Evictee

You mean the house inside the house.

You mean the mythmaker’s lodgings,

with its many doors and million windows.

Which is the sea under the mountains

or a thirteen billion year old light ray.

Which is everywhere, like ancient snow.

Oh, but why didn’t you say so?

You mean the house next door to the nothingness,

across the road from the flaming hospital,

by the exploding dancehall.

Where the carbon blobs happily dwell

and midnight barks like a dog.

Where the spectral sailors are knocking.

The house made of bones being broken.

The house of minds snapping.

The house where the World used to live,

until Tragedy stopped by for a while,

until Time spat out its toothpick.

I remember the blinds in the kitchen

coming down hard.

Like a fist on a table

or satellite crashing.

I remember there were walls in the cellar

and an angry lightbulb on all night.

With vast continents

hidden under its floorboards,

Mr. and Mrs. Chemical, long dead now,

rearranging the grassblades,

old toys still in the yard,

bejeweled in the glistening rain,

the roadway passing

filled with the children’s lost voices:

like a skip-rope-rhyme

in my feverish mind.

 ________________________

 This Word Has No Word For It              

This word is unpronounceable.

Translated roughly,

it means a bluster of breath.

Spell it as you wish.

This is the first word in words.

It means love

in any language.

And rhymes with nothing.

This is a dirty word.

Nobody knows what it means.

Class, linguistics

is not an exact science.

The word for blood

actually tastes like blood,

a real jaw-breaker

better left unsaid.

And this word will get you killed.

You spit it at your enemies.

Repeat after me:

This is the word for silence.

 ___________________________

 Shedim

Demons down the drizzly rainspout.

Demons turning to lovely fall colours.

Demons in the bridal chamber.

The daemon Az, the daevas Jeh,

demonic ambassadors

at the ass-end of the universe,

who enjoy nothing better

than sniffing the gussets of your love-letters;

Bethphegor, that little hot-headed peckerhead,

that little red-breathed dickens

with a bite out of its garbage-soul;

Agrath bat Mahalath,

and her 10,000 consorts and attendants,

mother of all the motherless,

the darling infection of her acetylene glare;

the demon-lodger, unwatchable monster,

servant of the unseen, souls slashed

by the whiplash of its fiery embraces.

All that’s demonic, which includes the divine.

The demonesque hairband, capstan, herringbone.

The Zen art of demonology.

A malevolent hierarchy

of celestial and spiritual beings.

Satan, the Antagonist, the flies’ god,

and the temples of meat where they pray festering,

their church buzzing and vile.

 ________________________

The Spider Says

I’m familiar with apprehension,

aware of doubt, sympathetic to terror.

Consider me a patient knot in a thread,

a little stone calling to the dark of the world,

the multi-eyed beast in her sullen quarter;

she who is tethered to a latch or a hair.

The spider says Sweet fly, sweetmeat,

think me the wraith to your gummy end,

my door invitingly ajar, the table always set.

And these are my babies, my thousands,

so curious, so ravenous, nimble copies

of copies, sentient pebbles fleeing hunger’s edge.

It is they, era-perfect, who scurry.

I set them loose upon the edible earth.

 _____________________________

Twin Silences

There’s no one in your poem, she said.

It’s an abandoned barracks, I replied.

It’s a prefect vacuum.

Nothing ever happens, she complained.

That’s because we’re tired, I explained.

Certain circumstances are vying to defeat us.

(Then night crawled out of its leather pouch

and darkness whistled in the shower.)

Another thing I’ve noticed,

she continued, is that there’s never any

mention of your family, about your life.

Be very quiet, I whispered.

Sound travels differently on other planets.

Knowing something doesn’t make it right.

(The wind stumbled into a round corner.

Half plastered, the rain struggled.)

And something else I don’t like,

she went on to say;

as if it was important that I understand her –

(Then blackness pursued other blacknesses.)

It’s the way your poems finish . . .

 __________________________

Auspicious

The weather promises to change

from man to animal.

Today’s forecast is absence,

with a chance of longing.

In the east, flying horses

and a scattering of flowers.

From the west, incursions,

barbarous hordes, black ice.

The weather changes its mind,

abandons its principles,

is forced to choose between

darkness and light.

They’re predicting tons

of tons and long cold showers.

They say it might break,

but we’re in for a hard spell.

Today’s weather is being

brought to you by sponsors

who’d rather you didn’t

put their names around.

Listener, the sea is rising

up out of its empty shell.

For all its talk of courage,

the wind is turning.

 ______________________

Ground Zero

In Nothingland, a cloud of horizons

and stars burrowing under the void ground.

In Nothingland is a profound silence

the colour of air; and very low temperatures.

Nothingland, an imaginary supposition,

emphatic obscurity, a geographical trifle.

A place between two other places.

A slight theoretical conundrum.

A construction of paradoxical math.

Think of a holiday in outer space

or the dreams of the sleepy dormouse.

Think of a million word long sentence,

but with nothing to tell you.

Nothingland, next door to Babylon.

Of dubious mass and dimension.

Of debatable purpose and girth,

its preposterous citizenry questioning

reality, asking so much of themselves,

receiving so little in return;

who need to refocus their attentions,

to find a point in the distance and just stare

at the whole of their insignificance;

inconsequential, as it is, featureless,

and all around them.

________________________

Through Dale And Glen

The journey starts in a cupboard,

in a plug behind the TV set,

from a shoebox of family photos.

You can tell you’re traveling

by the wind feeling at your neck,

by the dust on Christ’s sandals,

by the dying birches scratching the moon.

The moon’s eye follows you across night’s room.

You’re the Eternal Hitch-hiker,

the road a river of bitumen,

a parallelogram, a notch on a rifle.

The road is your imagination,

a howl stirred by cocktails and yage.

It’s not a road, it’s a line drawn in the sand

or path of personal misgivings.

What matters is how the journey begins.

Marching to Thermopylae.

Swimming the Euphrates.

Kicked like a can.

Because getting there is half your problem –

wormhole, dune buggy, dirigible . . .

In a contemplative mood

you’re rehearsing endless departure,

envisioning the journey’s end,

its pretzels and beer and unexceptional Saturdays.

You’re older now,

and more tired than thought justifiable.

Evening is your constant companion.

Patting the dog’s head,

your eyelids flutter then wow.

When you sleep it’s a terrible slumber.

 ________________________

 Into A Bar

A man walks into a bar.

In his head are visions of amber.

A nail is hammered into his hair.

His hat is in splinters.

A man walks into a bar

and the planets change courses.

Slush and slurry head for the exits.

Gravity tugs on his nethers

while he washes his footsteps in beer.

And like the moon, he tips heavily.

A man walks into a bar.

Which isn’t a bar; it’s a temple

to the goddess of work and worry.

His coins are negatively charged.

His heels are sinking.

Then the waitress climbs from her sleeve.

In her eyes is the great outdoors.

In her heart is an alpine avalanche.

The man stares into his beer,

ignoring her curves and entrances,

his thoughts the size of Australia,

his mouth in drought.

In the time that it takes

to open his hand, nothing happens.

Over and over again, nothing happens.

Somewhere, wind in a meadow,

but the man is riddled with blank,

addled by light’s perspectives.

You can hear his life fading in and out.

He’s slowly coming to his senses.

 __________________________________

Flag

It's nights like this I ask myself,

what is a flag? A fluttering

symbol of a nation's amplified

psychosis. A blood-drenched rag

dipped at the passing catafalque.

A handkerchief to wave at the

soldiers marching off to war,

marching against human failure.

Run it up the pole and see who

salutes it. Use it for swaddling,

a bandage after an accident, to

mop the feverish brow of one

unwell. A thing to dry your hands

on after throwing in the towel.

 _____________________________________________

3 - Publishing Histories

Evictee:  The Journal UK   2006  -  The Potomac   2012

The Word Has No Word For It:  The Dalhousie Review 2007 - Hamilton Stone Review   2011

The Spider Says: Hawai’I Pacific Review  2012

Auspicious: Whistling Fire    2012 - The Journal  UK    2011

Through Dale And Glen:  Theodate   2011

Into A Bar:   Sub-Tropics    2010

Flag:   The Journal UK   2006  -  The So-Called Sonnets;  Silenced Press 2010