Poems

There is no still life except in death.
Everything is quick till dead: fish,

Two months from twenty-nine
as rain slashed into Manning Street. My life,

A day when the rain only let up
           for an hour,
and in this brief, clear time
we saw a pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos
float through a break in the dripping gums.

But it is the end of the world to River, who’s standing there
thrown by its incomprehensibilities as I play him R.E.M.,
which is otherwise what he needs, total sleep and churning dreams,
not the drums, distortion and irony, he does not feel fine,

These days, evenings are heavy
with clouds that refuse to crack, to open
a window is let in the night
creatures, which flutter and tumble
into the glow of a phone

1.     worlds inside brown eyes
2.     a figure in a bed
3.     stars in summer
4.     women of clay

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset

[      ] commands a thunderless lightning, a noiseless rain
to spill strange – cold and dark –
over the prostrating city. [      ]
does not shout tonight, the veins
in my legs do not swell. overheard:
a child mimics a lightning strike

Like I’m doing something a lone self
determined, I put foot to floorboard.
Into a harder and faster world
brittler and slowlier

What had art – their
own, anyway – ever been
about, though, if not