and like all the other skinless you slide through your days unnoticed remember that army obstacle course you entered with old school friends, when you ran through mud and manure and contracted flesh-eating proteins that removed your epidermis how easy it was for the skin to peel, for viscous fluid, clear, bloodless, to roll down your calves and how easy it was for the cardigan to rip the interconnected cells from your flesh you have no skin and yes, there are strengths how easy it is to feel the young jonquils unfurling from your flesh with a glance and you are stamen and stem how easy it is to exude sweet spring musk horny jasmine and magnolia on heat and to sit beneath the soft skinned melaleucas and imagine coccyx reverting to tail, bones emptying and hair reverting to feathers how easy it is to flit amongst the mangroves also, how difficult it is to the be the skinless amongst your predatory race, you cry beneath those paper-skinned trees, and you think of a friend’s client or a client’s client, the one who swallowed razor blades and apparently the oesophagus is resilient and you hate that word resilient, a word used as both blindfold and gag to ignore scar tissue and shrapnel in the belly to avoid asking could life be lived another way.
Tag: poetry
we do not know ourselves
let me tell you about us, all five million of us:
we are a city allergic to the damp, when waters rise, we forget to flee
instead, we gaze upwards
searching for sky fire, mistaking light mist for feather embers.
we are a people programmed for brightness, in this postcard, bridge framed city
coaxing bud to open into wisteria and mulberry and
shoving tufts of jasmine into windowsill jars
herding spring like sugar fuelled children onto greyhound coaches,
and all the school fetes and blossom festivals,
fairy floss and food trucks:
Turkish gozleme and vegan donuts
a Filipino family singing
on open mic:
a high school teacher brings her newborn to the festival and
the basketball boys/the almost juvie knowntothecops boys
clear a path for her child,
space, space they call to each other
shrinking as a sign of respect,
let me tell you about us,
without sunlight we do not know ourselves.
a week of seeking solace
I feel broken, I have not felt broken like this before,
and the wise woman that reads your whispers,
the one who breaks into Italian when she is delighted or drops her guard,
she says maybe, maybe you are simply aware of these long-broken parts
and you speak these beautiful, awful truths to a forever friend
whose fingers are always moving and she says
think of pottery though
when the ceramic is being glazed, it looks like it is breaking,
but no, it isn’t breaking,
and you’re not breaking, she says,
your surface is splintering but your interior is still intact
as she drives you to the ocean to comb moss
that grows like human hair on sea rocks
and there’s your friend with the renaissance soul
the latest one to make a new life and weary and sleep stolen
she introduces you as a writer first,
not a teacher/therapist/ academic,
not a failed woman nor a would-be wife
and she says we must create because
nothing is secure and
life is uncertain
and life is short-
and this same week you are running to the river, and you are never too
quick that you cannot stop for the burst of cherry blossoms ushering spring
and this is a delight,
a kindness,
that you can stay still enough to capture the bees
dancing across blossom and bud
and across the road
you hear the man you cannot stop loving for his improbable love of unlikely song
and he’s playing the uillean pipes across the field
and you are breaking
still and the river
will take you, broken or cracking you are mostly organic, and your banyan tree will hold you amongst her buttress roots and will remind you that
all that lives
is prone to break.
reasons for not returning*
*a letter to my mother
because this is the nature of our dance I step out of time and then you yank me into place to always feel hunted, because my earrings, junk shop, metal, painted teal and gold offend you and still my thoughts are too silent for you to grasp and my denim is ripped, and my eyes are kohl rimmed and aside from liner I wear no other makeup and I am too much gypsy punk for your boomer aesthetic and I collect degrees like magazine coupons so you can be proud though my bank account is in arrears and yes of course I am still not good enough
because I have spent years stripping the interior of my skull removing thoughts that were not my own with scraper and acetone and forever chemicals that may one day command my cells to grow uncontrolled because my heart is smeared across the brass bedframe you slammed me against and I am too weak too shameless to wipe away my own blood and I am still searching for cleavers that you hid around the house or that kitchen knife for boning chicken and cutting pork when you invited me to die with you and I was only 7, maybe 8-
and because maybe you knew and maybe you didn’t anyway, I forgive you, I forgive you because how would you know, really know even though there were whispers and warnings but he always took me in the shadows cast by 1970s home décor a crystal green disco ball that cast lurid pools contracting with the edges to never tell so how could you know about that architecture that interior aesthetic breaking a child against the canary yellow walls beige carpet/ tan bedpost/ cream door frame/ teak bed head pink satin coverlet he held me down upon until I finally screamed but by then I had fractured into carbon and nobody listens when dust begins to speak
because you loathe me even though the science says a child alters its mother in the womb chimera cells so the mother is also child because this is how I speak now and do you remember the gaffer tape plastered on my mouth, my arms, legs, torso bound tight with orange sisal rope for tying boar and game and because it started then, the words filling up the cavities in my mouth, the hollows of my throat and I couldn’t speak or move eventually the words leaked through my skin lacerating into scar tissue and cigarette burn craters and though I couldn’t speak I learned to write I couldn’t stop writing because you said ‘what can I say you are/ what profession/what worth’ when I studied literature instead of law, because what can you say I am? I cannot stop writing/ is all I am I am simile/syllable/syntax I scribble into voluminous sound my fingers are always screaming.
Even still
it’s not safe to drink water from the sky anymore,
and the soil is laminated in plastic.
even still, the egrets have returned to Cooks River
and across the Tasman the Waitangi has human rights
the plagues won’t stop because the tundra is melting,
because the not-us creatures are homeless and searching.
even still, the winter wattle is in bloom, and all along the estuaries, yellow scrub grins.
and we are a treadmill species moving not moving
even still you see lorikeets glide across campus, nesting in the cabbage tree palms
and when they ask you where do you see yourself in five years ten years
how far on the treadmill would you like to have run, there is the only the treadmill
‘even still,’ you say, ‘I will step into the empty space beside the machine
where do I see myself?
Beside a reborn river,
playing Celtic reels
and speaking soft sounds
on sacred
ground.’
Mind-field.
So, now. The search teams aren’t coming-
the fog’s devoured the deep ravines,
swallowed boundaries of ground and non-ground
elevation and air.
So, no one is coming, no one is safe
on this trickster terrain.
And now. The cavalry was never really deployed.
Though they’ve set a gift of artillery and gunpowder
at the border and
it’s all for you,
all the prayers and murals and hashtags
and kindness and never again’s
all for you, the one-person army.
Because now. The enemy doesn’t just look like you,
the enemy is you, all the many yous future present past tense-
Know this now. No one is coming. Not now but
maybe later to pick the bones clean,
to conduct a moral audit
to assess mistakes made and
codify/ ratify /enshrine the never-agains.
To logic
the illogical.
So, now, there is no police back-up inside your skull battleground,
No heroic dog to sniff tripwire in your mind-field
because the enemy is you
earth squashed between bone and air that pulses
across the neuronal superhighway,
where thoughts ignite and reignite.
And because strangely, everything is beautiful
during ceasefire/truce/evening’s pause.
And there is stillness as you sink exhausted
into gyrus and sulcus, enfolded into mind earth
gazing into mind sky,
where electricity is energy,
dancing across this silent space.
Then you don’t know me
Then you don’t know me.
You don’t know how much of this life I’ve walked alone, that I’ve had to be my own lighthouse, and if this is what scares you, well…
Maybe you’ll learn.
You’ll learn brick by brick, with spirit level, mortar, and grout. Eventually you’ll gauge the right elevation, where to cast your lamp and from which headland. You’ll learn to pick from the dashed bodies of your broken self, you’ll learn which cargo can be salvaged and what must be discarded.
You’ll learn that so much of your self is simply this:
Detritus.
Or you won’t learn. That’s ok too.
But I have no time for the blind, the easily seduced, searching for siren’s lights.
Lost in a shipwreck of their own making.
Sacrifice
What does she want but to charm the swallows and make the trees dance, Almost Orpheus, but a woman with an instrument, not from heaven, but Hades.
A sacrifice is needed. Take them. An ovary and an eye, she whispers, Let me hang beneath the banyan tree Almost Odin, but a woman, I am used to hanging I am used to bleeding, she says. But first suspend her from that leafless tree, With grandfather’s beard draped upon Its branches, like chain mail of fallen soldiers Where currawongs perch, crow-like but flightless Dismember me, she says. I am used to it. In time, I will reassemble.
If you stay too long in the sea (poem in progress)
If you stay too long in the sea The mermaids will take you, her cousin said, a bored babysitter, fourteen. Reluctantly, she exited, four and in love with wave texture, sand texture in love with all that reliably rose and fell -
If you walk on the cliff rocks alone The men will take you, her mother said. Instead, she brought a kitchen knife and clambered along capricious cliffs Seventeen, in love with all that was Predictably harsh, in love with a A cadence of crest and crash.
If you bring a towel, We’ll be more comfortable, the boy said. Twenty-one and agreeable, She lay in the private cove Hidden but exposed. Twenty-one and watching beyond him Wanting the salt on her skin Her body submerged As the shallows caressed her.
If she leaves now, she thinks, She will arrive before the families Thirty nine and sensible she arrives at dawn Seeking solace, she wades into the rock pools A hermit crab peers from its jagged crevice, Watching, not judging as she floats on her back as the rising sky blinds her and the ocean holds her.
Protection song (a poem in progress)
I am still working on this, but wanted to share the first verse.
The violin is what you play when you can’t sing. Red backed fairy wrens know their mother’s song before they hatch to protect themselves from birds of prey. The violin is what you play when your mother didn’t have a song for you, but you’d like to find your own Protection song.
Word upon Word 