We borrowed our shoes from a dinosaur on the hill each foot crashing with indispensable decisions - mammoth & satisfying. Giant houses & wrathful money seem smart in the clammy fists of men until cash tires & desire becomes jaded, slipping to the floor like damp newspaper. Frogs, fat on sugar & the gratis of … Continue reading Shoes of Dinosaurs
Season of immolation guts & bones ribs seared to white sun-glare, heat-dash pebbles’ broken-tooth chatter underfoot, a rolled ferry carcass, & bridges that span simmering air. Water runs, they say to some finish line taking life with it. From rock to rock we mark the passing - rivers as graveyards - such fundamental deaths. Written … Continue reading Water Runs
tectonic love, I know you’re too old to start again you swaddle me in your gauzy scarf those rapscallion clouds spelling sunsets or possibly the daydreams of fire ants nest unravelled one cicada alone is beautiful beaten rainbow wings - (note the azalea swirls like shokunin steel) but we are a carnival roaring against your … Continue reading I Heart Earth
Tourist Without a Dictionary Beneath every mountain is a map flung but unsung by ravensong or the witchcraft of breeze-saying. When we walk, breath coarse as ice flow from this snow-crusted air, I stop on thigh-sore’s pitch and turn to the view. There it is, the sprawl of our city, roof-tumble and tree toss and … Continue reading Twiglet #290
Image by Students at Wangari Maathai International School today in a cave, neck craned we saw fig roots long and plaited their wild search for life cracking limestone in plunging serrations and watch how we dangle our Earth from carbon’s canopy sky we’re leaning over mountains, taking our planet skydiving through time’s twist and drizzle … Continue reading Hunger’s Glare
Captain Morning have you always been? Holding the tiller, prow skewed in among cloud layers Imagine one enormous star baked into sky’s dark bread infinity’s rising yeast and can you hear the breaking? Brittle crack // a toffee eye sheets down, permanent raining Captain Morning skipper of waking your yellow fuzz warms my neck, bids … Continue reading Captain Morning
Bring in the coroner. Let her stand before the court and speak. "Thank you, Your Honour and all the grand, wise jury. Here are my findings: What sinks is not the eye blue and white as granny’s delftware beside the tall vase of fresias: pretty things (our frames and lockets) get preserved for viewing, taken … Continue reading The Last Witness
(hopefully brief) we are all but sharks in the planet’s glowing tides snapping at spilled blood and exhausted by a need to grow teeth some days a deep breath means looking up... missing keystones and folded tower-blades, all in the seven greys of a dead fish, clouds raked into piles and societies bent low, as … Continue reading a failure in optimism
Paint big ideas on the old blank sky paint them bright to catch the eye Paint some more and paint it large: paint the pollution from our cars and paint the sea a foaming brown and paint the greyness of our towns. Then paint some green in one small place to remind us of Earth’s … Continue reading Painting Hope
Sugar Mass & Colour Swirl Perhaps Earth’s a lollipop and we - tricked into sugar-mass and colour-swirl sticky and expendable - forget to think of space, its dark flap of tongue, the wiggling tastebuds of stars consuming time (we created ticking clocks although their message is not ours and control ends at our fingertips like … Continue reading NaPoWriMo #3
‘You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness.’– Ernst Junger, On the Marble Cliffs, John Lehmann, 1947 and so too the garden scrapped of colour the dry soil set to run up every limb and bough and leaf bushes of standing dust sepia shadows replacing bold ink lines … Continue reading Effacing Earth
Write about the weather in Present Tense These last few days, everyone is saying “Thank goodness for the sun!” People are stretching like cats, long skin and whiskers pleased. It’s true the summer has been a wet one. Canberra wringing in a wet towel, warmth like dogs breath fogging up the sky. Mosquitoes are having … Continue reading #Go Dog Go Haibun Wednesday
On first sight, I see that the surf rolls up light like rice into sushi and that the disingenuous sun has one bright blade dissecting sea from sky. I see that the clouds puff darker grey on the broad cheek nearest to the headland’s blunt fist. I see it all. But when I come again … Continue reading This Waking Guilt
When the bulldozer came for our house we sewed signs into the windows that said “panegyric government perpetuating poverty” and the great machine purred there like a cat contemplating a lizard’s tail. Then a bloke yelled from the driver’s seat “What does it mean?” and we yelled back “Look it up in the dictionary!” He … Continue reading In the Way of Progress
as we walk the ancients shriek feathered song of dinosaurs and in the pond, a rippled grey sky white butterflies' irregular ascent soft handed clouds blindfold the mountains i turn away from information boards extinction: the past's blunt tail a black swan dives and dives dripping from beak's red blade in my wrinkled heart a … Continue reading Sanctuary Walk
(i) on the ridges trees in death black arms still flexed for holding up the sky but it falls strung between them whitely broken such soft caressing of their limbs now rain comes the marching of time slick silver arrows (ii) we walk in a valley torn flat trees prostrated by flood the tinny upper … Continue reading Two Years After the Fires
you never appreciated the way I framed your world fishbowl blue and swimming with clouds you never saw it from up here, an exquisite bauble tied to nothing except my one primitive eye. slowly, turn by turn this season of regret I watch fish meal clogging up the rainbows and your busy pumps keep drowning … Continue reading a letter from the sun
This wasn’t technically written on November 26th but I’m reposting it from November in 2019 as part of Fandango’s Friday Flashback.
In The Power of Imagination, I compared Eichmann to a cog in a clock, unaware of the bigger picture. This morning, when I re-read it, I thought about how it is not the clock that makes time pass. A clock is just a measuring device, like a tape measure or an odometer. All these human concepts. The birds have no clocks and yet they know when to do what. The nest-building, the partner-finding, the egg-hatching, the migrating. It all happens. All around them are clocks, I guess. Leaves falling, buds growing, sun-rises, rain falls, tides, moon phases.
Humans have our clocks and yet we seem to know so little. We know when we need to be at school or at work or how long it is since we ate. But we don’t know when or how to find the right partner, we don’t know how to prioritise raising kids…
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the sun our fair weather friend agreed to an “in-spirit” contract whereby like bottled lemonade his fizz may be captured, flat-packed on roof-tops and then sipped straw-like through wires but some of us prefer, hands in pockets hunting for the gravy of burnt dinosaurs Written for dVerse - Linda's Quadrille prompt "Fair"
look to the grey sky the absence of corners that’s where we are humbled - in that arc, there’s no resting place no flat-footed motel - insipid tiles to drop our tears on with our faces upturned we must listen now and acknowledge fundamentally the persecution of raindrops Written for Miz Quickly QnV 10 Use … Continue reading the absence of corners
What if exhaust fumes were purple... City buildings bathed in amethyst, and windows tinted to wisteria. Lunching on plum benches in a bruised park, sunflowers nodding magenta. Would washing machines whirl out the debonaire sweat of Unicorns and surfers watch storm water run into a periwinkle sea? Perhaps then, we might look up and notice … Continue reading What if…
1) I have tried hairlessness the way it takes from my profile those silver edges. Mammalian softness. 2) The bannered dog sells beauty like shampoo his coat in glorious shuffle Galahs in fearful flight. 3) I walk in the race of cloud shadows wind like falling card houses. Frantic ant highways. I watch my feet. … Continue reading Chorus
(Pink Floyd - "Wish You Were Here") oil - sinewed rainbows rafted up to swirl and giggle riding high on the nausea of a fatty sea your blood’s dark swig sucked and spat your prehistoric core birds in Brylcreme slicked sick I hear them weeping yet I sleep on bubbled in glass so far away … Continue reading Two Lost Souls Swimming in a Fish Bowl
The sun sits in leaky splendour; watermelon juice staining this upholstery this smog brown décor this Faberge sunset this velveteen smoke haze. A cloying choice but here we all sit in our plush living room our shrine of consecrated ignorance and listen to the clock and the crackle roar of our future. Written for Misky's … Continue reading The Place We Live
When a million stars take leave from night duty and arrange themselves on Earth's blackened boughs then you know that tree cries are heard all across this universe we perceive as barren. But tomorrow, when we stand dressed in smoke, completely lost in its ebb and rolling, our asphyxiated wails will vanish quick as bio-luminescence … Continue reading Who Hears the Crying?
pour happy thoughts into your breakfast bowl that summer mayn't dry out hope leaving it on footpaths adrift amongst the stepping stone madness of commuter feet try looking for a moment through the spectrum of flowers petal art by vein they have hearts too open to the sun begging for bees and if they wilt … Continue reading They Have Hearts Too
It was said that all things must pass: the big wheels turning, turning over the drought-lands, the down-and-out lands cattle skeletons ploughed in like rotted ships fence-posts - frayed and far-fetched zippers - dragging lines of wind-sawn wire – dun and drear the fierce fires rolling, roiling wanton flames - the lunge and buck, the … Continue reading Things that Pass
Soldiers (and not only you) they may lie before you die they may lie again when your speechless body is in earth's pouch the close, dark hug of it... your life given for a cause... not yours. Lies are the wounds in all our histories suppurating as tiny texts in little known museums or finding … Continue reading Truth
The sky shiny blue Thai silk - you would rip a portion and hang it like a Mantra curtains leading into the day. Step into the sun the subtle hum of traffic melding with the bees petrol fumes forgotten. Floral scents unfurl rosemary from your herb garden the kalistamon next door a giant Cootamundra wattle … Continue reading How it might’ve been…
Oh my children, born into a world of opposites; dividing lines. The horizon, like the wild words of dictators, stomps parapets and, uneasy, leaves drift by them from tree to ground expecting scorn. Seeds rear bruised heads through soil’s ceiling awaiting crazed weather’s cruel whip. Invisible clouds, our human waste, hug tight Earth’s sphere; suffocating … Continue reading Apology
Out of the Cave 