Contemplation

We are mutes.
discovering each
other in words
and sparse notes
without lyrics.

Amongst other happenings,
we will forget this
and yearn for it
again.

Envying others
who have found it.
We will pity ourselves
for losing it.

We are lost,
in our wandering gazes
and so many faces.

Enclosed within ourselves,
our breath, to not
blow out candles,
or feed fires.

Inarticulate longings as
eloquent prayers.
With swollen tongues
in closed mouths.

We will smile silent.
Later we will grope
for a sound.

There will be uneasy
nights with everything
bare and distant.

I will ask you nothing
and answers will come
from everywhere.

Kolkata

Listening for you
Your capable lips
warbling birdcalls

Like an unseen cat
coming toward me
through long grass

Flattering skin with
harmonic variations
To leave cheerful
mouths open

Your almost sounds
move nearly closer
Behind me women
shuffle perfumed
with frangipani

My face averted
Shaded by a banyan tree

Back pressed against
ivory walls painted
in egg white and
tamarind

I sit writing
submerged flowers
tied to stones

The Unsaid

If I could send you something today
it would be 500 white pages
For you
to place your own words onto

This morning as the sun yawned
stretched
Through my window
Across the bed
Your side
empty

I slipped from my cocoon
Eyes closed
to place my mouth on yours

Aware
that the husk left on the bed
in all its silken quiet
would never speak
as honestly of love

Read on that soft skin
in the light that plays around it

All

the unsaid
the unnameable
the unsayable

wordless poetry of my love

To Have

In these hours before dawn
that aren’t night-time

My hands feel empty

All day
they move about
without seeing themselves
They point at things

Only one of them is quicker
As your eye settles on other things

Sliding over the page
it feels and conceals
Doodles the mind’s thoughts
The heart’s longings

Steadies the cup
at the utterance
of a hopelessness
Positions itself as a shield

In these hours before dawn
that aren’t night-time

This hand can’t hear your voice
Can’t reach over to wake you

Won’t taste the face it touches

It yearns to articulate
an emptiness
Shape the clay
that explains

In a quiet heap
beneath sleeping breasts
as separate as stars
hands rest
Holding their secrets

In these hours before dawn
that aren’t night-time

This hand runs a bath
tests the temperature
signals the body
to follow

Reluctant Cartographers

There are words
that should only be spoken
into the solemn skin of a sleepy lover
In the closeness of an exhausted room

Losing track of time
reluctant cartographers set out
as sighs

Faint tracings over contours
and hidden reefs

Mapping the gentle anchorage
of the palm of a hand
in the small of a back

Placing names beneath gestures
Stripping emblems
from the statuesque calm
of an understanding

Guiding
lips to the cusped arch
of an ear
to speak in whispers

Trapdoor

Trapdoor of things half-said
in whispered non-disclosure

Your thoughts
I count on timid fingers

One
A stranded boat
Two
halves of your face between brightly pinked nipples
Three is a blueprint of perfect humility
Four
swarming of your hands asking for lips
Five
you think to step aside

That’s on one hand

Your mute presence filling silence
Breathing through my pauses
guiding this
yearning to the hidden course
of words to words to come

Circling

He is here again today.
Sitting
watching his daughter
building sandcastles

Crying,
he turns to me,
nods.

I am here again.
Walking into the wind,
my dress too thin,
my arms around my waist.

The heat is restricting
movement.
Holding people indoors,
or here.

All still.
All stirring.

I’m walking faster,
through the absences
words can’t fill.

Inchoate

My existence in you

With a clairvoyant salute
of shadow hands

She grins
behind your closed mouth
Enjoying the sensation
of tongue to tongue

My existence in you
A brightening
of encircled edges
Bundled into cellophane letters
Pink tiptoeing
the rhythm
of your lonely walk

Unable to see
your wounded eyes
she wont run

Obscure to herself
In the glowing church
of your skull
undressed
in tomorrow’s memory
She climbs atop the altar
in a camisole of flowers

My existence in you
has promised conjugal visits
I also
love this shining likeness
of myself

Her Room

Spider spinnerets shroud
the curtainless windows
with shuddering webs

In the diffused light
The chair where days of aching sat
The corners
where shadows darkened
and chased out sound

There a view once extended
to be severed by eyelids
shut

Here the residue of emptiness
drags itself into your lap
to unfold your white hands
curl

As the morning upturns
luminous and gasping

We Entwine

I had an inkling
More than delicate tears
and soft lips

More than a sip
from your golden malice

Unfettered by affection
Surrounded by miser’s smiles

In the aftertaste
of your voracious tongue

The rolling apples
of your words

Beneath
the dimly vanishing

The common language
of selfish flesh

Cipher

Detached
from the body of meaning

Clotting
in a blackening red

Your words

Emissaries
of a fearless razor
to bulging lies
englobed
in the closed
nervous system
of our beguiled gaze

A slight shift of focus
from the cloying scent
of our collective fear

I Write

because my fingers are long and thin
and they can't grasp everything.
A lot of the time I keep them in my pockets.

Instead,
I balance things on the end of this pencil,
skewer them with it,
turn them around to get another view.

I encase them in graphite
so no one else can really see them
but we know they're there
in the shadows.


I can kiss the skin beneath your earlobe.
I can capture a bird and tame it.
Teach it to say your name or recite a poem.
I can make my father a kind man.
I can visit all the houses you ever lived in
or didn't.

I can resurrect the 2am ardour of room 203,
Pinjarra Motel,
and make it resemble the tv static
that lit it.
It dissipates.

I can wander from floor to floor, smiling,
can peer in windows.
I can replace the chattering teeth
with a thick heavy silence.
I can write an ode,
can make my father a kind man,

can swallow broken glass or swords.

I can catch a bullet between my teeth.
I can hold it.

Furnace

Now
The only thing that can be taken
has

Those small mornings
with so little left
A gesture
A sensation
A residual smell that cloys
A curl of hair stuck to a cheek with sweat

Life has closed over
Still
No deficit

The dark blue bird folds its wings
The sky stretches a little further
Some earth blackens
White ash falls
The circle excludes what can’t be eaten

The prolapsed womb of the universe
continues dragging down deities

White knuckles in a pretty hand
with lilac veins and bitten nails
and a curl of hair stuck to a cheek with sweat

The enormity of a singular image
in a morning where bridges hang slack
against a backdrop too large for the stage

A white bed with green sheets

The wisdom of martyred prophets rests
at the bottom of the ocean to graze hulls
Skeletal wreckage awaiting
a spawning
drifting to flower
Polyps
gelatinous hands to cocoon an ache
against a dry wind clothed in language