.
Steps to an old pavement,
parchment & flagstones
rubble & ruin

pugilism

Charlie’s gone for now – stunned as I am

to be introduced to an old man in

an attic, not the gutter-drunk pugilist you know –

this turpitude some sad joke from

a sick movie

I couldn’t do that sort of easy breeze –

he’d say I hadn’t found an edge, the

next-bottle focus of a consumption

that spurred him through all the

hovels and whores and walk-aways –

comfort kills that grit, I’m begging to

see

words obscure words, a shower of noise

in a sea of thoughts, scraping at your

brain, moths tonight set to

sizzle before they soar.

Exercising charlie

Poetry is what happens
when nothing else
can ~

Charles Bukowski

Charlie (Hank, Huck?) was right when he said

nothing else

is left.

But the space between words,

that’s the truest time -

soldered to a chair, port-induced

haze mingled with free-based elegies

and steep admissions.

they walked you today

out and across the bridal veil,

water tumbling like sheets of photo-chemicals,

all slick and deep and burning

You stroke the keys - like a gland for milk

and nothing but association to factions survive

you type and hope nothing’s left that isn’t yours -

even though they’ve all said it,

maybe you’ll follow Dylan to the grave – rigid with adoration and clogged with old, dead, poems.

do your slippages account for these gaps?

the little times bereft of ‘comfortable, clever poems’ maybe that’s all there ever was – hazy winter wanderings, padded and pandering declarations

and half-carved demi-gods – mortal and yet stained

can you construct this? Charlie wouldn’t ask a question like that, buried up in his room, candy wrappers and bottles and hate –

his dysfunction a fuel, his fucking an ode, his drink an answer.

he might not have seen it so…grandly. He wouldn’t have talked to you – but you don’t know that, at least

not tonight

Para-aortic

Star light on a ring of snow, two men, one imperceptibly shorter than the other, begin to dig a grave for a fallen clown.

It’s harder than they think, this clown being by now at this later stage, more jolly than perhaps is best given the circumstances.

They hunker down for a long dig and talk about the effects of green-house emissions on global warming and the rising price of fine salmon.

They’ll dig through to night to bury this half-remembered joker as close to the centre of the earth as they can get.

They plunge and punch and push his bloated frame deep into the warm earth as storms lash their fine bespoke suits, muddy now in the torrent.

But he won’t go down, not this way, not whole.

They’ll have to hack him up, slap and slice the fat from all around, like whittling lard to make an old toy soldier fit back in the box.

Once their done, what’s left of our Jester strewn in and around the cavity, they’ll lie on the wet grass in the burning morning air and light a cigarette to share.

They laugh at their ruined suits and the night’s wet fury but somehow they manage to eulogise their deceased and dismembered charge.

He’ll be remembered for that quick maudlin temper, his sweet rages and biting barbs, the purity of his joy and the harshness of his gaze – but he wont be coming back, at least not back through the earth.

Destiny and Irony will sleep well tonight.