Poems
Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
A citizen of a difficult
memory, I travel at the full speed
of sleep. In my coat pocket: a fruit knife
to peel the sun, a wine
And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
Ovid via John Dryden*
... (read more)Everything seemed a catastrophe then
but I had things to prove.
From a certain point, there is no more turning back.
That is the point that must be reached.
Franz Kafka
... (read more)
winter nights
days of looking
at the flames
and into the ashes
in the house with wood-panelled walls
‘I made bad decisions and for that I am sorry.’
(Oliver Schmidt, Volkswagen AG Executive, 2017)
... (read more)There’s a poem that begins
But that other wreck, where the crew tumbles out of a bad dream
and into a worldwide storm of interpretation.
Life is inhearsed, everything’s on affective hold for an hour
as the heavens pause. A melancholy playlist is blinking its lights.
It was the time when the awful narrative of their journey
was lost at sea, the violence of the weather and the politics
of humans and demi-gods all cast into the deep.
... (read more)On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag
a dead manna gum, chained to a ute, into camp.
They’re talking innocence. Is it inborn, or clad
layer by layer by behaviour? Around the grey stump
the men start chainsaws and crack beers, open
a phone (there’s reception), search innocence definition.
Blamelessness. Chastity. Childhood. But also
integrity, which means innocence. The confusion
– that integrity means wholeness too –
heats up when one man says he heard children
arrive with sin. Then two-stroke fumes
drown the twilight bush’s scat-and-pepper scents.
They cut it. Some of the men scream, some don’t,
when spiders erupt from the warm hollow.