Poem

More and more I live with your paintings
or more precisely the moment
you first saw them and chose them:
the red bird sitting in

An American wannabe child star
told the workshop of his still-born
brother. How his mother had said
the lost one, endlessly cast in a silent

I spent the first years of my life in a valley

                    sitting in woods muttering the occult business of little folktales;

                                        madness sometimes works

The storm had passed through –
the bric-a-brac, hurly burly, the rough and tumble
racketing down the road:
a clothes horse at full sail

It began with structural analysis of a dragonfly wing.
The first task was to create
flow in the DelFly II.
Wing flexibility in ‘clap-and-fling’

What is it about laughter that makes us lift
As if the burden might be gone or the weight
Be somehow alleviated? Laughter is just noise.

Drive one nail out with another,that’s our only hope.
We can’t live any more like birds on a branch,
because the murderous past never stops,
not even at night.

Afterwards, Jiah Khan slung her red silk dupatta
from a ceiling joist in her Juhu beach apartment,
my viral-stricken buck rattled to sleep curled by
my bed, and I woke to the cold body of silence –

Distant, untouchable night is stooping
over fingers of street-lights
that push her away. And the children of night?
The children of night are in hiding

It’s the stale argument once again
of course, old verbal horse,
about that ethnic fairy land
and all the dark-brown banksia men