[When you think you’ve grasped the core]

On the shining glass coffee table, squat in the living room, a package.

Brown and loose paper wrapping held together by persistent string
that frays in annoyance when you sit down and unravel it.

A person is like its contents. Strange. Loose in the hand.
Just enough marbles to fill a purse, and a throwaway memory of collecting them over a lifetime of street-sides.

You sit on the sofa with your daily mail. With impatient, trembling fingers,
you attempt to imprison something that shivers in the morning sun like a dream. 

Origami anticipations bubble in the now-frothy mid-day air,
when you loose the fourth or fifth layer.

Inside there is
a paper frog, 
that leaps out onto the floor
and hitches a ride on the breeze.

[The forest of jungle-trees]

I leave and return again
to the forest of trees
made for jungles, with their hanging vines
threaded like telephone wires
I can't make a call with
even if I wanted to hear old voices.

I am here with measuring tape
and a sketchbook of things
I encountered, on my long meandering travels,
acorns and apple pies,
assymetrical, the shape of lies,
I've come to measure them against the trees.

I pepper the paper 
with pointilistic numbers,
hoping they will grow
into drawings of flowers,
wildflowers and grasses
that cling to me even
when I lose those other unimportant shreds of identity.

[Fragments: No goddesses for between-space places]

I
The woman is lying outside of my body / the lyric in her is not my lyric but it/
harmonises in some discordant cicada song/ in the break of dawn brick-white.

II
Before nightfall I'll lock her out/ for lock me out she already has/
us two on drifting driftwood wreckage/ in the bright darkness of the morning.

[Metal in my bones]

The world is an iron skeleton
with a favouritism towards softness,
ribcage cradling butterflies
the colour of dandelions and tears

but not all things ironic
are poetry.

Either I'm a bitter farmer on the fringe
doomed to shatter the souls of children or
maybe metal isn't cruel, metal is just
used.

Metal is cutlery at the dinner table,
a knife through bread and butter, so 
why only sing of the plates with floral rims
and not the forks and spoons you eat with? 

The way I am is embedded into my bones;
if I tried, I could peel away the outer layer
rich white in calcium and show you
the rage-coloured marrow hiding within.

If only you would look,
and not say
how frightening, 
that I should think that way

because I never intended to become
the person you believe I am,
because I was a hard-hewn, shining slip
of ore before you arrived
and made me care
what you think.

Album.

dog-eared pages of images
 rusty green
     playground slide
 and see-saw
     between the last time i wrote
 poetry about the past and
     now.
 now whittles away
     between my fingers,
 like a speck of dirt crumbled
     and flicked to the side
 blown by bustling breezes.

 i leaf through pages
 with a guitar strummer
     crystal clear, and
 clearly never used.
     how many dreams
 i spin will end up the same
     a dry, dusty museum?

 but spring-cleaning
 without the spring
 is just self-sabotage.

 i keep my precious things
 inside an album. 

Sandstone Skin

Spills of salt, crystal
on the sandstone skin;
I think of how the sediment
might layer, deep within.
Heat that chokes, the narrow
cheeks, the knapsack skin;
I think of how the veins perhaps
are furious, stuck within.
Spills of salt fall crystal
down on sandstone skin;
I think of how my history
has fossils, deep within.

The City Bird Tries to Leave

Tugging strings of blue
from between the railway lines
and electric pylons, the wires
are tangled with them.

Birds before me left them here,
before the year
was empty tracks
and cold brittle dust front to rear.

Fiery orange sky hums disapprovingly
folding cloud-arms at me, the crows
are pealing in the distance, but I
tug the strings of blue from me
and set them free
and set them free.

Do they fly free? I can only see
so far, the road accordioning
into cumulus stairways where
recycled air is cycling.

There is an Inner Sanctum

Engine pistons ripple,
circulating the flow
of blood around my body.
In the guts, ideas spark
where the absence of light
ignites them.

Outside this intestinal home
a pianist looks over his shoulder
to see if anyone’s listening.
Gilded instruments confuse
hyperlinks, leaping between
one mind, between the others.

The colour red darkens
as it meanders away from the heart.

The Best Words

The light easy words that melt away in the heat
between two hands, two pressing clinging hands
are not for me.

The best words are of stone, building cave systems,
burrowing into the blazing centre of the Earth
where I can walk.

Where I shake off thin nylon twists that tie me
to every other woman transfusing me an opinion
that’s not my own.

III – Cleansing Solvent (or Memento Mori)

I poured a bottle of death
Like cleansing solvent
A cork-stopped vintage fluid.

It dissolved
The shapes of faces
I only grasped skin-deep;

It dissolved
Rotten sheaves
Of identification in the shredder;

It dissolved –
Left my workspace cleared, but
Not myself.

I did not dissolve myself.