οι καυμενοι *

there's a passage to the back - if you wedge through the dead mice faded slats - where you can see the gully and if you're quick, can slip-slide down the embankment and onto to fern floor. When you penetrate there's a hush, nothing but old puffs of green moss, the odd rock, a bird making an almost word noise, like a lost call to Mecca. It's the gloom at first, but I can see in the dark, push past the big dead Black-boy (though we can't call them that anymore) and if you squint into the rock face to your left there it is - a passage, a gap - a slit almost hidden in the rock. It's a Nargun-place, I swear it moves each time a little, then deeper in you'll find her. A Mister-minute hat, with a little zip down the side for a key I suppose, sits on her skull with a little of what may have been tawny hair, but in a bob, not the fashion anymore. I call her Kate - that's all there is really. In the cave, we have tea-parties, seances, ballroom dances and grand parades. She's faded now, but I like her sparkling wit, her careful grace. I brush sand from the entrance, trying to keep the gully at bay, the ferns out there but I know in the end I won't be able to save her from the mud and the rock-wall increments. So I'll crawl out, past the ferns, past the Kingswood shell, last night's bogan fires and back to the picket line, bleached board house, the cool coast air and you...




* after Patrick White...that bastard...

vigesimal...

I can count
this year's communications
on one hand, I think
the times real was said,
something broached
a subject, a taboo
so you and you and
you and me
that's enough said cause
what are words?
I'm sick of talking about it.
Yeah? Yeah.
Just last week...
I find that hard to believe.
I'm going.
No, don't - just...this isn't...
I'm so angry at you...
I know

moccasin

what doesn't kill you makes you...
there are plenty of ways to live blind,
enlivened by lust and a deer's white-tail
flight for
green and
green
there's a corollary need, a virgin-cave
present in a moss-topped over night
sense
felt in the brass of a centre-fire cartridge
down the long rifling
through a orthodox graph - an x-and-y
and no beyond
down wind and smeared with pellets
he can see your breath so
there's
hold
and hold
and
not so
so
to fight the pulse-bounce, parralax
distress and calm sweet down onto the -
squeeze not pull
snap
snap
click
snap
like nothing you've ever
slumped, corrosive (you'll be surprised how
quickly the skin comes off - in a one piece, a
flash leotard, a pelt for all seasons)
mine's a doppelganger, some Dorian
reproach, he for I and I still on
through Adirondack slack hilled
weevil trails and the
weird Manhattan spine
glimpsed before a truck-stop plunge on
the grey-green trail

down

Think of me as the one you never figured
the job you couldn't work, the one
that got away
a heist-plot planned and programmed
a celebrity-free crash course in dienetics and
the distribution of wealth
that's how they'll see me, righteous
and divine, ridden into cap-gun
Camelot rapturous and sublime
not a soap-box dynasty, a flicker in your life
more a beat-down mimicry - a soul-fly
enterprise
that's the way that rhythm works you see
ticker tock ticker tock down down with me
a rap for all ages, a white-line
yellowlabel inch by inch crazy
that leaves a retina burn of that girl
this house, his hands
my my my
the familiar bed, the working-bee Panda
something in the way he holds her -
nah, not this super-princess
robot vice positronic brain-beats
she's a simple switch, on-off-again
that's the mode, a la you see
it needs simple fool, oh yeah,
that's me

Tompkins Square, NYC

It's six years gone and I find
myself dead or alive ( catch me
on the first bounce) and I want
squares, common!
a mis-print dollar (what dyu got?)
I can't be like - something's got to
be traded - now the intervening time
denudes passing sentiment until
eleventh hour miseries (michael
jackson, soda) mean you're not doing
anything over again
throw it over here! and you'll
get their money (older men, the
subway) and if you keep them
out later, the ones who cheer you
up it's the first nerf fight ever made
(in that it's sub-mechanical) touch-down!
don't do it.