I’m not quite comfortable with that fireplace, amor,
or the smoke from all the books you’re burning.
I was working through the Dewey Decimals,
I’d kept a little eight two one.
You told me everything defined is lost
by definition,
a soul’s reflection in a mirror.
I thought it best to undefine myself.
We need a chimenea.
I’ll remodel with the chainsaw.
The chainsaw roars, she says a little more
I cannot hear.
An arid future in a waterless world,
where all our understanding wavers
on a bridge to whiteness.
We are replicants in the land
of nothing new, and the westerlies,
hot and dry, are blowing away the children.
As they fall, we fall.
I wrote a kookaburra
perching on a paling fence
motionless in the rain,
sharp eyed waiting for a worm,
but the words left worm impressions
as shallow as my florid thoughts,
washed away by the garden sprinkler.
urban environs
It was once a loud industrial location,
but now it’s slightly damp: Venusian squid
with brollies promenade in the quiet streets
while humans pass their time
overpainting all their windows.
A small symbolic light above the planar world,
the curveless planetary horizon
and yapping dogs on the wind,
run I walk I queue I
grow tired, eyes close and flicker,
yet every photon tells a tale
of a restless luminous voyage.
After midnight I wander under
sodium doublet illumination
to the very end of the street.
on an unremarkable planet
Contessa Isabela fluttered a manicured hand.
Divers divas and devices,
glorified in dullness.
I crave novelty.
We’ll send someone to Planet Sauria
whence no-one has returned.
We might get lucky this time.
plagiarism on a beach in france
I’ve imaginated death:
dark rivers, darker seas,
the luminiferous earth,
its plantations
growing to that darkness
in headlong blind embrace.
I share my thoughts with Joana.
Oh how you’ve changed, amor.
The city is to blame,
its exhumations and exhalations,
obsidian and glass.
I want you to live without me,
the time has come for you to spread your petals,
to hop and flutter.
I knew I couldn’t fly
but still I left her, not without regrets
or longing, but knowing I was
so much more than the helianthus
I once was.
I was ready to seek another light.
It starts with fire and ends with rain,
zero is infinity
and my home
is filled with strangers,
yet their strangeness is not reciprocal.
zero
Everything’s unpointed,
worth the special introductory
price of free.
The scientist Irene in white
peered over her half-moons.
Let’s apply a little logic: if everything
is worthless, so is that idea.
Come with me to Improbable Park.
… meet the zeroth law of motion.
We’re dropping out of hyper now
into normal space,
the words of Azulinha, the fluidic pilot,
flashed inside my head,
and don’t touch that,
it’s not a percolator.
Soon there’d be no more
chromatic thought transference—
empathic rivers of the gaseous mind.
It would all be stuttering and stumbling
with optics and acoustics
on the surface of the planet.
There’s something unfortunate about seven a.m.,
when the dreams of worlds that might have been
ascend into the vanishment.
~/~
As I traveled the Redfern Rail one night,
through tunnels that smelled of soot and ghosts of steam,
I chatted with a stranger. Her auburn hair was wound
with a golden asp, and she told me this:
Your mind’s your own, to do with as you will.
I saved mine for special occasions,
believed in pixels and maquillage,
bowed and chanted to great Osiris,
but I know better now.
There is a place where all imagination ends.
There is a frontier beyond which
nothing is comprehensible.
Who will tell me what lies in between?
~/~
Diurnal hours on planet earth
It’s as if I’m alive, I’m almost sure.
Strangers know me at the supermarket,
even family knock and peer through windows,
ask me why I wasn’t where I should have been
by rote and custom.
Yet I know when I awaken every day,
I’m here for the very first time.
Chalcedony, a distant and unfriendly planet,
orbits an old-fashioned chartreuse sun
in an unsociable spiral galaxy.
It’s a centimeter or two away from earth
on a standard map of the universe,
Mercator Projection.
In a café on the planet’s surface,
it’s Monday morning, neither late nor early,
and Manique, of humanoid appearance,
is sipping a humanoid coffee.
She’s putting on her armor just before the sun up,
with a snap of latches, and the buzz of her
electric screwdriver.
In the far field, stuttering unsteadiness,
in the near field, delicate slivers of glass.
~/~
He knows that he is not himself, someone else
inside authoritates the wine list
and whispers to the pillow:
a loquacious tropical parrot will emerge
and leave a chrysalis remainder.
In my mind I’m in a granite tower, fog and raindrops,
lichen and moss. The sea above its maritime level
is scattered and forgetful, tiny fish have fins
for swimming and for flight.
I chose a basement cavern and pretense,
Martyrdom Lite with a flower,
I curled on the runway where interstellar flights were landing
and bathed in temporal trickles,
lacking seriousness and gravitation,
factualising while my compass spun.
The planet’s hold had waned,
Newton’s fruit was drifting to the West
and ripening, yet I remained
while those around me rose.
There are certain places and certain moments
when a single word you speak will evaporate
your flesh and reveal what lies beneath.
In the distance everything is magnified, desires that
we cannot reach, immensities, improbabilities.
The mountains of dawn are hidden from me now,
but I will see them again.
Some people think we’re all the same beneath our hair,
they hope the thoughts they fear inside their head
are just a common cold. Others, that their
special vision of dominions and desires
is not a stuffy nose.
But I remember turquoise afternoons
when everything was intermediate,
and you and I could be by being,
when all our past was yet to happen
and even sins were innocent.
