Broken Bricks and Smoke

I'm speaking with a stranger, today.
Beautiful liar.
Don't blink.
Eyes will stand in your stead
As you lean quietly behind them to watch the fuse
lit in simple sentence and burning fast.

They will ring a strong barricade around the fragile dereliction
Of your history, that makeshift language

So the cool wall of this steady gaze, may rein in the thundering demolition as everything falls,
Hiding the deafening collapse of yourself
as you become broken bricks and smoke.

The Birth of an Artist

These are not words

scraped across a page

Rather the broken and hesitant trails left in the dust behind us

Our feet and fingertips mapping

what the tongue cannot in the face of description

and endless distinctions

and stanzas

and composition

that, after everything, will not even rhyme

Try to fabricate well enough,

upon a flat and dull surface,

anything worthy to be recalled

of the wet streets

of the dry sand

of cold wind’s true flavour

or the way heat will drain breath

Perhaps, just begin a beautiful lie

as you think of the place

where old roads run alongside older tracks

upon which trains fly faster than sight

where space dislocates sense from the senses

For that moment when three hundred people pause

is that same moment a single hair softly,

caught in moist light, falls

vertically through the horizontal air

And your rawness, like meat,

picks at the edges of awareness

like a part-learned language

And those words proclaiming all that is felt and heard and touched

is all there is, and nothing else

Realise, instead, there is no tomorrow

and never was a yesterday,

only a tale whose moral laid out that a love grown up is one grown cold

So, beauty or not, tell no lies

Better, perhaps, you remain a traveller.  

Junk-Box

Tonight I miss my family.

There is no reason

No difference in this night from any other

that may call up such reflection

Just that I note them

Wrap them, in my mind, with the distance

that I created, with such tremendous effort.

I think of us all together

In a public place, perhaps some restaurant

Conversations, those same questions

and tired answers

All cushioned in the comfort of familial culture

A state built through a lifetime of mutually tolerated nuances.

Why tonight I am struck, I do not know

Perhaps an indefinable smell on the evening

lingering just below perception

Or a certain slant of cold wind

uncoiling something from that junk-box memory.

Fox

Walking home in the early morning

there is a fox in the middle of the street, standing only a few feet away.

Watching.

Silent.

It’s a large city fox. Half feral and the colour of rust in a keyhole.

It doesn’t run.

We regard each other for a few minutes.

It’s raining and we move along our separate ways.

The sum of its parts

I walk past a copper coin lying in the dusty corner. I have seen it there, the same coin, each day this week. No one else sees it because no one else examines those dusty corners like I do.

It's a bright and shiny two pence. The copper used to make the small disk is probably worth more as a raw metal than the monetary value of the minted coin. A thing less than the sum of its parts.

I don't bend to pick it up, even though I want to; partly because the crowd in the subway behind me surges too strong and fast for me to stop and partly because I don't want the perceived public embarrassment of sifting through the greasy floor for two pence.

Walking on, I fight superstitious thoughts,"Find a penny..." and all that. I try to ignore an irritating self-delusion that it is some omnipotent benefactor leaving me small messages of hope and that it is an insult to reject such a gift. I ease my pedantic conscious by designating the coin as the rightful property of the subway and all who truly exist there. The beggars and the buskers and the street sweepers. It's not mine to take.

Half an hour later and out on the street, I think about the coin. I tell myself I will look for it on the way back, I'll pick it up. But I don't.

The London Sketchbook

The London Sketchbook is a collection of images that record and map the story of being a stranger in a strange land and making a life in a new place.

Though I was born in Australia, I never felt “Australian”. This feeling of being somewhere else pervaded everything I did. It was like a constant background noise. So, I travelled a lot, did a lot of wishful thinking and eventually moved overseas.

I came to the UK because it feels like home on a molecular level. I seem to operate at the same frequency as this part of the world, but I still have some adjustment to do.

Thresholds

Loose the curtain, knotted up,
to fall across the dark window
like hair unwound from a braid drops
across bare shoulders.
Lace that shields us from the night,
impenetrable beyond the cold cold glass,
that turns this room to an enchanted castle
lighted and locked behind the frozen ice.
This mobile threshold of cloth,
hanging like a membrane layer,
no more a part of the oblique evening
than unbraided hair would be
part of the mind's long dreams.