To Oaro M

Heading north by north east
into the nor'west,
all my ghosts
horde behind me.

The dusk is pink dust
rolled over the ocean,
the sun is a torch flame
licking the hill crest.

Everything seems serene
in the hot wind huff
along the shoreline,

but the black rainbow
bleeding down from the clouds
cannot be ignored.

My dead mother's voice whispers
from the brown plastic bowl,
the blue and white tin bread bin,
every fibre of carpet and curtain,
every glisten of paua
and curve of driftwood
in our old batch on the coast.

The moon peeps a blind white eye
through a chinked lid of sky -
like memory
it refuses to die.

Jake's First Payday

You're my boot button boy,
shiny eyes and polished smile.

Fifteen pennies in your pocket,
and so proud
to have earned them all yourself.

Money can't buy the medals
such an acheivement pins to your chest.

Stormbird

She dwells in his embrace
like a dove returned home.

His hands fold like wings
against her back and raise her up.

In his kiss she feels the wild
flutter of sky, in his gaze

the quickening of lightning.

He is the nest
and the edge of the storm,

she's poised like a feather
on the rim.

Poets of Delicate Angst

yes, it's a rant I'm afraid ...


In your pause, pace, pedantic phrase -

where is the passion,
the rage against rage
or procrastination?
The clever use of space
in its dance across the page,
paper cut of rapier riposte.
Take a sledgehammer and pound
the blue into finger grooves,
forget the clever prance in prose
and shout in my face.
Forget your sensitive, new-age pose
among the pansies along the fence,
pick a side,
even the wrong side.
Lose your decadent American drawl,
in your haste to compel me,
propel me into tangled unutterable scrawl.
I want more than your heart
in wallpaper bouquets -
I want your foetus,
your unformed, bloody mass
of inspiration.

Search for Home

Here, amidst planes of stars,
on the knobble of the universe,
we stand, with moons like shells
beneath our feet.

Our skin is like treebark,
gnarled where flames of three
holoburn wars have licked.
We are unbeautiful. Shunned
on every planet we seek refuge.

But our children are clean.
Long and strong of limb.
We search for a home
where they may live
after we are gone
when memories of the wars
have dispersed into stardust.

Liberation

When shadow inhabits
every mask of your face

and bones have encroached
on your pearl skin

I will visit your evening
with release

The Idea of the Word

The beginning was fire
in the emptiness
creating light
from no-man's land,

and if we are afraid
of emptiness
we are afraid of peace,

create mayhem forever
to avoid the stillness
and calm of the center.

I am hungry -
not hungry, but stuff myself
with words, till I'm so heavy
I cannot walk,

my wire framework too fragile
to carry the flint
igniting inception.

Who could bear the weight
of that apex from which sprang
so much blood, suffering, and evil?

Stone Roses

This poem was inspired by a desert rose stone that I picked up at a market. If you've never seen one, here's a picture:













In my hand I hold a desert rose,
chalk edges on petals of stone.

I am the moon,
dusted into your eyes.
The sound of your name,

soft as sands
flowing to the call
of the wind in the desert,

eats away the stone
bloomed in my palm.

In the hot breath of rose
we fade -

The Darker Reaches

What is a well?
A place for water to dwell,
a circle from hell
where fire creeps and groans.

A ring of stone
restraining liquid
in a shape prescribed by masons

when it would rather run free,
falling through dark waves
of its own effervescence,

reaching ever further,
until it outreaches itself.

Wordless

Once she held him in her arms all night
like a sled into the void.
Tangerine lips and white pelt
knocked on the door of her dream -

He signed his name along her back,
lassoes of Indian ink
wrapped around knots of bone;
secrets written in magenta trawls
of nails over skin, blackberries
raised along their scarlet vines,

crumbs and dust
collected in remembrance
of that she cannot name.

Beginnings of Lightness

Their bodies, luminous eggs,
glob along beaches,
golden ovals on black shoals of shingle.

They bounce against the edges of cities,
quiver and wobble beneath the velvet cloth
upon which the moon glimmers a rib-bone.

Endlessly pining, they seek
to engage one another, never realising
the birth they long for is their own.
Slick, thick, oily membrane envelops them
repelling friend and foe alike.
They remain trapped in their aloneness,

cast about themselves for points of view,
for the blade of truth that sets them free.

Alas they bobble,
little bobbleheads -
one by one
down the streets of the enfolding years -
blind, deaf, dumb,
reproducing in brief mitosis,
storing data in streams of binary codes
to explain why they are alone.

A collection of knowledge, opinions
from this one and that,
in attempts at longevity,
the hope that accumulated chicken scratches
might someday illuminate -

never realising the perfect completeness
of their viscous egglike forms,
missing the white light that flares within.