Heart flowers

Flowers bloom on the roof of my mouth.
Sugary coronets uncoil into the teeming
stitches of time.

My moon-faced clock ticks.
The main-spring gives.

Heart flowers red, o red, redder than
the very pulse of red

beat love
heart blood
beat heart
rose red.

Some thing undone

A low feeling — neglect —
some thing undone,
a bead missing.

In my bag are beads
I picked up in the street,
yin and yang, pearl and jet,
not around my neck.

(I'm washing this lace to death.)

I missed
some word, some prayer ...
a thought, a stitch.

A shabby seam.
A hem worn through.

A low feeling,
some thing undone.

A gleam unstitched.
An eye unlit.

Poem

Words, words, what is a poem?

Ideoglyphs imbibed by the hyaline mind.
A story of ghosts sifted from dream.
A shining song in a hollow bone.

Is it message or is it a maze?
Is it a moment inked in stone?
Is it forever
     or shredded to stuff a crocodile?

The bird calls the unseen sun.
The stars shed their timeless dust.
The wind wheels our weal and woe.

What sets my hair on end?
The stirring of the storm.

What smooths it out again?
The honey in the coomb.

Petals

Petals fall
from the high vase
scattered in the wind's eye.
Recombinant colours
pattern a phantasm
falling, flailing, feigning
blue veins,
red arteries,
yellow pollen
glittering like leaves
torn from old books,
the crowns of fabulous ghosts.
Omni-coloured eye-bytes
have laden me asleep.
The sparkling dust
sings jubilation
in its haul of light.

The years erased

In years
no longer here,
being nothing but
memory, you
lounged in this room
and we chatted
about food we'd eat
and animals we loved
and people who
rubbed us the wrong way.
Lives elapsed.
Now in this
room, you are
invisible, impalpable.
The years erased
your foot-step
on the stair.

Light echoes

I am the echo of light.
A fish glimpsed—gold
above unseen gills.

On silent glass
my quick eye gleams—
in the deep room

I watch—miming
skin breathing
on white bone.

I am double—sum
of seer and seen.

Empty—I
colour dark sense.

The silvered face
draws the drowned
beam.

Freedom is

 
    like getting out of school.
    I run along the footpath
    over the bridge across the creek.


When I was six
   
    my sandals were jelly-bean blue.
    I ran under the culvert
    where the water splashed.


Late home I ran

    in the middle of the night.
    The immeasurable
    hour-glass from outer space
    had landed in the yard.


   
Now

    dust-covered helicopters
    hover above the banks
    like rooks on a chessboard,
    like faceless eyes.


I run

    along the footpath
    across the bridge
    over the creek.

   
My wings' sweep
    wields the wind.

The wattle bird

sits on the slender tree
elegant in silhouette
against cloud cover

like a Christmas ornament
clipped to a twig, a sleek ellipse
with a tassel for a tail.

Like the glass of my memory
set with bright bead
eyes among the pine

a living, brindled pair
perches on the railings
round my house

clucking perennial
colloquies in the
green.

Sunday night at Club Voltaire

       Poster by Branko Kuzmanovic

Edgar Allan Poet Journal #2

I am delighted to be published in Edgar Allen Poet Journal #2.