Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Poems

And the world is fire.

And the sky wears a smoky veil.

And the bloodshot sun stares.

... (read more)

    ‘Addio, valle di pianti’ –

    These the composer’s plainchant words

    No librettist dare rewrite

    At using up imprisoned air

    To sing like miners’ warning birds

    Inside the sunless atmosphere

    Of Eros and eternal night,

    Amneris concertante.

... (read more)

the gardens dyed silver. finally he was

less keen like an eaten bird, it wasnt my thing

the path diverged off course to a camp.

you were willing to grow a pomegranate inside.

here they were gods people with their quiet domestics,

the redheads were nicer however. the pram, was full with a baby,

‘dreaming’ of white museums. & white art.

... (read more)

Freefall
must be like this,

... (read more)

To be alone in the wide room
in the house’s crooked elbow, turning point
for extensions as the family grew
and grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room
nobody needed now, though it might be resumed
like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,
without notice (and that was part of
the appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place) to play the ...

Not since I was four or five at most
and in the first of many striped tee-shirts
have I been this close to the flavour of safety.
I’m walking into town again, the child of hills.
You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own
adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans’s
tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways.

... (read more)

Waiting on a reeking strange
     railway station –
then the dead-quiet but crowded
     night ferry.

... (read more)

It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
       The all-pervading dark of space,
       But not meant for the world of men.
                    It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you.

... (read more)

Past the final service station
into the green beyond of paddocks
soon to be carved up, quartered,
then watched over by streetlights.
In the post-work haze, nostalgia reigns:
lonely crossroads, abandoned weatherboards,
paddocks stretching down to the sea.

... (read more)

There are no lions to whelp in the street any more,

and conversely

the Council by-laws forbid

the keeping of the pigs and chickens, goats and cattle

whose prodigious multiplications

could serve as an adequate metaphor

and there are only so many burgeoning plants

you can squeeze into a one-by-three-metre courtyard

but the possums have come back,

and the daylight moon

... (read more)