NovPAD Day 30 (and...) & submission to Visual Verse This month's image is by Kabiyur Rahman Riyad and you can see it here disaster unfolds in the everyday spinning of shapes a car on its side its fling of glass petals and pooling oil mirrors an owl’s hunter carnage, beak’s scrimmage in the body’s loops … Continue reading and then came Rubik’s Law →

NovPAD Day 29 (Truth Poem) Under a giant mural of parrots the bus draws in for the woman with the purple wheelie-bag for the man whose head shines in the sun and for the girl whose uniform is crumpled and whose plaits-ends touch gently her wrists. and the crows ask why why why. She knows … Continue reading why why why →

NovPAD Day 28 (Remix of Day 4) flowers hip hop and bees beat bop they shoulder roll in the daisy shoals purple beaches and star patrols joy in gold's suggestion honey heaped in hexagons dancing is their predilection dancing without any question because that is how the spring unfolds

How he loved his paper planes the crease, the fold, and tuck a pilot’s license he could obtain He’d fold and throw, and throw again watching swoop, and dive, and hooping arc. How he loved his paper planes To read the rest of the poem, please click here. Thank you to Visual Verse Anthology for … Continue reading The Mother & The Dream →

NovPAD Day 27 (resolution) to be simple like leaf litter vowing only to find my place in the wildly clean Earth

NovPAD Day 26 (2nd thought) resubmit like buzzard’s beaks, the hail stones on roof & glass, vendetta drums the storm it comes, the storm it comes shredded trees draw fatal line a folded car, sepulchral wreck the driver’s neck the driver’s neck these storms once freak are now a tax it’s Gaia’s way impugn our … Continue reading Everyday Freak →

NovPAD Day 26 (second thoughts) "on second thoughts," I say "I would rather not that’s all no excuses I just don’t want to"

NovPAD Day 25 (Serious) Tina Newt lives in town where shacks sleep up against each other all huddle and bunkum. Tina’s shack smells of aged coffee and the rinding grime of drought and lavender. Tina loves lavender. Near the front door, frazzled as her own hair, bursting with purple tips, fluffed like Patty Woosan’s only … Continue reading The Lavender of Tina Newt →

NovPAD Day 24 (For...) for the river time is hurtle weight's a concept abstract as dreaming for the river speech is too slow great tongue flaying earth while the stones run and the ground melts solid suffers rummaging beast is deafening for the river water is dragon it cracks the hullaballoo

NovPAD Day 23 (Family) the little girl with the gobstopper plays chess, giant pieces she must bend her knees to carry her brother almost knows the rules and tells her what to do when a stream of watered down milkshake runs through the board "you've already got wet" he says "at the beach" he watches … Continue reading Siblings →

NovPAD Day 22 (Love Poem) like a poem she has set herself free to be understood or not it is wild a kind of ownership & blind the way blindness sees through the dark it is beauty without eyelashes cloud ribbons in a mango sky it is the scarlet bird rising from the cactus

NovPAD Day 21 (use words: button, hold, not, sweep) the widow keeps his buttons (brass) and she’s glued them to the oven door likes to hang her tea towels there in his black shoes (leather) she grows mint, parsley and chives she has cut out their tongues his old favourite hat (woollen) holds eggs on … Continue reading the widow →

NovPAD Day 20. (Conflict) Since the weatherman started dressing like Darth Vader our cul-de-sac’s been sadder than an empty tiffin tin. And then, last week, a gargantuan hole opened in the sky just above our letterbox. As you can imagine a yawn like that attracted the neighbours; all sucked in like umbrellas to a lost … Continue reading lost umbrellas & other zombies →

NovPAD Day 19 (Myth of... ) old gods with rocky knees are all love and cooing this morning. light washes in like painted fire the many coloured blankets aunty clouds draw in and everyone's watching as the mountains dandle a newborn sun ready for pendulum’s almighty swing ‘cross sky’s vast mat and the tickling trees … Continue reading Myth of a Birthday →

NovPAD Day 18. (funny) What ho, Brabantio? That thieves should steal our Friday night! Sixteen and theatre-bound we ate Maltesers without wisdom. Shakespeare seemed to us a slow way to dusty death. Behind hands’ meagre arras and ‘midst quench-ed giggles we meanwhile sprouted plots. To spill or not to spill that was the question. To … Continue reading Now might we do it, pat. →

NovPAD Day 17. (Risk) before that day you didn’t know about risk one shower its battering stream one lifted arm and the water bruising unusual flesh your fingers find it living’s most imminent threat nestled just here beside your rib after that risk is a new measurement coming in an elbow's ache perhaps or the … Continue reading that day →

NovPAD Day 16. (A Panel Poem) bare wood ceilings stretch the traffic of geckos in tongued pine - to lie at night and count their bellies, see their tails drawn out - extended arrows of growth. Another One Bites the Dust beats like the future on the stairs like the drumming of time through my … Continue reading Pine Ceilings →

NovPAD Day 15. (thoughtful/thoughtless) (i) two moons had fallen to form her eyes peached with wisdom my grandfather’s gift (ii) it’s not much a slapping of bin lids and a gentle thunder in my ears spring passing

NovPAD Day 14 (______ Story) a girl sprouts like putri malu beside the chug of sea beside the long grey of low tides beside the topless papaya tree beside air conditioners that groan and drip there are grasshoppers arcing between golfballs and in the wet season puddles slide into every afternoon she speaks bahasa dapur, … Continue reading Expatriate Story →

(inspired by the book "Swans of 5th Avenue" by Melanie Benjamin) NovPAD Day 13 (Ekphrastic Poem - Artwork by Gustav Klimt - "Woman Gold Tears") to him every woman is a portrait and i stood there at the altar framing myself in gold. i sold myself for his collection, for this mausoleum, this house of … Continue reading Babe Paley To Truman Capote →

NovPAD Day 12 (Future Poem) whaddawewant? A FUTURE! whendowewannit? THEN!

NovPAD Day 11 (scary poem) waist high grass & wind’s whimmer she lies in it invisible as a body in a river as a woman going grey gives herself up to growth’s tide & grass’ run bowed over by a thousand blind heads slashed by shadows’ whips she’s drowning in summer, knows the choke of … Continue reading swallowed flies & fallen sky →

NovPAD Day 10 To The Man Who Suggested The Society of Women Writers Constitutes Positive Discrimination (i) what if strength was holding your tongue perhaps the great would have the ears of elephants (ii) I saw the grass bending to the East every gold head cupped against a breast of breeze hymns of casuarinas

NovPAD Day 9 (blank of the blank) we watched from the old hotel past the great bell flowers lunar-white and flared to dancing against the verandah rail in that city of fluorescence we were tiny as match-sticks the park’s humming baize watched breathless too as blackness took a bite a dog – face split dark … Continue reading night of the eclipse →

NovPAD Day 8 (a form poem) & for Rattle's Ekphrastic Challenge from the window I see your arms cradled in other tempests engulfing the dart-stream. it’s a day in monochrome light-skim and leaf-lobby a thick potassic melt, a fiddle-dee-dee of water dashing summer is devoured now its images scribbled over does your skin remember its … Continue reading Ode to a Split Gum →

NovPAD Day 7 - An Adaptation Poem If you were a cloud would you take offence at grey? Call it boring? Ask for pinstripes or one bright sock? No... it’s only because you're not a cloud that the grey falls around you like quiet confusion and your predisposition for skipping seems muffled and trite. So … Continue reading Adaptation or Propaganda? →

NovPAD Day 6: News Story (i) it happened: two days of brown drowning imagine the loss to see one’s self disappearing in this gelatinous top-slide from our known Earth our limbs, without leverage prove fragile as seaweed how inexorably we tunnel in with every writhe and struggle and the inkling cold oozing, wet and tentacled … Continue reading Man Saved from Mud →

NovPAD Day 5 - "Peril" it’s after we take the crossing, the truck’s yearn and grind this fat brown river its sucking flow, eddying and dark it’s soon after that we see him on the track motorbike hang-dog by his side hail-pocked and limping he tells us of a nimbus swarm sudden and inimitable between … Continue reading The Man at Finke River →

NovPAD Day 4. "In the..." look closer beyond daisies’ pink-inked tips to find infinitesimal galaxies & we float between or dart in to shoulder-roll like basking lions on purple beaches among shoals of stars & then home to majesty, to dancing, to a honeyed constellation of hexagons the pantry of gods

NovPAD Day 3 (a misguided poem) the tiny child violin in hand plays three uncertain notes father sits, head down must see the pavement abrasive beneath his feet bow up, bow down coins in the case hair flaps it's a discordant breeze we walk on words in our eyes silent wonder