woman with a hat

It is real, but not

the moment pulses

which is purpose they say

some light, probably halogen, beside them

the sound, the mind,

breaks.  Nothing. 

Not even a star.

Is this all we are?

The shuffling solitude beneath your gaze

passes on, then further out.

The prints left behind

in and around memory

is my lasting impression.

It isn’t enough

there must be more to everything

the imagination cannot wrap itself around everything.

On the painting by Henri Matisse, sort of.

bill (what else could it be)

An envelope bears the expected package

Before it opens the red cross explains the content

In the awkward, crowded space between knowing

For sure and just guessing, and hoping

There has been so many moments akin

Where putting it off is an exercise

One where we never get fit, our muscles remember

Anyway, time and again where it is obvious

We’ve all gone through the trepidation

Understanding full well it cannot be elation

Never, to recollection, has this sensation felt right

I am clutching abstractly at the letter

The inevitable image of the objective invoice

Something utterly static and beyond symbolic rapprochement

in refutation of bloom

the clamor of his self is unbearable

I hide behind the tractor

even if I didn’t grow up on a farm

you wouldn’t know I milk well

better than the cogs of this machine

enough about us for the moment

he, though, has taken the altruistic

route too far and has confused

the look of the word for something

that I think was meant to be theological

oh but a poet isn’t a god

only a religion of the weight words carry

not an angel nor a deity that controls taste

pretend and dress up some more

the moustache, the spectacles, the manifesto

confuse no one in these back streets

where I came back into my boyhood

and celebrated an imagination

that wasn’t only necessary but significant

if it had been greater than its immediate purpose

then I don’t think I could’ve been young

be careful not to invest so much

these writers know less than their performance would indicate

than their harem of intellectuals let on

lonsdale shopping center

The faces flow past

So many that some must be the same?

The escalators stutter

Her weight, with the rest, may be too much

The shopping in rustic plastic

That strains against the rolls in her hand

Breaking now, a birth ripping through

The eggs smash like a new dawn

The sauce makes it set

Individuality saunters off again as more emerge

Through the doors on the linoleum

Out now, crowding around the broken planed meals

We say, ‘This is competition’

For a second I cannot find my own face in the opposite mirror

In some sort of ill-defined end

We’ll know that one’s purpose matters no more

Than the momentum of just

Being there 

momentary loss

Once, in a moment that lacks the requisite panache to label appropriately,

I felt the nourishing trickle of consciousness fall heavily away.

Breathing through an absent nose on a face, disjunctive and garbage laden,

the notion occurred that perhaps wakefulness is a sign of belonging,

a chorus line of motions perfectly in sync like puppets on a string.

Sure, we couldn’t be stuffed

                                                But we’d eaten.

                                                                        Couldn’t be rooted.

                                                                                                But wanted to.

The crashing of scraps and hormones and desires that falls away

from the sudden, vertical disappearance of awareness, the doona envelops this loss,

as a baby wraps itself around an iron toy that is comforting for imagination,

but we’re not the child and I cannot afford to get that confused again.

The surface of the mind as it slowly spirals down what feels like a sink, 
but, mate, isn’t anything like a pipe, is slippery under the touch of my hand.

Though oddly rough under the thumb of a tradie working long, expensive hours.

Sincerity, or a solid memory, was never a strong point, so perhaps

you didn’t happen.  Even if the warmth that fuels my feelings is absent

I’ll always reach for it until someone declares it’s over or something else

develops into focus for my whole state-of-being and holds tightly onto the drip drip

of the always perplexed thought of together that in this central moment

matters not a jot, not a sweet fuck all – this time and the last of my heart. 

diss traction

A charlatan with a jaded carpenter’s bent legged stroll cannot be mistaken for the hopeful dreams of the animals around it.  It is just the materialized conjunction of things and items and actions that cannot quite find a way to connect with the ground upon which it is seen.  Always above what was there and then so high the picture is below every moral aptitude ascribed to it.  And she enters the frame in a way that makes believe in a purpose, but it is misguided.  A Ruse to create the sensation of objectivity.  It is a feeling we are passionate about although unwilling to actually make happen.  The eye, still, is drawn to the stumble of the initial activity.  Distracted and unkempt, it demands a Chinese proverb and a critic’s plastered sexual innuendo: a plastic jumble in the forest.