Unlike my desk or room and bookcases the garage is a mess that hides things. The extra set of screw drivers handles eaten by rats. That ball of twine, now I have a baker’s dozen. I never left the fencing pliers by the one inch joiners in that box. Surely something else, an incantation a … Continue reading Ludwig’s Riff

I heard from Hooper you were dead like whale song in watery fragments through Donovan’s harmonica see you running down the corridor in velvet defiance of the headmaster’s ropes to separate the sexes that lasted as long as peace you and Debbie chided my chauvinism over My Lai photos that dragged barbed wire through our … Continue reading Last Days of Watsonia High

How simple in the end: to smell the vinegar of an infant’s head this blink: how different to the beginning, when the whole world collapses to a baby’s cry. Know the pomegranate cheated with hibiscus flowers, and siren ficifolia recruited through marooned stars falling in an aureole of shell bursts (the blue mosque unseen the … Continue reading Last Breath of an Unknown Soldier, at Canakkale

Simon sits in the paddock entrance alone at his table with his drawings, in his pocket a piece of cotton jade (Number 29 of Work Team 3). Although the State has copies it promises to keep, he worries New Europe doesn’t want to remember, how much love passed down that road (Avenue 1 New Life … Continue reading Map Maker of (Number Five)

it’s like hurtling through the moment of creation where the dog beguiles the trajectory of convoyed vans slogging it out to the next town a grand marquee in centre hinges all these grounds flings of carousel shift between performances taking the gloves off rushing to the country and western dark voice sings white love strums … Continue reading Darby Put a Spell on You/When the Stars Begin to Fall

Spooky day. Mist so low and custard thick The river noiseless, a longboat prow Could come across the veranda. Cats have embraced all of yoga, curled As mollusc shells where spines shouldn’t bend. The orchard stripping crows are finally speechless, Stooped in their overcoats, raggedly on guard For something with the password. The air’s gone … Continue reading Autumn Break

I no longer seek to understand the shilly shag of aspiration more the settled stone why try to steal the wind? having seen the veils of rhetoric fall to tumbleweeds out of the ribs of ambition skilled out slim as fish bone swallow a broken habit breathe it out cloud a thing of loose direction … Continue reading In Respite, at Sixty-Six

The cemetery cat asleep on the warm headstone careless of the worthy mason’s curfew ignores the adjustment to place my fingernails caught in the fierce scree of memory I try to place the language of a pebble from when we slept huddled at Roaring Meg waking laughing snoring back at snowflakes carried by a pilgrim’s … Continue reading Heart Stone

This is the transmission of leaves the eatings worth of physillids a dusting of nigella seed within the guilty fingerprint by the unravelling meander after rain all cochineal as maple floats those burnt ceramics of summer now cracked and soothed under shade turned to a gentle tajine of promise an exclamation of hover flies pretending … Continue reading The Transmission of Leaves