Leopold

In Nice, a town of fat tourists
and too many boat stripes, I
met a dental hygienist
with inky calves and a
love of drunk women.
He bought me a rose
and we touched in an alley
discussing his metal band
with messy lips.
Stumbling, surfeited, across
a social media profile
I noticed he now has
a plumpish toddler.

On waiting outside Randwick City Council dressed in head to toe streamers, ready to surprise the man who plans towns

There is nothing better than this.

Girls

They are the girls I like, you say. Girls with knee high socks and scuffs around their ankles, girls who wear patchy denim overalls with nothing underneath. They are the girls that own countless pairs of frilly panties, the girls who lick their lips and giggle when they orgasm. They are the girls always rendered in black and white. They are the girls with hardened nipples, girls with sleeveless tops that dip low enough to reveal their breasts. They are girls who want you to have them. They are the girls who are always ready. They are the girls with wet t-shirts and wooden floors,  girls who never argue, girls who don’t get mad. They are the girls I like, you say. Girls who chew bubblegum and let it pop loudly, girls with hard abs and feminine curves, girls who eat red meat, girls with legs for days. They are the girls with sandy butts at the beach, girls who don't peel or burn, girls who take pictures of other girls. They are the girls who wear white towels after showers, who order vodka with soda water, girls who have girls' nights.

Walking distance from Marrickville, Sydney to Long Beach, California

23 195 kilometres
4 578 hours

The 2:40 flight (or From the Desert to the Sea)

We took off. Once the small buildings beneath had dissipated, sparse as they were and quite unlike other capital cities, and once the strange town of Darwin was nothing but an orange speck, it was the clouds that took shape. First we saw them in tinges; more like trains of icy white mist than anything else, peeling past our great sardine tin as it whirled across the sky. Then we were above them, watching them billow below, great celestial beings forming a lilting sea of white.

I sat back in my seat and watched the world from the double paned window (plastic on my side, glass on the outer), and all the while the wing protruded sharply into my line of sight. The light danced around the bodies of cloud, changing its hue every minute with a flirtatious wink. First it was sky-blue, crisp and filled with promise. A little later, a wash of pink crept slyly over it, followed by bright oranges and purples, midnight shades; a mask of black.

Who was I in the sky, packed tightly against all these people? I decided I was no one. Just a stranger in my body, a soul removed from Earth. People millions of miles beneath were going on as usual; slipping tired bodies into thinning pyjamas, cooking dinner, having sex. The nightly rituals. I knew that this felt like no other flight – without distraction I waited and watched as life below, in all its sadness, was revealed to me. I wasn't sure where I wanted to go that night, but it wasn't back down. I needed more time in this half-way space.

There were grids of light on the descent, tiny pricks in every colour.  Thousands of them stretched out to the end of the horizon. The weird, newly-birthed continent below prepared itself for us. It was draped in some dazzling sheen, and Sydney twirled about, flashing its harbour like a twinkling Rolex.

The cabin crew prepared for landing. White lines drew themselves across tar roads. Small cars indicated and turned left. The runway was smooth when we hit it and I closed my eyes as the wheels rolled on. Before we had landed, I was preparing to leave.

The Velvet Weekend

Eating velvet with you

in a tired motel

where the velvet is the vessel

of quiet obsession

And the inlets carved across your cheeks

are also in my hands

my mouth, my belly

There are weekly rituals

we perform, moving

with practised steps toward some place

our wrists have brushed before

Erring on the sycophantic as we fill

the other's throat

with the shapes it needs

to be full, to know velvet. 

Ungewiss

There is some of you 
that feels alien
and other parts that feel
like the melted stretch that pulls across 
a Sydenham sky at dusk
Where the dull
has been embroidered
to the smoke of cumulus clouds
and the only hint of absence is
the soporific sun.

Rimbaud

In the morning, his almond lips
drench the man of symbols

Languid limbs curl across him
as youth holds no restrictions

between new lovers
The stench of liquor

affixes itself to chests
to thighs, to underarms

In the dark, in the damp
the small Ardennes accent stops and waits

to hear its name tied
upon the cream coloured moon

A Holy Death

It was at dawn that I knew it,
blackened seraphs spat new truths in my ears, 
draped velvet curtains over every Holy Building
until the gold did not shine.
I had been tasting words for twenty years,
repeating strange things to my ribcage, telling
fresh generations with clean cheeks and lips
that I knew how things really were. 
I licked wine to the left of the pulpit, 
touched the grape juice and the bread, punctured my wrists 
with the thickened panes from ogival arches. 
I left at dawn due to the discord, a break in the harmony
Stravinsky promised, as he sat atop a black piano winking sternly.
Am I wretched now? Bound on some sybaritic vessel to Gehanna? And am I
never allowed to taste quiet calm of Notre Dame, lest the candles tilt
and burn me alive? There is sweat in me to mark the learned guilt,
they have made locutions to question the nature of my condition.
They say there is no salt in me and perhaps I am not salty, 
but I do not want the clasped hands,
the bloodied teeth,
the stink of a lamb too torn by circumstance to walk in a straight line, 
the weight of a wretch
in the mask of John the Baptist.
It was many things, the Holy Death.
It was clean eyes and dead eyes; it was to pour milk over my feet,
to step off the pier, look Dante in the eyes and deny his inferno, 
to delight in those castigated pleasures of flesh.
Mostly though, it was to nod at Toklas,
and know that what will be remembered at the end is not the carvings in a pew
but a woman with her tresses clipped,
wrapped in cubist paintings.

Words for a woman in stripes

Small hips Ro with your stripes and velvet hair, with your paint-flecked cheeks
With your prayer book shut and your crosses clean
Soon you’ll be clasping hands with Him in New York City, in the low east of New York
You’ll be waiting at the cusp of the Atlantic, willing bigger things to happen
You'll have left us all behind, coughing up sand
I can see you on West 23rd Street now, sucking on a pen and winking at the sky

Misdemeanors

I’d eaten it accidentally of course, that cucumber. How was I to know there existed any tangible aesthetic variance between the organic vegetable variety and the generic, supermarket drudgery I had supposedly bought; that a great sickly stench hung over my own purchase? It had just seemed like an ordinary cucumber when I sliced it thinly for a salad; when I poured a little balsamic over the top and ate it alongside a TV dinner. What’s more, it was sitting in my spot (or sort of) in that bottom drawer of the fridge, right there with the tomatoes and the eggplant I bought on a wild culinary whim. Surely a frivolous cucumber accident doesn’t necessitate a two-day verbal stalemate between you and I? How long must this punishment last? I didn’t mean to let that slick green center slide past teeth and tongue, into the welcoming arms of my throat. I swear I never wanted to cause such callous pain.

I've been thinking about Big Sur, California lately, where the Santa Lucia Mountains meet the blue of the Pacific. I think I'd like to be there.

I'm on a public mini bus and I'm on it in Hong Kong

We're heading to Sai Kung. There is a winding hill and bowing trees, scenic things, the things you take pictures of and show to people who maybe care, but most likely don't. You know how it's done: you string all the photos together and make the whole family crowd around.

There are a lot of old women on this bus, little ladies with crooked, scrunched up faces and tiny feet. At the front, up near the driver, there is a bucket of Easy Finish joint compound (ready mix), stacked next to numerous bottles, tools, backpacks, rubbish offcuts. A pile of junk. It's the sort of thing that inspires confidence, knowing the bus could fall to pieces at any moment. ("Hey driver, half of this left wall just fell off!"- "Don't you worry, just grab summathat joint compound at the back. It's ready mix for your convenience.")

The bus stops multiple times. I get off on the last. When I'm off the olive seats for a moment, I breathe in the cool stiffness of a not-quite summer morning, then get on a connecting bus to Mong Kok. The streets we pass are thin, built up along the sides with cramped little buildings and tall, palm-like trees. We pass the sea on the left, and around it, hundreds of white tottering houses mirrored by the clean white boats below. We move through Pak Wai village. It's just a half hour ride to those big Mong Kok streets.

An afternote:
Some punk told me Hong Kong was dirty as hell while he sucked up a drag and blew it out over my face. I don't think he really saw it.

Beat on Silver

(intended for spoken word purposes)

Tiny and me
We gettin off the airplane
Long walk, tarmac
Pickin up our stuff again
Small cops, big heads
Guns cocked, all prepped
We move, we walk
Push our shit straight ahead
“Look out kid,”
the singing preacher said
with a borrowed drawl he picked up
when he was still a Zimmerman

Big hut, white doors
He polishing the wood floor
Hair all beehive
he hardly had it did in time
Tiny scoots right off home
Me and Bee smokin on
Lick along, rolling
Then he cookin up, forest things
“Get that mush
down my neck!”
Well, he says it so polite that
I barely stop to check it’s right

Tall men, they fast asleep
Beehive lookin moss green
Face clean, bow-tie neat
My airplane sailed so smoothly in
We cookin up things tonight
Well, we cookin up dreams
We makin all the plans
and then we dictate what they mean
“Let’s go off,
some darker place,”
Bee and me, eyes closed
No covers on them windows

Flying out of Bangkok

Flying out of Bangkok; the plane slowly gathering speed across the runway. And there are lights across the tarmack, tiny rows of red and blue, and green a little farther up. In the distance, there is the glittering yellow flicker of a city awakening, stretching its great dirty arms and yawning broadly, looking up to greet the pitch black grin of eight o'clock at night. I am leaving Bangkok now, Floyd is playing in my ears (Wish you were here), the song of so many lonely morning coffees and broken moments of forced nostalgia. There are surely hundreds of us here on this souped-up white machine, beginning trips and ending them, running away and running home. There are thousands of us in planes right now, pinned up pricks of light along the sky. We are going places - or we think we are. We are meeting people. Everywhere we go we are all moving the same: touching faces, touching hands, touching more.

Morning tides

To know the morning tide
is to sit silently
and feel partial detachment
get every vitriolic pigment of your body
and let it fall against the floor.

Ten stubs

The heavy droop of limp fingers
with nothing much to say -
like the cruel heads of dead flowers
with half-wilted stems -
like a burnt out fluorescent sign
winding down above the cross.
Ten stubs - pallid and weary,
like something broken
like disease.

She really doubted that any other institution was as satisfying and worthwhile place to spend time as that of the public library.

Glass-walled and dripping in quotations. The scent of the library, of thickly bound knowledge, was the smell of everything she wanted to become.

Intimacy

Sydney has never been very deft
in its handling of the seasonal shifts

always too moist
with clumsy, slow-moving hands.

sticky
wet

a very bad transition.

This time though, the air smells different
the creeping December invites delicate things,

the grazing of legs
as we climb your back fence -

the thrill of pool chair fumblings
in the morning's damp dark -

the surrendered, half-open mouth
disabled on the very first plunge

sticky
wet

slow moving hands.

HERE IS THE MIDDLE

OR HERE IS FURTHER THAN THE MIDDLE.

OR HERE IS NOT QUITE AT THE MIDDLE.

Ceramics

The type was neat. A good font.

"Today," it started off with - always beginning with today. It was as if (for him) these interactions were not a conversational mode of engagement, but a place for one-way divulgences, a dear diary online.

"Today," he had written, "I got to use the wheel again in ceramics, used it for the first time in a long time."

I pictured the wheel in his ceramics class, in the heartland of Midwest America. Was the wheel small and resting on a table? Or much larger, on the ground? I decided it was the kind of thing you straddled, thick and grey between your legs. After throwing a moist heap to the batter-board, you would sit on a plastic stool and bend downward as the damp, crystalline structure spun through half cupped palms. In that small town class, there would be four or five students. Sitting quietly. All spinning clay.

"It blew my mind, the wheel," he said. "I would like to show you how."

Later, I presumed, he would ready up a pencil end for incised decoration. Square sort of patterns - that was very Romanesque. He was a son of the classics, he was straight-laced schooling. Post-modernism or the post-post or the new way, was too far from these smooth clay forms, from the Romans and their Greek antecedents.

The talk between us was faded out, it was old news; it was dead. I wondered now, almost a full year past, if it was graduation season in Iowa, or if the ceramics classes were still on.