You thought you were lost

you were
attempting to land on
the thin, top most branches
of uncertainty

They...

Even they...

wouldnt hold
your thin, hollow bones

You took the long way round

Terrorized by unseen futures
glimpsed faces of disconnection
and the distant twinkling
of orange lights singing
your unknown longing
back to you

The Couple

The homeless man rummages through a bin,
Looks up, and walks away as the light turns green
The couple watch him from the car window
on their way to purchase a new lounge suite.

Later, while the couple are talking over lunch,
there is a

Pause

A man with a gold watch
at a nearby table is blowing smoke rings
The couple finish eating

It was a lovely day we spent together, wasnt it?

Yes. Yes it was.

In his therapists office, later that week
The man explores his feelings of jealousy
and being excluded as a child

Away At Sea

Ive been away at sea, love
Sweeping the discarded tissues
of the grieving from the decks
watching them drown
and dissolve in the briny murk
Drifting for what seemed like
Endless, windless days
Ive been away at sea too long

Ive been away at sea, love
Watching the sorrowful rain
Sting and beat on the decks
and fall like unheeded tears
on an endless horizon rocking
Ive been mopping out the swill
While the timbres groaned in the hull

Ive been away at sea, love
Watching the Albatross,
the Silver gull,

Ive been thirsty,

havent eaten

Ive been away at sea too long, love
Looking for the eagle

The Crickets Eyes

The sky above
was some unsure shade of blue
And the black shapes of pines
poked over the rooftops

A cricket Chirruped
as was fitting for such an evening
of hushed unease
Its unseen, black pearl eyes
staring from somewhere,
nowhere
With mute invertebrate
wisdom

I stood
And felt the crickets eyes
Running through my veins
I almost felt the valves opening
to his frightening wisdom
And the soft, ever deepening
blue night crushing everything
As if the earth were the very crucible
of love itself

Breathe

I breathe
The stench of
Panic

Breaking open and
Spilling innards
In the middle of the road
Like some drunk
That cant remember
what she did last night
In her effort to forget

I breathe
Her halitosis curling
Its rancid desire
in my nostrils
Expelling from
Tar choked lungs
I wretch with compassion

I breathe
And cradle her head in my hands
Look at her ravaged mouth
Her chewed nipples
Slender fingers tapering
To drawn knives dipped in red enamel

I breathe
Dim lanterns
Far back in dark caverns
A salt edged hope
Spilling
A river
Down a sunken,
Dying desert skin
The final window

A Love for Evil Things

You still haunt me
like that ape that swings
through the trees
behind me,
just out of sight
in the periphery
Like that bird of death
to consider
on the rusted cyclone wire
fence thats falling apart
by the station,
with the rotting clothes piling up.

When a dead body becomes
nothing more than a sack of
potatoes...
dispatched with the required
paperwork.

when evil is
Cursed in the other,
But not transformed in the self

Your terrible love...
The love for,
not of, evil things

Stands
Like a large, worn smooth
Rock in earths desert of hate
On this rock I perish,
Am smashed to bits
and broken beyond repair
That evil maybe transformed
in me,

to a love for,
not of, evil things.

Wing beats

I saw you beat your wings over my head

a silhouette of my sadness hovering.

Following.

I cut the cord for protection

And fell

Snakes and Ladders

I wont make anything for
you that wont enhance my
brand recognition

I have a profile

here.

Or you can contact me

here.

You can read
a sample of my self
published manifesto

here.

Its all just a game of
Snakes and ladders
we are playing
After all.

See more

here.

Infection Control

Severed arteries
pump nightmare
into the grocery
aisles stocked with
sanitizing agents
that
ripen souls for
pandemic

As legislation
is enacted
to avoid the truest
cleansing

The theatres are
all disinfected

Fathers Day

His dead mother
haunted him in the suffering eyes
of his wife
as she sat,
day after day,
year after year,
drinking coffee at the kitchen table.

Until finally,
he wondered why he was so
angry at her for sitting there all day

His sins
haunted him in the proud eyes
of his son
that roamed
through his sadness
like a mad bull
through the most delicate china

Until finally,
He wondered why he was so
impatient with the pig headed boy all the time


His living father
haunted him in the expectant eyes
of the children
that kicked a football
to themselves
in the street
every afternoon.

Until finally,
He met his own eyes in the bathroom
mirror one morning and wept.

Counsel on Small Things

Rest your sorry bones
From their labours often
Watch and listen
To the birds that do
not toil or spin.
Work diligently at the few
small tasks you have been given
The known,
but mostly the hidden.
Give special attention to that
Which the world does not want to see
Or touch
And take one step only
On the lake
Before you take another.
Do this, and you will live.
Do this, and you will certainly suffer.
Do this, and you will become,
in some small way Christ's brother.

The Pouring

Some part of you inside opens up
and pours words out like a waterfall.
Like a tap. And they splatter on the page
not like that. Not like tears. Though sometimes
you still cry. Not like the bitter patter of pain,
but like wine from a decanter. Or spring water
from some ancient rock. From a jug with a lip.
So that the words pour in a liquid cord of beauty.
and begin to take some shape or form that makes
a little bit of sense.

But they collapse at the slightest touch.
Being so fluid and poured from the jug of your heart
they are displaced by any form or weight that is brought to bear
or interrupts their pouring. And you wonder, where do they go?
What dry lake bed holds the liquid cord of beauty? Into
whose cup does the water descend? This you will never know.
Only let the words pour, when and where they may. Do not
worry about wasting them. Only fear that they remain unwritten.
That they go unspoken. That they dont get poured.

How white the tomb

When your room was emptied
of the former days,
Those days of lost photographs
and other shrouded rooms,
when your heart was emptied
of its joy and sliced from you like a limb,
How many nights did you bleed on your bed?
Feeling the phantom nerves?
How dark were the streets when you awoke
that winter morning?
How vacant the white crib?
How empty the tomb that day?

Ascension of a neighbor

I never realized that you
cared about me until after you'd gone
I always thought of you as this
berating, critical father standing
in my skull like a little despot
That part of me that never
should have been there

But is

And that's what kept me away
from you and your suffering
You and your sad, playful eyes

The fear...

But you brought me a plate of
leftovers from your Christmas lunch
And I said thank you
You had a picture of Jesus
Hanging in your hallway
which startled me
You offered me a hand with things
But I never knew you cared
until after you'd gone
And thats what changed things

Two or three good lines

I dont know jack about poems
I only know that once,
when I was very young I was

Alone.

So I wrote it down and kept
it in an old Elvis record sleeve
And I kept on writing it down
and I never showed anyone
Except God.

He saw...

Even though I hid them from his gentle
burning eye and screamed, NO!
What do you know about it?!
And I sat on the top of my parents roof,
in the rain and thunder and dared
him to strike me dead.

But he knew,
Knew I loved them
And wanted him to love them too

Then I applied for that writing course,
and the woman said,
"you wrote two or three good lines here."
we both looked at the words
like they were an unusual oddity,
and I knew they were the good ones too.
But when I got the acceptance letter,
I realized that they only let me in
to get the course fee
And anyway, while I sat in the hall waiting
to be interviewed with the others, I heard
two people talking about poetry
And they sounded like they knew something
I didnt want to know anything
All I wanted was to squeeze two or three
good lines from my loneliness
And thats what I did.
Thats what Im trying to do.

Territorial Pissings

Partakers of the Sunday meal,
what we call the Sabbath,
herd their children from SUV's
into the carefully planned dining area
To shield them
from mild forms of maddness

For what does innocence
have in common with the damned?
What does hard work have to do with being drunk all the time?
What does prosperity have in common with being lost?

Nothing darling, nothing at all...
Now put on your coat and gloves,
We are going outside.

A poem is a suffocating fish

Ive learnt
from all the crushing
and squeezing and straining
by that invisible hand
that seems to push your life
through a sieve like lumpy batter
that a poem is not a statement
but some plumbing
of the souls pond
hauling suffocating
fish up onto dry land

You cook them
they get smaller
And then you eat them again
or serve them to your friends

Guatemala

Charcoal
carrion raptors
peck out the eyes
and the tounge
Leaving bloody caves
of injustice
In the murdered face
of a weeping son

Chipped nail polish
calls out the forgotten
name of innocence
a hundred times
from dead, curled,
gnarled fingers
once gentle,

Something calls
from the silence
Some shocked, absent
violence
rolls like mist
over maternity lost
while at home,
tannin faces weep
for the blood of their daughters
bleached
of its cries by the sun

One long lonely day

One long
lonely day
is not equal
to a thousand

A crushing
painful life
is not equal
to death

Go off by yourself
Enter THE silence
Bow in prayer
The weight
Will release
the aroma of love

One long
lonely day
is not equal
to a thousand

Little Bird of Peace

The little bird of peace
sits on the shoulder
of suffering
and sings softly
in a minor key
While suffering wails
and rages and squalls
at the sky that
wont
come down
though he calls,
from sun to moon,
season to season.

the little bird of peace
sings not into the ear
but with sufferings
unheld heart
like a gentle bow
across vibrating strings