Not even a day without!

It isn’t good,

now black poems pile in every gland.
It isn’t all bad.
This morning I leapt clean from the blocks,

pushing up into lulled woodland.

Low fog was with me like a tailwind.

Even the marsupials seemed groggy,

letting me metres closer than usual

before the bolt.

                           Losing sight

of shore quickly through drenched bracken whelming

taller than thought; occasional gumshed

clearings to catch breath in, lowlit

with heath, banksias, quadruped acacias,

all busy uploading winter blooms.

Lungs gasped like landed fish.

My calves burnt. But I was busy

beating out a way, a non-way,

fumbling its breadcrumbs childishly back

to half known tracks – but not quickly.

Untold hours away from myself

were gold.
Lagging back to the shack

still brimming with animal fatigue,

I forgot to take lunch seriously –

scoffed! – letting blinkered

thoughts get a zealot look in.
But a scarlet robin bobbed up

just in time to enthral me:

insatiable bird narcissism

craves every drop of crimson, every jet

black pixel the car’s side mirrors

kept dishing up – and then some;

the pull looked worse than heroin.
Then when you consider the sugar-fix

sought daylong by a needling

eastern spinebill … (But you

wouldn’t. What sober person would?)
Everyone was carrying but me.

And hadn’t I already lasted long enough?

And what cost continuing this see-saw without?
A precious deafness had dissolved

with the morning fog; the pistons

more than audible now, insistent

as the blanks always there between stanzas

spent leaving myself and landing on things.
And then the phone rang and I forgot

that to answer a phone is to look at a clock;

and to look at a clock was to know,

mid-June, if I didn’t leave soon

I’d miss my dealer’s daily window.
The addicted mind is a mob:

Chinese whispers at compound interest

gain sociopathic sway. For me,

the forum always screams loudest around 1600.
Who was I,

already one foot out the door,

to deny them more?