Anuradha Vijayakrishnan

 

Anuradha Vijayakrishnan was born in Cochin, India. She completed a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from Calicut University, Kerala and a post graduation in Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur. She writes fiction and poetry while pursuing a full time corporate career. In 2007, the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, Seeing the girl, was long listed for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize. Her work has appeared or is due to appear in Eclectica, Bare Root Review, Nth Position, Orbis, Desilit, Aesthetica, The Pedestal Magazine, The King’s English, Every Day Poets, Stony Thursday Anthology, Poetry Chain, Indian Literature, Muse India , Asia Literary Review and Magma.

 

 

Beads

 

In her hands they are like dust. Or sun-dried

blood, fine-polished. Glittering, unlike

her eyes that slept through the day and through

the caveman nights that came snaking

out of their den and shed their skin

on hers; on hers, for god’s sake.

 

With her hands, she unravels them on her

skin; that skin scrubbed twice and raw. The beads

drizzle over, touching off cold sparks, tiny

nerve spots that meet and combust. So there is

life yet, and there is something that lives. Rubies

beneath the damaged soil, secret black emeralds

that laugh at the night, laugh at the scarred day.

 

On her hands she makes red markings. One cross

for every spent force, one knot for each thing

that was taken. She moves those hands in clenched

circles – willing them to cleanse

and be cleaned.

 

The beads find their way to her feet. Sunspots fall

into her eyes and she turns them into tears.

 

 

Who dances?

 

When I dance, I am like a rustic. Oily-haired

and round armed. I flap my head and grin

at invisible birds. I rise and fall in the garden

sand, laugh out loud when the rhythm

beats my feet.

 

So this music suits; this wooden bench

on which I can dance suits too. I can clank

my rings, my beaded chains here. Can imagine

wood drums, swing my bountiful hips, go one-two

with my heels, my shoulders, my chin.

Snake-dance, peacock-dance; dance even

like a happy calf with new milk sloshing

in my mouth. Kick my donkey heels

as if they can’t break.

 

And then, the neighbours fall off, their pet dogs

and their studio kitchens fall

off. My cellphone shatters against the wall, and the internet

dissolves into unreality. Beetles and moths

gather in the corners to watch.

 

Green plants in window boxes shiver

at the feet, of this goddess

who dances, like a rustic.

 

Margaret Bradstock

Margaret Bradstock has published four books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright prize) and Coast (2005). In 2003 she was Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University. Margaret is co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.

 

 

Recherche Bay

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” – Thoreau

When Aborigines watched
Abel Tasman beating up the coast
                    (overhangs of cliffs

their camping spots), the great eucalypts,
sclerophyll forests, were already old.
                Green is the colour of renewal,

of wild woodland and cultivated garden,
                    amber the fossilised resin
like tears, or blood on a scimitar’s curve,

the nets and traps of war.
If no-one is there can you still
                    hear the forests screaming?

Bulldozed out of history,
the gestures of reconciliation
                  become sites of mourning,

incendiaries dropped from a helicopter
our defeat, the blackened
                   fern-covered boles.

 

Pond Life

‘Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become
an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old person,
renewing and moving on. You are not who you were…nor who you will be.’
                                                                          – Sebastien Faulkes, Charlotte Grey.

Your gardens reminding me
     of a different space, penny-frogs
          pulsating in darkness,

tea-lights on water.
     There is
          always water, recurring,

water I dive into, under,
     breathing, floating, drifting
          in tadpole existence,

 my memories fabrications.
     Sometimes the tide rises
          to the head of the cliff

(sighing among grasses),
     green weed tangles like hair.
          Dead fish, two-dimensional,

clutter the shoreline,
     eyes whittled out
          like holes in memory,

moonlight’s abandoned haul.
     Frogmen surface,
          leviathan-like

on the white tide.
     You are insubstantial,
          stitched into the seascape

and the clacking sound of boats.
     There are dwelling places,
          mansions within mansions,

 rooms within rooms,
     a labyrinth of mirrors.
          Waking, I am not here,

my amphibian selves
     spiralling down
          to the sea’s wrack.

 Shadow-puppets rap sound-tracks
     in crazed patois
          on the garden wall.     

 

The Baptist

Light like gauze,
an oasis somewhere before me
or a Messiah descending.

Living on locusts and wild honey
(dreaming of wine, of bread)
I find my chapel in the wilderness.
Caravaggio will paint me
identifiable by my bowl, reed cross
and leather girdle.
Herod Antipas will proffer my head
upon a platter
to please a lissom dancer.

 And I will ask
if what I saw as baptism
was merely death.

 
 – after St John in the desert, by Sidney Nolan

 

 

Stuart Cooke

Stuart Cooke is a Sydney-based writer but at present he is in Chile undertaking research for a PhD on Australian and Chilean ecopoetics. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various magazines in Australia, the USA and the UK, including upcoming editions of Overland and Meanjin. In 2007 his translation of Juan Garrido Salgado’s Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 was published by Picaro Press.


 

 

Birthday Shift
 
The entire memory of waking, a
quarter of an hour ago, might also
be handed back to forgetfulness, incurring
                                                                   no loss. It’s amazing
how quickly it goes – money, I mean,
and love. I had love, once.
I had it I knew
it was there. But
you can’t write about that swift
and sudden fall from grace It’s
that mild evening, ruled
by still air. “Mordecai,” she asked, “what
became of the old books?”
                                                   “Books?”
He could have been contemptuous or filled
with hope: you can write this way, you
assembled in wash, blubber, observation,
folding
            silica,
can. Write. And I
turned on the television:
Germany’s done with words:
too much to be said; nothing
left
to say Our
daydreams carry us back to it. Love.
Love,
in the faint, white light. You can’t write
about that. At dawn
I see a fox
                 on the lawn the queerer
the dearer in pink the moment leaves
us,
and passes on.
 
 
I was filled with a desire to say, ‘Those
were the days’. Return. Victory shifts, you know, now
one man, now another. Shift. Light
shift. What silly
physics! (now as I look) You
can write lonely poetry. This armageddon of the brain
is lonely poetry and the Jew,
who was seen to be quite elderly,
made his own way to the door.
I came back filled. I hate
birthdays, this enforced
loneliness we step into
locations and change them history
channel blues.
 
 
I’m sorry, for whereas the real beginnings
of images
will give concrete evidence I
wouldn’t have fallen in love of the non-I
that protects the I if I wasn’t a lonely poet to teach
the world to laugh at virtue to drink
gin like love
on leaves. Parks filled
with the dream departed,
leaving him there, his heart racing with hope
shifts, birthdays shift
new work in old
light.
 
 
 Cited texts:

‘Breakfast’, by Martin Harrison
‘Stranger in Moscow’, by Michael Jackson
Riders in the Chariot, by Patrick White
‘Lighthouse Series’, by Kate Fagan
The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard
‘hare encounter’, ‘art nouveau’ and ‘nella casa di balla tutto balla’, by Michael Farrell

The Iliad, by Homer (trans. Robert Fagles)
 
 
 
Those Without Limbs
 from Sihanoukville, Cambodia
 
 
Those without limbs, those
with round stumps or shards of bone
 
covered up
 
 
are absent from clubs.
 
Clubs
 
are the realms of the beautiful,
 
 
the whole,
 
the bodies untouched by history.
Those without limbs are left
 
 
to drag themselves along the beachfront,
their half-thighs drawing thick lines
 
in sand
 
 
which we, the varnished, the well-
 
composed,
 
step over with wet feet, with
 
 
lovers
 
smiling, and damp wads of riel for the white
blood of bulbous, dissected coconuts.
 
 

Ana Blandiana translations by Daria Florea

Daria Florea was born in Romania in 1964. She is an enthusiastic single parent and short story writer currently undertaking her post graduate studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. After fleeing the communist dictatorship in her home country and residing in Australia for almost 20 years, she has rekindled a professional interest in the literary and political themes in Ana Blandiana’s poetry.

 
Hibernare

Nu-i asculta pe fraþii mei, ei dorm,
Ei nu-nþeleg cuvintele care le strigã,
În timp ce urlã ca niºte fiare aprobatoare
Sufletul lor viseazã stupi de albine
ªi înot în seminþe.

Nu îi urî pe fraþii mei, ei dorm,
S-au învelit în somn ca într-o blanã de urs,
Care-i pãstreazã cruntã ºi apãsãtoare în viaþã,
În mijlocul frigului fãrã-nþeles
ªi fãrã sfârºit.

Nu-i judeca pe fraþii mei, ei dorm,
Rar câte unul este trimis în trezire
ªi, dacã nu se întoarce, e semn c-a pierit,
Cã încã e noapte ºi frig
ªi somnul continuã.

Nu îi uita pe fraþii mei, ei dorm
ªi-n somn se înmulþesc ºi cresc copii

Care-ºi închipuie cã viaþa e somn ºi, nerãbdãtori,
Abia aºteaptã sã se trezeascã
În moarte.
 
Hibernation
 
Don’t listen to my brothers, they sleep.
Not understanding their own shouted words,
While they scream like approving wild beasts
Their soul dreams beehives
And they swim in seeds.
 
Don’t hate my brothers, they sleep.
Wrapped in sleep like in a bear rug,
Preserving them savage and oppressed in life,
In the middle of the senseless,
Endless cold.
 
Don’t judge my brothers, they sleep.
Seldom one is sent off into the awakening
And if he does not return, it’s a vanishing sign,
For it is still night and cold,
And the sleep continuous.
 
Don’t forget my brothers, they sleep
In their sleep multiplying and caring for children.
They believe that life is sleep and, impatiently,
Can hardly wait for their awakening
In death.

 

 

Pastel

Þara mea pãrãsitã de fructe,
Pãrãsitã de frunze.
Pãrãsitã de strugurii
Emigraþi prevãzãtori în vin,
Þara mea trãdatã de pãsãrile
Rostogolite în grabã
Pe cerul mirat ºi încã senin,

Veºnic împãcatã,
Mirosind a ierburi
Care-ºi dau sfârºitu-n soarele domol,
Credincioºi pãianjeni
Þes pânzeturi albe
Ca sã bandajeze
Locul frunzei, gol.

Noaptea stele coapte-þi
Fermenteazã cerul,
Vântul curge ziua
Tare ºi-amãrui,
Orele-þi mãsoarã
Nucile cãzând
ªi te lumineazã
Cuviincios gutui.

Pastel
 
My country deprived of fruit,
Abandoned by leaves.
Abandoned by the grapes
Migrated prudently in wine,
My country betrayed by the birds
Somersaulted in haste
In the wondering yet still clear sky,
 
Forever content,
Smelling of grasses
Which pass away in the melting sun,
Faithful spiders
Weaving white webs
To bind up
The place of leaf, empty.
 
At night baked stars
Ferment your sky,
The wind flows the day
Strong and bitter,
The hours measure your
Walnuts falling
And light you
Quinces decently.

 

 

Eu cred

Eu cred cã suntem un popor vegetal,
De unde altfel liniºtea
În care aºteptãm desfrunzirea?
De unde curajul
De-a ne da drumul pe toboganul somnului
Pânã aproape de moarte,
Cu siguranþa
Cã vom mai fi în stare sã ne naºtem
Din nou?
Eu cred cã suntem un popor vegetal-
Cine-a vãzut vreodatã
Un copac revoltându-se?

I Believe
 
I believe that we are a botanic nation
Otherwise, where do we get this calmness
In which we await the shedding of our leaves?
Where from the courage
To start sliding ourselves on the sleep-toboggan
Close to death,
With the certainty
That we will be able
To be resurrected?
I believe that we are a botanic nation-
Who ever saw
A rebelling tree?

 

 

Scaieþi ºi zei
 
Scaieþi ºi zei uscaþi de soare
Schelete lungi, subþiri de temple
Rãmase albe in picioare:
Iremediabile exemple
Ale nemorþii ca povara.
Precum o nesfârºitã varã
Timpul intreg e doar o zi
Rãmasã vãduvã de seara,
În care frunzele nu cad
ªi nu pierd pagini trandafirii.
Nu e trecut, nu-i viitor,
Un azi etern, nãucitor,
Cu soarele deasupra nemiºcat
Nemaiânstare
mãsoare
rãderostul nemuririi.
 
Thistles and Gods
 
Thistles and gods scorched by the sun,
Long, thin skeletons of temples,
Standing pale survivors:
Irreparable examples,
Undeath is like a burden.
As an unending summer
All time is only a day
Widowed since night,
In which leaves do not fall
And the roses do not lose their pages.
There is no past, no future,
An eternal today, stunning,
With the sun above unmoving
Unable
To measure
Immortality’s failure.

 

 

Cetina   
 
Spectre de brazi mai vânturã stindarde              
De ceaþã, proorocind sfârºituri noi,
Dar cine are forþa în casandre
De cetini, chiar, sã creadã, dintre noi? 
 
Pe-acelaºi loc, dar mãturând cu pãrul               
Mult cãlãtoare zãri de cãpãtâi,                     
Topindu-ºi în rãºinã adevãrul,                   
Cel necrezut în scrâºnet, mai întâi,                        
Nu pot sã plece, nici mãcar nãluci. 
În jurul lor ºi cerul ºi apa emigreazã  
Vântul întreabã-ntruna „Nu te duci?“   
Cetina plânge-n hohot „Sunt acasã.“

Fir Tree

 

Spectres of fir trees still flutter pennants

Of fog, foretelling new endings,

Yet who has the courage, in Cassandra Branches,

if only to believe, between us?

 

On the same spot, yet brushing with their hair

The all-journeying skies of endings,

Melting the truth in their resin,

That unbelieved in screech, firstly,

They cannot leave, not even as ghosts.

Around them water and sky migrate.

The wind asks constantly: “Don’t you go?”

The fir tree sobs: “I’m home.”

 

 

Torquato Tasso   
 
Veni din întuneric spre mine el, poetul,
Poetul de spaimã ratat.
Era foarte frumos. Ca la razele röntgen
I se vedea în trup poezia.
Poezia nescrisã de fricã.
"Sunt nebun" – a rostit. De altfel ºtiam
Lucrul acesta din prefeþele cãrþilor,
Dar el îºi purta nebunia ca pe-o parolã
De intrare în noi, ca ºi cum ar fi spus:
"Mã rãscumpãr astfel
De lipsa-adevãrului din poemele mele.
E preþul imens. Vin spre tine.
Primeºte-mã!"
Dar eu am rãspuns: Pleacã de-aici!
"Scriam la lumina de autodafeuri – îmi spuse –
Simþindu-mi pe trup
Cãmaºa pãroasã care se-aprinde uºor.
Odaia mea avea ochi de cãlugãri ferestre
ªi-n loc de uºi, lipite una de alta, urechile lor
ªi ºoarecii ieºind din borte erau cãlugãri,
ªi noaptea pãsãri uriaºe-n sutane-mi cântau.
Tu trebuie sã înþelegi…" ªi cu degetu-ntins
Îmi aratã în trupul meu poezia,
Poezia nescrisã…
Dar eu am þipat: Pleacã de-aici!

Torquato Tasso

 

From darkness he came towards me, he,

The poet failed by fear.

He was very handsome. Like an X-ray

The poetry could be seen in his body.

The poetry unwritten out of fear.

“I’m mad,” he uttered. Besides, I knew

This fact from book prefaces,

But he wore his madness like a password

For entering us, like he would have said:

“This is a way to redeem myself

For the lack of truth in my poems.

The price is enormous price. I come

towards you. Receive me!”

But I declined: Leave me!

“I was writing in the auto dafé’s light

– he told me – Feeling my body,

The hairy shirt that easily lights up.

My room had monks’ eyes for windows

And instead of doors, stuck one to another, their ears.

And the rats coming out of holes were monks,

And at night gigantic birds in large habits sang for me.

You must understand…” And with a pointing finger

He reveals the poetry in my body,

The unwritten poetry…

But I screamed: Leave me!

 
Fiecare miºcare

Fiecare miºcare a mea
Se vede
În mai multe oglinzi deodatã,
Fiecare privire a mea
Se întâlneºte cu sine
De mai multe ori,
Pânã
Uit care
Este cea adevãratã
ªi cine
Mã-ngânã.
Stãpânã,
Mi-e fricã de somn
ªi ruºine
A fi.
Pentru mine
Orice rãsãrit are
Un numãr necunoscut de sori
ªi-o singurã
Adormitoare
Zi.

 
 
 
Each Move
 
 
Each of my moves
Is seen
Simultaneously in many mirrors,
Each look I take 
Meets with itself
Several times,
Until
I forget which is
The true one,
And who
Mocks me.
Mistress,
I am afraid to sleep
And ashamed
To be.
For me
Each and every sunrise has
An unknown number of suns
And a single
Soporific
Day.
 
 
Descântec de ploaie

Iubesc ploile, iubesc cu patimã ploile,
Înnebunitele ploi ºi ploile calme,
Ploile feciorelnice ºi ploile-dezlãnþuite femei,
Ploile proaspete ºi plictisitoarele ploi fãrã sfârºit,
Iubesc ploile, iubesc cu patimã ploile,
Îmi place sã mã tãvãlesc prin iarba lor albã, înaltã,
Îmi place sã le rup firele ºi sã umblu cu ele în dinþi,
Sã ameþeascã, privindu-mã astfel, bãrbaþii.
ªtiu cã-i urât sã spui "Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie",
E urât ºi poate nici nu e adevãrat,
Dar lasã-mã atunci când plouã,
Numai atunci când plouã,
Sã rostesc magica formulã "Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie".
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie pentru cã plouã
ªi-mi stã bine cu franjurii ploii în pãr,
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie pentru cã-i vânt
ªi rochia se zbate disperatã sã-mi ascundã genunchii,
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie pentru cã tu
Eºti departe plecat ºi eu te aºtept,
ªi tu ºtii cã te-aºtept,
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie ºi ºtiu sã aºtept
ªi totuºi aºtept.
 E-n aer miros de dragoste vie,
ªi toþi trecãtorii adulmecã ploaia sã-i simtã mirosul,
Pe-o asemenea ploaie poþi sã te-ndrãgosteºti fulgerãtor,
Toþi trecãtorii sunt îndrãgostiþi,
ªi eu te aºtept.
Doar tu ºtii –
Iubesc ploile,
Iubesc cu patimã ploile, înnebunitele ploi ºi ploile calme,
Ploile feciorelnice ºi ploile-dezlãnþuite femei…
 
 
 
 
Rain Chant
 
I love rains, I passionately love rains,
Maddened rains and calm rains,
Young-girl rains and loose female rains,
Fresh rains and boring, never-ending rains,
I love rains, I passionately love rains.
I like rolling through their tall white grass,
I like to rip off their blades and wear them in my teeth,
For men to become giddy seeing me like that.
I know it’s rude to say, “I am the most beautiful woman,”
It’s rude and perhaps not even true,
But allow me when it rains,
Only when it rains,
To utter the magic formula “I am the most beautiful woman.”
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s raining
And I look good with rain’s locks in my hair.
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s windy,
And the dress desperately struggles to cover my knees,
I am the most beautiful woman because you
Are away and I am waiting for you,
And you know of my waiting.
I am the most beautiful woman and I know to wait
Yet still I wait.
The scent of live love is in the air,
And all passers-by sniff the rain to feel this scent,
During this particular rain you can quickly fall in love,
All passers-by are in love,
And I wait for you.
Only you know –
I love rains,
I passionately love rains: maddened rains and calm rains,
Young-girl rains and loose female rains. 
 

Pietà
 
Durere limpede, moartea m-a-ntors
În braþele tale supus, aproape copil.
Tu nu ºtii dacã trebuie sã mulþumeºti
Sau sã plângi
Pentru fericirea aceasta,
Mamã.
Trupul meu, dezghiocat din tainã,
Este numai al tãu.
Dulci lacrimile tale îmi picurã pe umãr
ªi mi se strâng cuminþi lângã claviculã.
Ce bine e!
Neînþelesele peregrinãri ºi cuvintele,
Ucenicii de care eºti mândrã ºi care te sperie,
Tatãl, bãnuitul, nerostitul, veghind,
Toate-s în urmã.
Liniºtitã de suferinþã-nþeleasã
Mã þii în braþe
ªi pe furiº :
Mã legeni uºor.
Leagãnã-mã, mamã.
Trei zile numai sunt lãsat sã m-odihnesc
În moarte ºi în poala ta.
Va veni apoi învierea
ªi din nou nu-þi va mai fi dat sã-nþelegi.
Trei zile numai,
Dar pânã atunci
Mi-e atât de bine
În poala ta coborât de pe cruce,
Încât, de nu mi-ar fi teamã cã te-nspãimânt,
Lin mi-aº întoarce gura
Spre sânul tãu, sugând.

 
Piety
 
Clear pain, death returned me,
To your breast subdued, almost a child.
You do not know if you should thank
Or cry
For this happiness,
Mother.
My body, peeled out of the egg of mystery,
Is yours only.
Sweet, your tears drop onto my shoulder
And collect obedient near my collarbone.
How good it is!
Uncomprehended wanderings and the words,
Disciples of whom you are proud and who scare you,
The Father, the suspected, the unnamed, watching,
All are left behind.
Free of known suffering
You hold me
And secretly
Rock me gently.
Rock me, mother.
Three days only do I have to rest
In death and in your lap.
Rebirth will come after
And again you won’t be given to understand.

 Only three days,
But until then
It is so good for me
In your lap, lowered from the cross,
That, if I would not fear to scare you,
I would turn my mouth gently

Towards your breast, to suck.

 

 

Ar trebui                                              

Ar trebui sã ne naºtem bãtrâni,
Sã venim înþelepþi,
Sã fim în stare de-a hotãrî soarta noastrã în lume,
Sã ºtim din rãscrucea primarã ce drumuri pornesc
ªi iresponsabil sã fie doar dorul de-a merge.
Apoi sã ne facem mai tineri, mai tineri,
mergând,
Maturi ºi puternici s-ajungem
la poarta creaþiei,
Sã trecem de ea ºi-n iubire intrând adolescenþi,
Sã fim copii la naºterea fiilor noºtri.
Oricum ei ar fi atunci mai bãtrâni decât noi,
Ne-ar învãþa sã vorbim, ne-ar legãna sã dormim,
Noi am dispãrea tot mai mult, devenind tot mai mici,
Cât bobul de strugure, cât bobul de mazãre, cât bobul de grâu…
 
We Should
 
We should be born old,
And arrive wise,
To be capable of deciding our worldly fate,
To comprehend from the prime crux what ways begin
And only the wish to walk to feel reckless.
Then should we become younger, and younger, walking,
Mature and strong to arrive
At creation’s gate,
To pass through it and in love entering adolescents,
To be children at our sons’ birth.
Either way, they would then be older than us,
They would teach us to speak, rock us to sleep.
We would disappear even more, becoming even smaller,
Like a grape, like a pea, like a grain of wheat…
 
 
Totul

Frunze, cuvinte, lacrimi,
cutii de chibrituri, pisici,
tramvaie câteodatã, cozi la fãinã,
gãrgãriþe, sticle goale, discursuri,
imagini lungite de televizor,
gândaci de Colorado, benzinã,
steguleþe, portrete cunoscute,
Cupa Campionilor Europeni,
maºini cu butelii, mere refuzate la export,
ziare, franzele, ulei în amestec, garoafe,
întâmpinãri la aeroport, cico, batoane,
Salam Bucureºti, iaurt dietetic,
þigãnci cu kenturi, ouã de Crevedia,
zvonuri, serialul de sâmbãtã seara,
cafea cu înlocuitori,
lupta popoarelor pentru pace, coruri,
producþia la hectar, Gerovital, aniversãri,
compot bulgãresc, adunarea oamenilor muncii,
vin de regiune superior, adidaºi,
bancuri, bãieþii de pe Calea Victoriei,
peºte oceanic, Cântarea României,
totul.
 
Everything
 
Leaves, words, tears,
Matchboxes, cats,
Trams sometimes, queues for flour,
Ladybeetles, empty bottles, speeches,
Elongated images on TV,
Colorado beetles, petrol,
Flags, known portraits,
The Euro Cup,
Trucks of gas cylinders, export rejected apples,
Newspapers, Vienna loaves, blended oil, carnations,
Airport receptions, Cico, sweet bread rolls,
Bucharest salami, diet-yoghurt,
Gypsies selling Kent, Crevedia eggs,
Rumours, the Saturday night serial,
Coffee substitutes,
The world struggle for peace, choirs,
Production per hectare, Gerovital, anniversaries
Bulgarian tinned fruit, national meetings,
Superior regional wine, Adidas shoes,
Jokes, (security police) boys on Victoria Avenue,
Oceanic fish, Ode to Romania,
Everything.

 

Justin Lowe

Justin Lowe was born in Sydney but spent large portions of his early childhood on the Spanish island of Minorca with his younger sister and artist mother. Completing his schooling back in Sydney, Justin gained a BA in the Central West of NSW and then spent several years in Europe working odd jobs and honing his skills as a writer. On returning again to Sydney, Justin settled down with his partner in what was then a fairly crusty Newtown teeming with disparate souls where through the course of the 1990’s he published more and more of his poetry and collaborated with some of Sydney’s finest songwriters such as Tim Freedman of The Whitlams and Bow Campbell of Front End Loader and The Impossibles, as well as editing seminal poetry mag Homebrew and releasing two collections, From Church to Alice (1996) and Try Laughter (2000). In 2001 Justin moved to the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and has since published one more poetry collection (Glass Poems, 2006) and two verse novels (The Great Big Show, 2007 and Magellenica, 2008).

 

Will Oldham

 

her nape

smells of the earth

where I will hum my one, long note

 

in the powdery dawn

when the crocuses are budding

and the quicksilver in their irises

 

speak of poor choices

a fatal misreading of the times

though if there are limits

 

to the limitless

they are drowned

in the banquet trill of the magpie

 

and she turns

so slowly, anyhow

she barely troubles the creases

 

where I have let my hand travel

like God’s cold eye

along the ragged exodus

 

feeling out the green, ticklish spots

the gentle frost that never lifts

the hmmmm of the little girl stuck in her throat

 

and the question always asked

when the end is slowly dawning on us

crisp and golden in the lattices

 

baby, what time is it?

 

 

Janis

hers is the beauty
old prophets once exhorted
too long in the desert
pining for that cold touch

 

what some call purity

others a blade

the idiot wind

how many times how many times

 

but I am already

turning this poem on its head

for she is not one of those

ice maidens of sepia

 

the fog light tavernas

of the mud-caked generations, the ashen-faced:

the gods have not been kind to her

but nor have they played their usual games

 

she had a good man

a good, sweet, honest man

and he stuck by her

the Lord alone knows why

 

for she sang of him

but never to him

sang so long and loud of him

that all the nameless suddenly had a name

 

all the faceless had a face
all the silent stirred like crumpled paper
while all the blameless suddenly confessed
and all the heartless wept
 
and this good man drowned lonely in her throat

 

 

 

Patti Smith                                                                                                          
 

his was the first instinct
to protect his own
and so he did
 
and so
the pinched face stares up
and the pinched little fingers scratch at the sun
 
and the line crackles
and I am back there as he cooks
buttering over the thousand silences
 
so I assume
she cackles as at a name
she does not like
 
water with oil
the absence of hesitancy
is the absence of humour
 
a dry cackle
some ancient enmity
neither has the time to explain
 
or perhaps because
he clutches his pink little fingers
at the myriad whispers, the opaque face
 
high strings
and a lonesome baritone
and every river gurgling down to the sea
 
the salty death in his tiny mouth
where the gulls hover hungry
and the sun feasts on the eyes of everything

 

 

Morrissey

 

 

if by a gypsy you mean

a man skirting the hearth light

the spastic dance of the tv

 

then I am your gypsy

 

I have a home, Johnny

but it is not of this world

whisper of traffic on a rainy Sunday

 

I am that hunch you see

on the stone plinth in the trench coat

with the eyes of tarnished copper

 

the stiletto wind on Canal street

the echo of your guitar in the old farriers

like a tap dripping steel in the old farriers

 

I hardly know you

why do I bother trying

to cut this cloth for you?

 

tapping away on that fretboard

like the ghost of a factory child

humming my heart and soul over and over

 

time is not our currency –

is that what you’re trying to tell me?

live short and punchy, Steven

 

make shapes of their hours

 

 

Emma Carmody

Emma Carmody is working toward her PhD in creative writing and French at the University of Adelaide. Prior to commencing her doctoral project, she worked as an environmental lawyer in Sydney. She has also worked in a volunteer capacity with several NGOs that provide legal advice and support to asylum seekers. Her poetry, prose and translations have appeared in Australian and foreign journals, including the Australian Book Review and New Translations. She currently lives in the South of France.  

 

 

 

 

Divinité Khmère, Musée Guimet   

 

Flank entombed,  

A thew of root around her

Goddess waist,

 

She meditates on centuries,

Incubates the temple’s

Holocaust.   

 

There is no modesty

In the jungle:

Insects breed

 

Between her virgin thighs,

 

Monkeys take their pleasure

On her naked breasts,

And in a flush of humid green

 

Bamboo shoots

Quake about her feet 

Like nerve endings of the understory.  

 

What memories she must hold

Of another world,

Where each dawn was guarded

 

By the season’s alms, humble

On the altar,

The droning of the sutras –   

 

Her divine core.

 

Being so vital,

So sovereign to the shrine, 

She offered up her wisdom

 

Until suddenly,

Her naked arms severed,

The empire slain:

 

Rebirth in the wild.

 

  

The Ento(M)-uscian

 

Piano player. Hands agonised into
Deftness,
 
By ten you’d almost
Charmed an octave
 
(While I was chasing insects
With a salvaged net,
 
Suckling the nectar out of
Wildflowers). In a
 
Pool of light
You press needles
Into Apollo.
 
You explain:
The wings are clad
In scales of dye,
 
I observe:
The proboscis quavering
Beneath your weight.
 
Another day,
We listen to Liszt’s études in the kitchen;
You palpate the tune
Across my rib cage.
 
You tell me:
My right hand’s too stiff
For these studies
 
As I disrobe grapefruits for the salad,
Divest the flesh
Of seeds and rind.
 
In summer, we drive South.
 
In valleys that antler
Seaward,
Through fists of granite
And nimble scrub,
 
You hunt Lepidoptera,
 
Circling flowers in adagio,
 
Conquering with ease
 
The woman in the tent –
Your fragile prey.
 
                         Though there was
 
An evening in Cassis
When the cicadas,
Corralling the earth to their staccato
Spared a moth its genus
   
And I bunched
Wild herbs
Up in specimen jars marked
 

Parnassius Apollo, Polyommatus Eros.

 

The Shore Line 

 

Alone on the beach

with the lovely slaughter of evening’s

thrust: puffer fish, a slick of gull,

crushed shells. Between

open ocean and smaller things

I walk North, through fits of rain.

You stay inside.

 

Three urchins on my mantel now,

vestigial spines worn but keen. 

 

We grieved our loss on the phone last

week: the garden’s thriving, your brother’s fine,

may I visit? Such responsibility for

chance words, barely meant –

 

such tenderness, these killing fields

at lowest tide.

 

 

 

Desh Balasubramaniam

Desh Balasubramaniam is a young poet. He was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in both the war torn North & Eastern provinces. He fled to New Zealand at the age of thirteen with his family on humanitarian asylum. He is a qualified barrister & solicitor of High Court of New Zealand. He has spent number of years travelling on shoestring budgets around the world with the strong desire to understand the world and his place in it. His first return to Sri Lanka in 2005 had further enhanced his passion in writing and various forms of art. He describes his writing as “a voice for the unheard”. His work has appeared in Blue Giraffe and Sunday Times (Sri Lanka) Online. He is currently working on his first poetry collection.  

 

Expressionists

Woods behind the yard
              a month-old calf cries into deep night
Dogs in wolves’ mask
yowl in cemeteries of the streets
Voices, voices––that scream
              fade as another gun fires
Nail the windows, slam dark the doors
Hide within the cracks
              next to centipede stings
Last night’s blood in the throat
taste of cold feet to the heels
A game of hide (without seek)
              as death nears the bend
Neighbour’s misery (a school teacher)
baton across his learned temple
              the rusting knee caps
His wife’s sari on the floor
––scream of silence amble
Shadows beneath the door-split
            hunting dogs––their prey
Will you fight for freedom?
Will you rather pray for life?
              (a lifeless life)
They came and they came
              to our homes lit by kerosene lamps
dressed in green, a metal face
              to liberate us (they said)
Armed with a paint brush that fired
the island’s expressionists they screamed
Painted our homes with bullets, and
a trail of blood they walked

 

Waiting for Freedom

Down a blurred alley off Serangoon Road
in view of Perumal temple
five-headed bells ring
             waking the sleepless sleep
Familiarity within unfamiliar corners
             strangers begin to lose their shadows

Courtesy of a spaceless room––windowless
shoulder to shoulder, the six of us
Staring at the dim of ceiling
waiting for words
             madam from the mansion

Through the racket
            rough lovemaking from the neighbouring room
father confirms: “freedom awaits in a new land
our futures”
             ––away from the death knot of civil war
common obituaries
the unforgiving sharpness of a knife
She screamed finale––a long aaahh!
              a moment of freedom felt by all

Dressed with a thin noose
the interview at High Commission
Raised to answer every question
in little known language of English
Yes madam, even though it ought to be no at times
she smiled at my village-school politeness

Father forced to turn home
five unguarded left on our own
              ––the bells kept their heightened blare
Months passed, so did my case of puberty
Sympathetic strings of sitar
our story in a melodious eulogy
Unable to meet the rent
sought asylum from the unknown
Perumal stood his solitary stance
unheard our pleas

Living on milo bungkus
and daily dollar of curry puffs
Counting the number of passing cars
drunken men who sing their misery on Indian streets
wiping the tears of mother
(I had grown––
faster than the roaming clocks)

Month after month
under the lowering opaque ceiling
we waited––shoulder to shoulder
for a letter of freedom

Month after month
under the lowering opaque ceiling
we waited––shoulder to shoulder
for a letter of freedom.

 

On My Way To Asylum

script of my memoirs, I find
on unlined pages
rear of a novel I read years ago
written with blood of my own
photographs in black & white and burnt edges
smell of ash
            brittle memory of a life buried beneath
an affair with question
never leaves the bed
mind hangs on a barbwire fence
commas turned to colons
            showing clear breaks
story with a struggle for breath
born on a tear of Indian ocean
without a nation for some years
covering the scars with a silent pair of eyes
crawling on bare knees, with
broken body of words and a weightless bag
I arrive here in the cold
            with and without will
searching a new beginning
my drawn hand to greet the horizon

 

 

Kristin Hannaford reviews A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar by Kerry Leves

A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar

By Kerry Leves

Puncher & Wattmann
ISBN 0-9752405-4-4

Glebe, 2008
Order Copies from http://www.puncherandwattmann.com

 

Reviewed by KRISTIN HANNAFORD


Sometimes you have a book that travels with you.  A collection of poems which has secreted itself into a handbag or suitcase, a book you grab and keep chancing upon like a forgotten bus ticket floating at the bottom of a purse or wallet.  Kerry Leves’s A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar has been my bus ticket for the past eight months. It has travelled to Sydney with me, to Brisbane; it has ferried back and forth to work and made appearances at lunch hours patiently offering up delicious snippets of India.

Carrying the book in the backseat of a Brisbane taxi I ask my Indian taxi driver if he is familiar with Lata Mangeshkar; he seamlessly negotiates city streets while enthusing over her beautiful voice.  Lata Mangeshkar is also known as the Nightingale of India.  Her pre-recorded voice can be heard in thousands of Indian films as female actors dance and sing through their lip-synced Bollywood musical extravaganzas. The taxi driver and I discuss his home town of Mumbai and the hugely successful Bollywood film industry. He states very seriously about his intentions on returning home to India, ‘God wants me to be a Taxi Driver for a while and then I will be an actor!’

So it seems that as I dip in and out of this collection, despite the fact that I have never been to India, that the connections between my world here in Australia and those of India are many.  A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar takes place, for this reader, in that wider ‘mythic’ India; the rich tapestry of Hindu gods and temples imbued with colour, energy and noise of people and the streets. The collection opens with ‘Mumbai’, a beautiful poem simply focussing on the sights and sounds of the ‘pearl-dust’ dawn in the city which carries the title line,

            There ought to be a shrine

 

            to Lata Mangeshkar,

            her honeysuckle tones,

           

& all the faces

            she has ever sung.

            (12) “Mumbai”

 

‘Mumbai’ delivers an Indian street symphony. The couplets in the poem serve to slow down the reader, we survey the city, listen to the rising cacophony of street sounds, which quieten to silent prayers ‘& the god in a knee-high roadside shrine/ is only colour loud; is quiet’ . In the final couplets the Mumbai crescendo peaks with the arrival of the day,

           

            Breakfast puris tan

            in oil that seethes;

 

            blue flames hiss, a kettle blackens –

            welcome! Welcome to Mumbai!

            (12) “Mumbai”

 

It’s hard to imagine living in a city as large as Mumbai, with close to nineteen million people, its competing for the spot of the world’s most populous city. Leves’s sensory exploration of the city is delightful and his attention to imagery works well throughout the book, lines such as ‘The sun/churns the river.’(Himachal morning) and

                       

late 20th century fireflies

swarm

                        & spin the darkness

like a raksha’s eyes

 

Rough sprits guard this valley

                        where town lights

networked close along the river

                        form a yoni –

 

coincidentally

                        map a Goddess part

on Shiva’s inky carbon –

(15) “Night piece, Himachal’

 

suggest a sensitivity and awareness of the intimate connections between people, environment and spirituality in India as the poet observes the landscape at the foothills of the Himalayas.

 

The collection is prefaced with a quote from Indian Poet Keki N. Daruwalla, ‘In an alien land, language itself turns brown and half-caste’, which I believe gestures towards the difficulty of processing and translating experiences of ‘elsewhere’ into language, into poems. The writing inherently becomes happily muddied, infused with words, experiences and traces of the ‘alien land’, both shaken up by the experience and transformed. In an effort to guide those readers who are less au fait with Indian phrases and concepts, like myself, Leves has included a meaty glossary at the back of the book.

It appears Leves first began this collection in the 1980s (or at least this is where some of the poems were conceived) when he travelled in India with well-known Australian poet Vicki Viidikas. Viidikas is included in the oft-quoted ‘Generation of ‘68’ which includes poets such as Robert Adamson, John Forbes, Ken Bolton and John Tranter; poets active and engaged in the inner city Sydney poetry scene in the late 60s and 70s. Many accounts exist detailing the poetry and personalities of this time; Ken Bolton’s recollections of this time in Sydney are particularly interesting. Viidikas died in 1998 and Leves dedicates this collection to her.  Viidikas’ presence in these poems is large; in many ways she appears in these poems as Leves’ muse, visions of her appear as moments of enlightenment or struggle, in Kali:

            a golden doll a crazy-clock but animated using

            all her wicked tickling wit to tick him off

            stick-limbed a cloud of incense

            sandalwood the scent                        she is

translucent like and autumn leaf

(37) “Kali”

 

This poem explore the concepts of the Hindu Goddess Kali as seductive and beguiling, a woman capable of change and cruelty, the reader gets a sense of Viidikas’ ‘slavic cheekbones vast dark eyes/ with sly dimensions swim for his subconscious striking out’ and her charged and unsettled emotional life. The narrator is her ‘Magister Ludi’ (Leves’s witty reference to the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name) and the reader begins to glimpse here the complexity of the relationship – is the poet suggesting he is, like Joseph Knecht in Hesse’s novel,  a servant  or slave? Or is she/he a willing ‘intellectual’ participant playing a complex game of thoughts?  I’m happy to be left in the dark here, because this is one of those times when complex layers of meaning joyfully saturate and obscure the ordinary. As Kali draws to a close the narrator knows he is ‘second’ in this relationship, second in love, second to her demands and ideals:

            he sometimes fights their way onto trains and buses

            can discuss the gods & God

till the candle’s low

till the flame’s engulfed

& through all this

she clarifies

                        that it’s not enough

no never enough (for her)

 

for him it’s close to perfect

(40) “Kali”

 

Viidikas also wrote a collection of poems from her time in India called ’India Ink.’ I’m sure it would make interesting reading alongside Leves’s work; a kind of dialogue of poems and experiences of India.

 

Some of the poems in this collection predictably fall into the postcard poem basket, providing glimpses and observations rather than sustained insight, but I believe this is part of the appeal of a collection of travel poems – sometimes the view from the street or out the window is enough.  There are, however, many interesting sequences of poems. I particularly enjoyed ‘Monkey Balconies’ (pp.60-67) which explores the journey to Shimla, the old summer capital of the British Raj when India was under English rule. Images define the mismatch of ‘English swings, fields, stiles’ and the ‘paan stained bathroom’.  The narrator experiences his ultimate severance from the landscape, traces his place in this strange misted vision of England and India:

                       

So this is seeing the world

            without Hindustani: a tartan shawl

            bundles my bones together.

            Into & out of the mist, I’m a walking

            shadow of history. Must be the altitude –

            not even drugs can earth me.

 

The sequence ends with ‘Celestials’, the poet negotiating Jakko Hill, the shrine of Hanuman the monkey God.  Here the monkeys rule. Aggressive and ‘ungodly animals’, any reader familiar with experiences of monkeys and temples (or for that matter any place where the native animals have been encouraged to seize food) will get a smile out of Leves’s clever depiction of a tug of war between the narrator and a monkey over that aforementioned ‘tartan shawl’. Comic images ‘descending into Monkey Hell’ and of a tireless priest ‘flailing a knotted club/ in some karmic fandango’ are memorable and witty.

 

A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar is Kerry Leves’s long awaited fourth collection of poems, following Green (SeaCruise, 1978); Territorial (AnT Studios, 1997) and the chapbook Water roars, illusions burn (Vagabond, 2002).  For the armchair traveller or India enthusiast,  A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar is certainly well worth a read. The collection reflects Leves’s longevity as one of Sydney’s most interesting poets.

 

Cyril Wong reviews The Kingsbury Tales by Ouyang Yu

The Kingsbury Tales

By Ouyang Yu
Brandl and Schlesinger
ISBN 978-1-876040-82-6
 
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG

 

In The Kingsbury Tales, Ouyang Yu has decided that he has written a novel, instead of just a collection of poems. Although there is no overarching, dramatic narrative beyond the physical and emotional transitions the poet makes between Australia, China, and even Singapore, Yu’s latest verse volume is arguably a novel in the Bakhtinian sense. Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has made a general point about poems for when they are potentially novelised: “They become…dialogised, permeated with laughter, irony, humour, elements of self-parody and finally…the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.” Bakhtin has emphasised that a novel is dialogical by being constituted by various autonomous discourses in respect to which the author takes the position of an interlocutor.

 

This is certainly the case here, in which Yu’s book consists of an imagined, or remembered, smorgasbord of characters held together by the poet’s critical and poetic imagination. If one is searching for narratives in these poems, they can be found in the established, historical ones that intersect across the poet’s diasporic position as a Chinese writer living in Australia (Kingsbury, Victoria, to be exact.) The Kingsbury Tales has irony and humour, but they are subsumed under the long shadow of melancholy (life, Yu writes in the book’s closing poem, is, for an old man, “not worth living / Better never born”.) This melancholy permeates the poems as they struggle to expose the often discomfiting “openendedness” of historical discourses and contemporary multiculturalism (an openendedness that also exists in the definition of genres like the novel form, which Yu unabashedly exploits for his purposes here). Divided into general sections such as Historical Tales, Women’s Tales, Migrants’ Tales, Singapore Tales etc., the poems within them care less about offering an aesthetic thrill than about conveying a sense of jarring displacement or tragedy that stems from the poet or his characters being unable to make sense of the world.

 

From a poem like “An Aboriginal Tale,” in which the poet parallels the same racism faced by both an Aboriginal person and a Chinese woman, to a poem like “Shanghai Women” about how a Shanghainese woman, who is “living a not very interesting Australian life,” longs to return to China with the ashes of her dead husband, Yu starkly brings to our attention the real life stories and microscopic incidents that go wrongfully unnoticed by larger narratives about society. The poet’s own life is put under scrutiny too. In “The Palm Reader’s Tale,” the palm reader takes the poet’s hand and reads him as a man “not content with doing one thing only” and notes that whatever he does, “there is always something there that tries to frustrate it or him.” Restlessness and frustration are the fuel that drives these poems to form a picture of what John Kinsella has described, in his preface, as “a paranoid zone wrestling with its own exclusion and belonging.” What is excluded are the oppressive ideologues according to which our lives are forcibly aligned, while what belongs in the picture, or Yu’s poetic zone, is the indeterminacy and fragmented nature of dissonant, cultural units that the poet, and other diasporic figures like the poet, are forced to hold together within the conflicted spaces of their own self-identification.

 

If language is the entryway into a different culture, then it is also how we most evidently manifest our inability to ever assimilate ourselves. In “New Accents,” the character, “C from Canton,” mispronounces the word “English” as “Anguish,” indicating the pain that comes from being thrown into a culture that one often remains paradoxically excluded from. It is a paradox that a poet like Yu is struggling to resolve, and also—hence offering another paradox—not resolve, at the same time. On one hand, the poet aims to re-imagine a new linguistic space for cultural disparities, yet it is a space of more conflict than harmony, more chaos and shit than the shaking of hands. After the poem, “Holding Up The Candle,” where the poet recounts a story in which an officer accidentally writes ju zhou (raise the candle) in a letter to a friend, turning this innocuous phrase into a sentimental call for courage to illuminate dark times, comes the incongruous poem, “Bowel Movements, A Tale.” The opening of bowels is a recurring image throughout the book. In the latter poem, the poet contemplates on how even falling snow is like shit issuing from the sky’s anus.

 

This is a poetry that is deliberately full of it. The poet makes a convincing case: history is full of stifling delusions of grandeur and hypocrisy—full of shit, and so is culture. It is this shit that we have to deal with whenever we find ourselves in the position of being rudely and unsympathetically marginalised within the context of a new place and language. The idea that the world would be a much better and harmonious place if different races would simply sleep with each other, is a point that Yu humorously, and not un-seriously, makes in the poem “The Mix,” where he writes, “This racial mix, which, in typical Ouyang speak, is the great Fuck.” From shit to plain fucking, the poet ends the book with a section of No Tales (obscenity shifts to a critical discussion of nothingness), in which Yu writes, in “This No Thing, A No Tale,” “This no thing, the notion of a no / In the heart of us…Years in denial, self denial, soul denial…Constituting the smallest part of this nation this notion / The biggest part of this no thing”. The “no” becomes not just the “no” of denial, a repressive denial of the inconsistencies of cultural identities, but also the “no” that signals, within the poems, the emptiness of such discourses that we have to simultaneously accept and deny in order to play our roles in the socio-cultural game of history, as well as stay sane, keeping our heads and souls above the excrement of it all.

 

 

Felix Cheong

Felix Cheong was the recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature Award in 2000. He has published three books of poetry, Temptation and Other Poems (1998), I Watch the Stars Go Out (1999) and Broken by the Rain (2003), which was short-listed for the 2004 Singapore Literature Prize. Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems will be published in 2009. Felix edited Idea to Ideal: 12 Singapore Poets on the Writing of Their Poetry (2004).  A Bachelor of Arts (honours) graduate from the National University of Singapore, Felix completed his Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland in 2002. He is currently a freelance writer and an adjunct lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Temasek Polytechnic.


 

In Praise of Sloth

 

Not writing is a pain

five years in the making,

a knot you choose not

to untie, pact of convenience

with time, vow of silence,

itch at your back, the back

of your voice you can’t reach,

neither pen nor stick.

 

But how it grows, terrible

territory; you flog dead

lines, sub-verse, start

false and stutter, follow

the lead as it sinks, suspect

animation, play dumb, downplay,

punctuate yourself with commas,

poems in coma, this lull, dull period

when you have nothing to say,

nothing to say it with.

 

For not writing is a virtue, let

sleeping words lie,

an implosion of sloth

before you find the gift.

 

 

 

Before Reality Shows

It will be, will it to be,

faith that a wall

is your window to morning,

glory, gilt-mounted, coughing out

the sun, sheen and shine

as if no closure, never

foreclosure. Imagine, yes, hold

it together with words or gods,

that into the distance,

doors lead you on,

corridors steep as the steps

you can carry on your feet,

before dead-ends chase you down,

nail your head to your heart,

seal them blinding shut.

 

There are no alternatives. Nothing

else will alter what is native

inside you: A box

where not even silence escapes. 

 

 

 

Night Calls

 

Soon, your day will

pass, no matter how fast,

vast, furious, light will run

itself out, like a boy

given legs for a field

or a man, women for a song.

 

It’ll always be too soon,

like that last kiss,

the lasting kiss, a kiss at last,

at the mercy of needing

too much, saying too little.

 

When dark matters, rises, steadies

itself for the kill,

you’ll not be this weak again

but complete, completed,

taken out of circulation

and buried among stars,

want for nothing.