Retail-hunter gatherers pick
clean processed bones, digging graves
with their shiny teeth, studious in
their reveries as they drone

past worlds dumped in the thresher;
the trucked-in fields of film-wrapped
gore splayed lustily before the managers
wound tight in Machiavellian design.

A shepherd herds his flock of
wreathed iron back to its pen, its
skeletal tangle lit in riotous gold by
swords flung from lambent eyes of
pre-dawn’s shunting chariots

Cages shunt and bobble like tugboats
chugging stoic up swimming pool lanes
of nondescript tile, cheered on by shouting
colours to float through archipelagos of
paper towel and chocolate blocks past

the vegemite diaspora, and the arctic
wastelands cased in sliding glass fields of
perfect steady storms as wraiths baked in halogen
ask silent questions of the silverbeet, while

Lana Del Ray’s voice falls like
nightshade—slutty and serene—coating
shelf stackers in a Piaf sadness as the
shelves reach their arms out for more.

The check out chick hatches
a sense of déjà vu as carrots
and biscuits drone towards her
mind berEFT of any twitching
sense of POSsibility that wised
up and flew this leering coop and

deep in her catalogue of grey folds
something stillborn and waxen is
perched on gleaming steel, reeling
out her guts like cassette tape with jerky
nightmare arms and laughing like a
banker watching ***** films, mornings
dull cerise an invocation through
auto-jaws as she bursts out to warble
with magpies in car park’s climbing fire.

Your eyes gulp down milkshakes of galaxies;
clusters of God’s Christmas lights he forgot
to take down, you tell me, stretched like
gossamer skin against the roof of time

without end as you howl, spinning through
the breath of pooling waves in particle showers
of joy, the ghostly hue of dawn hovering
suggestively just beyond the curve of the world

and you laugh at the speed this pretty rock
is hurtling through yawning nothing as you
shout challenges to the monsters roaring in the
deep.  

The primordial soup inside your head is cooling
now as shadow waves curl like butter across the
alien toast of hard packed sand and you sit
offering up prayers to Pisces as morning feasts
on the stars.

Word called this file
Document18
and it’s funny to think
I have that many windows
open.

Funny to think how
that many thoughts have
leapt from the tank
dripping in revelation and
so sure of themselves
they demand a pristine
white canvas
untrammelled by lesser words
where they (think they) shine
like white hot stars
but are only so much
cheap gaudy neon.

‘Bring me the horizon!’
she cried, eyes raging
with a terrible joy.

Bring me the light
of a thousand searing suns
and explode the bliss into my soul!

Let me writhe in the ribald heat
and simmer my flesh
in love complete
for now is all and all is now.

Fell the birds from crimson skies,
facsimile their lullabies.
bring me songs from Heaven’s stage
to shimmer in my gilded cage.

Floss my feet in clouds so sweet
as sugar spun across the sky.
free my dreams from out their seams
and fall into the blinding light.

Surge with me to silver stars;
to glinting worlds that
twist and twirl
and sparkle from afar.

And join me in Elysium;
the Eden of Nirvana
where Love strokes Beauty
and the air purrs with pleasure.

Stay with me forever
and pulse with joy unfound.
but never dip below the clouds,
for monsters wait
upon the ground.



======later======



‘It’s all a lie,’
she murmured,
guarding her cup of winter tea.
‘I’m sinking, and the mist is drinking
everything that’s good in me.’

The colours start to leak,
the world bears its teeth, as
shadows crowd round and
join their hands.

This opioid mist of requiem
hides demons loosed from out their den
I sit and slowly swirl
drowning in the silken shadows
of muttering dark worlds.

It drags me down in furtive heaves
to somewhere I don’t want to see,
but somewhere I know I believe;
with meshing, hungry razor teeth.

It’s a solitude of sorts,
pervading though it seems,
filled with plotting cohorts
laughing deep in silken streams

that leak into a Sea of Grey
housing horror on its tides,
in-bound now, with rotted sails,
cover me and let me hide

from needle-sharp torment
and callow moments put to flame.
I sit here counting down the hours
until I’m born again.

So eviscerate my fragile faith
and leave it for the saints who stay,
awakened to the mystery
of all the mouths could ever say.

The Queen of Absentia rises from royal
stool to watch the moon set sheathed
in broiling cloud as she skips whirling
adders that hiss in fat jagged coils, their
hollow blades jutting death in sprinkler
sprays of misting veils and her

head is hypethral; a Gaudi shipping
container soldered in reptile curves,
licked by arrowheads of falcate flame
as she rounds its laughing corners;
an adderaled lab rat, eyes black funnels
drinking electrodes pulsing crimson and
the stars are crackling in the pan as she    

sees planets torn shrieking down Hell’s hungry
plughole as fallen Gods divide by zero
and the clock’s skittering claws scratch
prophecies of consequence of poorly
sewn seams, but she smiles like a risen
crocodile and says,
    
‘you’re just jealous cos the
             voices only talk to me.’

And again she dives as unwanted
advice gibbers up out snapping drains,
and power points shoot sharp blue spears
lighting substrates of ancient horror, inchoate
but fattening before her eyes as she

sits, wrapped in ghosts, guarding her
ochre tea in its chalice of steaming bone,
trying to sell herself a ticket to
tomorrow’s sunrise, staring at thunderheads
bunching up satin over sodden ninjas sprouting
cardboard hair, slicing down legions of
roaring pearl as death hunts hollow-eyed below.

Her Majesty holds court, amid the percussion of
steel and plate, a matador to shadows
that clasp their hands and dance around, as
clouds hammer rain to the ground.

You smile black-eyed as
the city belches blue neon
through its steel-glass canyons;
a cobalt factory of lumen, pulsing
through dendritic labyrinths
of sapphired circuitry.

Diodes of cerulean fire,
spreading with virulent sophistry
amid the glittering obsidian dark,
like pale horses of light that
leap from pane to inky pane,
like a Pentium’s ******;
God’s own seething fireworks
watched in reverse
as they float in through my car window,
strobing blue against your freshly
washed hair.

Greeting the skies as
The fires arise,
We contribute our own,
Burn them down, to the bone.

And as zephyrs are hurled
‘Cross the heavens unfurled
We abandon our
Persistent Friend;

Leave him deep in the Dark,
Where the World
Won’t distend.

As Enraptured Eyes
Drink velvet skies
And rockets soar
Within,

We paw at the heavens
In sixes and sevens
Dragging them down
To engorge us within.

We build our own logic
In towers of toothpicks
And laugh as it crumbles
Into clarity.

We scatter its ashes in
Serpentine splashes,
Cresting drunken peaks as we
Shimmer like freaks.

Giddy we run, with palms
Full of sun, falling to nature’s
Verdant embrace.

Through swords of green
We join at our seams
Rising and falling,
Our sanity stalling, as we
Lustily chase what we seek.

And at the dying of the day,
We linger, happy, small and fey,
Reeling and ponderous
Sated, and wondrous
as sun cries its light
through the leaves.

The steel monster rumbles,
then sways
with resignation.

Forever trapped in
timetabled precision;

suburbs
                 to
                      city
                      and
         ­    back
again.

Sunlight splashes warmth
on tartan dull and drab

while

single mothers shift their gaze
avoiding confrontation,
as stained-black gum watches
from below.

Air congeals
with a baby's cry.

Spray paint proclaims
that you don’t
****
with HCB,
*****.

Darting eyes of venom
warn against complacency
as iPods beat
hard-house hits
and lyrical dreams
of somewhere else.

Masses lurch forward,
brakes screech with agony,
waiting for oblivion
or 5:17pm express
as city succumbs to night.

Death can come in the night
like a storm
or sometimes
in the form

of a 747
ploughing through your office window.

Or death can fall
from above,
from seemingly serene blue
with measured precision

on

families cowering in ruined remains.

Death could even
make your acquaintance
amid the dark, laser-lit world
of cocktails, bass and

****** pick-up lines

because someone has
finally found
something worth fighting for.

The writer sits and ponders,
filled with empty silent dread,
‘Sorry, this word cannot be found’
the smug spellchecker says.

Weary of petty complications
he drifts, searching for inspiration,
soaring through the African sky
with glorious, lofty liberation.

The yellow plains stretch far below
herds of buffalo, running free
the lions hide amongst the grass
dotted around sandarac trees.

He soars now, over snow-capped peaks
tableclothed in angry cloud,
by eagles, gliding with their young
their talons stretched in readiness
silhouetted in the fiery sun.

He conjures now, Fijian sand, lazy swaying palms
crashing frothy, roaring waves; silky banana ***.
A sparkling ocean glittering, caked with yellow icing,
just a mirror for the setting sun.

But then wings of grace are stripped and
he plummets towards uncertainty,
falling back to swivel chair, staring
at desk lamps, coffee, burgundy.

The rain drizzles down outside,
the heating pours through well-placed vents
as Chinese Communism awaits:
confronting, mocking, dense.

Music is madness.
It screams
Through seventeen
Forked tongues
And pounds
Its pig-skin urban drums,
Ordering on the
Machines of meat;
A soundtrack with
Samsaran beat.

Music is mournful.
It is the caw of the crow
‘Neath the stain of the sky;
The song of the wind
To squeeze truth
From your eyes.
It weaves woven silk of
What could be,
Pirouetting through the air
In a gorgeous despair.

Music is a ghost
That crawls on our skin,
Armed with gilded subterfuge
To bargain its way in;
To coil ‘round consciousness
In serpentine swathes,
Spreading its questions
With ephemeral grace;
Covering completely
Our naked cold
In a gossamer blanket
Of symphonic souls.

Music is a bird
That sings when I want
Booming its voice
From an amplified cage.

But bars soon will bend
As a zephyr distends,
Lifting me with
Wings full of holes.
Climbing the clouds
In communion I fly
Seeking infinity
As eyes drink the sky.

While the world is trying to reach us
We abandon shallow spectres of time
And scratch each other’s itches
Salaciously.

We sink into these magic hours,
****** under coverlets of dreams.
While outside thunders leaden showers,
No water leaks in through the seams

Surrounded like a snake
By suffocators of reality
We shed each other’s skins
Coiled in twists of content.

Angels dance from her fingertips,
Twirling in nascent currents.

The world outside is dissolute
It wails and spatters.
It sneers in through silver panes
It wants none of what we have, the miscreant;
It wants only to breathe its grimy breath.

But we are resolute.
In fact we are ebullient.
The haze of incense, the heat of bodies,
Our world is infinitesimal.

We cavort under our big top; our tipi;
Our tableclothed Elysium.
We dance through each other’s minds
Twirling golden ribbons
Behind us like shooting stars.

We soar through subconscious clouds
And smile at forbidden sunlight
Splashed across our faces.

And we sink back slowly
Listening to the fading showers
We sink back slowly
Into these magic hours.

He writes words on walls and
toilet doors.

Looping black texta with
measured precision.

Emptying out his importance in
tomes of acrid, sickly-sweet-smelling lapses
into hope.

Cascading the loneliness with litanies
of somewhere else
that pulses with a joy unfound.

Tales of intermittent dreams
and dalliance with beauty.

Strobing in translucent beams,
the light leaks through his
poorly-sewn seams

onto the toilet door.

Buzzing
cries are muffled
under forests of
crimson flags
that march towards
the city square,
rippling with intent.

Banners are crude
in attacking today
but naive
when dreaming
what could be:

‘Poetry is in the streets’
they cry,
‘Tis forbidden to forbid!'

Granite towers high above
protruding into nothingness,
sheathed in angry cloud as

rulers sit inside,
poker-faced,
pondering
Inevitability?

...

Well-placed muskets
spew forth shrapnel
as white-hot death
enters bodies
that fall to the ground,
their fists still clenched
in unyielding rocks.

Out leak scarlet legacies;
The blood is striking
against the snow.

...

A forgotten placard sits,
buried half in mud.

Red letters still visible
it reassures

that two and two
no longer
make four.