I'm an olympic housewife.

My mantlepiece of medals
is perfectly folded washing
arranged in mahogany drawers
with calm elegance
like swans on a lake.

I’m an elite athlete of the mundane.

My scrapbook of 1st place ribbons
are surfaces that sparkle
a masterpiece of purity
zen arrangement lust
like Ikebana in an empty room.

I’m an extreme sport star of domesticity.

My list of world class honours
gluten free bake-offs  
blogging my parenting tips
a domestic online celebrity
like an effortless Demeter.

There is this hell inside me where the flames are mesmerising

it’s shape fits your outline

it grows and shrinks
                                            every time you walk in

walk out.



Tell you what

i’ll be the empty house

and you be the ghost


I’ll keep my favourite illusions about us in tiny glass jars

                                                           ­               (like portable mausoleums)


What do you want for dinner?
                                                         I'm leaving you


Shall we watch The 7:30 Report?

                                                        ­ You’ll never see me again

I’ve made your favourite dessert

                                                        ­ You can keep the house


Did you know you can be crying for years

and not even notice


The funny trajectory of feelings

They rise up      
you take note  

                                they fall away


some don’t fall away
becoming embedded in your bloodstream

and there’s my only enemy right there

inside me

and no matter how much I vacuum the cracks in the floor
my childhood just doesn’t change

but maybe
just maybe

if i do everything the opposite way i was taught i might survive


I thought you were the face of my survival
                                                                ­             (silly I know)
                                        
I thought you were my very own swashbuckling hero
like the one's dreamed up by Spielberg and Lucas

but after awhile getting your hopes up

becomes just another extreme sport

If only i had known

the best way to keep our romance alive
was never getting to know each other

Refunds for emotional disappointment should be a thing


and weddings
weddings should happen under water

the suffocating non-air
can break you in for your future

You’re working back again/What’s her name?

You know, there’s a freedom that comes with being forgotten actually

I can relax and become a mountain again
                                                           ­                 free of perfecting myself

to outshine your golden girls
all of them competing for the crown in your secret world

I would cry about it
but i bought 80 pairs of shoes instead

It will show up on your bank statement

There is a sound in a house when it’s occupants have left for the day and it isn’t silence.
It’s more of a dull collective hum of electrical appliances enjoying the chance to indulge their expression without the need to shout over humans.
There is the echo of words whispered in soft tones and the violent ones exchanged in heated debate, also the screams and laughter and the bark of dogs.
There is the sound of unfolded washing, waiting patiently to be transitioned from unkempt mess to organised functionality in a drawer or cupboard.
Their sound before such a transformation is heavy and unlovable, but once the task of folding is completed, they fall silent, thankful to have reached their destiny this week before their new cycle of destruction of order begins.
Toys, where does one start with the sound of toys in the absence of playmates. Their sound is dependent on how loved they are and how much time they have left before they, like a wife after 20 years of marriage, are replaced by the upgraded model, the new and better version.
But it’s the breakfast things, the things left on the table, half eaten toast and a mauled boiled egg that have the most sound.
It’s the sound of a dwindling life force struggling against its fate to be recycled in the compost, like us.
That sound is a deafening silent scream of a resistance to endings, an inevitable journey back into nothing.

Your fortress, a structure spectacular
built with blood and memories
of those who made you loathe yourself.

I was in awe of it for awhile
and then later, bored
with your need to be holed up
with historical demons
and antique canons ready for blasting
new suitors, me.

I know you love a sword fight as well
so come down swashbuckler
and show me what you’ve got.
I have only an open heart, sorry
a useless weapon I know
to bring to any game of love.

I’m going to love you anyway, so you can relax with your cliche game playing.

Anyway, does a game exist
when the other team decides to stop playing?
That’s me. I forfeit
until you surrender
your need for that tedious control.

All your defences seem a little silly
in the face of such truth
yes, I just want to love you.

You say “Can you love this?”
as you pull off your mask
like  a modern day Scaramouche.

“Easy”, I say.
I love the flaw in all things,
the corner stone of a thing’s greatest strength.


No need to chase summits
to convince yourself that the world is yours
Love your weakness
and let it be your light out
of well trodden swamp lands.

When you acquiesce to the ordinary,
magic happens.
Don’t gather souvenirs to say who you are
where you have been
or what you’ve achieved

It’s just a declaration of fear.


When you hold onto nothing,
you have everything.

Can I be forgiven for my impulsive need
to present my love to you
as a viking would after a day hard at work

I’m physical about it
and chaos theory is the dress
I choose to wear to ****** you
not those flimsy night-sky black things
or a cliché of words tucked up behind your ear


I'm dressed up in an imaginary beard
with a palm full of unpredictability
that makes you buckle
underneath forgotten desires
and we destroy ourselves this way for hours
only to wake up and repeat.

I absorb you alpha and you become invisible
like a woman over 50
I'm a force to be frightened of
and you are an empty shell.


Never love someone
who isn’t stronger than your darkness.
You will **** them every time
and spend the rest of your days
explaining the head on a stick
at the end of your bed
to your next lover
it can become tiresome.


But you never asked questions.
You accepted my grit
my madness
and lust for emotional bloodshed
so i kept going.


You just waited patiently
to see if the sword in my hand
would fall away in the face of your delicate beauty
unnatural for a man admittedly
more suited for a goddess
speaking ancient Greek from magic lips.

You could have spoken
incoherent babble for all i cared
as i marvelled at your fingers
just trophies on hands not from this world.


Again, I’m physical about it
and i saw myself arrange quickly
your internal magnificence
to match the outer shell, so perfect
whether real or imagined
I indulged my vanity
that you were mine
washed with your sunshine
every time we moved
into each other’s view.

Addiction to beauty
it’s akin to a serial art buyer
I’d bid my blood to have that prize
next to me each night
and that’s all you were to me
it must have seemed.


Your love was more than mine i thought
so i could afford to be careless
I was a swashbuckling hero to myself
because i never believed you knew how to be
so just lie there and look the part
and be there when I come home
from severing heads of out-dated ideas
about how to move through life.


Quietly though, you were writing secret sonnets to yourself
about the possibility of our “maybe” love
I rode right over that
like a warlord blinded by personal victories
making my way to a new precipice
another conquest
forgetting with eyes wide open
how to encase another in perfect intimacy.


You just waited patiently
to  see if the sword in my hand would fall
until one night, alone again
you saw the space at the end of the bed
where your own head would stand
and you ran into the night
dancing over misplaced dreams
now scattered all around like forgotten tombstones
as I returned home to my future of regret.


Now this weighty silence between us
has me filling the empty space with love songs
to myself
just to hear us again.

i’m lost without you, did i mention that?


i scrape my brain cells that hold the memory of you
the way you remove dead flesh from a heel
and i keep the skin cells in tiny glass jars like portable museums.


i carry them everywhere for emergencies
opening them up at dinner parties
while the normals are concentrating on the cooking method of a spatchcock.



i pull you out from my secret purse
hidden under socially self conscious tables
and i roll your flesh in my hands until you’re real again

while nodding in agreement that thyme and lemon jus is always a wise choice for a side.


it’s a stupid ritual really
one that serves only to widen the divide between me
and that big chance Buddha moment:

‘being ******* present’


such a noble pursuit
but always dull and motionless in your absence
all i notice is the loudness of our silence

like a train station in those quiet despair hours
between 11pm and tomorrow.



Btw, if you see a girl running that’s me
and i can assure you
it will be from this chance for godhood
and what all those new agers chant about.

* the now *

god i hate that cruel catch phrase
that ******* of platitudes

forcing its sobering focus
on the inescapable fact that all your critical choices

made on a whim
appearing now as regrettably dumb.


Like that flippant goodbye i threw around at you
as if i would ever feel that way again
about anyone

and no
I never did.


you see, my heart’s a cowboy
too foolhardy with the lasso
that hip gun too
always going off

especially each time you’re not in view.


Did i tell you you i’m lost without you?

you are made up of everyone you've loved
they live inside your capillaries
ride your blood river
in tiny canoes
made up of wood
and memories

you notice them sometimes
the canoe attempts the impossible
and traverses through the aorta
that epicentre
of blood and feeling

it rides rough rapids
of turmoil
and regret
sometimes, longing
that terrible longing
the most wretched rapid of all

when your skin itches
that is them expanding
and contracting
touching your epidermis
to remind you they’re alive
and still a part of you

we are made up of everyone
everyone we've ever loved

There’s a stage in a relationship when you know that it’s dying and it’s when you breathe out when they leave the room. You know you’ve stopped being the ideal they kissed on a mountaintop when they forget to ask how your day was or would you like a tea. When they no longer touch you with curiosity you will know for sure that the relationship is dying and that is when you start to die too. It happens slowly, like most irreparable erosion. First you don’t get out of bed for 3 days because you can’t imagine what it’s like to not live inside each other, then you travel the world arranging big dreams of a future together by whispering incantations into the wind about your magnificent love. You get back home with exotic adventures trailing behind you and set up a house in a favourite city. You buy a dog together and you can’t stop singing from roof tops. You go out to movies on Tuesdays and have Sunday breakfast in cramped trendy cafes together and become a regular couple at the local Thai hot spot at Saturday dinner time. Just when you think that your joy has reached it’s zenith, you create a whole lot of trophies from that love bond and give them a life-force and names. The thing is, those mini humans can’t imagine living without you either. It gets crowded in your heart chambers. Suddenly you start to compartmentalise your feelings for all these people that are suddenly tied to you because of that double-edged sword called love.

Who I am is not this

not a still lake

jealous of the ocean
it’s expansiveness

freedom to roar and roll
gather momentum

wipe out coastal towns
if it gets the urge.


I am not this

a broken Brumby

fixed in a cowboy lasso
caught and corralled

in a vice for the spirit
craving chaos

not edges tucked in
like an over-zealous housewife.


Who i am is not this

a hero home from a war

of fighting the ordinary
wiping out villages

devoted to secure notions
only to find myself

a forgotten veteran
alone with our silence

in a cramped suburban living room
surrounded by mementos

a life once exciting
now just a string of photos.

that form a prison wall
like bad souvenirs

from a time too magical
to be reduced to just a fridge magnet.


I am this

a speeding car going off a cliff

squealing past others
who are still in love with their brakes

but terrified for me
as i ride off

into the unknown
a leap of faith.



The trick to courting danger
is the knowledge that I have secret wings.

Remember the first time you fell in love? Imagine the first person who fell in love. They must have thought they were dying or their body was breaking in two. Thankfully enough poets since then have given us the heads up over centuries that love never ends well. We can all enter that domain with acute awareness that at some point there will be a curled up in foetal position moment in the shower, sobbing over some new schmuk we’ve become entangled with.
But that first moment of falling in love with ANOTHER HUMAN BEING, nothing matches it. I just want to bottle that moment and make a Prepper’s dug out to store boxes of it for the post-apocalyptic days when the romantic bubble pops. And that bubble will pop.
The tipping point is frequently the moment you say “I love you too” and after that it’s just a gradual descent into slow endings as you decide who will keep the vinyl records you bought in the summer of New York together.

Falling in love is a lot like being on acid and mistaking a burning fire for a blanket to warm yourself. The love bubble pretty much wipes clean any clarity or logic while you set up camp on Fantasy Island. The problem with falling in love is that when it goes horribly wrong and breaks apart, which clearly it is designed to do, you have to find a new person to help fill that Grand Canyon left by The One. No one prepares you for this. Parents stand by nervously the moment you discover the wonder of having your hand held by a boy, knowing full well that in time he will hold the hands of others too and forget about yours completely. They smile and watch you make plans for your future with him, keeping the secret of outcomes to themselves, only coming through with words of wisdom once your heart has been thrown off a bridge in a foreign city when he’s left you for another.

COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT: THE TWO LEADING CAUSES OF BEING DEEPLY UNHAPPY ARE BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP AND BEING ALONE. GOOD LUCK EVERYONE

you can weep for 6 years and not even know you’re doing it
it's hidden underneath layers of obligation
yes i can do that, sure I’ll be there and what would you like for dinner
my mind casts back to that  moment of vulnerability
fearing forever being alone
I succumbed to the thrill of feeling fire in the belly
I succumbed to what I now know was just my attachment
to the possibility beyond love’s beautiful beginnings
I made a little compromise out of fear
not having the strength to walk my path alone
I succumbed to the need for others
i projected my needs onto something external
My error in short was this:

mistaking everyone for what I’m searching for

Sure, we all want love’s beginnings
but are we brave enough for love’s endings

my big feelings for you I have left all over town
hidden in the books
of famous public libraries