PRESENCE
eXit/beerburrum
for simone gelli what the streetlight is thinking is over her head her body a tongue depressor on the white line silence enclosed in silence is not silent enough when we realise she is not dead nor are we alive …
Trinity Bellwoods
Down to my last lyric Do you know the word pilling? it’s a piling-on of fabrications You wear it well or wore it Free range derangement commences as denizens make strange with tenses and moods I saw an old cancerous …
Kanashibari / 金縛り
Literally: bound in metal There’s a Japanese word for it. English needs one—the closest we get is sleep paralysis. It doesn’t do it justice. The crushing weight of a demon on your chest, immovable fingers clamping your throat, your mind …
Backyard Pool
1. Viewed from the decking above, your best friend’s pool holds the afternoon as a wobbly electricity. At the edge: puddles of deflated colour, white plastic chairs, a garden, other redundancies. 2. Far below the workings of sun, the surface-war …
Now
I would like to move this process along a little faster I would like to move this process along a little faster I would like to move this process along a little faster Iwould like to move this process along …
Archive Fever (after Jacques Derrida)
Do not ask who I am or ask me to remain the same.— Foucault a measure of flame and oxygen, a white heat degree in shame searing pain, unquantifiable pleasure that’s the key to a really good secret a secret …
Under the Native Frangipani
Ambushed by bees, I’m stopped at my father’s favourite bivouac. While I’m bucketing water to save what’s lived on long after him, through a whirr like warplanes, drought shudders petals down. My father in the last foggy weather of his …
Presence
Erudite licks embossed dictionary covers methodically. Rain is not gold, nor the colour of truth; merely green in essence. Subtext is always the opposite of pretence; underneath a scream. Laughter ticks proprioceptively especially under soft covers. Clouds can be beds …
Mothers’ Day
For Margaret Phelps and Mary Veronica Lang After the cups of tea and gifts of slippers we always went to Rookwood Cemetery – walk train walk again in swimming heat, me bobbing behind your trailing hand. To a small boy, …
