Poetry Archives | Giramondo Publishing

Toward orange sunset / on the grass-dry plain / I stare stupidly at silvery railway lines, / thinking they meet near infinity.

The winter evening settles down / like a failed soufflé / a television glow / announces more than we’ll ever know

I was down in Hell discussing redemption. / All my dreams came true so fast. / Long primrose nights are coming back to haunt me, / nearly the only pleasure left.

A ute erupts from gravel skid, / no match for the drunken / matador who slaps the bonnet // off his hip.

Even The Darkest Hour Lasts Only / Sixty Minutes says the billboard / at the Moss Vale Church

The poem at this point might have headed // nowhere, or in various directions, but settled / in a carpark cum beergarden

Fruit machines accept all cards for very punter / there’s an addict doorframed, they punctuate the street / as in a Florence gallery when restorers airbrush out / aureole and child to foreground areolae puckered / for remedial teething, too pure or too stoned / for lewdness

We wait in air-conditioning watching the pilot / of Lost in Space. There’s no Dr Smith / just wholesome cowboys wandering a moral maze, / dressing monkeys as aliens and killing Cyclops.

The man lay along / the woman’s back. / The girl stroked the slip / from faceless starts / to uncertain ends / and found a word / that softened her inside.

(Yes Petal, something’s afoot, just don’t even guess, right? / And I’ll offer an explanation, tomorrow, over a nice hot cup of tea / how This may seem ‘unnatural’ but it’s sure natural to me.)

It is said there was a moment / in the dock, / when her back was up against it, / she pointed the finger at him / to save her own, thieving skin.

Peter, of the stone, / in the crucible of dread / reduced to sulphur; / acid, ashes, stench.

Behind the blue-green agate of her eyes / is the knowledge she protects / even as she dissembles.

It’s the core this time, / the spine’s steps of bone / its mats of muscle, their tenderness / my pattern for this time.

While that was an intriguing/boring story, I was more interested in what my readers would be interested in: Hollywood and its sucking up of Australian talent, making them so popular they were like craft spokespeople, with indeterminable accents, paraded at black tie parties like weird big talking cats…

HAPPINESS. What an awful person! I love my dragon / When it’s There with its yellow eyes flashing like sunshine / It knows ALL About being eleven…can cough up bits / Of food in all kinds of River shapes.

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Poetry

The Alignments

Fantasia on a Theme by TS Eliot

Luminous Alias

Royal Hotel

Christmas, Kangaroo Valley

Open Season

Elizabeth Bay Road

Reaching Bedrock

White Clay

Saturday Girl

The Tattooed Boy

Peter’s Cowardice

Her Son’s Keeper

A conjunction of bone photos

On Meeting A Retired Orange

Drag The River