broken hill, 1993- 2000

beans like holidays
withered, black spots like sunshine
i throw them sideways till they learn
better than to wither

it's the tarp over the swimming pool,
1993, and i am in board shorts and brimming
my head over the water, my pale body
wants nothing and i am thinking less
than drowning more, rescued by a man, ok.
it's 37 degrees, the sun hops over the shade
and i stand on the steps but i want to go
where the sun is twinkling brightly.

it's nighttime and the revelry is in full swing
i think we gave up backyard cricket hours
before the beer whistled through the grown-ups
teeth, they had eskies like triage units
set by the fence, made better seats
than temples, i guess the swimming
pool haunts me, i can hear its pump
when there is a lull.

someones eyes crash into mine, i don't
remember who they were, it's nearly as
hard to remember who i was-
more evidence see, like pencil lines on the
wall. one of those years i was tall enough
to pull the pin on the fence and go into the
pool, i had forgot the sun, my hair would turn
green, i think i would go under and come
up again, rushing water from my face and
maybe i was 12, close enough to strangle
myself with awkwardness-

she wasn't my cousin, i guess everything can't be
as cliche as everything else, or what we want it
to be...but she was probably years older
and i tented slightly, and she grinned
like the same as when the sun was twinkling
in 1993 and the pool noodle and kickboard of bright yellow and weird purple bobbed at the surface
and if i dove in i would drown
but i did anyway

and i was rescued, but how do you rescue yourself
from the year 2000 and the cute but fiendish
mocking of a girl who you can't really remember
but for shorts which will dry on the fence
and be reshaped again and again by nothing
more than a memory?

-
i go back to the beans, i know them now,
that i have spilled them from open hands,
they are as slippery as memory, or
as well crunched upon, leaving me to
misspell nearly all that i am as i split my
shell on what has been.

see there was a boy

so there was a cradle

the button

off his pajamas lost

after mud in tea-cups 

playing nice for his sister and with the warp

of smiles

the damage is done in tow

in slowly unbuttoning 

his 

softness down to a man 

in a bed with his thoughts 

on being dressed, 

again. 

socks on, rocks off again

i hope i can be as young as betty white, less
less
fade out
elongate the "a" in your mouth,
well, it stands for my name,
but
really
i wanna put my cock in your mouth.
elaborate.
not the castellan.
not gentile.

slam shut the door, have a seat, pour wine into a bowl and stick my throat in

fish your underwear from
the nice reply i had prepared
it lacks the idealists ...punctuation.

gravity wears your panties in my dreams
i like the smoothness of your thighs,
the aching colour of your vulva,
the christmas tree of grooming,

want to hang my angels dead from it.

my sex wants yours,
with wry intent.

if my cock was in your mouth
i guess it wouldn't be in your pussy-
that's the logic of want.

but i am a good samaritan.
i think i'll leave my clothes on.

cosmos of us

it's like breathing in outerspace

my

oh

my 

so profound the cluster fuss

that years of hanging from the vine 

hoping that you'd pick me and dust 

me off with your tongue 

feels cerebral

rather than just plain love lorn.

i say IT'S LIKE BREATHING IN 

asteroids, comets, space dust,

splattered paint, dwarf stars 

and little rocks twined around her 

finger. 

it's the pulse of a star as you flicker 

the switch a million times or, 

playing my heartbeat: a million more. 

your hand is on the hand of another, 

it's tuesday, i imagine soup and day old bread

in an apartment where every step bounces skin 

pinballing jars, reliquaries, full of my tears 

and it's still tuesday and i see you out the window 

with a winsome smile and a man in shorts with 

mocha coloured skin, and i plead the heavens 

to explode and that gravity will pull you through my 

window but the nob is stuck and the air in here 

is still or sucked out and maybe by throat is 

wet or dry and i sip at my godless offering 

and you're sliced, stabbed, shredded by the window pane 

crashing through you and before you is a mirror 

and you see only my feet as i am rushed past 

you through the sky and into the sun 

and i am dead a million times or more 

than the time i died when you left me and 

it's like breathing outerspace 

but really it's like being human 

and not wanting to be all at the same damn time. 

"...changed the channel"

on t.v
the well dressed mannequins
hazelnut eyed wall paper
concerto concerto

the bassoon,  with sick mimic
i retched into a street
you would

walk over my body, my wild
side of offering
dead daffodils growing alive
by the chelation
of lead from my soul.

i was shot in 1998,
meryl streep in a silver shot
beard
like dropping b-52's
in a bar
for young hooligans.

last night
you asked me why i died,
and i responded by saying:
"you changed the channel".

catgut

my catgut eyes string themselves

my body is tuned too sharp

mouth like fishing line

mountains like silver clefts
over by the cloud wreaths

i purchased spain
from my worn
fallen out teeth

incisors hobbled on the table
by the hook and line

for you, i spend a comma
 make the poem pause

i celebrate you with less
words than

imagine:

a violin by your chin
and my song in a chair
with strings thrumming
between the light
begged by our eyes.

you have been my favourite thing this year

one time in

as if saying goodbye were harder than 

just plain gone.

my tears wont follow you north

but i am braver now, 

in song, in lullabies of poetry; 

ham-fisted

mocked by my keys as the settle into 

the door. 

they know. 

not sure if you do, as if spilled onto 

carpet and your feet get wet where 

are your eyes but on your phone?

_____

ten days will go, like snap, 

ten more, with a thud, 

till its thirty and three times 

or more

i hope that you beam, that i don't 

fall from grace

that afternoon sits pretty 

till it is night and then 

dawn and your face 

chops against the 

ocean

and i am listening to the wind 

so as to hear where my dreams have been.