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

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