Beard barcodes
Thick street grass
Underneath a xylophone
Ideas move
as clouds move
into one
clean soap bubble
swirling drain-wards
On bed sheets
A purple banana
Or vibrator
Soft cotton
On silicone
Beard barcodes
Thick street grass
Underneath a xylophone
Ideas move
as clouds move
into one
clean soap bubble
swirling drain-wards
On bed sheets
A purple banana
Or vibrator
Soft cotton
On silicone
Together alone
To gather alone
To gather all one
You can’t wait on the sky
To open up for you,
Undo it like a shoe
Right foot first
Left tight
Look at you,
Trying to
Undo a haiku
Did you know
Dead is god?
Now, go on
Yesterday used to
Be tomorrow
What’s the opposite of grey?
What’s on the other side of time,
after thinking it officially ended?
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Go on
she said,
Haven’t you already sucked enough ink out of my veins?
No.
It’s like you’re teething
#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
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.
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