Selected poems
Abandoned supermarket trolley
It makes me feel strangely warm and good inside when I see a solitary abandoned trolley spent and listless in a street, for reasons I don't understand. I feel even better when I spot one dumped into a canal with the carp under the moon, their natural habitat. I feel a weird glee. From the glare of the sanitary light in the aisle of a supermarket where people grab at things to impregnate it with their life, back to the beautiful emptyness of the dead-end streets of suburbia and lives unlived
Bringing it to life
Noticing something tiny can bring it to life — jump it alive. Puppeteering a flower, a blade of grass or the shadow of a leaf in the wind with your eyes and heart. The possibility of finding an entire universe within it. That true magic really exists. Which is why I find it weird when people invest in the big things: big tvs, big houses, big dumb box-ticking their way safely through life — no gamble; that they've somehow lost courage; somehow lost the will to live
Character
We all become 'characters' the older we get, I think. Like crumpled shirts. Un-ironed out by life. Ripped, stained, demented. The collar long ago lost the plastic things inside it to keep it hard and straight. Now like weary bashed butterfly wings.
Clues
I would pick up rubbish on the street as a kid and think that these objects were clues tied to some bigger mystery. Today I saw a clue drift past in the sky
4am, driving down the freeway in the rain
I felt there was something special and beautiful in the darkness, in the middle of the night. Not a 'horror' or a 'bewitching hour'. Just a strange world. People asleep at maximum REM. Not much synapse activity, analysis or thinking as everyone dreamt along to their own tune. You could actually feel the calmness of non-thinking across the land, the non-energy of human brain activity in the psychosphere – the electricity of thousands of brains shut-down as the storm calmly flashed in front of me
The magic in reality — clues so far:
Repeat your name over and over and it doesn't make sense.
Being able to hear your name across a noisy crowded room.
Some people don't look like their names.
Being able to see things in the dark by not looking at them directly.
The 5th dimensional ring of a wine glass.
Walking