Cicada

Each word is a brick
obscuring my vision of you,
when I would use none
for this Cicada
on a string;
distilling
all
to the resounding hum
of knowing you are
there beyond
the wall I do not want
to be building,
whispering through
the chink, walking
through walls
weaving trees
climbing up through
a humid earth; flavouring
this cicada song
with breath,
knowing,
before words
and after
when I would use none.


08

Feral Child

05

Feral Child looked for wolves and found a fox
on the golf course - they both hiding, both seen,
she in her orange coat and she in Khaki green.

Both camped out in bushes of thorns, as bold
as ghosts who can't be caught, snapping the traps
layed by the hunters employed just the night before.

Feral Child, a scruffy dove with one wing on her
right shoulder and a swag bag of treasures on her left,
looked the swaggering golfer straight in the eye.

A whittled craft box in her hand, she would emerge,
cocking her head: Can't even carry your own bag Sir,
to escape your Sunday home? I'll sell you these...
and lifting the lid on all the bounty she had found:
...each for a quid, or these: two for a pound!

Her camps were legendary, never owned so never lost,
and so it was with irony that she saw them hunted down...
in others' dreams...she couldn't save the blind moles.

But the other creatures dying in the bush found her -
or the fox's grin - whichever first would quench her thirst;
as it should be, quick; an edible heart, a twist or rip of the neck.

Dead. She would watch the kill, collect the poison pellets left
that scattered her tracks with future cries...So civilised,
the hunter, the guest golfer -and they called her Feral Child.

Disturbance of Shen

Remember the first scream
taking stale breath
and breath not yet breath
from the cavities of memory
through the oval of an open mouth?

Unlike the daily exhale of a sigh
hurtling, hot down nasal tunnels,
heat enough to steam a window,
tears rolling in quantities
of homeopathic salts.

So unlike the comfort of a sigh,
air gurgling over the larynx,
drying teeth, the fluttering
reef slip over lip. There is a rip
and tear to it, an opening; there

in a birth or in the wail of grief
lives something more than expelled air;
when breath could slice a bauble of flesh
in two; scalpel tissue, scissor sinew,
and laser through the pores.

The throat chakra, opening
to a rocket jet tunnel of force,
a primal scream of spores to the sky.
A disturbance of Shen, perhaps making clouds
of rain to wash the skin of the body, the leaf
of a tree, where fuel toxins lie in limbo;
pathogens preparing - there to dust,
for a returning to the earth.


goa

Moth

Perhaps there is no closet
only the drum roll
and the opening
of door upon door
the act of moving thresholds
bringing light to another dark room.
A moth caught
porcelain on a windowpane
a translucency
once again framed.



06

Talking Pond

People come
with such a thirst
to drink, bathe, and ask
will they be richer,
will they be wise,
in this mythical place
by the sea,
where silver statuettes
fountain fresh ripples
on a talking pond;
they clap and it bubbles,
they speak and it replies,
answers are inked,
inkled selectively;
while Ganesha winks
from behind a garland of orange,
one burp of air
for a yes,
two for a no.

Are you leaving myself?

I shuffle, repack my bag,
Are you leaving myself?
lock the door, check it,
stand by the sofa in a trance
waiting for Epiphany to walk
through the door,
set me on my feet,
click her fingers, and say
'Let's go - have you got everything?'



07?

A Still Point

With a tendency to over compensate
for disruptive changes
she felt that a trip to the brain doctor
was imminent

It was Shavasana she wanted
a corpse pose
some metabolic equilibrium

mid tide long tide
cellular breath
homeostasis

so she phoned her

a maintenance call
booking a still point
at the earliest convenience

Delivered by his hand

Bamboo reeds knock glockenspiel notes
blown in by crests from the shoreline,
rocking flutes, climbing the hill of the wind chime wood,
to the dead doctor's agricultural museum,

where his silence wraps ancient tools,
fat gourds, and earthen pots, flowering from the dust.

A bed, a bookshelf; a lullaby
in the shade of photographs:
farming lives; generations of births,
delivered by his hand.

A canoe, a wicker box,
pistols on the wall,
lines of medicine phials filled with salts,
names for healing, names for killing pain;

safe in this oasis; where walls map
cultural, technological,
and pharmaceutical phases,

a place of history and his healing hand,
and a love feeling, spilling over,
of the man.

charcoal lines, sketch 2

8/09
charc2

Told

She needs you, the you
behind my eyelids,
she told me so
and wandered off
busying herself
with making things
from colours collected
in the garden; homespun string,
driftwood, old milk cartons;
fingers busy, looking up
occasionally to check
if I am thinking – I
told you, her eyes say,
don't say I didn't because I did,
glancing over the smoke rings
which might read my mind,
those eyes saying you're
going to get distracted,
and focused, or unfocused, you'll leave
and forget, like you always do,
the I need you, she told me.





08
Inkblot,
Carter Street Review

soft charcoal lines - sketch 1

7/09
charc