just shopping

he misses her in the supermarket finds himself buying things he never would have bought alone hydroponic tomatoes recycled paper for the smallest room there's no one to laugh with he forgot the carry-bag from home again ah well that's the way it goes with the environment everyone's intentions are good how is it that …

mock orange

tangerine sky the day today was a stinker every time I saw the sun it burned me every time I looked into the orb I went blind now tangerine the sky so benign is nothing but a stinker no apology no why no promise to put its ire away just a passive sweet good night …

sabres at patterson river

a flotilla of flat-bottomed sabres red triangled teeth atop the white of a single sail forty strong and tacking as a shoal         tightly bunched with a solitary straggler to the rear and one that is running hard to port and pointed at the piece of flour-soft yellow sand marked out as …

the disruption in Mary’s Room

eeee!!! eeeee!!!! stop it stop it I hate it oh I hate it I didn’t know it would be like that it was the exposure that caused her reaction all of her life was shades of grey dark and light black and bone either full-block or absent eeee!! eee! ee! it was the suddenness of …

backyard latin

the dragonflies the sky the sun behind a dancefloor suggested in the air tango sharp they are they are over here then they're over there how then did they learn to dance in the air like this slow slow and quick-quick then a slow my dear let me around you I’ll-stay close a dragonfly tango …

mote song

music is reverberation ~ I hear the song sung by rays of sun as they fall they strike motes of the colored dust that fills the air spin them round listen to the faint vibrations the day sings ~ sun strike me  hard spin me around that I can add my own tremoring and harmony to …

Picture on a Wall

pasteled into a picture-frame is landscape slow blowing a breath of heated wind through my hair underneath a eucalyptus branch showing bark as fine as paper done in greys and reds and the brown map of cicatrising insect trailings into mountain shapes faded by a hazy distance like dim colour-clouds filtering the vision that is …

self portrait via life-draw

I have charcoaled a man I am inking a woman he wears a short goatee and no distinctive features she bears a tattoo that adorns the skin of her back like remnant lace from the rumple of a negligee tossed carelessly away his head is drawn as round as a circle and overly tiny I …

a visit home

he wheezes a first outing into uncontrolled air and it exhausts him completely as though he has been laboring for hours his breath hoarsely stertorous verging on distressed he looks around everywhere the familiar home of fifty years is more than halfway to seeming a stranger his first beer after a week of hospitalization taken …

axeman: a philosophy of the woodpile

sometimes like life a round of sawn firewood is too damn hard so will it be the axe or the splitter perhaps the wedge and a hammer maybe there is no way to cut through that knot but if you take the round at the outer you can slice after slice it apart and what …