Arcade

I wanted the old men who ran the arcade to be heartwarming gentlemen. I wanted them to be ambassadors of another, better time. I waited for them to greet me gracefully in the morning, to tip their hats and nod their heads to me in the evening, to follow these actions with an elegantly deferential word, a salute to the old-world duty of gallant man to eminent woman. In three years of coexisting in that arcade, three years of hopefully entering and exiting that building, expectant smile on, head ready to nod warmly in response to a sweet phrase, a charming word, a kind smile, I never received so much as a glance from the old men who ran the arcade.

Extract

How quickly our everyday realms sink into the mythic quicksand of memory. We are here. We were there. How quickly the forms of our ordinary mornings shift into twilight apparitions, pointing to the dark pool of night, signalling the gentle onset of death. Slowly, wittingly or not, we are undergoing a subtle drowning, a silent sinking into oblivion.

I would like to write a story for you.

We have shared so many stories, but like our time together, they have passed into the dream realm. I recall parts of them, though all recollections are dusted with a golden, obscuring vapour. I remember when you told me about your mother and your sisters. As you spoke, the tragedy seemed to unfold from the sky. The shop became a holy bowl of light, overwhelming as music, fragile as a soap bubble. You grew. Your brown eyes glowed like back-lit amber, your hair streamed in godlike coils of ancient rope. You spoke death with the assuring breath of an archangel, sword flaming against the dark. I truly loved you that day. You reminded me that only people matter. You reminded me to live with love.

Something to Aim For

I drink black coffee and I've
shaved my head.

I don't have sugar and I
talk about the dead just as plainly as I talk about
the living.

I'm done with giving everything
a coat of veneer.

I am now plain.
I am now clear.

Peter

Beard and bone

cut like a knife

sculpted in stone

carrying life like a baby bird.

The face of good

shaped by pain

draws his ink

from the human stain.

Karina

The woman, wan
and waxy as a white
candle

bears her morning body
through the wooden
rooms

Binding the blinds
with rope

Winding the windows
open

Catherine

The old woman was round.
"You could have drawn her with a compass," a neighbour had once remarked.
Her body was round. Her face was round. Her hands and mouth and eyes were round, though a compass could never have captured the sharp glint that lit them.
"I remember her scent more than anything," another had said. "Eau de Cologne. It reamed off of her. The entire house fumed with it, the kitchen, the curtains, the couches. She must have gone through gallons of the stuff before she died."
She had died naturally, if you can call the slow shutting down of the liver over a lifetime of heavy drinking a natural death.
"She was a strong old thing for someone with so many weaknesses," her half-nephew mused, "the grog mastered her for some fifty years. That's a long time to be mastered by anything."

It's Not George Clooney

leaning on the pole outside
the train windows

It's just a poster of him
telling us to drink
Nespressos

But what no one knows
is that I know his choice of coffee is
VERY UNETHICAL.

Dead Animals Curl

their heads by their broken
bodies
blood-sodden oddities
corrected by death

beyond calls
beyond bounding
beyond flight
beyond breath

dogs in boxes
rats in barrels
mice in buckets
birds on steps

Cleaning Bourke and Wills

water drips
down the giant temples
of the men who died
from thirst