Poem
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
Did I fly there? I may have flown there.
Maybe in something with the specifications of a crop-duster.
The Sugar Coast. Everything comes with a name. A name and a nickname.
The Soaked Coast. Bundy. Blue rustle of cane. Home to Rum City Wrecking.
When the talk is of angels
it’s tempting to think of them on the cold lake
small swan-shaped slivers of ice.
... (read more)Because in a foreign city even at eight
he needs the familiar nearby, to hitch
the gaze like the reins of that lacquered
horse to a fixed spot, in order to let loose,