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Saturday, 16 March 2013

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.

Tuesday, 15 January 2013

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.  

Sunday, 13 January 2013

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.

Friday, 11 January 2013

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.

Thursday, 29 November 2012

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.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

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.

Thursday, 8 November 2012

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.