So many relationships like bad business partnerships:
green bottles falling from walls; messages stuck in bottles
rotating in great gyres; swallows never at home North or South.
(Anti-Confessional? — It’s a fashionable trend just now
and yet what is it not to confess, when we claim authorship?)

Suburbia’s flat evenness suffocates (but I’ve repeated this
so many times and I’m still here!).
We need to find the cracks in which to grow, in which to place,
our errant thoughts like rude whispers in a darkened room,
and nobody about to hear you anyway!

We express ourselves well in silence but me, I gyrate,
not quite on one side or the other, a kind of even fullness,
or, that’s what I like to think, let’s get this straight:
I’m an uncouth wind against plains that offer no obstacles.
Better to wear me that way — it saves the snap under pressure.

Seven lyre birds sang each in turn a tune
doing their tonal best to hone
the reproductive skills akin to a master
in the art of Japanese calligraphy
but all failed distracted by the majesty
of a high-definition sunset on playback in perpetuity.

the foxgloves explode
in infinite slow motion [silently]

from them also we can learn
the soft crash and save ourselves

from the genius suicide:
the brief fame of a supernova

…

intermittent rain keeps the land fecund,
a deluge cleanses to the bedrock,
rain in perpetuity is impossible
and we think we can control this

but we live at one speed,
and measure in standard units:
our language is insufficient
to give a precise reflection

…

to assume our laws are true beyond appeal
puts into question our democratic process

we forget the necessity of conversation
the original Greek ideal of the agora;

to meet friends and argue is the point, is it not, of life,
of all this noise, after all, what use is silence?

…

our luxury of having the exercise of our conscience
is subsidised by the suffering of a multitude other

..and yet

when we all speak with one
language / currency / voice
there is no poetry anymore
no rhyme, no metre, no form

in this Heaven only, [on Earth], we are united

so much time spent in forests
maybe it was natural to want these plains
of wheat, barley, rapeseed, concrete,
but then, we build cities
—we’re forest people still

after the cedar, the oak
after the oak, the pine,
after the pine, the palm, the kapok…
we’re good at turning things into names;
at coding the world, then remaking it:
we can cut an entire forest of kauri
into the image of San Francisco

waiting for minutes to deliver movement

two tennis ***** on the platform edge
unlikely random symmetry
maybe this is art?

when we arrive in another town
we face the same commands
BE THE BATMAN
BE A GREAT WESTERNER
—so many commands!

everything runs like clockwork,
until we hit the bars

A chorus of yellow trumpets
are held silently to a sun
that doesn’t want to play.

I prep a shoulder of lamb
for its ceremonial consumption:
a mid-week meat ****.

One eye on the clock (always),
one on the world-window:
I’m blinded by both,

as blind as the buttercups
that unconsciously reach
for a light that has yet to breach

our clouded notions of reality.
The birds are in constant alarm.

flat white light
a beacon against the world
reduces every colour to a neutral wash
against a background of
titillation for our twitter,
Facebook make-up, eye shadow,
no foundation required

moving all the time
on a sea of data
even when we are located
it results in the same,
nonsensical beyond time and place;
the moment is all and perhaps
in that lies the only real truth

ephemeral, we live or die in the euripus
of flesh and its needs