one small light

I Didn't Even Applaud

2012-01-27T17:22:00.000-08:00

Coffined, I'm crammed in a seat
on the late bus, escaping the city, escaping
the jaunty liveliness hemming me in.
I have to hold far sight, doing
that trick with the eyes where they soften:
see, but look within. I'm tired, not right; can't see
how it's slipped again. Two psychiatrists, agreeing,
can authorise ECT on a sectioned patient.
I recite the litany of admissions.
The driver swerves too fast on the corners
and I watch a man with broken shoes standing
by the doors. I forget to ring the bell for my stop.

21 January 2012

Acceptance Speech

2012-01-27T17:16:00.000-08:00

with a passing nod to Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have only ever wanted to serve this community.
From my place behind the counter of my store
I have attended to the daily household needs
of each and every one of you as you've bought
whatever it is you've required and filled me in
on the doings of the town.
'Jacobson'll have it,' you say; or, 'Jacobson'll know.'
And I will, and I do.
I stock everything. And people like to chat, don't they?

I wear my apron when I work - not just to protect
my clothing, but because it's the expected uniform.
You trust me in my apron: the friendly, avuncular shopkeeper
who can put his hand on what you want and lend an ear - always
lend an ear. I know more about you, ladies and gentlemen,
than you would be entirely comfortable with, were it not for the apron.
But now, of course, having played my part to the full,
having serviced your lives - always deferential, always with a smile -
I am called upon to make one last sacrifice.

None of you has stood in this place before me, of course, because,
as of ancient rite, no-one can ever stand in this place twice.
So, with some sadness in my heart, knowing that I will not,
any longer, be able to pass on what I have gleaned, nor
furnish you with any solid thing to grasp and take home;
and knowing, too, the weight of the revelation
that has been given us, and its sustaining power in our lives,
I stand before you, a proud member of our community,
and accept, with love and dignity, the stones that you will throw.

I am your servant.

6 November 2011

On Commas

2011-12-20T23:38:00.000-08:00

Well, you just have to pause, think
breathing space, subordinate clause, emphasis
which, stopping the flow, reinforces the point,
or teases it out, further, like a looping ball
thrown casually, and drifting a little
before it lands. In the rush of our daily sentences
these tiny hooks give definition, artfully shape
meaning: lead, direct, regulate our pace and rhythm
like little policemen, or guides, who, knowing the terrain,
can lead us safely through contiguous words
thrown anyhow, and out the other side.

We are all grammarians, and in finding our way
use the surveyor's marks the language provides -

take pause, reflect, move on, and fly...

30 October 2011

Pilgrimage

2011-11-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

It came to my notice the other day,
while looking at some old photographs
of you playing in the dirt, laughing,
holding your face up to the camera
with an impudent innocence piercing
the air with its clarity, that a man
fortunate enough to have a son engaged
with life, one who walks a path clear-eyed
(I see you running at the surf, when you
had overcome your fear, with a sharp
thrust of relish) has been given one of the simpler gifts:
a clear note played with a bow, and sustained daily.
Some would call it love. I found myself
thinking about the careful hands of one
working with wood, who finds in the grain and warp
of the tree the shape of the thing expressed:
the actual heft of an object carved.

I wanted to hold you then. Wanted what since ancient times
the sprinkling of water might signify: blessing, grace, arrival.

I thought all this while sitting on a noisy train of skylarking teenagers
and hearing the bass note of what, too, was their need for love.

Since I walked from that hospital by the river,
every moving sinew takes me home.

24 October 2011

Bird Watching

2011-11-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

I showed the bird in my hand
to the young woman at the other end of the hall.
I wanted to kiss her, but my tongue
could not even shape a word. Songless, I left.

Holding the bird deep in my pocket
I mumbled excuses to the boys at the door
who were off to the school dance. I fled
to my room. I learnt how a shrike crushes.

The bird sat on my shoulder
as I performed my stories, taught my class:
displayed, conducted; practiced my craft
with lightness. A beak tore at my gut.

Hiding the bird in my throat
I knelt in some kind of prayer
till the tumult subsided and I fell
to the floor. Cradled in claws, I slept.

Where was the bird when I wrote?
Caged in my heart; free in my hand.
How is it no-one sees her, though she lives
with me still? You have to sit for a long time

for a sighting.

18 September 2011

What Comes Through, Must Go Out

2011-11-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

1

My wife's body opened
and I watched my son come through
from darkness
into the world. He was blue.

You could say the universe was rent by this birth.
And my heart crying, my wife crying, my son crying
was blood crying as the stars adjusted themselves
to what was new: a person, come into being.

I told him a story
to welcome him to this earth. He lay,
listening,
as you would to water running away.

And I trembled
to hold flesh of my own in my hands.
What a father wants, in time,
is to die before his son.

2

I held the flesh of his hand in my own -
this, my father's hand. Dying, not conscious
to us, bone-bag now, his laboured breathing
was not loud, but wheezing in the quiet room.

Then he turned, on his right side, and pushed
those three last breaths out. An act of will?
Or God, sucking the spirit from him? Such silence
I've never known: the whole of night a witness.

In the lingering aftermath, the long pause
of the world, something left. We felt it.
And I knew, again, the opening of the universe:
in birth we come through, in death we go out.

My son now, on the cusp of marrying, wants children of his own.

9 September 2011

Hand Sonata

2011-10-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

At rest, the fingers curve, folding over,
slightly biased towards the thumb,
which sits straight beside the palm's creased padding
like a tor watching over rivery lines.

Clenching, blunt, fused, my arm weapon now,
I strike table, face, gristle, bone
with sudden taut sinewed force flattening.
My concentrated power enraged. Fist.

'Like this...' And I learn to fold and crease
the paper delicately, my fingers shaping,
manipulating, teasing form into being -
the finished crane actual in its intent.

When they send me down, hands hung
limply by my side, I can still feel
his windpipe beneath my thumbs - his neck
mine to crush; his fate mine to hold.

My son comes to me now, takes my hand,
this withered thing that no longer holds a pen.
Tenderly I stroke him. Tenderly he curls my hand
in his. I feel the pressure of his clasp.

And gently struck, a distant piano articulating notes.

1 September 2011

The Palace Of Celluloid Dreams

2011-10-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

Ever since the Director said: 'That's a wrap', in 1934,
I've been stuck inside these elegant frames
forever sweeping down the staircase in my satin gown
to meet the man of my dreams just back from the war.

He's still my beau, even though something's changed,
and our skittery story unfolds round the great house
that's been in my family for generations - a citadel
of tradition that sees his damage as something deranged.

We have to escape, to realise our love - leave,
with the violins working hard to pluck the heart-strings,
in an awful, reddened dawn fragile with hope.
But it's only you, watching, who get to see the morning cleave.

We play out the scene endlessly: re-runs on Saturday
in the afternoon, late-night movie slots, all those
festivals of 'classics' used to fill programming gaps.
I am bright, fresh, young, full of hope, fey.

If they can preserve the celluloid, I will live forever. Be.
But I am trapped in frozen time, inside the screen.
Just once I'd like to look out, and see who's looking back
at me. Would our dreams match? Who is it trying to be free?

13 September 2011

A Random Card

2011-10-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

The dresser by the bed is empty
save for a single pack of cigarettes
and a deck of Queen's Slipper Playing Cards
grubby from much use. There are burn marks, grime.

Shuffling with his yellowed hands
he lays the cards nightly on the deal table
slanted crosswise in the corner
seeking the perfect pattern of the game.

He used to drink, he told me; used to fight.
Took the chance that came his random way
and always raised the stakes
till there was only one card left to play.

I only saw him the once. After a scuffle,
bleeding from the nose, he drank with me
in a smoky bar and talked of women,
how he'd lost his middle finger, moving on.

We all of us die alone, he said. And it was only
after I'd seen the story in the newspaper
that I understood the haunted look in his eyes;
the meaning of the single card he carried in his hand.

Is the deck stacked against us?
As the dirt falls on his pauper's coffin
I stand in solitary witness to his life.
The six of spades slides quietly into the pack.

29 September 2011

Fishbowl

2011-09-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

What am I doing in this place?
Australia is a rich country, they said,
and you will find shelter there.
I couldn't, of course, know
what cost we would have to bear
when we left our home in Afghanistan
and began the perilous journey
that has been so much more
than a thousand steps: one child dead;
my brother gone mad behind this crazy wire;
any money we had
long since given over into all the greedy palms
needing to be fed
to pave our way. Can a man's eyes bleed?
Can his tongue crumble?
Yet, we are the lucky ones - what's left
of our family is still together. So many others I see
drift even without this comfort
like stripped fish.

We look out at the Promised Land
and see its welcome shrinking.
I never knew a country could have so much distance.
Are we on the moon here?

And people, it seems, are looking in on us: exotics.
Does that one bite?
What strange colouring she has.
Am I carrying a disease? Am I the disease?

I came here to find a safe home, in a fair land.
I find myself in a fishbowl instead.

19 June 2011

Where's The Animal?

2011-09-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

'You animal!'
I lifted my head, alert now, ready to spring away
if things got really ugly, my tail flicking,
and watched

as they lunged
and lumbered, blotchy-red screaming faces
spittle-thick with hate raw like blisters, circling
each other.

When things
began to be thrown, wounds opening up, mess
splattering, the roaring gone really crazy now,
I left.

Hopping lightly
off the couch, my favourite soft cosy spot
good for surveying the inner house and keeping
a watch

on things,
I absented myself, with all the calm assurance
of my breed - contained, lithe, unhurried.
Truly a queen.

The back porch
afforded its sunny protection, and I casually washed
as I waited for the human din to subside.
The noise fell.

After some time
I could hear the strained, murmuring voices
of reconciliation and then - louder, gruffer:
'Where's the animal?'

28 August 2011

Reverence

2011-09-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

The boy king lies in his tomb for millennia.
Interred by ancient rite, silent, his sightless eyes

banished from light in the comfortable chill
of the afterlife so meticulously prepared,

he becomes legend. Civilisations pass.
And we can only find traces in the sand

of what it was that came before us.
Until the grave-robbers come, and break down

the hidden door that kept his sanctuary.
What dust fell on their heads

from those sacred walls
that were never meant to be seen again?

Did some dark presentiment stir in their hearts
as they gazed on the forbidden?

They shrugged it off. And now people
come in their thousands to see Tutankhamen.

* * *

Beatrix 'Trixie' Hall, my paternal grandmother,
lies, at rest, in Waverley Cemetery.

My father used to fall on her grave and weep.
In a difficult time I tended her plot

with care, learning, through my fingers,
something of the continuity of the heart:

linked to the earth - my family
living back through time; living now.

In a state of natural prayer
I kissed the marble of her stone.

I will not go and see the boy king,
torn out of his eternal home.

I'll find some earth to dig, some loam
that I can work in its proper place.

And if I find a skull there, I'll know
that I've been gifted reverence.

6 April 2011

Not Just Another Game: St. Kilda Loses The Grand Final

2009-10-08T17:53:00.000-07:00

Though the trend of the game
was turning against us,
it was the final siren that snapped hope.

Hearts heavy, we left quickly,
dazed with the intensity
of riding so closely each moment

of straining, concentrated flesh
torn from ordinariness by effort.
How brave they were, these men.

How forlorn in defeat's mouth.
Their collapsed bodies too hard to look at
I stared briefly at their agony

before turning my own sorrowing back away.
I, at least, had the privacy
of the escaping crowd, the subdued train.

They had to stand in the fading light
like prey knowing their fate: cornered,
already broken, finding dignity.

It was the rain falling as we walked home
that broke the spell: any lingering buzz
of contest suddenly cold and sad and heavy.

A woman hurried by under an umbrella.
Cars swished past on the wet street.
Already, it was becoming just another game -

except that this one was a defeat.

7 October 2009

Bringing Out The Dead

2009-10-08T17:28:00.000-07:00

'Good poems and good funerals are stories well told.'
Thomas Lynch

for Alasdair

For one evening you were my brother.
We talked about poems
and titles for poems
and how the stars moved around the Earth.

You loved the woman
I loved from afar. New to this
I held my tongue
and as we waited for her

in my rented room
we formed a bond for life,
out of which you were banged
next day by a car.

I remember sitting on the roof with you
eating porridge; your beard and motorbike;
the reckless laughter
painting walls at night.

And, of course, two days dead,
when you appeared at the foot of my bed
all light, like some silent blessing.
You were my first Death.

for Melanie

I hardly knew you,
but your ringing voice
and pure musicianship
accompanying me on stage
cast some light to see you by.

You walked, I think, where Angels walk,
having to see the terrible bright face
of what was true: love and death
like hot wires round the skin.
Your scars were real.

And then I heard you'd made life simpler,
ending the tumult -
you'd died, hung
by your own hand.
I threw stones into the pond.

Now, I listen to your music sometimes,
grateful that your voice can still be heard.
When the darkness comes
the light of song is what I turn to -
your frail flame has not, just yet, gone out.

for Stephen

When they came for you, the Angels struck
with sudden fury
as your bashed head met the pole
the car wrapped itself around: your son died, too.

I never saw an emptier stretch of road,
nor one so desolate. Death, it seems,
finds its natural place. We found
your jacket in the boot, and saw the blood

that was yours still spattered on the car -
its squashed frame a tormented mouth crying.
Your red dancing shoes
were somewhere else - no longer moving,

no longer singing to us
of the lithe frame spun so casually
on those long, long legs. In all the years
since, I've not been able to swallow them.

This is how it is: a hard death lingers;
shattered hearts never quite re-form;
the limp and scar are visible
as our lives run out.

They say its time that heals, but I don't think so -
how do you heal Death?
Like the spider in the corner, it sits there
and doesn't move - we live around it.

The love that grew from your ashes
is gone now. Your daughter, grown,
I do not know.
I put a notice in the paper each five years.

And in the darkness of the longer nights
your absence is a living thing
inside me. Yeats said it:
all is '...changed, changed utterly.'

8 September 2009

Solitary

2009-08-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

Flannery O'Connor
dying of Lupus
writing to the end -

the terrible certainty
of God's welcome
a lonely comfort.

There is one light on
to see by.

19 August 2009

Icarus Is Real

2009-08-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

Walking the tree-lined path
they stop to watch King Parrots
roost and swoop
among the winter leaves -
their green backs shadowed,
the flame-orange of their breasts
only glimpsed.
One bird
falls swiftly from its perch
and, wings clutching the air,
glides to another branch
further down the slope.
This is done silently
but the man watching, jolted, gasps
as last night's dream
explodes softly in his chest:
he remembers
running off the edge of a cliff
and flying out over the sea
with giddy ease.
Now, with electric intensity,
he flings his arms wide
and, rooted to the spot, soars.
He's flying again.

He won't stop. Turning,
he nearly steps on a parrot
standing near his leg
and startled joy surges in his veins
as the surprised king leaves flapping furiously.
Now the park is suffused with singing winter light:
golden browns and yellows and streaky greens;
thick, dark, looming trunks; gravel grey.
The parrots flitter about one last time
in a flurry of random shufflings,
and the man
is off and striding
with cascades of words
streaming behind his eyes
and his chest somewhere out beyond the trees
reminding him that Icarus is real,
the Sun is weak,
and everything in him called disordered
is gathered up beneath the wings
he now so purposefully uses.

When he wakes, he hasn't even been asleep.

August 2009

Mermaid Tears

2009-08-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

after reading an article by Richard Grant in the Good Weekend

Sitting on a rock, her golden hair
streaming with the morning Sun, the long
supple muscle of her tail glistening, alone
with the sea, she is taut with some inner grief
and keens a lonely song
that only the air can hear and the wind plucks away.
She cries salt tears.

Baekeland began the chain - making a synthetic polymer
copying what the Asian scale beetle secreted naturally
and using it to coat electrical wires: simple, innovative, cheap,
useful.
Did he know he was stealing fire?
Through the breach rushed polystyrene, nylon, acrylics,
foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, plexiglass,
and we ended up with clear plastic lunch-wrap.

Hard, soft, infinitely malleable, plastic
begins life as a nurdle: a pellet
of raw plastic resin. 100 billion kilograms of nurdles
are shipped around the world each year.
Some get lost - in fact, a whole lot get lost.
Dropped, blown by the wind, caught
in the currents of the sea

they find their way around the globe
in ever-growing clusters. A thin scum
of foreign matter joining all the other dross
we can't control: lakes of waste; beaches clogged
with thongs and balls and bottle-caps; pocket combs;
tampon applicators and toothbrushes; syringes
and plastic shopping bags; discarded fishing lines.

The sea's distressed. The nurdles, the little
hopeful balls that build so much we use,
have become part of the melancholy folk-lore
of the deep: they call them Mermaid Tears.
In the still watches of the night
the mythic ghost-ships of old, creaking,
sail again the haunted emptiness.

She's combing her hair. She's looking out to sea.
No man comes near. Scooping
a handful of water she sees the plastic glisten in the Sun.
A seabird, choked with fishing line, lolls
in the tired surf. She will not look at the land.
Sliding off her rock she swims for home. Her last sigh
is what we hear on the wind.

7 July 2009

Listening To Leonard Cohen

2009-06-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

1
It's dark.
I lie on the floor at the foot of the stairs
my head under the music, penetrated
by these songs I've never heard before,
inhabited by all the sad melancholy, the tenderness,
the mysterious beauty and hard, bitter agony
of the world
I'm just emerging into.
I've known this all my life.

I'm listening to my own heart beat,
listening to the night's heart beat thickly
all around, thoughtless, catching
stray lyrics, knowing only suspension,
not knowing
how long I lie there,
till the music is gone
and there's only the darkness
and I'm looking at nothing

and I'm looking at nothing

2
I'm sitting deep in a concert hall
looking through the dark
at the man
whose songs I know
as if written on the inside of my skin. Age
sits comfortably with him
and the currency here
is simplicity wrought with care
and a generosity
like that of a sea-conch singing.

His cracked voice
somehow conjures love,
and leaves us with a prayer.

3
At four in the morning
I hear his breath go out.
And all the longing roll back in.

4
Rollo and I
dance to 'Tower of Song',
delighting in its spacious company,
laughing

5
There are poets,
and poets of Song.
When my funeral comes
let words carve silence.

14 June 2009

Dylan At Newport; Suburban Landscape With Tree

2009-06-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

1963: A young, scrawny kid walks on to the stage
guitar in hand, mop of curly hair, a voice
that bends time. The crowd is close
and the songs ring out
from a new favourite son
who somehow gets inside what's changing -
his youthful wisdom raw on the wind.

In a safe backyard world
a child stalks enemies
with his plastic Winchester rifle.
The Jacaranda tree
his lookout, hideout, battlement.
His vivid inner life
he hides from prying eyes.

1964: He's grown into his own phenomenon.
He knows it. Comes on stage with ease and assurance,
a man filled-out in his body.
The songs have grown, too:
surreal dreamscapes;
the collisions of love; acerbic visions
naked on the street.

Playing with his cars
in the dirt
at the foot of the Jacaranda tree
the child, alone, dreams up worlds
that live intensely behind his eyes.
He doesn't notice
life on the street, or the TV news.

1965: He will not be contained.
Restless, creative, arrogant, sure of his vision,
he plugs in an electric guitar
and, amidst a sea of boos and catcalls,
announces that music has changed.
He'll sing those old songs again
but, for now, has let his own desire free.

The child has started reading.
Perched in the Jacaranda tree, book in hand,
he flies with Biggles
into Africa, dodging bullets, landing planes,
discovering whole worlds
that, dancing in among the words,
release his dreams.

Years later,
encountering the world for the first time,
he will hear those songs
deep within
not seeing, yet, his own first poem
drawing towards him. The Jacaranda tree
will shiver its leaves in the wind.

29 May 2009

Moonlight Sonata

2009-06-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

My father's on his deathbed
barely conscious
lying as he will lie
till the last breaths go out.
All around him
the muted hush of hospital hallways.
I do not think of the past
but somehow
those delicate, melancholy notes,
always in my life,
accompany this last act.

He played them once. I listened.
And despite his brute anger, his absence,
he did give this love
in the only way he could: through his fingers,
connected to his inarticulate heart,
the one,
in the flung body on his mother's grave,
that was surrounded by the dark.

When he was gone
and we walked out into the night
I looked for the moon.
It was, rightly, hidden,
but the night was somehow ablaze
with what had been accomplished:

a man's last breaths
a man's last notes

the slow movement

had come to the silence

of its end

11 June 2009

The Last Taste Of Orange

2009-05-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

I could have died last week.
I could have smelt my last burnt toast,
tasted my last orange. I could have.
Before I lost consciousness
I wondered if swallowing pills
would be the last thing I would do.
It was all over again, you see,
and I didn't care what happened next.

I wonder what a last night should feel like?
Just another stretch of darkness before the darkness,
or a slow, star-filled in-gathering
as time comes into its final alignment?
I remember staring at my feet sticking out
as I leant back against the door,
and watching the spilt bottle roll back and forth.
And hearing a train roar carelessly through the station.

10 August 2008

This poem won First Prize in the Poetry Section of the Blue Fringe Literature Awards for 2009.

I Offer Up A Prayer To Solitude

2009-04-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

In that first season
I kept encountering Lyrebirds:
their small, proud heads; the profusion
of their tails. Surprisingly brown
they were casual in their observance of me
before scratching again at the ground.
I would stand
in quiet contemplation of their daily occupation
still as a tree
before I, too, went on
with what was essential to me:
the prayer of walking.

I would hear them rustling off to one side,
these solitary rangers of the bush,
keeping me company.
Some cockatoo, or other, would screech in delight.

31 March 09

A Very Human Thing

2009-04-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

The spacecraft
took the transformed
away.

I turned towards
an emptier Earth

which, unconcerned, continued to spin.

I didn't know
how much time was left

and I thought, again,
of those three last breaths
out.

I dreamed fiercely.
I learned nothing new.

Each dawn brought cold, hard light

and yet I felt love
when another last person came into view.

Human, we would tell our stories,
and bear witness
to the end.

25 March 2009

The Emily Dickinson Road To Publication

2009-03-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

Finding courage somewhere
you sent some poems off,
only to get them back
with stern advice

about your "rough rythmns"
and "imperfect rhymes".
Were you standing by the window
as you read these lines?

Could you see your beloved?
You never tried again,
but the words never stopped
till they shrouded your head.

Then the world found your voice
and out of that tiny room
where you wrote, delicate gem
after delicate gem floated off.

Now, part of the canon,
your reputation is assured,
and as I sit here, scribbling,
unpublished, I'm reassured.

Not that I'll be famous one day,
but that what counts is the writing.
Lifted off the skin of my soul
the words mould a meaning for me

and declare my blood to the world.
I think you were probably small,
but no matter, your voice has been heard.
I'll turn the page, now, then stop.

10 Sept 08

The Violin

2009-03-15T18:01:00.000-07:00

Leaning forward we attend -
someone's reading again.

Weight shifts in a chair, papers rustle,
but words, now, are rising in the air
with the cadence of song
as the long, smooth bowing of the lines cries.

A bird arrives on the windowsill outside
as the mood shifts
and staccato phrases hammer and jump
out from the poet's voice

in plucked trills
that tear the blood from our skin.
Our confused hearts
are left, wired, in the long silence of after.

I notice, in the corner, an old violin.
It's missing one string
and hasn't been played, it seems, for years.
It's fine, curved woodwork, though,

carves a solid shape in the air.
Eventually someone moves, there's a cough,
the bird leaves, and our hearts
pick up their beats again. Conversations start.

It's only after we've gone
that the violin
falls on its side,
and a soft, reverberant sound

caresses the air.

14 October 08

Looking For Cockatoos

2009-03-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

Such white bright smudging flight:
gracefully turning bodies of light
suddenly gone.

I scrambled for my book
to try to capture the image
and saw, again, the boy
staring intently
at the sudden soft yellow clarity
of the light
spilling across the evening and into his body
before he ran.

Twice the road
has plucked a friend from my life,
their smashed heads mangled.
No bird cry, or evening light.
Just something fleeting
that I managed to get down
and speak into the night.

I look for the cockatoos
but there's only one last bird
out there. Then it's gone into the trees.

6 Nov 08

Self-Portrait With Chair

2009-03-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

1st Panel

Sturdy, a little away from the table, turned
at an angle
to catch the light,
it's the only chair in the room.

The sea-grass matting is frayed,
the wooden frame paintless with age.
Scuffed on the legs and back
it creaks a little.

Square, comfortable, simple
it sits, starkly there, staring back -
experience in its grain
rubbed in like oily resin.

2nd Panel

Overturned, it lies on its back
in the empty room
as the dust settles. Startled,
whoever was there is gone.

Crooked, the soft broken wood
shows its life
to the floor. They are both
grainy, splintered, flawed.

3rd Panel

The skeleton frame,
weed-overgrown, rots daily.
It forgets what it was,
becoming formless.

1 March 2009

The Very Trees Are Gone

2009-02-12T16:02:00.000-08:00

Did the child know
it faced a firey Death
when it was born?
The future is flat and implacable
and, at times, surprisingly fast
arriving - a firestorm of consequences.
There are no words, of course, that can encompass
the sudden suffering
of burnt corpses
lying anyhow in the street,
or little clusters of charred cars
nudging randomly together
as their fleeing stopped. They wait
like aimless sheep.
And everything is ash.
And colour has fled.

The planet turned this morning
and light disturbed us once again.
There was no sound of children singing,
merely voices on the flames.

12.2.09

Learning What The Rock Knows

2009-02-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

Real as a dream

you walk just out of sight,

your back always eluding me.

I hurry to catch up

but, of course, you're not there

and I listen to vague rustlings

that could be a dress

or just wind in the leaves.

I remember, once, that you brushed

my lips with your tongue

and I could see your face.

Now, there is empty air,

which I fill adequately, noisily, with care.

I will not wait for you to reappear,

though I long for you still.

I'm trying to learn what the rock knows -

that the fire that burned it into being

is stored in its core,

while time slips by in the wind.

I spoke to a crowd the other day,

alone in my declaring.

The sun burned down

out of the sky.

28.10.08

Empty

2009-02-10T18:20:00.000-08:00

after reading Joyce Carol Oates' 'The Gravedigger's Daughter'

The woman reads the letter

and knows, with the Cancer encroaching,

that she'll never meet this cousin

lately discovered. It's too late.

Too much has happened - in both their lives.

And so Death comes, we assume, in all its finality,

off the page, in some unknown corner,

and there is no reconciliation,

and the Universe is silent.

It's not tidy, loose ends abound.

I search for music to play

that will keep searing into my heart

this starkness. I reach for the Vodka.

I see one pinpoint of light in the darkness

that is the hold of life that we have.

I let the late-evening silence surround me.

12.1.09