States of Poetry Poems
The correct way to drink from a broken cup.
To welcome both dark and light into your house.
To imagine tomorrow.
To pick verbena and red clover.
On the path where nothing will grow.
The correct way to tend the frozen.
To take their sweet throats and swim down into their livers.
To disembowel without touching.
To do what is at stake.
To move from c ...
Beyond a man's face stands a skilful
Command of changes
Beyond a woman's face stands a weep
Over the sweet peace beauty
Borrowed emerging naked rage
Made these times emptiness
Being at the advancing haunts came
The hunter's stamping leaps ...
'statements to forget when remembered' by Nathan Shepherdson | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One
no one ha
s ever written
there is no gr
eater poem
than this one
no one ha
s ever written
there is no gr
eater poem
then this one
this poe ...
Your kind friend sent a condolence card
and in the envelope a small white feather
which, she said, seemed to come from nowhere.
Angel's wings obviously, I wrote in my reply.
And for days after everywhere I went
I found small replicas, as if some tiny
feathered thing had scattered its moulting
on urban pavements, in shops and unlikely
bathrooms, a ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Gilbert Place - Cafe Boulevard' by Ken Bolton
for Lee Harwood
Softly solarised and parallel
two lines echo each other, glow slightly,
in a space that is nowhere
#
...
Octopus
Quick across the twilight road,
the eight legs of the cat.
Flood
Water corrects the earth
to flatness, patching fields with sky.
Alarm
Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days.
Window
The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes.
Should the unique serve to typify?
Have they been ill-used? To what purpose?
Asian Couple
The Asian couple.
I am inclined to think Chinese –
mostly on the basis of size,
but not Japanese (the ...
I am history now
in the scales, the age of sounds
I make sense then drop it
it gets dirty, it breaks
the ants carry it
I am bent at the switch
my tapes of the archive
decay, loops stutter
glitch arias
I am bent at the floor
facts roll under the chair
little dust songs
or songs outside
the parrots know
and I am sti ...
Fitness: fact, fiction
or fantasy? – among things
meant. Parachutes
open like fuchsias,
picnic hampers
of kittens float quietly
down, as peaks
push through
resplendent mists.
Your sense
falls upward
like helium or blinds,
now it's precisely
subtitled, you realise –
as the first tentative
The do-it-yourself piano isn't
kicked to matchwood, and you take
this for affirmation. When we
work out how to switch off
Bob Dylan, your plangent homemades
will go unaccompanied, no longer
sought like an injury lost in the mists
of Hansard. People suggest topics
they won't be using, and this is
more like an archive sneeze
than what yesteryea ...