-limbs need to be lost-

i woke up at 6am,
still drunk from the night before,
and gave myself a hair cut.

i'd got drunk on everything,
on every liquid i could find-

on saliva.
on humidity.
on tears running down the sides of old buildings in country towns.
on science fiction.

i'd left my best friend
in the city
with a man who told us
'my brother and i are down and out'

i'd adopted the soft sort of vultures
and the hard sort of pop songs.

all night long i'd roamed the perimeter of town,
looking for people to attack with the stem of my guitar.

i'd channelled the most vicious diminished chords
through gritted teeth

but

you hung me
like a noose of fake pearls,

kissing me in the same breath
you told me i looked like marlene dietrich,

and i was still choking from the lies.


it took you months to come to terms with my magic powers,

-although now i think you find them quite charming-

the way i can read your mind
the way my eyes change colour every time i blink
the way i only sleep for six minutes every night

and that for every waking moment
i make a star or a hurricane or a traffic light
go off for you.

clerks

sometimes i find myself
sitting in the middle
of an empty room
trying to string together
random movie titles
in the form of dada poems:

in the naked jungle of a prozac nation
a master and commander
find a time for dancing
with the princess bride.

at 10 to midnight
the children of dune
hold a monsoon wedding-
oh, the secrets and lies
of quiet days and random hearts.

this exercise reminds me
that there is no such thing as poetry;

only simple collisions
of the words you always wanted to say

only simple collisions
of the words you could never say.

a certain kind of symmetry

it was as if we thought the exact
same thing,
although we thought it in the opposite way.

we kept edging closer & closer together
until we were standing

so far apart

that normal emotions
were no longer recognised or experienced

and it takes a

full circle

to bring you back to where you started.

all of our footsteps
occur in this formation

spaces & shapes
that never end
but collapse back into themselves
as they go round and round again.

for the ages

he spat something in my ear

i think he was saying
that i looked sexy
but the words were muffled
by thick daubs of sweat and testosterone
sticking to his upper lip.

he walked with a posture
that certain men cultivate-

shoulders attacking the air before them,
each step thrusting forward
like a sex act.

ramadan was over in the western suburbs,
an event
marked by a miraculous collection of shoes
splattered on your landing.

sequined thongs & coloured slippers
congregating on the lino like prayer matts.

i’d spent the night with you in an
industrial estate
trying to capture
something for the ages,
but returned with only
an empty bag of twisties, a chemical
induced headache
& the thought that
keeping this up
is something akin to locking eyes
with a stranger on the train:

caught together for a moment
& then apart

unable to stay staring
unable to look away.

google earth poem

she spat a mouthful of acid into the night
& looking up mumbled
you know when there are so many
stars in the sky
that it looks like fireworks?

when i used to call to ask where you were
you always answered simply
on my way to wherever you are, baby.

& i would wonder
where on earth that could be…

roof

roof and tree

road and sky

road

rest

mountain cloud

mountain grass

grass and tree

grass and lookout

grass and fence

grass

closer than they appear

mastectomy dreams

It was just after 9pm
and a sharp pain on the left side
of my chest
suddenly convinced me that I had
breast cancer.

In a silent spree of hypochondria,
I began mentally evaluating
the implications of my condition.

I imagined telling my family, my friends.
I envisaged their distress, their devastation.

I however, felt surprisingly nonchalant about the news.
I was overcome by a zen calmness
that bordered on existential enlightenment.

I believed, quite abruptly, that our earthly bodies are merely transient vessels.
I knew that my sickness would enable me to transcend my physical form.

I flexed my upper left arm and tried
to comprehend how my chest would feel with this absence.

I considered options such as
silicone replacements
and a life of padded bras.

wind farm

shopping list poetry

i feel like i’m coming apart without you.
this devastation does not take place in a dramatic way.

it happens in a tiny pieces,
one at a time,
kind of way.

it’s not like bridges are falling.

there is no celine dion crescendo to my longing.

just pieces

like a phantom limb
like an arc of pink cherry blossoms
like a masonic temple
like a tiny painkiller in my palm
like a whole list of metaphors that,
despite the tricks of language,
cannot quite convey

these days without poetry
where i can walk beneath a wall of colour…

& not a thing.

body like bread

feeding myself on sweaty bodies
& kylie minogue
while planes crash all around me.

i want to put this
to pictures.

i content myself
by sitting with you in the corner
pulling out all of my piercings

one by one

until my empty body
is perforated and un-jewelled. i find its

eastern-most-point,

it might be a rib or a shoulder,

and break it.

in my hands
the bones come apart like bread.

i consider, for once, thinking about something
other than my self

and we all begin to eat.

to all the cool kids

all kinds of dirt
all kinds of words

& you always know exactly
where to put the punctuation.

put it right there between us

and dance around it

dance right on top of it

pull off its shirt and dance right
up against it.

the longer i watch you do this
the more i abhor politics and art

the more music stops making sense to me.

& the only things i care about
are hats and dresses and shoes.

redfernrain

flamestreet

flametower

flamesky

podlove

we were standing so close together
that i could not hear you breathe.

but i could hear
fragments of guitars humming.
the reverberations from your ipod.

and you from mine.

you were listening to godspeed.
i was listening to sigur ros.

and i thought,
this is post-rock love.

a deep breath

I smelled his neck,
She said.

Dancing around me in circles
we were
listening to early U2.

Sunday Bloody Sunday.

The neck belonged to Bono.
The Zoo TV Tour.
She was 15 years old and staking out the band at their hotel.

Bono had singled her out of the crowd of fans, and arms flung open to pose for the cameras, pulled her in close, to the nape.

She had mumbled into it,
“You smell good”.

He smelled of cigars and whiskey and aftershave.
I could see the remains of that schoolgirl in her guarded grin.
Just how I imagined a rock star should smell.

“Well”, he had said. With that accent of his. “Take a deep breath”.

And she had inhaled the musky scent so deeply that all of her other senses dissolved. She became colour blind and deaf. Her skin numb, her tastebuds taken.

The song finished. Another 80s track came on. Simple Minds.

All these years later, I could still sense that smell faintly on her skin. The brush with fame. Lingering still.
The way a scent does.

There are days when they are wrong about the weather.

On Darlinghurst road
i had almost three quarters
of that cigarette down my throat

before i was struck with the most
overwhelming urge

To rip the music
out from under your nails.

All those riffs
that i thought were ours

(silence)

were yours only.

(sound)

picnics, fluorescent lights, the road.

(silence)

I though we felt
the same thing
that we felt it together.

I was mistaken.

I felt nothing.

nothing you can say that can't be sung

for you i formed
-in the back of my mouth-
an entire phonetics of forgetting.

i nursed it there
-amongst saliva and gums-
creating hypotheses and systems
that sounded more like slumber than science.

it only occurred to me later
that i should have sung it for you

i owed you that much at least

a pathetic karaoke opera

that would echo
in your ears forever.

blitz

i could already see
this whole week
unfolding before me
in a blitz of haikus.

only
that
perfect
symmetry

could capture in one

Inhalation & Exhalation

the

Rise & Fall

of an empire.

the right and proper thing

I walked across the car park just as the sun was coming up. During the night burnouts had appeared on the asphalt in formations that resembled crop circles. I thought momentarily about how the patterns of civilisation inscribed on the earth would look from the sky.

I still had that buzzing feeling in the side of my neck that I always get from ice. I kept rubbing a particular point on my shoulder with my thumb knuckle. I convinced myself that this amateur acupuncture could cure my comedown.

I needed to find that photo booth. I clearly remembered the inside of it. Where we had fucked madly, feeding sweaty coins into the money slot to squeeze out blurry shots of our entwined limbs. This city still seemed unfamiliar to me, especially at this hour of the morning. I had no idea what the booth looked like from the outside.

However, I did have the photos in my back pocket. They were burning a hole there like little squares of kryptonite. I’d thought to use them for directions to the booth, believing that they would instinctively guide me like thumbs on an ouija board. But drenched in the post-dawn glow of the car park my feet were drowning in the bitumen. I could not move. I could not conceive which direction to head in. My internal compass was broken. Not that it ever really worked. It had led me straight to you and that was one of the most fucked up pieces of navigation in my life.

I pulled out a packet of chewing gum from my bag and shoved all seven pieces in my mouth at once. I started chewing ferociously, working up the bile in my stomach, sloshing around great wads of saliva in my mouth. Sucking and slurping on the lump of white rubber like a cow chewing cud.

The more I chewed, the hotter the bile in my stomach burned, until it seethed like the lump of kryptonite, as if I had pulled it out of my pocket and shoved it down my throat like a fist. The bile began to stream from my mouth in spurts of magma, vomit erupting all over the car park. My body convulsing with spasms of nausea. Ejecting every last drop of fluid from my abdomen. Chunks of our respective hearts. You told me that you had done the right and proper thing by breaking mine.