una primera y última vez

the last time we met (I can say that now, again)...
still really a first time - for a while the last of many strings
trailing through a snow-surprised London - I noticed

your hair is long; you look like a brighter, better you...
only now I know sometimes, underneath,
we're both the same, more than we admit

it's been hard to extrapolate that for such a long -
my talents only stretching so far into intuition
before they fall off into cavities of imagined lovers, slick with...

there was a last time we met, and it seemed
we actually talked, and the world didn't burn and no one
made you take down any of your lovely walls...

the last time I enjoyed it

A small essay...

I do not generally write here as 'me' - the John you may see in the right hand corner of this page - something simple, an outline of a man;

Australian.
Living in London.

Theatre director,
playwright and poet

The reason I do today is...complicated...this is a public space, in the sense that I post things here voluntarily - I include them all as 'poetry' (a few I have been lucky to have published) but for the most part this is a select online record of something I've done since I was 15, a habit...writing 'poems' to deal with, record, enunciate and expand the world I live in and the feelings and emotions I have - often in the moment, often intensely or obliquely. More like capturing the sensation of something in words.

It's my default setting as a writer, not plays or prose really, something in between - a poem. Poetry, like Bukowski says;

...is what happens
when nothing else
can

It's come to my attention that there is, well, other attention paid here. From some dubious sources. I make no real effort to publicise this space, I like the beauty of the internet as somewhere to be publicly anonymous. I delight in the thought really that someone, somewhere is reading this, these things. It's about being read. And perhaps understood.

But I genuinely forget sometimes that, if you wanted to and were determined, it's possible to find this if you knew say my last blog's name or my surname even. Or if someone had given you this information. And it would be easy to read this, and confuse or assume that the things in here (the you's and she's and he's ) were meant as a record of the world as it is, not perhaps how I see or how it might or should or could be.

I'm not the most clear poet sometimes...

I think it was put in my head early on (it was high-school and then compounded in university) that 'good' poetry (the stuff we studied) was by necessity complicated - that it needed a professor or a book or a course to explain it. That that complexity or obtuseness made it 'literary' and not parochial.

I've come, of course to know this is not true and is in fact a dangerous pretension; study can of course reveal facets, great unlooked for gems in a poem, but it cannot substitute for the experience of reading (often out-loud) something again and again or perhaps just once. As T.S.Eliot said;

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

So in a funny way this is a post asking for...forgiveness? no, I don't regret the things I've written here - and a lot of them are real when they occur (often, unsurprisingly at 3am...) but maybe I'm asking for something more like compassion, I suppose and for those that would meddle in the lives of two people already struggling to live out and beyond each other, I'd say pretty much

fuck off.

nominative and objective

If you think all the you's are you you're wrong

If you think all the I's are unadulterated they're not

In the soft animal body of this poetry I'm hiding
everykind of longing and revelation

But now the lost Rosetta leaves pale & academic
scrabblings, and the sands are coming in

Heaven forbid we talk, that'd be...revealing

I've worked it out - you're afraid of a hole in the logic of
your absence?...or that all that's here on offer are recriminations &
mad demands for closure and truth - like they were
yours to give

I said I missed you yesterday, low and bouncing
but it was in the middle of a dance
floor and I (or the MDMA, you decide) seemed to feel
that dancing and that dj and that I were destined for higher
nitrates, a burst in the night

Don't believe the hype that there's a complete set of lives here, hidden -
under the bed is nothing more than a tent of doonas and the weird
round hope that I still could, if wanted, walk right round
and sit, nearer you

That was a you you, you see...

nobody's wife*

when you got...
I just couldn't
when you came back
she was no body's wife
one more thing
she sends her regards
time to get -
it was a good run
what can I tell you
my brother
today like no other
I guess that I miss you
I guess I forgive
you stood in the rain
soaked ribs splayed
(I still don't own an umbrella)
if you ever come by here
yes, well
the trouble
as I see it, there for
maybe I learnt when to get out
if you've a memory
of the set we created
that looked like the house
we shared once,
a tapered diorama
like a school urchin's
fruit-box, filled with
hanging packing-tape
planets with hasty rings
swinging and glittered
it wasn't
to scale
just to see if you're better
putting together
your own own again
I hear that you're building
a gin-bottle Babylon,
a kinda record to your
progress, scratchings
of triumph right?
a cigarette now
since you went away
you seem more you
than ever, it's gorgeous, I love it, another cocktail?
another locked park
meet every train at the station
you came home without living
treat me to a
flake of your life
and I'll get you cut out
by fire-men
tickets you don't use
stubbs and suggestions
maybe I learnt when to get out
from you




* after Leonard Cohen

The Crane Wife

I've lived alone before, and I can do it again

I know you're looking...

How was the premiere?

I can't feel my hands.