seriously

it's always
a blank space inside your skin
public mistakes

nothing to show you how -
that shows that inner workings
can succeed

explain the boxes inches from you,
the photos turned down
inside him

Tell me of single home-cooked meals
of people who let you
think this is a life

All because you ran and called it leaving

surmise*

you're arch noir plots
dense, turgid
filled with the ease of
a writing
conducive
to fictions deep and
startling

a prof and a detective
battling each for
some moist control
over the nubile
youngthing

those kisses, girlish
and disarming
a serious love for tender
wounds and stinging
elegies

you'll be
missed like breakfast
skipped, like electro shock
sometimes, at night
I wish I could slip through the
cracks in the floor
experience your soul



* in memory of Dorothy Porter (1954 - 10, December 2008)

Rosetta

it isn't cold sundays and
condensation dripping in
found corners - the known room
a moss-topped
bed, chair in ochre.

it's not that the problem's
been slept on -
there are other puzzles to
solve before being
bathed in cat-hair and bought
band-aids (in one too many
shapes) better then, with age

it's not lists of home-wares,
matching glasses, stained
far far up their creased
sides
it isn't scratching armpits
(purring and purr)
less than insistent
well considered silences,
it is weariness and my condolent chatter, the
out-loud way the bereaved go
further into reasoning chaotic and
retrospective, tinkering with the
hours of Monsooned Malabar
and cheap battles over
trail stops at times less ripe

it is the distance and twin
conditioned prodding -
it's knowing and still wanting
in the morning, the day
as foil and bright with the colour
of (you)
it is losing sleep to catch crickets
in hand-baskets, eating cherries
to prove how much
I...
use a word, this hieroglyph
on my tongue and you,
carved and indecipherable
behind pane-glass and out
of touch

but history's been revising and excising
our good times so
it's
gargoyles and dark bills, numbers
and semantic texts - inadequate
friends meddling piece-meal in the
fields we divided, fencing is
the work driven for, pound
in posts (good wood, good wood)
and make a line to cross

that's it, see?
it's ours what's buried
under the turf and walking
sometimes
after the rain
(but not naked) I can take
a creeping sense of your
progression out and away to
our separate hemispheres,
leaving the equator (neutral
blue) and the 51st parallel behind
bookshelves and smiles -
watering the azaleas with liquor
will do for now Green-thumb

teer (after Reginald Shepherd)

the time, over
deep and near

north west, a neat tree
bound for years
in French

wings spread sights
a welcome over-cast

hills and me sitting
naked on damp grass

(it rained in my yesterday)

black frock coats, a situation
I am used to.

a basket filled with a fruit
I can’t make out - nor desire
to

if I build it
will
you?

special ones

So rather than being kicked around, I'm going to kick you to the curb
So rather than being pushed around, I'm going to push you away first
So rather than trying to protect you, I'm going to cover my basses first
So rather than trying to open my heart, I'm going to lock it with a key
So that only the special ones, so that only the special ones, can ever get through to me ~ 'Special One' George (Lyrics K. Noonan/N. Stewart)

It's the cynicism of empowerment as fear
'This is about me' a licence to seek
yourself -
a righteous kindness
that I denied you (worn grey scarves aside)

that within us, you excised,
covered over in
acrid thinner, scraped and denuded,
canvas and bone and push-pins -
that you
disappeared into we

So sing hard lyrics and lament notes
no longer hit
I didn't take your voice -
you've not got me to blame (delicious)
but I feel seething

remember, how I see you
there, de-structured, wire-framed
in stark relief, crimson
for what you fear, not who you
delight to be - how you dream you are...

how's the light at the roller-disco?
do 90's school-sport memories
ache up your scattered child-hood,
and its indiscreet confusions

before a time you remembered me with
(she always said it was difficult to be jealous)
others hands - all over, deep
but do not make me feel

I'm the knock at the door

Yerke Nayev Aghotk Eh *

I promised to see it all again
ragged and hemmed by too many stitches

I still pick at it, unthreading hairs,
clutching tweezers, pulling and probing

pull back the bedding, re-run the tear -
unsafetied and unhinged, tinkling

said just say out loud, such things
but you don't know I'm up now

just enough so I can hear you
as you are with the excision of

our life's exposed here early
to radiation, steep and strong

whir, click, whir - see this with you now,
over chemical peels, straight out

as long as your hair, I feel privilege
that's what I said 'lucky to have...'

no one got deeper, but that's your
burden not mine love, your malfunction

as long as it takes eh
no, no, not for you fledgling




* Songs Are Also Prayers

Poem in front of Gorky's 'Waterfall'

Carnation falls to a young girl
her feet reverently bare
over orange juice and pale
copies of Rilke, Webb and
other unmentionables.

Sari gelin, sari gelin

to get here rocks like sepulchers,
swimming in your dirty whites
wearing his jumper to dry
she seems like him now, hunched
and bitter hacking at the sterile
ground, all salt and wattle brush

Sari gelin, hye kacher

post-options

Ben & Jules' house is filled with
simple indicators of homely status;
a disused beer-pump fridge, its
functional twin in the kitchen, doling
out sputtering home-brew remnants
matched brandy glasses in neat
collection carriages
I showed you Barcelona, deep
and dry and tiled - its wines
no longer mysteries to us
the foreshore a familiar substance,
a track line passing through
millenial steel, white and certain.
I worked hard for that weight,
laboured to lose what love and
catastrophe had given generous
It's back and my more ample
contours hide famine and
putrescence from all prying eyes
I'm not discernable to casual
onlookers, I'm not yours to see.

*

* I'm still sorry

I'm already trying to remember you

how the room re-arranges itself
with tags and clues of some
broader extra you. Unseen hair-pins
receipts for canceled concerts,
bookings for a parallel tryst
triage states, failed soviet cities -
a Berlin I'll never know from
maps,
I wonder what you won't pack, how
much jewelry reminds me of you
and which you'll claim outright
for your bold new life,
the endeavor to remind yourself
of a fierce independent
you, all sass and modern
disregard

Beach

Blocked and it's happened
three times, you scare a
weed - yep, nup, yep
I wouldn't worry about it
Sorry, but like no it's not
it does later
it needs to happen with
that ring, especially the
area
we had to surf, that's harassment
I was getting so over it
that's boys - it's like so bizarre
and I was 'no' for so long,
that's the crowded part
then
I always get nervous looking
at it, does it grow?
let's so get away

doubt

I've begun to doubt the structure
of things - I fear slipping out the
bottom of the bus, tumbling through
seats into the ocean basalt
everything seems dangerously translucent,
opacity removed
I see skeletons, rigid metal under-
structures but the skin's gone and I'm
porous, seeping out
I'm losing faith in the structure of
all things

fiscal returns

I've been living beyond my means,
reckless, irreversible, for far too long
I've borrowed, spent and spent
I can't sustain it anymore.

I've taken from you
freely given perhaps, but pounds
are pounds when paid in flesh
and this is nothing less than liquidation

you've nothing to give, oh, I know
I'm scrambling, pleading with
implacable men in dark suits
inscrutable behind horizon lenses

you're out there, lost to deprivation
we wish each other sleep
we wish each other well but
I've nothing you want anymore

far

And now, very suddenly, inexplicably, I am alone again.

On the far side of the world, with someone who can't love me properly anymore, because she doesn't feel she loves herself.

I have only love for her, still.

But that's not enough. Not anymore.

I'm flying 'home', where she isn't - I'm not sure if I'll come back.

What choice is there? Stay and forge a new life in the same city or leave, fleeing her and here; write it off as a bad bad year and slip back home, slink back home, alone, without her.

Whilst she moves and lives, on the far side of the world...

...

a break with tradition

ectomies

don't even know if you come
here
not anymore, that's a step too
far - to much engaged with our
secret failings, orange-juice conspiracies and
tumors unsaid
simple scars aren't a guide to slips and
purses
you're aching, stripped, white, greedy
for a new skin
greedy for an eloquence, a rage
something to delight in
not this abstract
second-hand condition

try not to say the word 'I' -
it's harder than you think - stay
in the prose and lick your way out.
there's a spark in everything
it's just that you're not;
complete in teeth
sound of mind
bathed in a glow like kerosene-fire

how burning's burnt?
would you meddle just to stay
bonded - drawn bakers, bring
a platter round, lay out sweet meats
and indelicate cheese hunks,
a stiff odd knife left to cut
(in the shape of a mouse)
everything here is ours
it's marked

the air, the atoms, the tiny cracks in the paint
on the door above your bed,
where you disipate each night
I watch you slink back in like a fog,
re-piece yourself, fill up the doona,
patch by patch
to resemble you - but tonight
I see infra-red
and it's a dark red smear across your face
obscuring
endless
savage
unhealed and unheralded

That face - it seeps me of me
wrings dry sweat, I can't stop smelling my self
the stink - pent up, pulsed, pushed
the stink
politeness is not the answer,
dogged semantic water-boarding brain
sleep-deprived, insolent
it gives name and rank
name and rank
name and rank
but nothing comes out, a cake
crumbling into bathwater

turning, hoping the subtle power of my
stare captivates you to talk -
begs you to corroborate,
to suggest just one second-guess
but I see all the spectrum
and you're already trailing out the door
a red gash, a tell tale invitation
to make shanty town preparations for
inebriate healing

I think the lumps back -
at least that's something

semantic somatic

semantic somatic
reading fine lines
between unspoken
dry-mouth hatreds

each means everything
too much weight
in words not long
considered for

effect and affect and
tense, steep gaps
meaning made meaning
made loose for nothing

I pore over digital adjuncts
vestigial texts rendered
obsolvent by streaming
radial waves

Coal-raod

I'm the open sign that's always busted
swinging away in real-time clamor,
out on the old Coal road, down Maintyr-way

You
held again - my dark permissions -
we try, try, try - sweat and sanity

the drifts get deeper, sleeping
beatify frosts frowns darling,
why this
harmful?

it's real this time cause you don't
feel words, you don't
feel steep irate poems bubbling

you feel packing, you feel dividing
dvds and newspaper-wrap on goblets
you feel bills and mail and photos

and facebook explanations for single
status friends, you feel like disentangled
stretched, thin, carried over

ours, a porcelein vase, all blue lapis-
lazuli tattooed on fine bone
given over to unknown sons

not this picket, white bleached
hot like sundays and oranges
home again to convalesce

they'll not, you can't
explain the system just didn't
collapse, entropy - no exclusions

stupid silences, gazing at glaring windows
curtains too thin to hide the UV clouds
from your tears, my generous hugs

but belittle efforts made, always
pushing to talk, I'll take you out past the breakers,
ask you to swim back in love

but you've gone, head down
powering out to Bailey's Bay,
chop and chop and you

Kirk-fall

Edinburgh

Friday night pants
they were flares but you
wash them too many
and they shrunk

now to lose so badly
promised to come back
the last week, it's not
really like this before

it's okay for a sad story
there's a lot going on in town
the distractions are the nice ones;
drugs, skates, sell-out position

call me when the neighbor-bell
sounds, it was a moon moved
in purse, I might go out too
always wanted to tick off the lost

v) visor's revived if you turn to
me now, just too madness
approved going to try and
get me to go over-night

vi) there's no poof - evil shit
an arranged pornographic ride
undies in tow - packed by your
mum (you don't own a pair)

vii) too tired to do all day,
you, you; don't need exactly
it's an implement (you've been
charmed) the only way down with it.

viii) in baby belly to what was
that arch, a white slip thinking
each pluck punch look a
firth to my kirk-bound altar.

ix) yeah, it was funny, half-children's
paper, off a side-show alley
you got tickets, they only bought
got to go public, out of our hair

x) like a dialogue, do you remember
I might recognize as something
yesterday you did exactly the same
thing, forced to drink w. us

xi) a long long machine-crawl crunch
mine's at fire at up there, provided
who's the thievier of the latent modern -
not the party's I go for.

xii) so what's happening - I might do it
it's just a bit of an attitude
(what tomorrow?) M & S baggie - that's
mine, just so you know, yeah?

xiii) or you can hear it during the show
I don't quite like twelve at night,
end about two, a very long haul
when you're strange come lightly

lidless

typingbacktothewall
my hand is still burnt
there's a melted cheese smell
bare-knuckle oven-backed
she's not here
cancelled, delayed, protracted
she's removed herself to me
I'm the career criminal
no more big heists
you know you're hurt
the writing's so shit
the poetry doesn't flow
it's selfconscious fucking literary fuck
the gizzms of your deluded second guesses
what's she..?-
It doesn't matter
It doesn't matter
you've done nothing wrong, you're perfect -
let's change
sure, why not
4.5 years down
one testical less
why keep going, we've exhausted all we could right?
I'm just holding, we're just back
only that's not the -
turn off, switch-back
eek out nothing from nothing
december again
december always
if i knew what you, I'll wait
demeaned, displayed
cut open and enamelled
bronzed
remember this shape
that's me
they'll have to use the teeth
most reliable way
i'll already be here
going
going
I would already be
septimus prime arcadian
but anywhere, differential
something to wait for
some dignity in squalor
half-packed - eyes shut
like a pet, like a lidless eye
searching for affection
finding only you

Oberon

there’s scruples in the lessons travailed
hymn of him gone Oberon way with
a fire-brand in his eyes, droving,
seeking only water-tank Golems -
he arches left through tense Lantana
and seeded eucalypt crushes
that’ll be the necessary
‘indolent and capacious’
‘more fuel than last time’
‘only the timid, I love –
that’s the least of the dividers
that mark, there on the trail
between the Holden, rusted
ochre, an dirt-paint bleached
I make a dark circle, walking
the route more times than ants aroused
it always sweeps to the left,
past the first, past the second
fire-trap, scorch tin-foil mark
empty ‘2-minute’ wrappers litter
tagalong patois cities
a dreaming from the time
outlander, starch white, stiff cane
stumble stumble to a carve mark
they met this tree, a bollard to death
boil leather to thicken the gruel,
horse-jerky for the road
bury a buckle for all to find
something tells me the mountain’s
insurmountable
but bitumen eat through trestle-tables
and picnic spots
gilded tractors, primary slick and painted solid
they don’t allow tree-houses anymore
too much pin-stripe action and
aspirational summons
close the parks, fold up the cinder-block castle
‘it’s too Norman, don’t you know’
‘but Battersea is closed’
‘farewell to old Eng –
we’ll not find acacial-fields or Banksia men;
they’re spending cheques at 6am pubs,
scrubbed up for pay-day, the welfare
all allotted, neat, sleeved portions
head up to save money,
facing Mecca for all we know -
isn’t isn’t good no longer
they taught me to ride a bike there
chain-teeth, prop down, revved
in a blue woolen jumper.
They’ll find the body with a teddy-bear -
someone has sown it magenta over-alls,
their buttons match
‘found one’
‘not dark, not like –
‘the rest, no.’

torch-light

Torch light
A boy runs through the space, small, blackened with soot
The torches follow him, searching
Their beams pick up the smoke, curling upwards as the boy disappears
The torch light grows until the beams crisscross the space;
endless, sweeping, building upwards like a fire
Crackling, sirens, wood...

penta

i
I'll carry weaver-lock baskets
reeds made mute with wed-
lock times down on the river

ii
You'll make jelly-fish allusions
bite deep cores of fruit
bowl a pitch too high

iii
He'll not take stock of
brown high-waist marks
of furniture arrayed in rivers

iv
She'll keep candelabra vigils
at ease with Tudor sentiments
can't see our rough delight

v
why we're grass shewn illusions
to idyll Picts and pinafore days
dreaming that we're going




and people, far prettier of mind,
recite our verse into the ether -
safe, knowing the benevolence of
interpretation does not sully meaning

hope, where it once was forgotten

Something's usually wrong if you're not writing.

That's something I am getting used to re-discovering

A fake Ah as you reinvent the wheel on one more stale thoughtless night

gap-jaw

A week gap.
Slices of sun, wind, ham - tidy domestic
terrorism, bi-partisan passive
aggressive sorties across
laminate and nudist beaches
with split leg promises and
beach-head cosmopolitan
brashness. It's de rigueur to
be blasé.

>>

I'm a construct half to foil
half to please the idea of
me. 1 third experiment in
ego to inquire obscurely into
my own relfection. Have I
begun to play myself, how does
this arc work devoid of
intervening tragedy and tight
coughs? A side-long glance
a writer-off, no stiff competition
that's hands down a quicker wit
more sinisterly applied to all
and sundry. Ever feel that
no words are left to you, none
untouched by countless
nibs, unscratched pecked fingers
typing this and that, predicate
and prejudice. We're gonna be
the wildest people we'll live
to see.

>>

I'm nothing if I'm not this high
I'm afraid of never fitting in, of
slipping out of my own skin.
Forgetting it. In a hotel. On a bus.
Heart stop flight-or-fight - frantic
pat-down, momentary relief.
Over there. Familiar.
Taut.
Grey.
One size fits all.
Each arm at a time. Pulled
tight, all re-arranged, settle
back into my head.

Somewhere near Palafrugell

You tend my hair
two grey's the count
An attention to the
composition of my eyelash
A catalogue of spots,
rogue bristles, sly,
defiant. Removed,
popped, denuded.
Maladies and rages
coruscating rash,
darkly mottled types
witnessed on the sheets,
vigil and signals
read, thoughts derived.
my my love how
much I am watched,
deep and contented,
visionary

At a kiosko in La Boqueria

There's so much more to this life - café
and butchers on every corner of a
high proud fruit-filled place.
I'm struck by the concentration -
of smells, of people, of jittery
rapid Spanish and men eating
mushrooms and newspaper.
I romanticise everything about
Europe because I've been told to,
I expect it of myself - one of
many greats. It's a self-assembly
day to day.

Bus to Barcelona

We pass weird squat towns
tall and crowded into valleys
everything looks deserted,
post-arcadian industrial ruin.
Underneath it all a rural-ghost
farm, littered with old stone
monasteries thrust under
the factories.
dirty Paso dobles - accusing pastel
heads doting the hills
then suddenly coke and nets
pine after pine into advertising
stock and taller barrios,
sleek architectural arguments
made in concrete and red light
another gherkin.mosaic
now coliseum doric grandeur
vistas nobler, higher still
filled with wire awning breath
and Gaudi's heights

Play with me

Ash. Smoke. Black.

Tony; middle-aged, wry, academic.

TONY: I’m not here to tell you what happened. You can see it for yourselves. The aftermath. I’m not here to clean out. To sift or sort through. I’m here to tell you what was lost. And what was found.
Let me show you;

A change. Clear light.

It’s 1988. The sun is shining. Somewhere a boy in sandals and blue socks plays cricket with his brother. Elsewhere people are getting ready to celebrate the Bicentenary. 200 years of settlement - white colonisation... I’m at my father’s house - sitting on his bleached white furniture, picking at the paint, staring at the yard. Tough grass out there. Good for rumbles, good for bull-rush. An apple tree teeters in the corner, its fruit more the neighbour’s than our own. His shed - long locked up - next to it. Never go in the shed. Not anymore. He’s about to tell me a story.

A man emerges; Older, greying, yellowed.

GEVARD: You want? (Offers him a Date) Its good. No? Hm, more for me.

TONY: My father. Lowering himself creaking into a chair. The stripped pattern fabric fading on our back verandah. Must have gotten 40 years of sun by now. Nearly as much as me. He offers me another date. No, thanks. I take a cup of coffee from him - there’s filigree gold on the rim, you don’t see glasses like that much anymore, not round here. It’s a long time till I see them again. He clears his throat.

A cough

And begins;

This time round...

I’m 24 when they take my testicle. The right one. Just a day surgery really. A small scar buried in tangled hair. The end always unhealed - the only thing to let you know. I had two once. I think I can remember what that was like – I have a sensation that I associate with having two. But I’m not sure. You can’t tell you say. It’s like you never knew before – when there was more. But I can sometimes; it swings lower now, freer, scared. Everything – every rash, every lump, every jitter could be – it. Back back again. That’s no way to live.

you like thai?

coming down tails and ties
I'm nothing if I'm not this high
there's an orbit to be made, languid and
crushed stinging
eye-shadow crimes still dangling
the 80's in your face
I did my time then - eating out,
taking in the sites
Leary would like it that way,
outer-rim spectacle an' all
Not like Stevens, nope, not like him at all
That's how I can tell, the chips, the metal
teeth
danger, danger,
circularities of wool, showing knitting's not
the adventure sport grandma would have you believe
she's nothing new.
so today's city scrappy, vengeful tiles,
the whole caboose-shunt-dodge no more
that's where I'd be -
hey don't you want to bleed?
there's all guarantees it's better than
a promise
where you been then, huh?
maybe better than the last, flick up tail
dot
for
dot
Noting how passing me makes the talk of drinks
sardine the time-line into rugs and dark-chocolate
I want to wear sandles and socks-
I had permission aged 5
a nod, a wave, a coat-tail flick.
Done.

titles

breaking the rules is harder than it looks

they're wiry and tough, more orange-peel sticky than banana-skin slick

how is it you found this place?

SaturnV

...rolling arches, a lit-stack datamatch made in heaven,
more slick nano than moorish goul...

I've made adjustments to the sync, it wont jam up so quick
Like ice-fire on Krypton?
Not this time, not this time
Something different then - an upgrade filament-boost
Tinkled with the timing, subtle but efficient
Interesting...
Nothing more than you would have done, in my...
Alright, let's out-face this and be done.

...skeet-pull acid triggers, a false-sealed double hull
of nomenclature and outdated metaphorics,
ringing heat-flares like a doublet in knife edge slack nights...

my, my - endless legs...
corporate biomeld - out of Seattle
pricey?
Not if you know who to -
Fuck?
Persuade...
Sure thing.
Same thing.
Not this gal

...movable feast, horror-box datacasts into hard space
out here, the time serves itself.
I've already pulled outer-time - drives you...

Away.
Something like -
On Stack?
Yeah.
How -
Long enough
See you in...then...
Yeah.
Yeah.

...lift out, gleaming haze and note-perfect slant,
Venetian interiors and mind-melds, nothing's quite
Saturn is it anymore?...