allue

i felt shame with the lawyers
     saw letters from employers
          a kanji sign for death
               and a sickness for the scholars

the flower boy
                       next door
with the wreath at the backdoor

reeds grow out of my body
     the scabbing antibody
          as an operatic ghost
               to you i seem composed

                       the flower boy
next door
with the wreath at the backdoor

satchel

the relation to your eyelid
and glitter

is fluttering, butterfly -

pretty lips is his dream, 
monroe
in the 
pipeline
 of his night

the planet dispenses with your knowledge -

no! kiss and keep your composure,
await his
hopes of a polygamist
in a monogamist’s body

lust or pride,
your mask of lucifer perplexes
he then assumes

at the very least, an unmade bed will suffice

beaut

i
equate a kiss to a

self-portrait
we're tall

spaces
but will never be
more than a breath
mirage of

fabricated self
dry hair, fill mask

with feature
curiosity of the
history void,

please bear this tongue apologetically

as i take the self-portrait and smear
brush strokes across

sabotage, you finally
appear

routine (to uncle lachie)

a nude picture of your uncle projected onto a wall,
you see the similarities between genitalia but
not of the eyes or the nose or the mouth.

to the hospital bed navigating corridors,
a distance for a distant uncle.
the compass of your mind seduced in the aftermath

of the news. the million year old man, ventilator
pumping wildly — a daily increase — his chest
erratic and bored of the everyday struggle.

you walk through another ward, the smell of birth
even worse than the smell of death. a baby cries, and
you want to tell it that this is just the start of a

whole lifetime. same old nurse walks past,
cigarette packet in pocket, irony too cliché to even
make special note of. working for your death

must be so ever bittersweet. but then, a break in
the sullen rooms appear — a lengthy narrow corridor
exhibiting paintings by children. always noting the one

which shows the child sitting in bed as a superhero,
and not the ones where crude representations of
family members are present. presumably, the paintings

portraying nightmares and surgical apparatus were
editorially cut. families outside waiting rooms — their
facial expressions always the same, choice of flowers

swap like a death rota. ‘his room is on the left hand
side, just along that hallway’. the trip has been made
every day within the past few months, the nurse

does not recognise your face like the others do.
but the nurses forget faces as soon as the casket gets
brought in. the chapel attached to the hospital is never

occupied — maybe a loss of faith has universally occurred.
maybe it should have been placed next to a less significant
ward, where the patient returns to their everyday.

placed in wings

stop gazing at the moon
and see shadow dances in concrete --

deep in a joyousness,
i draw my last breath to look at the stars on your face,

take my heart and place it in a
lightly woven silken sheet.
and caress it like the delicate wings of a bird
oxygen swimming to the highest peak.

-- upon this i may dive into the sun's ray
where your silhouette sits against stone.
in the mountain i hide you away.

john cassavetes

where people reek of near death,
 smoke cigarettes and set off hand grenades

to the days of youthful adventure.

and to retreat to a comfort zone would be a safe bet

but it lasts as long as your candle to a burning match.

find myself in a state of denial for days

hoping everything would turn back,

but our clocks are manual, the loss of life’s flow as they are turned back.

putting heads under water to obscure voices and their 
expressionist tone.


i'd like to think my mind is so clean you could eat off of it
 but days of endless TV advertisements and listening to people's phone calls
 have left my brain dry and seized. dirty minded from even the most prestigious of their words,
 the vegetable life beckons;
a woman under the influence.

yesteryear

scene:
old house behind a hill

dotted with touches of yesteryear.


drained of its family portrait, 
it lies awash with floorboard memories.

i visit the house for a sip of repression. 
the wood creaks while the ghosts converse,
conducting a generational lesson, a requiem for
the disenchanted and the forgotten.


there was an old woman i used to visit there,
 her skin stabbed of history

with eyes cloned from an obituary.

phrenology

placed in cosmic affairs --
bled antiquated.

an unwilling 
to coalesce with normalcy.
shrouded in pretension - consumed -
my feet pure in the virgin snow.
i kiss the snow, left blue, 
hurt by the vision of a doe.

the bitterest pill
 to swallow;
flashbacks of throwing birthday parties for my pets
.

wistfulness grass cuttings scream ‘world on your shoulders’
(please hurt me cliché, please hurt me).

sweated mosaic posed in
 metallic -
you poised rhetoric.

mountain faced and machine operated,
i am studying 
phrenology.

insecurity pt. i

fake petals
breath through --

reminiscence of needing,
then i cut God
desire relegated to your free will cloak

i push the brush
over white bowls

but see the face of
him
and him

hands posed, glint
between your vision

where have they been?
your fire of divine swelling light

fingers, mouth, cunt --

gestures of human condition
this kiss, that kiss - history's creations

a cup of light,
poured into my eyes
the milkiness of the blind

untitled

retreat not from the body
but into the body and away from engagement with the world.

cut off your tits and inhale the scent
that permeates from your now titless frame.

train yourself in stoicism — bare. a painted still life of the world’s origins you would dare to enter.

perfume it up, boutique’d and disposed. you convey skinless, a skeleton — anatomically disused and undesigned.