Some ghosts never die.


How do the incorporate
cast such shadows?

You permeate
each taste
each breath and moment

I feel your fingers in my hair
body pressed against me
late at night
when all good people are sleeping
your sex comes creeping over
my skin
in slick indentations

I will thrash and twist
try to resist
but awaken
raging with arousal
and despair
thick on my tongue

I am so much more
than you ever let me be
crushed beneath
the ache of your violence

I am beyond
your control

Beyond the soft fist
the brazen kiss
of teeth and blood


Apparition
dancing behind my teeth
as I whistle your favourite song

I have sat in that room

The one with the simple
lettering on the door

Where all the others
smile and murmur
sound without speaking
just creating the correct background level
through accord

The hum beneath us
the way it carries the day aside
moves us within the required parameters
and delivers us to the conclusions
carefully typed out on the neat
unfolded foolscap placed before us

I have sat there
smiling/murmuring

Although sometimes
you will see my face slough off

just tuck the skin back in place
please
I would hate for anyone else to see

And if I shudder
and begin to move out of perspective

Try to continue
don't draw attention to the
obviousness of my disappearance

I will return
murmuring apologies
smiling indulgences
and sitting quietly

Depressed
no just
collecting tears from
other era's
to keep in a droplet
falling from the old tap
against the west wall

Cursing the morning
how it brings awareness
forcing eyes open
mouth to greet
feet to meet
the earth for another
endless
relentless
remorseless
day

Sweet oblivion
how you call

with silver lips and pouting breasts

How you entice with a beckoning finger
of numb

Embrace me
a lovers naked heat
of empty
engulfing my
frenzied lack of courage

Sadness can be a choice

like cigarettes
like fucking

And still

the still reflections
from a dew dropped spider web
blinding

binding me
with sun

I changed nothing

History
written before I took first breath

and acceptance
given in last exhalation

I have seen you in the act of dying
shying away from the light
the way it calls and speaks

My mouth is the universe
a billion stars aflame and waiting
all hidden behind enamelled jewels

I cannot look at your fine lined eyes

The way time has brought messages
to your skin
left comments and asides
for me to read

I do not want the story to end

so I will not look

And they say media exposure and the internet is not adversely affecting our children.

A story out of Australia

A mildly intellectually challenged girl of early teen age met a couple of boys in an internet chat room.

They all lived in the same suburb, and agreed to meet at the local mall
when she met them however, there was a group of twelve boys,
who forced her away from the mall and down to the local riverbank.

With a DVD recorder in hand, they proceeded to sexually abuse her,
urinate on her, and ultimately, as a joke, set her hair on fire.

Afterwards, they created a DVD of the whole incident,
along with a few other choice things they did
like dropping a flare in the lap of a homeless man, exploding chlorine bombs etc etc.

They created a professional looking front cover and a back cover complete with the names
of some of the boys who took part in it. They then proceeded to sell the DVD at three local schools for money $ 5.00 buys you the kind of sick abuse you cannot fathom these days.

It is not just that they perpetrated these acts that is horrendous, but the callous disregard for
the shame and pain they created with their actions, obviously, not one of these twelve individuals considered for a moment, how wrong these actions were, how damaging to the girl and other people they affected. And it goes further, when confronted with the DVD and the actions of their children, the parents of them tried to shrug off the crime as just a joke, just pranks.

How can we expect the children to take responsibility for their actions, if their parents will not?

Where has the basic distinction between what is right and what is so beyond wrong gone?

Bum fights,
cat fights etc etc are all extensions of the same disturbing trend.

Filming people beating the shit out of each other for entertainment and posting it on the internet is a sickening trend growing in popularity.

Have we as a society become so jaded, so numbed to sensation that we can only find life and awakening through the pain and humiliation of others?

I am sickend
and terrified that this is a world my children will have to live in.

This is as close as I get


The scent of your pain
is distended bellies
ready to explode
a cloud of decay and death
waiting to engulf
and embrace

I have learnt a lesson finally

My fathers belt taught me
that welts heal
aches fade
and if I grit my teeth
the first strike will be less than
agony
and more than I can bare

Feral and skittish
I skirt the borders of the hedge
able to secret within the
curling confusion of branch and twig

There is a Mac truck waiting for me
to make a break for the water
across the road

It has my name
scrawled in absurd
swirling script
flames leaping from the letters
spelling out how my blood will
look in splatter pattern.

I love the throb of its motor
as it approaches though

I have written a poem
in the time it takes to make a cup of tea


And it

is eternal

Quick

In the one moment's hushed opportunity

come to me


I will accept all your frailties
the way petals fall from you
when even the softest breeze
gives caress

Hurry
I see the shape of things to come
and it is distorted beyond recognition

I will agree
to release me
allow the bonds to break
the stern lines of frown
shall disappear
and my face will be the clear
unfurrowed planes of youth
beneath your whispering kisses

Faster love
I see the stars fall
the dead have risen over Sunday
and my pockets are filled with you

I will place
trust on the ground between us
and wait for you to gather it up
into your arms
your eyes
the way you cry when
the guy and the girl get together
in every chick flick ever made

Come
it is time

Deeply personal
yet giving nothing away


I am fully aware of my insignificance

How I blend into the sun-paled patterns
on fading wall paper

My dreams
have left echoes on my children

They have a sense of who I am/was

The way I ran in the sun with the
reverberations of a gun shot
bouncing off the back of my heels

I cannot explain blood
how it coppered on my tongue
and thickened darkly
on the dry earth at my feet

Or how sharp and short
the cry of death is

It does not encompass the loss
the passing
it just ticks it off on a list of lost
and moves beyond

The children know
I am woven of secrets

my shadow never falls the right way
when the sun is high

They have seen my clenched teeth
biting around the tough skin of scar tissue
seeking a way in
or
back

I am accepted
in spite of
because of
my lilting cadence
moving against the conversation

How the slots are never the right shape for me
and yet I wedge in regardless

The gifts I bring

not wrapped
nor tied with ribboned conformities

Suzuki told us

is still telling us

of planet death

and how we should have responded

I taste the dry

and wish we had

I thought I'd write a bit about me but


How much information is too much?

If I told you the way I clip my nails
or
the consistency of the wax in my ear

The state of the nation
from the angle of my erection in the morning

The weather by my popping bones as I stretch

The size of my shoe
just one, you cannot know about both
for each foot is different on each of us
and both have a tale to tell

My favourite colour of underwear
for me
no one else

The times I have wept in total despair
snot and tears running together
a river of hopelessness meeting
on the valley of my mouth

The same number of times I have laughed so
hard my ribs have crushed in and taken the
breath from my lungs

My memory of standing on the edge of a cliff
the small stones shifting beneath my weight
the sun burning into my eyes
and wondering....

why I don’t like pasta sometimes

why I don’t like chicken often

why I will not sing the national anthem

why my hip has a small sickle shape scar


And what will you do with all of this?

Paint a picture
write a story
fill your empty places

wish it into a physical shape

burn it to the soft bone-white arc
of a branch
emblazon my life across its gnarled surface

Or read it
absorb it
and wander on to the next one

How many lifes should we bookmark
and covertly become part of?

Are you part of mine?

Am I part of yours?

If I only had
no time
to tell you
everything.

I would begin with yesterday
red gold perceptions
blurred through the falling leaves
of a cool Autumn dusk

A wicker chair
creaking upon the tilting verandah

The tinkle of glasses
shattering laughter
crystal refractions
rainbow
fairy lights wound around
your bare arms

Wrist bent to accept
reflections
breaking against the tremble
of lips

The dance of hands
adoring contours
shaped and shifting with the
shadows

We wove garlands of days
in wild flower disarray
gnarled branches
secreted within the splashing
color spilling over your lap
to greet me

Then
we bled to sepia
wide grain textures
fuzzy with acceptance
of passing

If I only had
the time
to tell you
everything

I would speak you today

Ravenous
now
as then
the adrenalin kick

want flickers

flame biting warmth
upon coppered skin

The start of each instant
lingers
the fall of time
you and I
reaping a harvest of summers

Today
in its infinite dazzling spark
leaps in cavorted boundless glee

A smattering of words
candle wax drip
heat on skin
each delightful burn
surging over the shameless
coupling of ideologies
we debate Castro
through red wine smiles

If only
I had the time
to tell you tomorrow

An old dog
tongue dangles
on the soft pattering
of dusky days

We are bound
beneath the weight
of memories
a heavy blanket of snow
to snuggle within

The words whispered
hushed rushed
and placed gently
in a thousand voices
loud clarion
lowest utterance

hang over our bed
silver framed needlepoint
carefully threaded
over endless nights
with tired fingers
aching yet resolute
in completion

You are quieter now
as we come to accept sleep
as the final brilliant flash
of a time
so long
and too desperately short

My If-only
slips from worn hands
to land between us
bent
spent and emptied
of time

All the infrastructure
gleaming girders
bordered in gilt
and shiny shiny chrome

The way the city breathes
moves in time to the inhale exhale
of us

The buzz
always

a whining counter point
to the high low pitch of life
and death
played out on neat suburban
lawns fresh mown
or back alley stained cement
where everything smells of wet
and sad and sexed out

We are intricate tonight
in the blue hook flesh neon shine
caught rabbit startle in the glare
only to shimmy sidewise
into a cafe cool embrace
where coffee is the only song sung

I want the distance you promised
from the sweaty human taint
clinging greasy and smearing
my skin

I sip and slip my tongue
between sentences

Waiting on the exhale
to rejoin the mass of tingling
adrenalin thrusting brightness

We covet the night
in all its lack lustre dazzle

blink

blink in the shades of grey blue

Iris red
the
retina's expanding into the dark

And when the light strikes
no pinpoint reaction
just the absorbing of it all
in glorious blinding disaster

My widened eyes
sucking in the vortex
slamming suns
searing imprints
a comet tail
a meteoric impact
burning race memory and history
far into
the
cortex of my soul

Becoming the hollowed impression
a billion swirling dust particles
up-ploding into mushroomed release

Close eyes
see the aqua light
of creation
suffuse

I can feel brilliance grow
bulge
encapsulate and encase
till membranous
we are twinned in the skin of tomorrows verse

Folded into a womb of genius
we weave the energy given from
the graceful fingers of humanity

How fragile
the thin sliver of hope left
to mankind.

The way they look to us
doe-eyed and shivering
with the cool wind
dimpled skin
tautness of waiting

How precious the gift
the amber glow
inclusions of supple interpretations
winding over your naked acceptance
and my final acknowledgement
of how it is
should be
and
might have
been

We rise
on the voices proffered
in joyful harmonies

Lifted above the canopy
of clustered anticipations
to join the sound
the humming ceaseless tone
of earth song
sky splitting and emitting
a high pitched whine laced
in the lavender and rose scent
of a gardens softer tones

Spreading petals of muted hue
across a landscape
carefully planted with
my essence
and the blazing foot prints
upon the surface of my life

left by you.

Make me
in copper and bronze

The flash of sun
sparking from your skin
blinding and binding.

Intricate
the design of time

The way it carries us

Shifting and sifting through
the boundaries of skies

Pulling us through the eyes
of God

You stand on the foaming breakers
as they come to caress

A smile
of curling waves

And I am merely the late afternoon
falling
on your bare shoulders
warm and familiar

Copper and bronze
we melt
reshape
softly hammered
to delicacy
by the sun