YouYou skip through this gallery putting out eyesof priceless Madonnas, Venuses, Helens.
You torch countless volumes of half-felt sonnets,smash the guitar on which I would strummy three-chord song of regret.
You bulldoze, trash and obliterate. Youlovely iconoclast, gorgeous barbarian; you beautiful vandal.
Summer '98 The city open like a teenage heart.Girls in singlets andcotton dresses; every boy in love.
The afternoon drifts with ducks and swans, before bright places on the foreheads of buses;the mall bruised in orange and shadow.
Sprinklers in flower along North Terrace and trees a million points of Christmas,like perfume poured out.
Better than candle-light, to leavethe quiet on all evening.Just conversation and the clacking of knives;the windows glossy with darkness,saucepans in the kitchenshining like souls.At this place where our talk ends, you smile.I find there's nothing I want.
RhymeThe way your slender-lovely neckis revealed by your taken-up hair.
How, when the bliss-cloudpasses over, I lose the thread of where.
Because of your angel and mineyou wound with such exquisite care.
LateThe wine sipped-downto luminous buttonsand the last guests gone. I snap the lights off, one by one,leave only candles and a song to burn out.On the couch you lie:replete, content, your beauty flushed and stackedto tip. And then a kisslike a latch.
Cats and dogsThese lazy days when cats bakelike loaves in windows or sprawl on footpaths like accordions.We lounge in the parkand contemplate what it might meanto own a boat.Every possible dog is here, slant-wiseon leads or nosing aboutin a hundred rough and scratchy orbits.Bees are bumping along the hedges.There's not a carein the sky.
Anti-valentineYou say to leave rosesfor the overcrowded arms of bikies
You pop inflatable hearts and cut the stringsof pink and stodgy cherubs
You shoot down my skywriting plane mid-cliché
This is notour day.
Each nightEach night the river of your slow undressing …I contemplate the fallof your breastsand think the wordsof the poet:May her breasts satisfy you always,if I think at all.
NameYou called me by my name; it wasa name I hadn't heard before.
Aidan Coleman's poems have appeared in the Australian Literary Review, The Weekend Australian, The Age, Southerly, Island, Antipodes, The Warwick Review and Westerly. His first collection, Avenues and Runways (Brandl & Schlesinger) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. In 2011 he will be writing poetry with the support of an Australia Council New Work grant.