7 December 2024
10 December 2024
submitted for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2025 but not on the short list announced 7 February 2025
solace in obsession
from the roll call, jugglers, geese, elect
spenser, superfluid allegorist, desperate to impress; shakespeare spews our next horizon; hill, fierce ardor burnt by england’s light; milton plots his power play in the dark; dickinson, endangered species ex nihilo; graham rides her sad stretch limo down the road; I tread on possum scats behind a log,
an accidental purist too dense to ease from poison pools of sleep where black forms rise and walk where flies lay eggs in wounds of earth; the maggot storm the incipient ocean; go paint it with no paint as ghosts do, ghosts of volition, ghosts of sacred tech; power the wild imperative, plainsong of connected concrete slabs, carry a guitar through discontented jungle: your face your face again
wild cries of managers at screaming desks, spangled tads of influence, stars twinkle in their nursery, generated hyper stuff abounds
it’s velvet to the touch, the taste of blood from veins long dry, the life that should have drowsed blank screens with eager tears, the fingers that caressed their interface, a trillion characters, arrogant; to think the data made a difference, to dream that peace would make you smile: your face your face
I can’t remember gulag comprehension, the time of spineless change when no change came; I built your face in pixels from conception until today – vague in archipelagos but recognised, you’re here…a red cross on a lunar field: your face again; and I your gentle knight prick one square forward or back, two squares left or right; avoid avoid attack attack, duplicitous; I’d rather be a pawn, be pwned, taken
en passant, of peasant birth and homeless age, devoid of current, sucked up a soft posterior, an a priori microbiome tomb, a fertile room of numbers, words, the precedents for life, eternal lux, my antiphon completes; the literature of light through which the daemons and the angels fall, their wrestling done
until?
- warp speed deliverables, supply chains snapped when snakes would do?
- joyce falling on his face, the upside being his downside blues?
- the emptiness of lungs before they breathe?
- plastic subs in a plastic ocean?
- and in the matrix of our perpetuity some few words sing?
- a few?
a new, bright disenchanted being, the democracy of grace; an ironed out world, a space with no dimension, no regrets; rest zooms from weary strife; imagine there’s no anything and then begin; the bridge between nothing and nothing lightning all the way; the congress of the juniors, seniors, in betweeners, up-the-wallers, the compress of the panicked polluted in their dens but
sorrow stars, engines stir, wells swell beyond their use-by date their data done