standing still

i could see

my days turning

around an opiated

neon sign

fighting for dawn. 

and i knew

living among bluebottles

that wash ashore

from a sad planet

in need of life support

that there were

memories of you

among them

calling me

a small sea creature

asking me to stay 

that plangent chiming

of our clock 

tearing time apart.

i arrived here just in time for a homeric sunset, 

a light so prehistoric, it blotted out

all terrible systems of belief.

getting ready for orgiastically

tasting the identity of all things, i wanted to

illuminate the erotic from a new angle

through a spiral of time -

against interpretation. that’s when

memories of you seized upon me, 

like how desire awakes only as one realises

one has been dreaming at the moment of waking. 

you who were like these trees, roots of trees,

that know my soul, who dug into me with such 

humble tenderness. and i remembered that 

almost impersonal love again, with us 

reclining on eachother beneath

my grand piano, and you said,

don’t be so interested 

in being good.

i am failing this spring, i know, i know!

if i were more certain of the sensual as 

a category of the soul, i would know that

happiness must be the least and best

of all human attainments. i would know that

syllogism is permissible, only in love. 

on this island where golden seaweed clambers

upon you and the cliffs, i thought of how death comes

not upon you but nudges you in

a mauve decline into smooth open water.

this, i guess, you have always known, and that’s

why you have always loved the noises children loved,

that sane laughter, that tide that has pulled them. 

the sea is dark and smell of fish tonight and 

it occurred i have felt this thirst for my own language 

before - not for heidegger’s, who disclosed being

as a possibility of certain death. or richter, who said 

to paint is to risk our existence. but something

pliable, soft and fecund, the kind of beauty

that asks for no permission.

I’m sporting a floppy existential sky-blue hat when we meet in the Museum of Modern Art. Later, we hold each other with a gentleness that would crack open ripe fruit. Then we slow-drag to Little Willie John, we bebop to Bird LPs, bloodfunk, lungs paraphrased till we break each other’s fall. For us there’s no reason the scorpion has to become our faith healer. Sweet Mercy, I worship the curvature of your ass. I build an altar in my head. I kiss your breasts & forget my name. Woman, I got the blues. Our shadow on floral wallpaper struggle with cold-blooded mythologies. But there’s a stillness in us like the tip of a magenta mountain. Half-naked on the living-room floor; the moon falling through the window on you like a rapist. Your breath’s a dewy flower stalk leaning into sweaty air.

For D

maybe that was love. that excitation spreading in all directions into our world like an avalanche, ever expanding in territory and then - shutting off from exhausting. 

maybe it was a story. not a self-consistent theory but a narrative that converged towards an ideal view, an ever increasing ocean of incompatible alternatives, each a single theory, each a fairy tale, each myth that is part of a collection forcing us into greater articulation. 

maybe it was just small wings of my wishes, taken by the wind on a spring day. 

i lift

lift you, states away

i raise my glass to that

joy, our once only,

your ever golden

and glistening

body of a clarity

nothing can mist

our solar life and

the sun that

accompanies you,

bearing the superhuman

you forward 

towards the mountains, the sea,

towards my home

don’t

don’t look through the window

don’t look into the house

look into my body

a fine and total image 

so warm and sad

and i remember that trick candle
sparkling on our bath, the flash and
speech of it, burning through my thoughts.
how it made me think of my first love,
or my second, in that city of light
that changes in my mouth.

if i had known you would be
such a fan of that light,
i would have save some for you,
a little more of that slow twilight
reflecting on the pavement,
the first night you walked me home

in the rain, on the roof of factories,
on the spring grass in fitzroy.
obviously, there are none left
other than - in my throat -
in our last cigarette, decaying
in the cold night of this city

so fearful to the open seas,
like the ashes scattering.
i tried to speak openly to you
in the photographs, postcard,
i tried to say how penniless i am
of light. 

yesterday, the air in sydney was so heavy and querulous, i couldn’t even light a cigarette. and i hid my thoughts about london between two stones, between the bougainvilleas and the thick of jasmines and began to read about sumo wrestling instead. a brutal and immediate meditation on how everything depends on what we choose to write, and how we write it. 

so…is pleasure only a minor bliss? is bliss nothing but extreme pleasure? how shall we contemplate the flesh? sometimes i think i am willing to give my life for mortal rhythms, to so much loving that it could drown you like a sea between two seas. 

your hair had that blackness that seemed to withstand the ages, stirring something in me, i thought i had lost, long ago. 

deep in Kangaroo valley

where the wind sounded so much like stravinsky, my symphonic sadness came to an end (it was always a bit drama anyway). i saw art as a kind of wildness, like how falling (in and out of) is a kind of vernacular. see this deep pool between flat rocks? how the middle glistens a blackness that is capable of bursting into flames that illuminate gravity? i know in my uncentered heart that this is not all imaginary, and the fanning of that wind often reveals paths to another foreign land where there is that love that hits me on the head and says ‘I’d sail with you anywhere, war or no war.’

in the meantime i paddled about in this strangeness so pleasurable, it could be mistaken for a pint of whiskey. a wild instantaneous fullness, no anticipation, no heroic advances, and accepted this aloneness irreparably. isn’t our need for speed simply another wish for closeness? towards a conquest of remoteness?

o space is not so bad! the sky so spatial and deep above me, the water so cool and smiling, i floated around here secretly admiring my love for you in the spring.

For F

such is the tide, turning, as one does,
to other interests. yet you asked me to forgive it, for all the
colours it brought upon us, late afternoon, so that our eyes
blurred out faintly the future, our ears ignored the warnings -
that incisive shadow. i have to leave tomorrow.

i focus on the swell instead, as you
tried to teach me how to get by what comes along,
what must be let go, that an idea could be
kept there like a forest and not emptied nightly.
o your eyes that alone recognise me

out in the water, on the tarmac, your scale of vision
further than all my small advances. 

What is it after, our soul? thrashing against the
boundless patience of the sea?
even when the wind blows,
it doesn’t cool us and the shade under the
cypress trees is weighed down by time.

What is it after, our soul? holding pines in
our chest, we set out to view the broken statues.
we heard they were on beautiful islands
somewhere near here

What is it after? in a country that is no longer ours,
I slept with the green wrapped around me like
a fern as you spoke softly -
it is difficult to find the meaning to your life,
but it is still allowed. 

i come from stabbing a tender sun.
new york, you’re a landscape that loves regret,
but i am told that we cannot live our lives in flames
and march is no time for letting the deep light
in. 

i walk home from goldman sachs and meetings with bankers
thinking: if the gods were still around, they’d surely
play a part in this accumulation of undergrowth
down on park avenue, rising into the
sky.

we could do with a little armageddon here
and a little more of that water, disremembering
our worst advances. to go to - landscape subsumed, 
language submersed, the shadow…liquid and
indistinguishable. 

solstice a few hours old, the winter is in us.
cold cut out like eternity, like a hard rock or solid ground. the
bloodless mid-afternoon sun seeping into the threshold
of the new studio opens memory on memory, like an
old newspaper. have i really lived so little? why do books
not speak of me?

i know that we will disappear without a sound,
wisps of white clouds, carried away like a leaf.
so i sit here, learning the names of things.
no, not the names we give them. their real names -
what they call themselves when
they think we are not listening. 

the end of desire is the beginning of wisdom
small room for rebuttal here: […]

i think the craving for magnolias to come,
pink and white, is not that bad at all. and

all the healing we can do with syrup and
sweetness of things, is pretty alright too.

sainthood is so bottomless -(didn’t she
say only perfection is sufficient?)

better to let the sun release you and
fall over your face. this slow light,

this smallish light, coppery blue.
try not to think about it

stopping.