You’re overflowing –
Like an ashtray
                      But no
You’re not a nicotine yellow stain
You’re not ash grey
You don’t smell like a stale insomniac’s late night in an empty room

You’re a burst fire hydrant
Children shriek and frolic in your shower
And somewhere out there plants, grass and weeds will turn green and tall
Because you have nourished them
But you’re still ******* off that firefighter.

But maybe you’re the fire?
                    Too hot to touch
But we all look on
                    We all glow with you
You eat the world but
In leaving it fallow give a chance to something new.

But you’re not new
You carry eons on your shoulders and
Wisdoms between your teeth
You are like the grains of sand between my toes:
You were once completely different

But I like you in all your ways
I’ll inhale your smoke
I’ll dance in your rain
I’ll let you burn me up
I’ll let you turn me into something new
I would grow old with you.

You stole my last cigarette and coughed red all over the ashtray. Fountain like it overflowed with our combined wants. Your limbs seemed annexed from your mind and flew all over the place, like across my shoulders, and I had to wriggle out. You drew sticky lines in ash and spit, into a ***** table.

Your mindlessness serves you well, in times like these.

All I could do was collect the half smoked butts and construct them into something not new but at least poisonous. I keep it far from you, though you’re paying as much attention to this as the last bi-election.

Your mindlessness serves you well, in any time.

My smoke creates a protective screen between us, unhappily easily broken by a waving hand or a breath exhaled forcefully. But it’s all we have, so we sit quiet and in our own worlds. You’ve got bats and old songs in your head while I have ****** in mine. Every second of silence is a plot to **** you, every puff, a breath, a gift, a warning. I’d give you anything you want because soon you will be gone and I will take it back.

Everything. The gifts, lies, memories. So your mindlessness won’t serve you so well.

The only thing you get to keep will be a coffin and a lonely name. Keep philosophising into your glass. You want a tin foil hat? Is that your last request? Let me laugh as I dig the hole, I won’t trust anyone else with your death. It belongs to me and I’ll take you and what’s due with utter carelessness.

I close my eyes as you open your mouth and I dream up a better world. It is better because you are not in it. It is better because you are in a grave I had commissioned and then forgotten about and your name is spelt wrong and I had done that and the headstone had been kicked over and maybe I did that or maybe it was some other random marauder with more beer in their veins than blood and an arbitrary rage to exhale.

I woke up into a smoky haze when you touched my arm, asked me for a light. You'd bought a new pack of smokes and two pints. Maybe I can deal with you now. You touched my arm and I started and punched you in the temple.

You don’t mind.

In fact, you laugh and snuggle up to me, take a sip of my beer and steal my cigarette and when I say I can’t wait to **** you, you laugh as if there is no consequence.

We forget about each other as we drink ourselves senseless.

“Hey. I heard about this country we could visit.

Would you go, if it was with me?

Well what if I told you it was a bird country, and everything was made of feathers.

Yeah, ocean and desert colours, soft and sleek and it glimmers like a dream.

Songs? Yeah, it’s full of ‘em. In all resonances and all keys, some of them mimic but most of them are original pieces.

So, would you go with me?

Why?

Oh, I’m just bored I guess, just feeling stale I guess, just feeling like there’s something out there I want to see.

                                                    (I don’t say that I want to see it with you).

Oh, you mean, why with you.

Well

When we were in the park the other week you stopped to talk to that guy with a sulphur crested cockatoo on his shoulder and you smiled when it bopped its head when you said its name – Larry, wasn’t it?

And you laughed for the longest time after we invented an adventure history for him and the bird.

That he was a pirate sailing the oceans to gather the gold and jewels to win the hand of his beloved.

The bird sniffed the air and pointed towards islands of treasure and scratched maps onto the deck of the ship.

He was only in Sydney – we saw this by the harbour, didn't we? - Because his ship needed to restock.

It would be one of those old school wooden ones and it’d look real quaint and beautiful next to the metal ferries swooping in and out of Circular Quay, next to the titan cruise ships that take up half the harbour.

Remember that?

                            (If I thought it would work, I’d sail ships and become a jewel thief for you)

Oh, no, no baggage limit – bring all the poetry you want. They give paper for free on the plane, even.

We can buy seeds at the duty free. No, Not sure about pens. I’m bringing my ink set anyway.

Haha, yeah, I still calligraphy faces for people who’ve lost theirs.

                                                                            (I could draw a book of you, though you don’t need it)

It’s a week round about trip.

Just us two, and animals that fly to and from our hands.

We can take bicycles and skate around the island and climb the dead volcano where gigantic nests hold eggs in warm rocking slumber.

                                                    (Perhaps we can be each other’s volcanoes and warm each other)

Oh, it’s casual, don’t bring your moleskines, just your two dollar notebooks. Weather will be light, so not more than a hundred pages.

So, does this mean you’ll come with me?

This is the day in which the birds die
We’ll watch them fall and dance slowly at a ball
For them
The next day will be that in which the cats die
Because they have no birds to chase
To catch
And we throw a ball for them, too
And the day after that the polar bears will die
But we expected that
And the day after that we’ll hold a memorial
We’ll be dressed like snow and sorries
Dogs will howl, because they know
They are next
The next day is the one in which the dogs die
And nothing but wolves can howl again
Until their day comes
Which is not the next day but
The one after the frogs
The one after the foxes
And then the cicadas
And then the rats -
Even the rats
Even the cockroaches
And we stop giving memorials
We stop throwing ***** because
No one will be able to do it
When our turn comes around.

Cautious I feel
The shape of my skull
Tracing the lines of anxiety
Smoothing them down
Tap tapping on my clavicle
Is anybody home?
Don’t know what brought me here
Or where I have to go
But urgency at three AM
Leaves me tapping on my bones
Checking their existence
Counting out their number
Who knows what could have happened
In the minutes that I slumbered
To my ribs, I scale down
Two hips
I have knees, I have toes
But I’m still tapping at my bones
Trying to recall how many vertebrae
I had yesterday
And how I’ll count them now

you are my Cardinal South

tell me
what will we find in the afterlife?
bird song and blinding light?
and will we still be walking?

now we
can only go to Heaven
because Hell is what we've left
Hell is what wrote and erased our breath

those who
have walked away from me would know
and maybe they will meet me
maybe they could teach me
how to glow

as now I am a ghost
now I float
I am your
Cardinal North

Here is the crown – take it
I don’t want it anymore
It’s shiny but it’s heavy and means you can never be
Alone
But you always feel it,
Alone
It means you need two hearts
One light, and one dark
One for loving and one for killing
And it’s all just too heavy
It only means a poisoned chalice,
A war declaration
It’s supposed to make you closer to a god
But only a god that dies
And does not come back
Except in ******-mystery novels
You’re much more suited to this
So just take it
Rule the world and I’ll be happy in my hovel
Take it, before I drop from all this sorrow

If desire is the cause of all suffering
It is also its end
When you can kiss the bird you hold in your hand

But this all depends on what you want
Maybe you want to touch the back of the sun
Maybe you want to understand history
Maybe you want to know why you are
-
These things are impossible
You will suffer for these desires

But maybe you want someone to smile and hold your hand
Maybe you want to travel somewhere new
Maybe you want to be a better person
-
These things are possible and
The suffering of desire need not be indelible

There is no dark horse of passion
There are only horses,
Waiting on the field of desire

So pick the one you ride and
Go find yourself a sunset

I was sitting with a boy
We weren’t doing much of anything, just playing
Video games and eating crisps
We blow something up and he turns to me and says

“Man, if I had a piece of gold for everything I knew
I’d be no richer than I am now.”

I snort.

“Don’t be stupid, you know heaps.”
“Oh yeah, like what?”

I think for a bit.

“You know there is blood in your veins.”
“Yes. One gold then.”
“You know that it’s sunny outside.”

(He cranes to the left to look out the window and nods.
“Two gold then.”
“You know your name.”
He shrugs his shoulder.
“Sometimes. Am I the name on the lanyard I use at work? Am I my girlfriend’s endearment? Am I the nickname I had at school? Am I my mother’s darling or my father’s ‘tough little man’?”

He pauses. “I’d only give it a silver.”

I say
“You know that you were born, and one day you will die.”
Another pause.
“Three gold, one silver.”

After that we can’t think of anything else.

There’s something damaged in your hands
Let me see? Maybe I can help
Why do you hide it from me?
Is it embarrassing?
Is it something of mine?
Was it an accident or on purpose?
Come on, I’ll just pester you until the mailman comes
Or I have to go to work
Or the birds stop singing
Show me what is damaged in your hands

You show me what is damaged in your hands
-oh, it’s my hands
-oh, it’s my heart
So – that’s where I left them
Don’t worry,
They were damaged before you came around
Maybe together we can fix them

Sorry, I’m just feeling a little lost
Please ground me.

Everywhere reminds me of home
Everywhere is strange
Every bird call is a galah or a crow and
Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road.

Remind me of the time we went to the beach
And all of us had the same waves crashing
On the shores of our dreams
How we all had the same sand
In our shoes,

Remind me of the mosquitoes
And how we made a game of
Waiting like crocodiles before
Snapping them between our palms,

Remind me of snow on the gables
Gothic cathedrals and cobblestones
And how you can’t help but laugh when I
Order us mulled wine in Polish,

Remind me that I have hands
That can write things
Remind me that I have feet
And can always walk somewhere new,
If I get bored
Or Lonely.

There is a body in the lake
You did not put it there
But now you have to deal with it
Now you have to console the ghost
And remember emergency service numbers.

You’re waiting for the cops with the ghost
sitting on the grass with your arms around your knees
And you say:
“Sorry you died
Sorry you lived
Sorry about that time you got food poisoning in that burger bar
Sorry your kids don’t call you at all
Sorry there will be no one who will cry for you
Now that you are gone
Sorry it happened in a muddy lake near a textile factory
Sorry you died
Sorry you lived”
There are not enough sorries.

But the ghost just smiles, and shrugs
Tells you it’s ok and kisses you on the cheek because
Sometimes **** just happens
And all you can do is say that it happened
Here, look at my hands and my face, it happened, alright?
So forget it already.

You are waiting by the lake, looking at a body
Covered in silt and lank weeds with skin blue and bulging
You wonder how it happened but don’t ask
You think you have an idea
Are those rocks in your pockets?
You still don't ask and
The ghost stands up an says it has to go
So you say goodbye, and wait by the lake alone with
red and blue lights in the distance.

Yesterday you died and I bought lilies for you.
But wait, back up, this isn’t where it starts.
:
Last year I was in an airport and saw lilies
And fingers touching the petals and the stems
Like a lover
And I had never looked at lilies as lovely before.

No, this isn’t right, this is still not the beginning.
:
I think it began when I was just a kid and I saw
A smile for the first time
It wasn’t for anything serious,
I didn’t know what lilies were back then
I made daisy chains instead
I got ***** in sandboxes and didn’t understand
Romance films. Still don’t, but that’s by choice.

But no, let’s move forward, there is too much
To tell
:
There is a day in which you fry me bacon and eggs
There is a day in which I mix the colours and whites in the wash
And everything turns pink and we laugh
There is a day in which your car breaks down
And I drive you to work.

There are some hours we spend in front of the TV
There are some hours we spend walking in the park
There are some hours we argue and
There are some hours where we just smile as we read in silence, Together.

There is the time you buy me a ring
There is the time I buy two tickets to Morocco
There is the time in Morocco where we dance in a bazaar
There is the time I argue with your parents about refugee policy
There is the time we spend Christmas in a tent in Colorado
There is the time you tap my forehead
When I say something funny, when we’re drunk.

And then there is the time
I buy you lilies for no reason other than I saw someone
Touching them in an airport, and you cry
They’re your favourite you say and
Did you know, you say
They mean purity, in both Christianity and Buddhism?
That it was formed from the breast milk of Hera, or
In the case of the Easter Lily, the sweat of Christ? You say,
You should be a Tiger Lily –you’re belligerent enough, you say,
Lilies are ****** and lilies are pure and lilies are death
And these are Lilies of the Valley
For our second year of marriage.
:
I had no idea, but smiled anyway.

So now we can return to the end.
:
There is an accident
There is a hospital
There is waiting
There is laboured breathing
There are machines beeping
There are tears.

Then there is a funeral
And I can no longer give you lilies
Because you do not have hands I can touch
So I give them to a block of stone with
Your name on it, instead.

I adopt lilies as my favourite flower
So I can never forget.

On the night of our attack we’re ordered to keep the fires damped. We huddle close to our horses and hum war lullabies under our breaths and the loudest sounds are the stars, creaking from their hooks.

We got the Speech that afternoon, when we’d rounded the valley and found the city resplendent and open and inviting in an overtly ****** way before us.

“Kids” we were told

“Tonight we are boys and girls for the last time. Tomorrow we will be dead and will have become new as warriors and fools. We will never be accountants. We will never be lawyers. We will never heal the sick unless with spit, and harsh words, and duck tape. We will never teach anything but strength through violence and stoicism. Philosophy to us is nothing but an action incomplete. Poetry will never move us – words will never have the beauty of the bottle, or the fist.”

Now hidden by the dark, I curl myself up in my hoodie and silently whisper to my mare. She’s oak brown and placid but for when we ride into battle, and then she is a battleaxe and has no fear, only forward, as if ‘into the black night’ are the only words she knows.

But she understands me when I look around our camp and into the shadowed faces of my compatriots who will not be here with me tomorrow, and those that remain will no longer be singing lullabies, of any kind.

Tomorrow we will fight, and account for our dead, even if we won’t write it down.

Tomorrow we will make our own laws, with swords and decision and violence that would only beget more violence and only leaves everything ******, scattered, alone.

Tomorrow we will ride into laughter and remind those who have forgotten that this is Chance, this is Life. That in itself is a lesson.

Tomorrow we will fight and die and be resurrected and in what manner that will happen will be a form of philosophy.

And when you slap me on the back and wipe away a drop of blood from my cheekbone and smile, saying ‘you done did good’, that will be like medicine to me, bitter.

Tomorrow we will ride into heaven and make bedlam out of it. That in itself is a kind of poetry.

And when I watch you walk away, the sway of your hips will also be poetry to me.  

And if I find myself a bottle it will not be poetry, only a soliloquy, a lament for something lost.

And the plunder that we’ll have won from this? Well, that won’t be worth anything.

But I am that which would have the war wounds rather than the name of coward etched upon on my cheek.

And so I hum my last lullaby, and prepare for tomorrow.

What’s with all the noise?
In your head,
Boy?
I’m vibrating with it
From across the room

What was said?
Over and over
What was done?
That led you to plunder the
                         Stars in their darkness
and
                                                      Run up and down walls?

It’s the back hand of the night,
Strong-arm
Girl?
Dark side of the world, curves
She may have bent it
                       Light side of the moon, she
                                                        Illuminates us

And what did you learn?
What did you learn as the hours curled?
And can you take it with you?

And what’s with all this noise?
The scratching dawn
A creaking sun
A daughter who becomes a son
From morning to each midnight
From bed to birdcage to sharpened knife
- The secret you carry in you

Girl, oh Boy
Sharpen your werewolf teeth
Caress the beginning of day back into sleep
And promise to never grow up

Post-Apocalypse Liturgy

0.
These are the days in which the dead outnumber the living, and in which most of the living
                                                                                                                                     act like the dead.

1.
The wind in this place is a howl that never gets tired.

Still, I march on, a lonely soldier in a foreign land, desperately trying not to feel like a refugee.

The remains of my regiment left me long ago and are now buried under grey sand-dust or are walking, but away. This does not mean I am walking to anywhere, or that I know what I’m looking for
or what I will find.

                     I once knew a girl, and then knew that girl as a woman – two distinct and different people who would be strangers to one another if they ever meet.
                                                                   I once knew a boy, who did not become a man because I couldn’t **** the other man with the axe fast enough. There’s blood flecked under my nails and it is not his but it may as well be. I carried his keychain with the rabbit foot on it for the longest time, but in the end bartered it for clean water.

These are two of the people who are walking away from me.

2.
Here there is only a scarf over my mouth and nose, scratched sunglasses and my battered boots moving, always forward. There is no longer a North Star to guide me so who knows what direction my feet are taking me.

I see hollowed trees and cracked tarmac peeking out from the dust. The sand and the dust are the only things that move here, swirling, like us, directionless and in circles.

But not like me, no. I am moving                                                   Forward
                                                                                                                                                                          
Through the shimmering haze ahead I see a smudge, a smudge that is not a ruined tree or a ruined building. Just a ruined person, and they’re coming towards me. I check my hands, my knife, my pistol that has no bullets but does have a heavy **** and no one needs to know it’s just a glorified club.

We stop a few meters apart from each other. He’s wrapped in ***** bits of cloth and smells like turpentine and fatigue, but he holds himself like a wire. He’s looking at my pack, the blade at my hip.

“Howdy stranger. Any sign of life your way?” I haven’t spoken in weeks and no longer have a voice. I shake my head.

“Got any water to spare?” Again, I shake my head. He keeps looking at me, all wire and tightly wound desperation.

I’m going to have to **** him, so
                                                    I do.

3.
It’s a lonely dark, trapped between the teeth of suspense and resignation - an abandoned parking lot at midnight where an old drunk man cackles at nothing.

And I made
          ****** sure I was surrounded by nothing.
Sing to me silence
                   Remind me that I can still breathe.


4.
I still talk to you sometimes.

“Remember when we met? You smiled and looked clean and told me there was water nearby. I didn’t trust you, didn’t believe you but followed you anyway. Maybe because I couldn’t smell anyone else, maybe because I hadn’t been clean in what felt like years

            (but only dead gods can tell time here, so who knows really?)

Maybe because I still had a bullet left or maybe because I was

Lonely.

Were you lonely? Is that why you trusted a wandering wretch like me?

Or were you one of those dead gods who could see the Future, who could see the Forward, and what came at the end?

Sometimes I ask you things forgetting you are no longer there. When I’m thumbing the sharp of my knife and say

“Pass me my pack would you? Need the whetstone.”
                                                            Or
“Do you remember Before? Were you old enough?

I remember,
Before
        Before
Before
         Before…

Do you remember if it was better than this?”
                                                           Or
“Stop hogging the blanket already, just lie closer to me.”

And I wake up thinking you’re there but it’s just my own arms wrapped around my own waist.

5.
When I see the first sign I imagine I am hallucinating. I saw a bird earlier this morning, and that can’t be right. I saw you this morning, and that can’t be right either.

But I walk and soon hear something I haven’t heard in a long time. Someone is laughing.

And the town I wander into is not really a town, just a place to sit and sleep, cobbled together with people and plywood and spit.

‘Hopetown’ it’s called. And that would make me laugh if I remembered how to.

I’m greeted with a mixture of caution and curiosity. There must be a few dozen of them, ***** but alive and they smile at each other and have the energy to talk with their hands. There are huts and there is a circle marked by stones and a fire pit in the middle that is a meeting place. There is a hut with a table out front that is a ‘supply store’. There is a row of bicycles, some more battered and twisted than others, and I look at them carefully.

I come in peace, I come in pieces.

Stranger, stranger, become a bard and tell us of distant lands.

But there is nothing to tell about distant lands. There is only sand, and ruins, and those people walking away from me.

So I make something up.
It seems good enough, I can stay for the night.

I trade a battered toy doll with only one eye for a refill of water and a can of some food with the label scraped off. I ask for boots in my size because mine are broken and giving me blisters. They say sorry, don’t have any, and ask me to sleep with a woman with dark red hair and bird thin wrists. Plant a new seed, they ask me.

Don’t they know I’m shrivelled and hollow? There’s another woman and a man I’ve seen who I’d rather sleep with, but I’m a guest here and I say yes.

Rozelle, her name is, and I forget it immediately. It’s safer that way.
I can tell she doesn’t want to sleep with me and I’m still thinking of you so we talk for a while about things I also forget immediately (safer, safer, safer) and then we fall asleep next to each other. She can always tell the others it didn’t take,

It’s common enough.

I wake in the night like a ghost has tapped me on the shoulder. I don’t like it here, can’t remember the last time a body was so close to mine… It was you, wasn’t it? Then it must have been centuries ago.

So in the dark of night when there isn’t even a moon I steal the stallion of the bikes. I have to knock out a sentry to get it, but I don’t **** him, I put him to sleep quietly.

Because I am the villain here.

Maybe that means I should have killed him, but I don’t want to be the villain. Bad is what this life has painted me as, and I don’t want to be that.

Not that it matters because I’m only ever going
                                                                                                             Forward.
So I ride,
Going
                 Going
                                 Going
Gone.

6.
They might follow with pickaxes, but townies don’t like to travel. They have water, they have each other. But still I ride all night and into the rising sun but
Still don’t burn.

Two days I ride and nothing happens but                                         space.

Wait, that’s a lie. I rode past a graveyard for the elephants: huge trucks, hollow, huge trailers, hollow, huge dreams, hollowed out.
hollow                                               hollow                                          hollow

I peddled faster, then, because I don’t like mirrors.

And now the sun has fallen out of the sky and I usually stop before then and find a place to camp but I was caught up in getting past the graveyard and forgot about it.

Now it’s pitch black – no stars anymore – and I’m walking my stolen bike, looking for a dune I can crawl behind and sleep with one eye open, bike tied to my wrist with a bit of rope I found several suns ago.

And then I see the glowing shadow of a fire. I smell cooking meat. This cannot be a good thing. I consider riding on but without giving myself a why I lay down my bike and crawl as silence up a sloping hill so I can spy on the people gathered around the fire.

Apart from my hunting knife my most prized possession are my binoculars. I put them to my eyes like a spy from a Before movie. There are three men and a woman around a sad fire.

A leg is being turned on a spit.

The leg belongs to a middle aged man slumped on the sand. He has no limbs left, and there are ***** bandages on the stumps of his arms, his left leg. The Eaters kept him alive for as long as they could, taking a hand there, an arm here, an ear and some toes there, but now he is dead and they will cook and eat the rest of him. Feast, feast, and starve until they steal another body, another soul.

I turn to go but see something else. A girl
Hogtied and *****, tangled hair.

She’s a scrawny thing but they’ll eat her anyway. I wonder if she knew the man, if he was her father, or a friend. Or just a stranger.

I once ate someone:
She cried and cried and cried and I devoured, devoured, devoured until there was nothing left

But her flesh.

“You’re a cannibal of the heart” she said, still crying.

And I shrugged, because I no longer felt anything (this was before you, of course)

Because this is the book of our lives:
          Read it and don’t weep
There’s not enough water to spare.

And she is another person who is walking away from me.

7.
But I want to be the hero.
I want to be
                 Something someone will remember with a smile
And not with tears, or rage
                Something someone will remember without reaching for a handgun.

8.
It takes a few minutes of planning, and some sneaky footwork. They have weapons but so do I and I have surprise. So I get behind the one with the shotgun by his knee and slice his throat.

Surprise!

Can’t remember much of what happens next but it ends with three bodies on the ground with the man without limbs, a blossom of red on my forearm and a lot of sweat, a lot of kicked up dust.

And the leg on the fire has burnt now.
Ashes to ashes, and so on and so forth.

The kid is looking at me as if her eyes could slice. And who knows, maybe they can – she was certainly born After and no one knows what is possible anymore.

“I’m gonna get this off you, ok?” I say, holding my knife and touching the gag trapping her tongue. She doesn’t move and I slice it off and she still doesn’t move.

“What are you going to do with me?” She asks. And I don’t have an answer.

I didn’t think that far
                                               Ahead.

“Nothing. I’ll scavenge that lot” (I **** a thumb at the bodies behind me and repress a wince as my bleeding arm screams) “and go.”

What she says next is unexpected.
“Can I go with you?”

I look closely. She’s feral and ***** and reminds me of jungle cats from Before. She might jump me in my sleep and leave me for dead, steal my knife and bike and name and ride into a sunset and burn in it.

But I want to be a hero,
I don’

Lived dangerously, loved yet lonely
Died poetically young, at Missolonghi
The fate of an arrogant *******
But still your words do woo me

The blooms are unfolding
The earth is now warming
There’s nothing like a freshly scrubbed sun
In the wild eyed morning

I wear my running shoes every day, even when I’m just sitting

I’ve gotta be prepared

For the next time you try to run me over in your SUV and because the last time I only had those sandals you had cut the straps off. ******.

But I lost you in the woods and you’d forgotten your shotgun and when I got my breath back I thanked the universe for little blessings.

So the next day I bought running shoes, and that night I slept in them.

But you didn’t try that trick again.

You waved at me over the fence separating our back yards as you mowed the lawn. You smiled, and that made me want to run, too.
You invited me to your Sunday footie BBQ and the rest of our neighbourhood was coming but my mother has a birthday so I had an excuse.

On your birthday I baked you a cake with as much rat poison I could buy without suspicion and left it on your doormat. I watched you closely for days but you were fine so either you were not rat enough, or you had thrown it out.

So I practiced running, scouting out places to lose SUVs and dodge bullets and you smiled and waved at me every day and I wore my running shoes.

Then, in a late November, old Mrs Thompson from down the road told me you were in the hospital.

I tried to think of traps I had laid, of ways in which I had sought to ******* you and found myself wanting. I thought of my running shoes, and whether they were still sitting neat by the back door.

Old Mrs Thompson from down the road said you had apparently tripped in the dark in your own living room and shot yourself in the leg.

I hadn’t heard, hadn’t worn my running shoes that day, because I was at my parents’ house and had stayed the night after a few too many glasses of wine.

But maybe I was responsible for your injury after all.

This is not a new day, this is a day gone bad, rotting and stinking like putrid death, but repackaged, perfumed, and sold like cheap ***, for dimes or a sense of certainty or just company,

Surrounded and Alone-
The essence of city life

Out of windows, dusty, and brushing cotton flakes out of hair
In a cold room there is so much to do, like breathing,
Running hesitant tongue over stoic teeth,
Why use it? When communication is fraught with shipwrecking maelstroms of miss-understanding, miss- understood and miss-interpreted

                                   -heavy headphone armour on,
Check.

But what is sung is wrong, pursued by romantics old and new, this modern age is fractured and cannot be seen by a mirror unbroken, while comedy halls are bursting at the seams with self deprecation and I laugh at everything I don’t understand, and don’t understand why I laugh but-

But I’m fond of morbid irony: is it possible to commit suicide accidentally?

I ask the Eternal Cockroach as it salvages waste and it rolls its Eternal eyes at miss-placed Inconsequence. It rolls its eyes and sees the bottom of my shoe and ***** off to cockroach Hell or Heaven while the crushed and oozing carcass stains my sole.

And I don’t care if I asked a question or wanted an answer or, in the end, what I got at all.

Forget the bridge; I’m flying over this-

A poem, played out on stark eyebrows and two fine forehead lines, then quirked, ruining a long lamentation’s worth of time, to say nothing of the ruminating circle, the square that fits in it, those fine fired diplomatic lines, deluxe and then depraved and then forgetting what that means.

If anything at all

A New Year I don’t know what to do with, an old expectation I still harbour, though here ships can only be wrecked and left unrepaired save for chewing gum and spit.

Baby faced innocence wrinkles faster than hands in tepid bathwater; here,
Skin crawls with the tactile hallucinations of a spider’s breath; evaporating

The words, which are always contested even by themselves, that remain seated on a reluctant tongue, everywhere, where echoes of watercolour paint and bolognaise sauce compete for existential poetic perfection, here,

There, on cracked amber shores, ancient icons and ancient dramatic dreams, tumbled shreds of history textbooks and photographs combine into nostalgia, ready to catch a hot wave and jump into another word-

The essence of speech, like bread and potatoes, is starchy blandness- the plaster base of meaning, waiting for the frieze,

Really, it’s a tasteless memory that supports the world in its frame, in its seams, and cracks before it compromises-

I do not compromise, not because I am the best but because I fall apart without myself, and any compromise will mean death and that arduous reinvention of the smile, the hand, to wield pens and stroke guitar strings and make gear changes and fidget with hair and with fingers express urgent ideas in the shape of air,

Here,

The hollow house has already been burnt out, but an X was marked, so let’s ruminate around it still, and still before we pounce

On anything that gleams, anything that shines; hunt with snout in trough for lost treasure, those things that gleam and shine-but it’s a hoax

As fox masked bourgeois wolves run behind backs and pinch backsides and pick pockets. Steal pocket lint and ticket stubs and laugh, waving miss-fortune in faces, equally lost in the search for the words of missed discontent, but with money and our pocket lint and ticket stubs to forget it-

Until it just stops: Reach out, and bash them on the head- or start a civil war, it’s not always a choice, but now it yours-

To swing lavish hips in the garbage of history, or not

Don’t want or need to know what made this: put up a sign for the archaeologists of the future: don’t dig here, nothing worthwhile here, take the trowels and brushes and theories of Diffusion or Constructed Hegemonic Discourse (though Gordon Childe may stay for Tea, tea, that most holy incarnation of caffeine)

And go.

There’s nothing that one could want here that isn’t already known; when weeping, when looking in a hotel bathroom mirror and pulling at hair and eye sockets in mad disorientated frustration-
So,

I’ll be East of Eden, looking for East of Ordinary (if anyone cares) dropping and rescuing causes like pebbles and shells on foreign shores,

Sure, I don’t know what to think, but I’ll feel it anyway,

Spitting in open mouths next to ancestral verse, no reverence for irreverent history or this,
these narrow doorways and double standards are doing heads in;

shrink it, trim this mental overgrowth, neo-liberalise this stress, just privatise it all, and it becomes

Decrepit disconnections, miss-spelled and miss-meant; missing a lucid neologism and marvelling at its absent meaning. See, all there was to believe in was a circle pit that spun forever and insistent chords and the increasing pressure that ended in a broken nose;
                                                who knows?

Revelation: maybe I quirked that eyebrow, and disbelief simulated stimulating dreams-

I’ve seen promises made out of diamonds, wood, gold, amber, spit, so don’t ask me to repeat myself or this, to diagnose or understand it-

I’m sick with everything I cannot count or count on, things accidentally found and purposefully misplaced. I could lie and it would probably mean the same thing anyway,

See, there’s nothing new to see, to this or me,

This is not a new day, but one wasted in a cold room.

Don't believe me in my screaming
Don't believe me in my silence
I can only eat what's given
I can't help it if I'm starving

You are waiting on a death wish,
You are impatient
But don't worry;
it will come in its own sweet time,
No matter how fast you drum your fingers
On my coffee table.

You once said that living was the hardest part –
So bored in the waiting, until you couldn’t help but
Do things, see things, whether magnificent or hated
You still sighed the same

You once said living was the hardest part
But after you arrived back home,
From what was now your
Seventh city of searching
You admitted you were wrong:
It’s the other way around.

I shrugged, because it’s all the same to me

I won’t admit that I bribed your demise to stay away
I met it in the car you would crash next month
Burning, your spine and ribs shattered
Your words faint and blood filled gurgles
On your split liquid red lips

I paid death to not, just not yet
It was a hefty price:
2000 bucks and five years of my own life

Because I’d miss you

When you’re at my doorstep,
Dripping rain onto the welcome mat

When you feed ducks and pigeons
The crusts of your lunch

The way you laugh at the tragic parts of films and don’t notice the rest of the cinema glaring at you

The way you make lists of the countries you would visit, the books you would read, but never what we need from the shops, and you always forget something.

The fact that you leave, but always come back

These are things that I admit to you, on this latest return.
After you’ve taken off your coat, hung it next to mine
After you’ve deposited your suitcase in the bedroom

So waste your time with me, while it’s here

I would be bored and waiting with you.

We first fell into each other when we were still small time, still ate stale toast for dinner and had to share rent with four or five other seedy folks. We didn’t know each other past our names and skins back then, but so we could pay our respective rents the next day we split a bottle of whiskey and drank all night. Why? A mate of ours had got shot and we were young enough to still care that we might very well be next. The gum tree leaves still smelled hot. Summer is a melting season here.

These days we don’t worry, because we realised that the worry would **** us worse than a bullet or an electric chair or an overdose.

But back then we reminisced on good old days that weren’t so old, and lessons learnt that we would not fully understand until years later. We spoke of experience, though we had none, and it seemed so simple when you kissed me and it was alright because it was only skin, only experience.

Years later when we were reminiscing on that, laughing at our younger selves, I admitted that that had been my first time, sleeping with a boy like that. You’d been shocked, and apologised because you’d done it and not done it gently, and you hadn’t loved me...

and you say you’re not a romantic ******* but I know you only act out of love, necessity, and revenge. These are the engines that drive you forward into the world. You may not have loved me then, but you needed me, and I had wanted you.

But we weren’t a thing – you didn’t love me, after all – but we worked together more often. We grew calluses on our hands together, ran in the night together, laughed and choked out adrenaline together.

I think we got too carried away – were we intoxicated by sunburnt skin and dried sea salt and long hair?

I think I was, because one night you had to stitch a knife wound in my thigh with murmuring concentration and I joked you could be a beautiful nurse and you threatened to knife me somewhere more sensitive while still threading the needle with precise care, while dried blood flecked your knuckles.

That’s when I got out of the game for a while, got a ‘real job’ – parents couldn’t be proud because that’s what they’d thought all along.

You didn’t seem pleased and I told myself it was because you missed me. Because no one worked the midnight silent districts like we did, no one ruled the bone grey estates like we did. No one mimicked a redback spider like we did.

And so you left, perhaps to find a different kingdom to conquer, one with more history and memories. Maybe you wanted to paint a new memory onto something, to show you were there. You said you were taking a ghost home, something you’d met in a forest on a Sabbath and who lived far away and you showed me a ring and said the ghost couldn’t go farther than the sound of the gold.

You’re always making up ******* like that, trying to put magic into the world,

When all you really need to do is be there.

So I worked an office job I hated from the beginning. The shirt collar too stiff, the paper cuts didn’t hurt enough, I cycled through memos and files and emails and reports on accounts, profits, billable hours. I slept with women, with men, but none of them make me feel like I’m bleeding out, not like you did, like I was on the knife edge of heaven with you gripping my hips hard enough to bruise so I wouldn’t fall off.

I would pay your rent if you only came home and made me laugh.

And maybe you hear me, from wherever you are, because you come back, in the night like a prophecy.

You show off photographs, a music box, a fresh bullet wound and a broken toe. I kiss you better and you don’t say that you missed me, you don’t say you love me, but I can feel it in your hands. They tremble.

You say you’ve found a job for us, a good one, and I say yes and don’t go in to work the next day.

After that we can afford a penthouse, so we do. But it makes us want to jump out of the windows. We buy a cat but it runs away. You ask me if I want to run away and I say yes. I always say yes to you.

So we pack up our guns, our skins, our names and go.

This is the sunset we drive into, this is the sun that we burn in.

This split lip will remind me
If only for a week or so
Why I don’t like romances

that cardboard box full of my books
the suitcase that contains my clothes
will only hold my life
for a few days
while I resettle

And for an unspecified, though finite
amount of time
This record will be
Broken
And repeating
Those last few lines

But years from now I will be wondering
What was it that you said?
And in the wondering I will realise
As I run a thumb over my mouth

It doesn't matter at all.

Strange things have been known by man. Stranger things yet have been known by women and the strangest things of all have been known by both, and everyone in between. Because that’s the nature of dreams, that’s the reality of nature, that’s the dream like quality of being alive, here and now and so **** material and intangible that it deserves a post doctoral thesis or dozen.

So that’s what the pattern of moonlight looks like over your thighs.

Now, we’re too old to hypothesise but young enough to ponder, not naïve but not yet jaded. It’s the best way to be, like lucid hallucination. It’s a feeling too clothonic for the modern age but not something that would fit anywhere else. Something belonging to the earth and desperate to return to it, desperate to drag me with it, with you, up or down.

I’ll swim or drown any which way life will have me, and anyone who knows me at all knows this.

You have a way of getting under my finger nails. I pick and pry but can’t clean myself of you, just seem to spread you around and over me like your tongue or your eyes. I never planned for this, but,

Sometimes love must be ad lib.

Kind of like us, don’t you think? Mirrored bodies caged by a mosquito net, trapped, entrapped, embraced. Moonlight over your thighs, across my back, pattering over my spine along with the sweat. Moss stained ruins and craning palm trees and monsoon season in our minds and outside them.

But maybe it isn’t like this at all.

Maybe it started because it was cold, so deathly cold, like a terse comment or the gaze sought for and purposefully kept away. Like the last ice cube from a ****** mojito in a faux Hawaiian bar crunched between your stellar teeth. Maybe it happens in a cabin in Siberia battered by fast and fat snowflakes and a howl of a wind. Not because of us, no, we are only pushed together by the elements. Feelings don’t come into it at all. Apart from the ones we ignore, and push away as virulently as we banish the frost on each other’s skin in our caressing and rubbing and trying to forget it all later.

Because even if there is no such thing as ghosts we still keep them inside us. In love, hate, in longing.

To never forget is to make your own ghosts. Spirit equals life knowing it will end and seizing it regardless, laughing all the while.

So we give birth to each other’s ghosts, and lie with them, the respectable beds we made are now burnt to cinders and scattered on trade winds.

Even the things we dream and invent in our imaginations are true in their own way, because they are all based on and born out of things that are material, things that are tangible, even in the waking world.

I can see your worries written in your collarbone. Let me lick them out.

Like I did in dry desert heat, when we were parched and our tongues scratched like sandpaper against the corners of each other’s mouths. The sand was everywhere, in your eyes and my shoes and it shifted inside us as we moved. Maybe that’s how it started. It’s a struggle to remember.

I remember you crying for no reason, your back to me, face mirrored in a cracked window.

The point, the fact that can save, is that love can be made out of misery. That everything can change even by nothing changing. This is true even if it isn’t right, I’m certain of it.

But certainty is rare as rocking horse **** around here, so we take what we can get.

And we got it, didn’t we? In the curve of a Renaissance painting we saw each other, but you are no painting that I could stop myself from touching. You don’t belong on a wall, you don’t belong to paying visitors and school groups and snooty experts who would pick you apart. If they did, if anyone did, I would tear them to shreds and spend the rest of my life recovering your pieces; from museum floors, from photographs, from other people’s memories.

But it’s funny how people always look best when walking away from you. That or people you’ve never met. Those are the most beautiful and perfect people, the ones that don’t exist except in your imagination.

But aren’t we all to an extent imaginary? Or at least imagined, by ourselves, by others. We become new from day to night to daydream, influenced by our past but not the same. Like Play-Doh, a square can become a circle and then a square again, but it will not be the same square as before.

So I remember you like I’m waiting, not regretting but always reminiscing, always missing.

I don’t know if it’s less painful this way, but at least it’s a feeling of something.

I was sitting on a train
I didn’t have my headphones so
I was listening to the announcements
The woman’s voice is butter light but
A little bit patronising:
“If you have an Opal card, please remember to tap-off”
Because what else am I going to do to get through the turnstile?
I’m too short to jump it
And I am not a ghost

And then I start thinking of her,
The woman who gave her voice to a train
If she can still use it anymore
If it annoys her when she hears it on her way to work
If she’s changed it like an embarrassing name or
Moved to a different state?
And do they have different voices in
Melbourne or Brisbane or Tasmania?

And what about the bloke
Who gave his voice to the station?
“Please be advised, smoking is not permitted on the platform”
Which is a ****** ‘cos I could really do with a smoke.

But then again what if
Train Woman and Station Man aren’t real?
What if they were made by a computer program?
And if so,
Did someone have to give their voice to a computer?

But that’s just crazy –
It would mean the robots are coming and
We’d all be gonskies
If they ever learn to think what we don’t tell them.

But they kind of already do, right?
Don’t know the science of it really but
I think therefore I am
Someone in history says this, but they’re wrong
I am therefore I think
Or I am, but don’t think, but am anyway

And Train Woman’s voice is here, right?
It’s speaking to us, but is a thing that is intangible
Still a thing?

And this is why I need to remember headphones –
I’ve missed my stop.

Ragged the origami crane
The china shop, the bull,
Bleeding and tired on the floor
The bull, covered in porcelain –
Just fall asleep and become a statue

This is spontaneous so don’t ask it to make sense

Bitten in half the book
That says it knows it all
Bitten in half the beautiful rose
“Now I am ugly” It says,
“Now I am more beautiful”
-
I’ve never been thanked
For destruction before

Ragged the lace of your dress
Sorry I did that,
Sorry I didn’t do it more
Wreckage as modern art
Spit on it and call it modern art
That’s an insult, by the way.

Rummage in the ******* of history
The China shop, all shot up
Mobsters of words ruining everything
Just don’t wake the bull
Don’t say the word
“Beautiful”

****, I turned the radio all the way up
The news:
Here is a terrorist bomb
Here is a tax hike
Here is a ****** in a suburb
Here is the weather
-
And I could still hear you over it all
“Beautiful”

I crumple folded paper in my hand
Walk over broken plates
Bleed beautiful for you

You’ll take it and
You’ll love it and
I’ll hate you for it

The blood on the crumpled crane and the bull
This is a joke in the making
But I'll only let the punchline brush your lips
I won't let you taste
I'll make you bite and lick
I'll let the punchline give you bruises

The blood on the crumpled crane and the bull

Perhaps the day is waning
Maybe corpses in their graves are
Wriggling
With the worms
And in turn
Maybe gods are laughing

I don't know, or care

Perhaps they’re up on high
Maybe they’re just high
Giggling
With their cronies
And ambrosia
Flows like rivers

Perhaps it flows like rivers
Through their fingers
Perhaps their fingers are the rivers -
They are gods after all

And they smoke joints in the park
And they get kebabs at 2 AM
And they get kicked out of bars
And they do it all again
Until their words slur
And they do it all again

And whiskey runs like water
And laughter runs like water
This is a litany, a prayer
A toast, blessing, laughter

This is us giving a homeless person 10 bucks and our last tinnie
Just because we can
This is us waving at occupied taxi cabs and night buses
This is us singing hallelujahs
This is us making guns out of fingers
This is us laughing at
Those poor souls who are too embarrassed to laugh
This is us wasted in a graveyard, saluting all the names
Claiming that we’ll never die
‘Cos we’re gods here, we walk on and run on this town.

I’m getting drunk on a
Tuesday morning
On a cold bathroom floor
Thinking of all
The people in the world
Who know my heart was at one time large,
But is not anymore

I’m sitting cold on a tiled bathroom floor
Not expecting anything
But waiting anyway
For a call,
So I can say:
“There is nothing left to say anymore”


I’m just a simple man
With a simple grasp on reality
I don’t believe in
Revelations or epiphanies
I only know that one day I will be buried
I will be carbon once again

And I say this
As Loud As I Can
To cold white tiled bathroom walls
I will have no impact on eternity:
I take comfort in this
And let hollow laughter drop, the empty bottle fall
I am Inconsequence Incarnate-
And this is such a relief
Because otherwise, all I am is
Wasted.

Out of the age of blue times
I saw
Gold steel
As myths disintegrated
Into old wives tales
And then into amber,
Drink:
Teleportation for a price,
My cells protest but I don’t listen
Don’t hear
Only feel
The cloying, throbbing, dry thirst and ache
The fuzzy bleary dozing-but-not-sleeping circular gnawing
Eroding the steel plate of my chest
Golden treasured amber
Whiskey dreams for everyone!
Precious tonic of the crazed, the homeless
The hopeless, the disappointed housewives
Overworked hands and underworked minds
Liquid celebration and tragedy
Blue lips purse and twist for a drop of illumination
Take me out of this age of remembering
Remind me you were only ever a myth

Young Sade

I am:
Combustible
Volcanic
Excitable
Fractious
Perverse
Hotheaded
I­mpatient
Convulsive
Agitated
Passionate
Alonebutnotlonely
Animate­d
Secretive
Tempestuous
Imprudent
Enamoured by the opposite extreme of everything,
Easily exhilarated
And when despondent, profoundly so
A minimalist who wastes words on purpose
And harbours private contempt

BUT I AM NOT MURDEROUS
Nor of savage intelligence
Though I am of disorderly emotions

I am a libertine
I am a socialist
I dine with Marie Antoinette and execute her also

I am in love with my own contradictions, and have no shame.
I do not fear failure, because when I am beaten I will become
Brecht’s Hero
I am wise enough to value ignorance
Even as I spit at it when I find it in myself
I love the divine in the mundane
I am a pitcher, and a catcher
I am innocent and evil
An immortal child

I love cats and blasphemy and 1000 and one nights of debauchery
I believe that nothing is forbidden by nature.

I am a mellow atheist, shrugging my shoulders at spiritual enlightenment
A PERSON WHO THUS FAR HAS NOT BEEN REDUCED TO GROVELING LIKE AN ANIMAL BEFORE THE ALTER OF COMMODITY FETISHISM AND PROFIT-
And I do not intend to.

I could eat the world
Hold it all in a deathly grip
Whatever paint with which my heart is brushed
I become a superman and prince
And raise the bar of feeling great
And I admit my mistakes
If only to the dark-
But I bear my teeth
And smile like I’m crazy
Posing for the portrait that they’ll carry past my grave.