What is it about the lavender-grey dog
hanging around the men
playing with a piece of straw
as though it were a stick
while Moscow burns behind them?
What is it that makes her lie
across my mind as if she might be
what all those words were about?
Category: Poetry
Words are all we have
MCDLXI
Every shadow has a shadow.
In the dapple a dark speckle, the meadow’s thirst.
Every sorrow has a sorrow,
a lessening lesson, a congealing ghost.
Density of loss;
a, ‘once was’
Grief not grudge. Extinction’s edge.
Last on the late last list.
There is a pang the weight of the sun’s fist.
There is a pang the weight of the sun’s fist
The big-small city
Every time I think of loving
someone again, I build a city
in my heart.
I fill the city with noise and bustle.
People old enough to know better
drink pints, women exchange words
as children play, dogs bark,
you can’t hear yourself think in there.
When ready, I open this city out and say,
‘this place is busy,
there are skyscrapers and banks.
There’s hopscotch roads
studded with traffic,
delicatessens with fancy cheese,
and cafes with beautiful twenty-somethings
shooting espressos.
In this city there’s a small
stable with fading walls,
cigarette ends and a double bed.
Sprawled on the sheets, I’m there
waiting for someone to come home.’
Where the skin fits
I squeezed myself into the body of a man this morning.
Zipped up my spine like a sin, hoping this skin wouldn’t appear
so red and bruised today. I jump-started my heart from the bonnet
of my neighbour’s car. These eyes saw similes in everything.
Compare them to a boxing ring; my pupils played out loss on repeat.
Laugh with me, I cried. I promise not to take it so seriously.
Promise to shrug off the hospital appointments and the tiredness like an animal
sheds when it no longer needs to carry the burden of self.
Promise to bend at the knees, fall short of my dreams; forever
pray to matter and bone, youth and time.
Wreckage
I have a memory.
Age eight I come upstairs
to find the cracked ceiling
of my bedroom open,
my father’s foot
collapsed through it,
the plaster a tsunami
at my feet.
My father sat
in the aftermath of
gypsum and board,
doubled over, head held
in his palms.
It was the first time
I had ever seen
his face contort.
With such rage.
I thought it was just the wreck
of the ceiling
Until his hands flew up,
into fists,
and into my throat.
And he roared.
And roared.
And roared.
My father had a memory.
Swimming in the ocean,
floating on his mum’s
stomach, the milky sky
a storybook above them both.
‘I have to give you
away now,’ his mother spoke,
and left her son treading
the surface, keeping his head
above all that water, trying
desperately not to drown.
Everything Since
Three years later,
a year, ten years from now,
I’ll always remember;
not why perhaps, only that we were there like that, together.
Everything, all of it, leads back to you
Special Water
Low tide, a boy picks up a stone
and puts it in his mouth; his father yells NO
and peels it out. This is special water
he says, gently shaking his
body. It may look pretty
but it’s very, very bad for you.
The dog doesn’t care, she prances
in the muck, then climbs in my lap
and licks. Some habits die hard, says her owner
Her wet black blunt smelling like heaven
memoryhouse 