All The Way Home

i

Beginnings deteriorate
Even the second knock sounds
an imitation

The scraping of shoes on the mat
the soil trapped in the tread
The space once travelled
which then feels known
arches back like a snare

There is a particular silence
only found under the feet
of a traveller at rest

As windows of hotels sing back
at the motors of aeroplanes


ii

To stretch your arms
around both sides of his body
Pull him close to your chest
rock the squalling flesh
into a curved hush like
a horizon


iii

These soft annunciations
breathed into frontiers
of hard flesh

dewclaw words coiling
beside a tangle of legs
agape in silence
at the look of things

The pigment darkens
as skin covets its own
articulation


iv

In summer
made pretty by smell
of frangipanis

There are these mornings
where heat deadens everything
where
you don’t remember your own name
until you hear it

What if you lay with a stranger?
What if you fell asleep and woke
beside him?
Recognised your shape in the sheets
your colour against the white

Could you coyly
become a sound?


v

Geometric alphabet
with its sharp edges
offers no security for the memory
It cannot keep the devout
gushing of the mouth

greedily taking in what it can
hold of the voice
what it can retain of what was seen
bristling in the water

This point
which cant be reached
can be called separation
no matter the distance

Blue Alice

absurdity of trying
to grip a fish
with needle fins
as it flaps gills
gulps choking air

hook mouth
to a memory
silence swells
to a freak wave
a wall of water

the smallness
of a body sucked
ten metres under
water beneath
a ledge of rock

Forearm

to thought

swollen bulb
to
thumbprint

mouth to valve

words that barely
fit in
the throat

i
drop to
your

pillowcase

Making Room

describing you
to myself

i pour hot

in silence
an ampoule

cooled glass

a moment
before desire

Seminal

Deep in the throat
they laugh-
hungry little bodies
with their pointing bones
fastened with buttons
hooking eyes

He has seen her
alone
through her window
turning her body in
the mirror

This is a gift
(she tells him)
Takes his wrist

Fingertips focus
in childlike
desire

It may take
root
grow inside
leave accompanied
by words and sounds
Thoughtless

In her parents’ bed
Red mouth agape
she listens to his
whispers

He lies
beside her
slightly
Off-centre

Counterpart

When I watch you choose your face in the morning.
When you hold the silk voice to your unshaven cheek.
Muffle questions with the scarf of your full throat.
I want to bite your tiny glass fingers,
snag the fibres of your lungs
in my clenched cat teeth
with indifference.

It stays like this,
holds to the refrain.
Strains to open and wriggle free
then leans back into itself.
A perfect disciple.

This is how we queue to touch you.
In the middle of your chest
dousing for certainties-
through the ribs,
through the pink flesh,
through the mouth.

Sensed Through Opaque Windows

It’s hard to understand architecture
when my past is sea and desert.

It could be that these things are not
simultaneous.
When you kiss me and the inside of your mouth is the colour of mulla mulla, it makes my feet burn. Then, I am standing on the red earth in the middle of the day and a girl’s voice shouts “you look deadly sis”.
Beside you now in this rectangle of flowers, in the pocket of my black jersey dress, my fingers find forgotten cherry pits (I ate them to wash those last words out of my mouth)

These pieces of memories I haven’t known
lie lightly.

Undone by the closeness of the ocean, forgetting returns in pieces. With the skin of my body resting on the skin of your body. We form small patches of darkness between us-
As smoke, leaving, the fire aspires to a more spacious form.

Todays encased
in yesterdays
Tiny birds in eggshells

Smaller

Next

In latter versions
it was told somewhat
differently

Her following always
the direction in which
her toes pointed

Her disinterest in
recognition leading
to the still belly

Le prochain
Write something
(don’t write something)

Not Enough To Fold

Forgotten like air
without movement

The simple dream
of people talking

Animate with hunger
for the unexpected

While the woman
I used to be
sleeps

What Have You

A lean beast
in a recurring dream
feeding on sound

It wasn’t here
Never even passing
close

It touched me in the way
a lover’s words do
when they talk in their sleep

When their tongues don’t
move

Hulled seeds of truths
Sluggish buds

Before the trap of morning-
the questions of daylight-
the tallying of proof
with dusk closing
around each certainty

Scalloped into my thoughts
by soft arched words
a gentle query arranges itself
in the emptiness of my mouth

The pulse behind my eyes
measures quiet in vowels
quickly swallowed

Three Part Tale Spin

(i)

I’m thinking of a night full of birds
A confusion of wingbeats and soft
collisions that feel like heartbreak

Crowds are gathering on the hill
in their pink masks
to watch the sky which dwarfs us all
It’s the colour of the desert
Stealing our shadows in funnels of dust


(ii)

They’re there to see a poem unfolding
Where words haven’t arrived
A small underscoring of half-slept moments
Of forgetting weakness

Here we are again
Away from them
and your hands are in my hair
My face is in your chest
You smell of cigarettes and solitude
Your voice is close to my ear
in a form I know but don’t understand
This is no story you’re telling
in bare-knuckled braille
It has a narrative I cant follow
back to your mouth

This is the easy eye of beauty
Silence of the planets and falling starlings
in a cosmic tailspin of absurdity

The black stones under my feet are still warm
from when the sun burnt them
in the middle of the day
I wonder where I left my shoes

(iii)

Naked of meanings your face eludes me
Still the words aren’t coming
The patterns are there
lightening then darkening
The sounds amplify
bird cries swell thick
higher now
with throats full of clouds
Caught as they rise
No truth we’ve been
offered corresponds to this
These are feats of the imagination
To feathered applause and closed eyes

My skin is my mind
These are my dreams
they bring it all closer
Sink it in

Crawl up under my sheets
under a blanket of memory
warp and weft of surfaces of things
Woven threads of messages received
from every cell touched, held, imagined
Hold it, touch it again to remember
whisper into it
into the scars
into the dull ache
like a bridge from some place not located in my body

Or write it and I’ll read it to my hands
with my fingertips in a soft slow scrawl

(red)

Little glass pen that I chew on,
wound my expression with
wet closeness of cut lips.
To answer him
with sticky kisses.

Undo the corset of
diminishing faith,
unsigned, unsighed,
unsounded air, that
fills my mouth with gifts.
Sealed and forgotten in pink bows;

the colour of hearts which are
not organs behind our ribs.
Not the liquid which passes
through carrying the
mineral of my will,
beating my submission,
keeping my feelings
and thoughts
pumping together

in a bloody rush of
a tongued faltering that
braves fire.
Lick the cinders
from my white skin,

desires relics are
slipping the leash with disguised teeth,
to announce the beginning is over.

Kiss (A Cinquain)

Your kiss
The dark shadow
between your open lips
or the mouth surrounding it gives
pleasure

Torch Song

“All the secrets a wise heart has
must be more hidden than the Phoenix is
Because concealment in that oyster-shell makes the pearl
From that water drop that comes from the depths of the ocean”

~from The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayam



Putting out candles with my tongue again
and wearing tiny blisters for days.
I can barely taste my food.

Where statements might be invitations
there should be silence.
Little, stitched-up, sewn together
secrets that stay where they are;
rather than bleed from a vein which suffocates with a blackness.
Pushing with backs of cupped hands
a fine layer of powdery tenderness to the periphery.

We knew about this love,
we learned about it in mirrors.
Cold, clear, we decorate ourselves in front of it.
To obscure what we see, to conceal more than a blush
or forked lightning in our eyes at the sound of a name.
Until hiding is habitual. A proud discipline.

The humble portion, still,
inside is held, nurtured, transformed.
To expose it becomes a soft, slow loss, a seeping.
It aches as tears of a little lost girl, alone in a place of bones
and skulls. Telling herself stories, while the wind encloses her
in a relentless lullaby of an emptiness.
This is impossible to wrap in the warm strangeness of words.
This image of a pocket inside a jacket sealed with tiny stitches
which should remain unpicked. Stays and expands,
becoming all.

A Poem To Read In The Dark

To read without breathing
between these fragments of words
find me
with your lips
here, press your finger to them
now and say tongue
nipple waist toe
belly button earlobe
Neck offered
a wrist exposed

These things we hide
to discover
beneath beneath
like crying or dreaming

The laughter we seek
as destination, a drawing-
bodies as bridges
arched spine arm elbow thigh
warm blood coursing
below the surface

The thoughts sent to air
or paper
The perfect wisdom of bodies

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

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

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.