Sunday, February 6, 2011

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."

Saturday, February 5, 2011

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

Friday, January 7, 2011

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.