Selected poems
Knock knock
When I came back from an emptied space
they housed me in a museum that was
exactly the same as my home.
Endearing dioramas of my friends
repeated what they'd always repeated.
A projection of my lover
reaches towards me daily at noon,
it is a tease. Touch is impossible.
There's a volcano out the window
& a recording of waves in the distance.
Haven't looked in a mirror since I was 23,
it'd be crazy to start now.
Doors here have no locks
I have no clothes
because it isn't cold,
common-sense like this
sees me settled in a thoroughly
comfortable deception.
There may be nothing left.
It is time to light a fire.
Wearing glitter in the fire age
We all need a bit of weird, turning
chops orange or making ice-cream out of beetroot.
So I aspire to be a paperclip — that touch
of menace as I approach a putative community of sheets
despite all their disparate hate & flimsy promise.
I have been taught
necessary unhappiness. A golden paperclip
because a psychologist once said I was gilt-ridden.
By the time I'd left unhealed
he had developed his own habits.
One day soon I'll clamp
my bright (but a little showy) future.
Composing in a dead language smeared
with ink and pharmaceuticals
I refuse to leave the memes alone
though they're always veering off
in the opposite direction.
On page 3 the glaciers stopped melting,
the sun turned a merry beige to go with all
those curtains across town.
My own fulgence will flatter the world into stasis
& on page 20 I am victorious (yes, everything).
Promise
With trains suspended for trackwork
had a few stiff drinks
this life feels a little country
& we're both a-pickin'
at an old straw tale.
There's a river cycling down the road
storms haven't waited for summer
thieves took all I'd abandoned last week.
That conversation yesterday was no soufflé
& tasted like shit anyway.
We talk about Syria
with no right to rhyme.
There's ruckus in tribe,
the bruise of ideas &
no art in war.
This impermanence will last forever.
So isolated —
even the swashbuckling motorways are distracted,
their plans miles away.
We are frantically passive
beneath all those salves
manufactured to stifle, tamp
the aches of reason.
Wait. Watch. Even if we're both falling.
Catch me.
& I'll catch you.
Ford Falcon
G picks at the horror, somebody's fault.
This shard world, this collapse.
He was due to receive a crown.
Hell, it was just to be a minor diadem,
no jewels. Knew he'd be under-recognised
but this?
No better than a bricklayer
less respected than some halfway sensible nurse —
his studies, the years.
A career shouldn't careen & now
he's hit the tree of his age, his male whiteness.
The vehicle is not a write-off
though there's smoke from under the bonnet.
100000ks on the clock
those chunks of windscreen glass