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?

Kamikaze

I was once a boy but now
I am the living death

nearing pure obliteration
gearing towards that

last

explosive

breath

I will go
and take others with me

blow their worlds apart
change the course of history

I will take the road
from the earth up to the stars

see

I was once a boy but now
I am a kamikaze

Shampoo

I bought a certain shampoo because it smelled like something I'd
forgotten - showers at the Eltham
pool - my fellow small girls
sharing sweet shampoo - the mothers
half-wet from helping us lather our heads - bulky bosoms
bustling round the room - wedding-ringed hands
briskly towelling us
dry - dripping ponytails
on the bus back - uniforms sopping
at the neck - hope
and health
and the holy road
home.
I bought the shampoo because it smelled like
home
and I used it
in spite of the parabens and petrochemicals on the label.

Pitterpatter

Oh my pitterpatter friend Grief
you little baby bother, with your iddybiddy
feet, you live inside each of my
brothers, give us all a papery leaf
from your book and take our mothers from
our fathers, make stewing cauldrons of the
meek, lifting love out of our
lovers. Grief

you useless eunuch

I could mistake you for no
other.