unrequited

THE BIG BAD WORLD…

This love ran into a brothel because somebody told her she was sitting on a million, because she had a romantic vision of sassy, stylish, self possessed, and fascinating figures of women which drew her curious self.

Her eyes,
milky skeined,
Titania saw a glamour,
and loved
what of an ass
a flower knew.

She was in another city, she was in another world, had been initiated into the secrets held in whispering gold fantasies and grungy motel rooms; she’d had opera singers, she’d had plumbers, hippies, and rock ‘n roll drummers, men handcuffed to suitcases, drunks, crackpots, and sweeties.
It started off in a funny little house with a t.v. in the lounge-room; worn carpet, lino, mushrooms growing out of the corners of the bedrooms, and a ceiling fan for really hot days that always threatened to come flying off spinning down onto the big round bed, (feature exotique), but never did.
It ended up in a high class brothel in a bigger city, run by a woman who decorated the rooms to suit the taste of desire,that is if desire came in four main expressions, there was another secret room: a special room that for some reason remained locked. It's black interior may have closer to the desire of the madam, its sacred air was not for common usage.
She ended where she began but it was too late for the sass to charm, and the style had melted into that sadness in their eyes and the shared tragedy in those traded smiles.
She caught loneliness from her lipstick and couldn’t enjoy the making of love with just anyone anymore.
Love ran back out of the brothel.


BIG BAD LOVE AND MADNESS ON THE ROAD…

This vessels' lip has caught
harmlessly that bright, young
burning star, and bound it.
An object of wonder,
it is shifting blinding-brilliant
in gaudy scintillation
upon the surface.

Yet the depths that quench:
extract light
which strathes in waves
of calm-continuous,
but shallowly contained.

Thirst flatters
an amphora in the sun.


Despite this the still Moon rose up and shone upon her life, but the one she called the Moon was in love with a wolf-lady and this, Love decided, was fine and she could not interfere. Being in love didn’t help, she travelled to let it wear off.
Once, memorably,  a friends child intent it seems upon saving her soul pantomimed money in hand and, squatting, shoved it between legs, "Putting money there!" it seemed to say.


They broke up and she looked at them both with their divided love.

Kissed, once on the neck and it burned for a week while her loneliness writhed inside and choked her, knotting mad sheets and never letting her eat, the Moon shone into her skull and lit up the corners of her sweet and icky mind while weary voices encouraged her to flee to where he was, "they" said in their Greek chorus "You’ll be happy if you go there".
So Love started travelling, she picked up her heart and went hitchin’ outta town.
That night the Moon shone through dirty train windows and metallic-smelling air lighting up the wings of a sympathetic moth keeping her precious silent company all the long train-hidden night.
It took days of lost wandering but Love found the Moon.
Him and his friends welcomed her, stared at her, laughed amongst themselves at her, got angry with her, and told her to go away.
It was all too bad, too awkward, too confused.
She was a mute, words were clumsy like something once a vine
twisted and battered into wrought iron,
she was a leper... stuck... in front of their fire. "Nice place you got here" she offered, but 'I want to live here from now on, I have come home, I have walked into heaven!' she screamed inwardly. She wanted, she wanted them all to feel that she’d come home, she wanted the floor to swallow her up every time he looked at her, she wanted him to stare at her and she wanted to stare back. She wanted to talk but she was waiting for something, some sign, some surety. She was sure but everyone else kept giving her sidling glances that would quicksilver away when she couraged to look back.
Perhaps she stared.
Perhaps they had heard her screaming within, the force of her own screams would shake her frame with the double effort of them drawing out of her mind and her keeping them going inward, away from the others.
Perhaps she was talking in a different language thinking that they understood – it seemed they did but their conversation was scripted and their movements choreographed. They had to set a scene and she had to work out what the play was. It started off happy then became sad and strange.
She felt beautiful sometimes and she felt their awe,

Beauty exists in a forest
that Art seeks to freeze
and thaw into Creation:
an isolated growth.
Forest free –
Laughing fleeing Beauty.


... but at other times she felt cringing and repulsive, almost threatening, and she felt their disgust. Did it matter to him that her iridescent soul was shining through her eyes in the light of him - whom – she – called – the - Moon? He called her black and she didn’t know what he meant. Did it matter that yin was turning to yang and back again so rapidly?
The house was full of music and every song said everything for her such that she had no words to add, expecting them to know that the lines where saying it all for her.
Her own poetry filled the gaps in space, her scribbled pages held away from them and hidden in her book in her bag. When they weren’t talking to her she could hear and talk to the rest of the town, right there on their lounge-room floor: Armadillos and councils of dragons while she was amusing herself magic carpet flying.
She talked to the dogs and they understood,
and sometimes so did he, she had Hope.

But Hope went against Patience when Honour died in the fire.

She tried to leave town. It rained.

She slept with the dogs one night and the household didn’t understand.

A grinding,
slow,
of gears and rust is this promise;
this is
a sour-blooded morning and it is
awkwardly
traipsing through ambivalent corridors
of a pessimistic morning's thinking,
denying a palpable arrogance.
Clouded mists and clouded blood
colours this dun morning
with it's insistent repetitions and
remembered hiatus
walling doubtful progressions
of days,
their clinging memories;
accompaniments of stiff-jointed thinking,
alkaloid manners
avoiding each preconceived sting,
each aspersion of boredom.
Minutae frighten
as sour, purple, clouded blood
trickles in secret
surrupticiously staining
a seeming indifference.

Love admitted Defeat, she did eventually leave. There were the spirits of bird and platypus to say goodbye to her at the foot of the mountain, at the foot of heaven, his place in the clouds, she had a vision and then got a ride outta there.

Oh but she was still in love! She died and died again, over and over. She scrawled across her pages, pouring it all out stream-of-consciousness you know? She was unlocking the id, she was the dew that fell on dragon wings, fell on everything, covered the slime and the orchid alike. She saw all: co-incidence and the universe attached to it. She shifted form, walked through walls, wept through the night. Lost everything. Walked with leper’s feet bathed in dream-time oils, anointed in one place and shunned in another. She was free but continually trapped. Cheered on and then slapped down. Nature was giving her the roses and the thorns. She trod unshod and made love to strangers when they reached through to her with their wordless pleas but it was understood, she couldn’t stay.

Somewhere she is,
somewhere it seems forever lost.
When she dares to look
she sees, in all directions, eternity:
Some gift, from an existence blown apart,
Of sight.
So change and the strange
surprises in any form,
are relief as dew
to that desert;
that topography of hunger and blindness,
that human scream,
that vast singular fact harboring, but only just,
the germs of life.

Disaster made of her a judge,
Somewhere lost
so far away
but so very near to your centre:
her pithic emptiness.

Her hand was spread over the dome of a skull, she was wrapped in a thick blanket sitting over the crawling moonlit sea with a shining crystal rock in her other hand, she had been anointed on her feet as she lay curled and weeping that afternoon, and all night kept vigil over the sea hand upon skull’s dome. In the morning she went walking to see people breathe underwater and found the sea’s gift blue veined with a special fleshy seed for the land for her to plant popping out of an orifice. Birth of birth this little seed she pushed into the sand deep. The sea seeded the land. All calmed and subsided, that perfect silence of a soul's breath followed.

You bled last night.
Your mouth-stigmata
Glistened with red
That you could not see,
But felt,
Tasted,
Momentarily.

She was eating stolen roast goat in the rainforest when he,or the ghost of he, found her. She was singing jazz throwing her voice down the valley, throwing her voice off the cliffs behind her – "Summertime and the living was easy", "Natureboy, fools and kings" – her voice trials off into the falling water and he was shouting her name from atop the cliff way up there. He was the angel Michael dropping from the sky. He said "I’m on the edge of the world!" leaning over with his arms outstretched. She waited for him to come down, expected it. Her friends said she had the fire in her eyes. She amused herself waiting by smoking mosses and bracken from a peace pipe whilst sitting on the water. Moonlight washed the valley and he never came. The waterfall cried into its primordial lake and she left on the traces of a hurricane.She knew she’d always come back, she knew she wanted to marry him.

tectonic plates grate and slide away
within, and
avalanches fall
and breathing
sends a shiver
across the sea
and her smile
is a shooting star
her sleep
is the rhythm of frogs songs,
her walking feet
roll the planet
along with me.

He found her in a pub room in Fortitude Valley – he was the tiger spirit that had climbed over her balcony. His flying truck had taken off into another dimension that she’d dragged him into through math and fantasia. He’d walked through the wall, it was like mist, and there she was curled up on the bed staring at him with limpid large eyes, eyes like dew shining under the moon at night. Her body was made of stars, and there was a little potted plant swinging outside the open window fronds aglow in the streetlight singing at the top of its voice. He said “I don’t believe it”. She heard him but couldn’t see him. He said ”I don’t believe it” and she disappeared. She was still there but he was gone. She heard all the glass in the place break and some old Irish voices said "don’t worry".



She found him one night. She was walking out of a city at dusk, a large faun or satyr was teasing her from the drainpipes :
clop, clop.
A fingernail was writing things on the soles of her feet as she trod along the sides of storm-water drains and through parks. She walked alongside the busy road picking red fruit off the trees. She walked amongst the pine trees and kicked over some Autumn-dried fly-agarics, voices dared her to eat them but she knew that it was going to be a long night anyway. Voices always dared her.
She placed mud upon her lips, and nectar, and sap upon her eyelids to appease the faery dance.

In a dying eye a crescent slowly grows
‘til lifeless sockets spill
with dead milk.
Shining whiter than the moon
white globes
as if some mother at last
had given some child it's fill.

She went out along the highway and a car stopped the other side of dusk, they were going a long way and she got in. A little way down the road she saw him. There was a campfire by the side of the road under some trees and there he was standing tall beside the fire stretching, arching his back, looking up at the stars extra fine and bright that night… and she was driven past on into a night that never did end. A night when she saw a dead man tied up in a fridge, played pool with his killers, and escaped their rape. Run outta town and hope they aren’t following.
The stars keep shooting and falling everywhere she looks so its like walking under fireworks and she plays upon a harp strongly in the lower register to it all. Big green coat flapping like wings as she walks, no-one else around. It’s so cold. When she couldn’t walk any further a dry ditch was there to curl up against in the long grass for don’t know how long, in stasis, too cold too sleep, vaguely thinking about hypothermia when lights!
A bus.
Stopped.
Female driver agrees to take her to the crossroads. Walking down the aisle toward a seat big bag over her shoulder pushing past whispering old people. Old people looking surreal in that post midnight dark and she thinks they are all Irish and knowing in their faces showing all their judgement bared in this stifled muffled thick warm pocket of a cold, cold night.
Ejected into the dawn, plopped onto a service station cement block.. Sign says $5 breakfast of steak bacon eggs and mushroom on toast.
She ate looking at her eyes reflected in a chrome-edged roadside cafe gas heater. They were burnt black pupils on electric blue flame-pools; eagle-intense, burning through everything, the eyes of no sleep and no promise of sleep daring danger to play, when play was long away.
Walking the Sturt Highway, clothes feeling like rags. Seeing a pile of white snow, thinking it an hallucination but it won’t disappear, it ends up to be a pile of iridescence, solid sand but clear like glass, fairy stuff and she filled her pockets with it. Hot sun burning dry like her eyes searing what they looked at. There were hawks and ravens flying close and low along irrigation ditches alongside. They listened to her stories and her harp low like the rhythms of a didge with cocked eyes and silent beating wings.
The cars kept going past, their drivers making grotesques of themselves in their distorting window glass and mirrors.

Piles of ashes in her mouth called regret, the campfire was so so so close.
Pile of ashes right in front of her and she washes with its silk. It powders and silks her skin, her sweat, her regret, her hair it whites.
She, white, walks, the anger gone.

A truck stops and the next town is filled with the voices of the dead singing to her.
Hotel room.
Shower.
Big dream:
The eggman sees her for the first time, she’s cooking the seal that really was a Labrador that she caught in the sea on the beach. She’s doing it to feed it to a little girl there with her mother to cure her skin disease and the dog forgave her while she was bringing it in on her spears. He’s drinking red wine in the cool café behind and talks philosophy to the young women with him. They are close enough to overhear and they notice each other which is enough,
end of dream.

Walking outta town, roses in her bandanna, pink and grey galah feathers between her toes. Red clay earth encrusted her labia so he wouldn’t rape her but by that night, through a quirk of fate, she is dancing naked with his pet diamond python in his lounge-room and it watches her with glowing red eyes in the night as they clench together spreading her blood all over each other.

"i'm as bent as a barbed wire knot,
seduce me, and
i will try to forget your name
in the morning"

She watches this stranger's sad face in the bath and she knows she must go.

She felt like she was in a movie, like the sky was the eye of a camera, and she felt that people who were strangers were seeing her in their dreams, she existed in those dreams only, living a surreal reality.

In the dark of truck cabins she saw some things. There by herself, being chauffeured across the country she slept in a black rose.

She slept in the black rose and after a while it was blue. A fox one night runs across the road in the headlights and flashes its magnificent tail diving into a bush. A rabbit with large limpid black eyes like dew reflecting the moon at night poised at the roadside in the headlights looking past them, straight at her, before it disappeared. The forms of tiny countless mice, crickets, and frogs jumping, seething across the road. In the headlights, the nighttime and the rain showed its ghosts.
She saw a young Pan, complete and ghostly, putting his pipes from his mouth.
But it was when she was lying on the furs of an old barbarian king red haired, bear skin vested, with missing teeth that she saw her Moon again.
"Chimera of a lover", she called him in the night, surprised and almost bitter, bemused. There, through the windows of the truck and through the windows of the roadhouse, past the red haired driver sitting with his fellows there was a tv showing a movie that no-one was watching. There, it was his face and there they were talking low to each other through the glass, through the thousands of miles that most surely was between them. He said to her "What do you want from me here, do you want to get married here?", She pushed up the heaviness and leveled straight through the glass into his eyes on the tv and said "Yes, let’s grow up."

Between intricacies of solidity
a crumpled-soft, membranous
skeletal splay fans fillagree-bones.
A moment of piqued interest
spreads curiouse ears;
angles, stretches, turns;
silent and listening-sensitive,
capillarial webbing
catches minutae of sound,
of impression
with attentive reach,
seeking voids,
sorting intelligences,
sifting with each stretch,
every adjustment
blindly instinctive.
A weird furtive shadow is cast
showing a filmed diaphonous-delicate creature
caught within an instant
by a sense of something
as ephemereal as itself:
something palpable upon the edge of fantasy,
traversing metaphysical meniscuses,
where,
when cracked,
creates within the fracture
from paradox of real,
releasing,
from stringed mucilagonous nothing,
birth!
Flesh
from merest flesh,
fleshed from a whisper of life, an idea
becomes a germination of spirit
nurtured in a vacuum by it's growing symbol,
forming with every noted attenuation into existence.
I thought i heard something in the vast night,
that shade i shelter in
birthed,
it's seed the quietest sound
sounding in it's chasmed harbour.

Through the tv he did it again in another place: there he was with his back to her, she looked in double take for he’d surprised her, he looked over his shoulder and said, grinning at his cleverness, "Lookin’ right back at you babe", she laughed.

She travelled living on a jar of honey into which she’d popped a rose, a lemon, a chili, and some basil. Her finger tipped with this honey was enough, a mere taste filled her senses and fed her. Her flesh dropped from her, the walk and her heavy bag worked what was left into rock muscle, her bones sang with the air and the stones, and her heart was a thistle in flower, a stone too, and her blood was the sap. She melted as the birds flew in flock above her wheeling and changing and changing just for her to see. She carved and carried found bones. She planted seeds that the hungry earth opened up and sucked out of her fingers, she shed tears that its thirst drank.. so many tears so much in her bursting heart exploding again and again the sweetest pain.



BACK IN THE CITY’S STUDENT DORMITORY…

The soul takes it's breath at night, in that peace when the loudest noises are dreams, when the smells of freshly damp earth and leaves, tender scent of night flowers hangs like a kiss in midair, when moths dance with the moon reflected on leaves and on transient pools of puddles left after rain showers in dry creek beds, when soft crickets sound and the wilderness sighs of sleeping creatures and branches creak in the breezes and the silences of star framed silhouettes rear.
This is the soul's breath, that dark water is the soul's drink, those footsteps are her own, and she crawls through the tangle of thorns to get there and the moon chases her down the mountain, playing with the path to light her way.
She follows the light of that moon down the mountain, it lights the way direct, throughout the trees and onto the city streets where silvered roses nod and hang over garden fences, and the moths there frenzy the street-lamps in flitting, winged madness. Moth-spiral haloed lamplight fractures out through the moist air and the bitumen glitters with their wet reflections starlight as bare feet glide over.

impossible to condone
is my hearts silence
but then
it should know me by now:
i am the impatient,
demonstrably
exasperated type.

on such nights i am found
stalking elusive indigo
shadows
in velvet yearning for
the perfect compliment
to fuzzy nostalgic
jaaazzz,


(and i find it
conspicuous,

perhaps such deities
simply do not exist...

they seem to
in you

in your strangers face
and over-familiar
accusations).


why condemn my hearts silence
battle a solace,
uphold
this top-heavy weight of
turtle shell sinking in
the sands of reality's
flaring
edge.

(and i find it
conspicuous,

perhaps such deities
simply do not exist...

they seem to
in you

in your stranger's face
and over-familiar
accusations).

i am
waiting around
for an apocalypse,
in despair of miracles

i am
turning my feeling face
to a
palpable meniscus of light,
light spilling into my winter

i am
falling for ghosts
vowing not to drown
in my inner life.

Houses discreetly enclose the dreams within.
Dogs talk in circles like ripples and waves over the suburban streets and cats silently watch her pass pause in their stride or their preen, the owl glides over, outstretched wing noiseless.
She takes perfect roses home to her one room world so that she can watch them age and change and their beauty grow. The air there crackles and rustles as she moves through, the petals of drying roses sliding together their perfumed dusty air in eddies swirls and the door bumps gently closed.

There is a mouse in the basket of dried wildflowers near the window. It is a wild mouse and she tries to entice it into view with sesame seeds and water laid in oyster shells at the base of the goblet shaped basket. She sees it only briefly through the cane. It likes violins from her radio. It tells her strange mouse secrets and runs through the straw stalks and flower dust making small noises. She leaves the window open for it to come and go.
One night she woke to see it climbing up a twig to the windowsill and watched it climb through the little hole in the screen out onto the ledge and as she pushed herself up to see where it would go next it grew wings under its fur from its shoulder blades and leapt out into the night.

Every morning the starlings nested in the eaves would flash their black iridescence into her room and talk to their babies in the language of their whistle singing; the complicated trill, click, and sonic scales.

She sees him walking the hall outside her door one night like a ghost all white and somewhat transparent, he had his back to her and walked through another door. She watched the lights in the city blink and wink and listens to trumpet jazz soul singing it, fitting it, blending with it… "funky yeah one more from the city". That place is always there and yet never again; always and never, the forever moments; the fleeting, the swimming eternal.

No conclusions can stay
without mercurially slipping
with shifts of great momentums.
Scattered inertia, we drift as dust,
as motes in a sunbeam.
As ghosts in forgotten thought
the dance is vague,
inimitable and balanced
one upon the other.
One could make motes
of each individuality and
as freely float.


ETERNITY TOUCHED

Tall they stepped through her dream with fierce-browed looks and their horned foreheads flashed weird. They opened their mouths and called across the distances in a blare, but oh so quiet are they in the morn. These are those who are too proud to love but still hunger for her with snorts and doubled over they clutch their testicals when she sings alone in a language they can hear through eternity from a world where they cannot go. Only her delicious inner screaming, only her need arouses them, only her loneliness tempts their lust with sweet and sad music; this music that the trees listen for , this music that pierces the stranger's dreams: her wordless song.

I seek velvet depths to outlast the furies of night
which herald the approach of exhausted dreams,
i seek the gay and breathless heights,
to leap with the joys of innocent and fecund things.
i seek the cool, green-gradual maturity of burgeoning fruits,
of bursting buds.
i seek the peace of the blossom's fanned petal-lip,
humble and fragrant, in softened sunlight fires:
life holds it's graces in secret, secret places.
This night's shadowed jewel,
this night's a greedy kiss of fear.
Welcome is a draught of cold
in such stifling thick nights
moving over waiting skin while
sleep, with it's unicorn-horn of dream, steals in
to settle in that fractious corner and it's hooves
strike sparks like stars in it's static uncertainty,
like stars in it's liminality
they scatter as glad dust free of gravity.

It is a draught of some nectar that cannot yet be drunk; a tremulous soul still and waiting, full, as the reflections of ages play on her face, events passing over as constant waves of a thing called time ebb and ripple to the pull of the planets upon each other and the shivering, as if in anticipation, of atoms maybe waiting for an end.