pumpernickel sky, low cut & dense grinding its heels in the carpark lights are on browsed by white teeth; the sleety rain splintering your hood, umbrella tick & charcoal puddles find traces of dry humour breathe hah hah! your hands are bloodless and burning Written for dVerse quadrille with Linda Lee Lyberg "browse"
a rush of light between buildings and everything is white or black or singed with silver like a knife’s flash or a fish’s leap and there I am age 8 and the river is weeping while trout heave and thrash on death lines under a quiet sun Written for Twiglet # 281 "quiet sun"
I rake leaves and contemplate the selling of beauty as a capitalist ideal: boxed and essenced, smelling sweet. Meanwhile, the western sky rips apricot horizons from blue. Another day ends in brutal waxing. No, hun. That's just a sunset. I read Misky's lovely Sevenling and thought... that's a form I could try! I hope you … Continue reading Sevenling (I rake leaves..)
this wind kicks pieces of autumn through a slatted fence and my stratospheric eye chases neon in cerulean blue - orange pekoe stars from plane tree toss. this day is poised before a seasonal hand shakes down winter shutters, the rattle of bare wood and trigger breezes, sunken sky and the whip-snap of frost in … Continue reading Transition
Le Sommell by Salvador Dali Lately she finds sleep propped on fragile sticks // vinegar nights their pale heat blanching the sky. Closed eyes reveal nothing but absence // unbalanced retreat of shadows into thought. It's all a constant toppling, reaching for Earth but thrashing on... this cursed flight Written for dVerse Quadrille Monday "In … Continue reading Insomnia
yes, you hang untainted by the rusting of trees or their bare-fingered poking all these days of rain fall, falling, fall full moon round as possibility a vast, bright musical note in your stave of power lines washed clean in the black glass sky star choirs mute and brittle the thickness of a cloud its … Continue reading full fall moon
Or Rejecting Trajectory Let the night leak in, and distant fog from lamp’s yellow gaze... chemical smoke, and history, green the dark. Maybe cold can save me from drowning among blood-warmed black drapes, whisperless and listing. Far-off, like wishes, my bones walk in moon grit and the echoed twittering of disturbed birds. I’m still wondering … Continue reading Disbelief
Black Mountain Tower raises its hand, claiming clear air from low cloud smudge left by yesterday's rain. but the sun is distracted long flamboyant arm chooses a flock of birds, their timeless endeavour - sky-tiny and intrinsic - refugees from light to light. perhaps this is how the world will end - a triumphant sparkle … Continue reading Beauty
cloud, the doctor says implies humidity sometimes, the doctor says it’s not cloud, just colour she sees now her brain in a dry tank perhaps like printer cartridges she sees now fine powder ink without moisture what colour is thinking? chemically descended it’s a coloured bottle and out there, a shaded distorted world what colour … Continue reading Thought Haze
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
this woman measured in tears stands oblique to the drumming when she bends her head those ears like waterfalls and shoulders calculating ache if ache could nestle, or if ache was some thing between blades chopped onion, or the stretched cord you don’t want cut, letting go the crying. Written for msjadeli's dVerse poetics prompt … Continue reading letting go
In the Carpark in the carpark long puddles my wheels splinter a church steeple and wobble autumnal trees later, feeling daring I plant my boot in the wide grey sky and watch it rattle like wind juice Written for Twiglet #277 "wind rattles"
The chicken preens. Filaments of skin, feather tip casings: fallen yellow like static on my sleeve. How readily it knows the art of being itself - a million tiny recollections of an unmet mother. But in the yard magpies ogle. I have my uses. written for dVerse Quadrille #151 (44 word poem including the word, … Continue reading Mothering a Chick
A Cadralore (i) generous celebrations parcels wrapped in newspaper intriguingly initialed WLFMAD in thick black texta (ii) we’re all born a bit shrivelled sultana'd in the womb but my ears retained it curling from my skull sometimes I pin them back and imagine mixing two-part adhesive with a match stick on a small off-cut of … Continue reading Gifts
I try to think kindly of Icarus, waxed feathers and florid heat melted wax, & boiled tears he leaned into that bud of sun too far he believed & the hot rose beckoned greasing the sky with his epiphany the oily swathe of his feathered fall a grim sort of way to be a legend … Continue reading modern suns
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
Image: Ned Kelly by Sidney Nolan After E. E. Cummings' Poem [Buffalo Bill's] Dear Ned, born in a drink poor Irish lad aged 12, lost his Dad dressed like a letterbox & held up The Mail (to pay for his bread) your money or his life … hanging by that thick thread his last horse … Continue reading Ned Kelly
In the style of Kay Ryan In the backyard strands of trash plastic, twine or haberdash scratched up from decades now past by chooks. They don’t aim to be iconoclasts; they just scratch and their beady eyes seek bugs or roots or wormy writhe. And as they dig the little chicks check the minutiae of … Continue reading Watching Chooks
Twiglet #275 beached words: silver grain or threaded weed, fishy skeletons of age-old rules, evolution’s suck and stench that’s English frisbee words, handled with a strong wrist flat and placid, good for skimming. silver flick and thrumming rings that’s English pop-up shop words, noisy arcade or neon words, big-headed pushy words, elbowing to the front … Continue reading World of Words
the sun slouches slovenly as syrup down Mt Taylor's west side the small girl swings, white sandals, touching the sky, tiny toes flexed a dog scampers tags like tinkling shells, tinny as new stars in a paperback sky Written for NAPWRIMO Day #22 "write a poem using repetition" I was trying to repeat sounds
(i) do you remember our cave & the money tin full of dreams sitting in the bush crafting our souls among ant sand and the crumbs of Dutch Rusks one birthday we rode pillion on your Dad’s motorbike and music was playing “we wanna get out of this place” and you did. arms spread like … Continue reading Money Tins & The Milky Way
"Roses" by Anna Eliza Hardy cut from the waist a fallen petal measures the weight of shadows written for dVerse poetics - using the name of a rose in a poem or as a title. I chose the name "Absent Friends".
"The Roaster" by Pablo Picasso this one feather-struck and cock-eyed and tongue hard-wired to drunken yell yodel yay eeeeee! he says do you love it? my self-portrait it's the psychedelic '70s so you see i am the dawn, ladies from wishbone to tail feather i am the dawn hear me roar he tapes himself on … Continue reading Disillusioned
(i) my kite strings sagged, dragged like caterpillar lumps, the soft grass not offering any lift skies don’t laugh, just watch brightly; pale pinions and the rimming Earth and a quiet fleet of butterflies the ones seen and shimmering (ii) the paddock, wide as literature, finds me in the middle examining a ladybird, crawling on … Continue reading Five Answers
I am collecting the disliked bits: myself as dark, ridged stones, frothy with knitted-in flesh. I would change, given a wand and grace (that ineffable word, silver as a cat’s arch) but I’m spittle-shot and thin of eye unable to see a way out of the orange moon-glow. My conscience, an apricot clamour - juice … Continue reading Inner Voices
A Curtal Sonnet The lake’s skin shifts; stolen colour and flicked light, and already, as we park, my camera craves the view. The museum’s bright shapes, provoking modern lines and beyond a gulls’ shirred cry, a wake in foamy white where a wind-surfer-cloud sheers swiftly the lazuli blue and to the north, two cranes necking, … Continue reading Easter Saturday Walk
A Villanelle I have no interest in the news in which I can’t find a marbled fact, just people with power spouting views I feel I have to hunt for clues where truth and fiction interact I have no interest in the news I want hope, tea with kindness, light diffuse; not lies like eggshells: … Continue reading No News Nancy
birds-eye-view of the nullabor stretching like the mulga sky fell down map flat, and folded abruptly to the sea watch the blue Kombi inside, two brothers play in a cot skin stained pink from dust; used to long swims and tent sleeps and helicopters and camp food, lots of blokes around and school of the … Continue reading Introducing Josephine
(My Horse) My attention is drawn to the endearing pucker of skin behind ears the shape of candle flame, my fingers in your mane and your thick smell inhaled sunshine and chaff dreams like floating Sundays. It’s afternoon in the big shed: shreds of Earth’s skin flicker in long golden slides, an air-space slaked with … Continue reading Wahambi Bashar
Out of the Cave 