Aug - 2020

Why Does The Ocean Calm Us?


Curled knees, a

Faithful sea dog

Lapping feet,

Comfort foam

Hugs toes. We

Come for sand 


Out like seasons

Back like a cat

Sin wave,

Or just waves;

Welcome

and goodbye 


Slow wink sun

Looks out

Indifferent 


Azures umbras emerald 

Deep wet. Or

Almost black, like 

When red 

Diaphanous eyes

Close at midday. Later,

The moon

On water;

Poems ephemeral

Light

Kisses

From full

Faced sun


Or murky 

As eye

Crud


Stand with damp

Toe nails 

Watching nothing, 

When really watching 

Everything.  


It’s 

Nature’s static 

Chanel 

Always moving in

Arrhythmic rolls

Cardiac familiar 

Woosh—my right ventricle 


But

Curse death hooks

Disrespectful undertaking

Let the beasts

Sleep

Let the creatures

Be


Such we

Can chart 

High and

Low

But always know

Of the calm


And still

We throw guillotine nets,

Puke micro death 

Rubbish

Keep hairs over 

Splitting atoms. And 

never once asked:


Does the ocean want us anyway?



En Gard

 

 Butt  butt butt 

much like

 putt   putt putt

 

You flew to float 

          than swam

with Weird Fishes 

             picked  over by the worms 

      nibbling at your toes 

 

And little             seahorses  pulling 

   at your                   sheets

riding into               dreams 

   of an  underwater Queen

    with   infinity   breath 

       and sun set     hair 

 

 I was born under    black cats

        Good Black Friday

       Spooky   signs    (of)

   a little Houdini 

    Magyar    magic 

 

And I like, the porcupine 

           bits    of most things 

                     Squeaky hinges 

       Cock eyed  bats 

           & the gaps  around 

     apostrophes  

Tell me  

            of your 

                 squinty eye visions

And

   upside downside 

                Cheshire Cat grins

 

   Spoke me of large juicy berries 

      Phobias of balloons 


Whet the page with

              loose-est

word drool

 Bitten corners 

        and 

fret buzz


-


The child next door 

Has a cap gun


Bang!

Bang!

Bang!


I can hear them go off 



KS B31


  Swords

    Fjords


  Such 

  Strange 

     Words 


Like numerals:

One

&

Three

)))


Kind of bent shapes


Like little 

     Sticks 


Of leaning in

///

Or 

   out \\\


Just ahead of the present /

  /

Tippy toes back

Head for/word


 Numerical arms 

  Swinging around

     Ticking 


Or hot thin salty potato chips

         And curves of winding roads


Spring’s

  Bell   will  well

    rings 

          soon



(S)words

    Fjords


Such funny 

             words



Just like strange  


               People.

June - 2020

With The Week I’ve Had, I Should Written A Better Poem

Words fold like origami
Concrete felons fall
Full soon new
Skinny black dancers
Scumbags on
Paper a page, stage a
Braille robbery
–Mimes in the dark

Lungs will fill with the sky
Headroom to hum a new tune
–Warm oat cakes
Life’s crunchy bits
Hard raisins
Migrate south for the winter
Cool bold boondocks
Into splinters and flesh integration
Linseed works best
What is heard?
He gets hard over circular rope
What does she want?
The mouse or the trap?
Long game or highway blues?

Old shades, coffee grinds
How many words do I know
& do rattlesnakes care?
Serif fonts are just stupid grammar hats
Sneak squeeze capillaries

Lebanese teaser
Makes me into a dream
Karma come up if I never see ya again

But there’s always new trinkets
Just gotta practice my double kicks
And cartwheels

There’s always a DJ and an acid trip
To reel god back in the mix

March - 2020

Just Before March

It’s hard to know where to start really
But the top left hand corner is as good as any,
So maybe the night of the invite to an all black party,
Nails included, all guests like shadows or old battered memories
And bulbs all red like a red light district,
And they lay down on slivers of silver tinsel
–skippingforward is like a week or three days
Of watery tea just wet herbs in cups
–A photo shoot finishes and a vegan curry is eaten Cold 

and a request for desire is told and bets are lost
and Carnival cries quietly
in the distance because:
    the feet were not in the wrong; just not quite in the right place.

But downhill lies a midnight pool
So, off the black clothes came
And down to the fence line
And began the rain
Soothing, the metal bars
Were climbed over
“We’re safe now”, he said “It could look like we live here”
“But I used to live on this street” they replied, “All the sounds sound so familiar to me”
And so, all things silence now, except for the moon, and even the rain
went quiet
Conversations wet
&communications
&bodies floated in the chlorine
  Boyuent answers
Flirtatious awareness of hands
Warmed and cooled,
Now, over and out with no need to lock it
Since it was never opened
  feeling like we were stealing
Walking out of a shop holding
                                    Hands
–Sydney gave Colombia a full stop–
It’s a long walk back with a squeaky wheel
And sharp rocks
And black cats in
Quiet streets
“Goodbye goodbye, thank you for the towels!”
Now, 1.5 in a small room and showers
& ladders
& shared body heat
are all terrible for getting to sleep,
Small beds are tactical with no head room
Accepted
But unexpected
“Shhhhhh”
we still rattle them off
One by one
And the heat makes waking quick
With only enough time for one
But still new things are learnt:
First coffee,
Then the art show.


A new day moons but Bossy Boots arrives for round two
Turns up the volume
In a bigger room
Closer to morning and with little sleep,
light
fingers
tease
when lifts
for friends beacon
to their airport needs.

Jan - 2020

As Great Deities 

  Oh!

How we fucked

    in the afternoon! 

As great deities we

Made brand new rivers

Of sweat down each other’s backs,

Sheets pulled off corners 

Of maps

And Niagara Falls

And

 For moments

I had 

 No thoughts

Just shallow

 Breaths 

Left
  Hanging

 Sharing pants of air

Back and forth 

Playing tennis with sighs

  And running fingers through 

Now wet hair

 —Laying in soft almost gone sun 

And sheets no more dry


-


Gym

Shoot

Gallery 

Hanging out

Smash windows 

Goat

Great, tired


-

Dolphy exhales

—Jazz holds its breath

-

The grass in the park is a

Leaf collector in the autumn



30 In The Rain

And Zack, carried the boat sized BBQ up the back steps as the summer rain washed the sky down on an orange tarpaulin stretched over the giant bird framed wooden structure, exoskeleton of proportions. This was meant to be the party gazebo, a rave nest pinned up with cotton soft eyelash clouds to triangular flaps, our hopes and prayers in the frictions of holy saint staples to hold this whole crazy mess or nest up. I felt sorry for the neighbours. I felt sorry for our poor asses rushing to drag a one thousand watt PA system under cover. Sal and I are trying to dry our arms on wet clothes–damp shirts and sodden overalls. The canvas ceiling leaked like a wet dream, but we managed to detangle the wires and hump the speakers up. The only thing left was a broad dark leafed plant sleeping in an unused toilet bowl–do plants name each other?–do they speak in French, or another tongue?–maybe Polish? Let’s call this on Marcle.

So, Zack had all the burners going on, the near quiet rain playing in the background night air–a leggarto of notes from god’s fingertips–and the infinite stall of 80% Humidity, a constant hiatus, and the deep cerulean blue flame moving the wet air to sweat on neck and backs–it was time to feast. The corn cobs stripped their husky dresses, and onto the char grill, two mushrooms the size of a Parisian girls head were brought out into the middle, and on the char grill, onions quartered, wild capsicum, blankets of smoked garlic. Our stomachs empty from dancing, and we swarmed, teeth ready to eat like typewriter keys.

There was a small atmosphere of smoke closing above us like a soft coffin lid. And bird masks were caught by the edges from an upside down lamp light–and everyone on this great hot buzz of a balcony was below the in-human eye of the ‘PRADELLA’ neons a junkie sign atop of the small high rise blocking our view of the river–gawking nocturnal till dawn. Eugine, all hyped up with new earrings: “Gold plated man, such a trip, you can’t break it, It will look real good on you man, try it.” His whole face moving, this kid could never get a rest like his entire outfit–two tone blue jacket, white shorts, short red hair all jostling for attention.
I take the gold swirls with black polished stones in my hand and head to the bathroom, Kurt had swapped the bulb for a tacky blue one. You would feel like a junkie just taking a piss or washing your hands. And the gold looked darker and the black stone almost invisible against my brown hair.
‘I will definitely buy one’ I thought. 

Dec - 2019

Heat (the opposite of Thank You) 

Heading the opposite of East

The wind blew hot through a hollow straw

There there

Sunset following down

Passing the

smells of dead flesh

sounds of tapping typewriter keys

Mixed morbid ants crawling

Lobsters hanging off the walls

Barbecues falling off balcony ques

Stale organic coffee stuffed down jeans in marble sconces 

Molding sodden doors fold open top down like wet playing cards

It’s an anger of red hot florists fleeing to get out of the sun all wearing lace fascinates 

Polished nails in the air

Flying gnats

Red ants

Beehive mittens 

Gloves shaped hands,

 no touching compadre!

Rows of sardine children
Thwarted with oars one by one
on their thin backs, hiding in polyester oil sleeping bag chairs

Watching it all from the conductor’s stool a short otter dressed as a human womankind break dances on a mojo Pogo stick yellow springs and hydrologic smiles. 

There’s so much applause it fills up the auditorium and because of recent renovations there is nowhere for the swelling swollen sound to go, swirling around fat ankles in socks and stockings streaming up trousers legs and skirts and down esophaguses-of-guests, claps of mustard gas up against theater dams walls where everybody including the woman otter drowns slowly like moths in lamps, mouths locked open to the sky in a swarm of warm thunderstorms.

June - 2019

Eyelashes

Maybe that was it! The only chance that it could have existed, the slightest of gaps, like the air between eyelashes. Then gone. Like the path of Luke to destroy the Death Star–atomised and hurtling through space in a mass of infinite shiny metallic shards. Like how forest fires erupt from thrown down lighting how they suck in all the air around them and irrationality so, wailing, striping bark back to sap spitting vapourised tree vomit out, sucking in the free air gulping down oxygen engulfing us both in blankets of soot and ash, that black tarnished sky flotsam free chaos debris that can’t be put back together that drifts and drifts and drifts outward, outward over polyandric potholes and drifts over broken one-way communicative flat battery radios and falls and mixes in with ink so well I can write this poem and falls like an albatross of death on your hair making it even blacker and it makes your eyes deeper and harder to read and the space between your left be-freckled stars even further away.

January - 2019

#2 (wet heat)

It’s as if yesterday never came around again to tell us what has happened like a spat out hunk of bad meat–You speak like an atom bomb all sleek and twisted, polished and gleaming, mirrored jaw bone grin stock piled teeth–no muse but she loved the stripes and dots all in a row, visual opiates, they drip in penned ink, dip to the black rhythm on the white beat–a sea in a cylinder rushes out of an iris, but its like a newborn with each curl birthed into a family a gestational thought from the fuck of life. As infant letters clamor into adolescent words run to meet adult sentences, on the wise add pages. But the ink is still hot, wet and lingers like a kiss.

The hands of time slow down,
To one final wave

November - 2018

Australian Mega Fauna Project

There is a secret hidden deep underground, lying in bedrock and stone.

But what if this secret moved your car, ate your pets and stopped traffic?

What if giant omnivorous marsupials were still around?

This project wishes they were, like wanting to slip back into a thirty thousand year old dream.

This is not a Paleo diet, this is fossilised cupcakes baked in lava.

Stop.

Move.

Blink.

Don’t look for foot prints, instead notice the scale of these soft monsters.

Think of the Thylacine last seen in ’36. Think of giant lions, think of bus sized wombats, three-meter roos, seven-meter lizards and even bigger snakes.

But don’t think of them as gone.

Only missing.

Still jumping, climbing, purring, and hissing.

October - 2018

September - 2018

June - 2018

April - 2018

The Sun Back


All over it

So

Over it all

So over saying

OK

But being knocked out


Can’t lose

Can’t talk
Lucked out with the genes  

Got the skin, with height, intellect and balls

He’ll be right–

But something feels missed out


So much opportunity 

Given

With no room left to feel down

No floor to fall on

Or stairs to trip up

Or well to sink in


I really need to tell people 

I am
Pushed up against a wall

Stuck like a stick


Reactions are gatekeepers

I know I know I know I know what they’ll say:

‘O Diddums’


I should call my brother

To hear him

Being listened to
And

To tell him I love him


To tell him

Lately, I’ve had my shoes on the wrong way

So when I run

I run backwards


And that I lack courage

And feel frightened 

And feel vulnerable

And that I think it is okay

If he does too


To tell him 

That


The other day, on Tuesday 

I tried to stop being slack

So I made a timetable

To get my spring back

But I slipped

And the track skipped

And the needle dropped

On a sad song that

Put a stop sign

At my running track

Turned my dog black

My thoughts dark

Closed the curtains,

And now all I want
Is the warmth of 

The sun back

                                                                                                                                                                                          All Content © Thomas Oliver 2023