Drunk Near St. Pat's, 1am

God should not be forbidding
God should gleam with all the dreamlike
welcome one can muster
God should not be grim and grey
with skewers piercing through the day
and carving up the night
God should be all light and lustre
warmth and softness and give
God should not be made to live with roses
fenced with knifelike spikes
God should be a wild, growing garden
calling you to smell and touch and lie.

Who set God in this cement?
Who killed him in his sleep?
I’ll reach through the tomb walls
and pick a rose to keep
in memory of
him.

My Man's Heart Runs

My man’s heart runs with beating blood
the colour of Southern sorrow

strung veins straining with a love
for men with no tomorrow

Rinsed through with bellowed
blues

soaked with soaring
sighs

My man’s heart runs with beating blood
the colour of Southern cries.

The Other Morning

I dreamt some benevolent being leant over my head

and as it swooped to kiss my brow

the alarm sounded

Concentric Circles

we work in concentric
circles

round and back the way we
came

curled, one within the
other, clicked in together on
different scales, made with different
radii, lined where different lines lie but otherwise we find we are
identically the same

you and I share the same fundamental, mathematical
name

we are concentric
circles

round and back the way we
came

What Do We Do

what do we do
when the ones we look to
have buried
their eyes
in their
hands

Bourke St 27/11/2009

I am looking out the window onto a cool and leafy world - Bourke St is fizzing in a coat of post-heat spittle, sweating out the grime of the thousand footfalls that befell her today. She hushes, swishes, pushes trams through her weary body, walked over, walked over, endlessly, always. And I sit in a pocket of her torso breast height, most likely, wishing the particularly woeful walkers well, and meaning it, before some smarmy smartarse parading through my scene sparks my wrath, my all-seeing, all-searing censure. It's these villains who break my alliance with the man on the street, these who turn me into a tyrant, triggering my desire for fire, or maybe I'll send a flood?

Who could be my Noah?

I'll need a good swimmer, a good rower. Someone who can weather a storm, a real goer. Maybe the Sudanese man out the front of the Red Violin, I'm sure he's seen worse times than these. Yeah, him. Definitely not the stumbling stiletto'd staggerer, styled to the nines in the finest Supre` had to offer. Arks get rickety, and she's finding it tricky enough trying to stand on land. No, she's not my man. I think I'll stick with the one from Sudan.

Right, so, what's my plan?

Tell him what I'm feeling? Make him understand the situation? The way things are? And ask him if he's willing to be my star? My chosen one? No one'd turn it down, surely. Not once they hear abut my plans for Bourke, no way. They'd set to work on an ark straight away, they'd get all the animals picked and they'd pray for my guidance, my mercy, and maybe the sparing of their friends and their family. And I'd grant that, for sure! I mean, what are gods for?