Liabilities.

Miniature Bridges, Your Mouth
Marty McConnell

What we do in the dark has no hands. No
crossover effect, no good-bye kiss after the alarm.
What we carry in, we carry out, end of story. This
doesn’t even want to be love. Except in minutes
when your face has the shape of my palm and I think
lungful. Let want out with the cat. Returns
and returns, something dutiful. Persistent.
Hold your breath, let it build, let go. This is practice.
I’m losing weight, a bad sign, I’m happy. Serious,
you say. Contained, I think. The cat comes back
with a dead bird to the doorstep, an offering. Bloodless
this should be easy. A two-step to cowboys. You’re beautiful
but that’s not the point.

x

I know my way back perfectly well. Like the back
of my hand, as it were. But look, the labyrinth walls
are high hedge and green. This also could be joy.

xx

I literally don’t know your middle name. Does that
matter? What systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. Not
what I’d anticipated. Softer. To begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that’s a liability.

xxx

I am not often off-kilter. But you’re so silent, even
naked, and almost absent. I hush too, why
are we here? Go. Want to throw things, you, the clock,
break windows until something bleeds and you finally
scream. I tell you too much; we are not
those people. Or nothing–maybe I say
utilitarian fuck. How would that be. I want you
to want to fall in love with me and that’s
unhealthy. Wrong. Leave your shoes by the door
and pretend it’s about the movie. It’s love
in the movies it’s Casablanca and Toy Story
and water no ice come here. Pockets need
to be untucked, drawers thrown open,
nobody’s safe. There, I’ve said it:
someone I was could have loved you.

chrome.

sonnet xi
pablo neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

a final hit.

Worthless
by Nick Flynn

My fingers
cling to your shoulder blades now
until fucking becomes
an urging, a way to shake you, gently. How

can I tell you I don't feel
safe, when inside
a man holds bars before his face

believing himself into a prison,
when parrots fly from his open mouth
as he tries to speak, repeating worthless,

worthless? I'm trying to love you

but I don't know how, & then
I start to remember we are locked together
& pushing, pushing.

--

"I need one more fucking hit!"

blueski.

no-one must know, judith pordon

You lean to my side
tickling my desires.

Below my clothes
I quiver in infinities.

Others lean towards us.
Do they sense

your exhale is my inhale,
your out, my in?

We sit motionless
but betray ourselves,

glancing around
to see if anyone is looking.

ninety-three years on.

Wrapped in the chill and silence of June, I find myself aching for long stretches of sunlit concrete and hourless, blurry days and nights. Today is for rain-streaked streets and my too-slim, miserable reflection in glass buildings watching me back from unrelentless grey. I always seem to fold back into myself during the winter.

--

your airplanes
Rachel McKibbens

I.

over breakfast,
my father asks what you see in me.

I bite the inside of my cheek,

shove a forkful of pancakes into my mouth,
notice the salt shaker eyeing my wounds.

II.

you launch "I love yous"
from a Brooklyn fire escape.

they travel 3,000 postcard miles
and collapse into my ear, exhausted.

I pinch their noses,
breathe new life into their lungs,
fold them into airplanes,

send them back to you
and wait.

III.

there isn't a building
taller than two stories
here in Orange County.
not a single fire escape.

no point in jumping.
the worst that could happen
is a broken leg or heart.

this is why the sad kids get
so goddamn creative around here.

the mayor's son rigged his noose
to raise with the garage door
when the Mercedes came home.

a nine-year old leapt into the lion's cage
at Prentice Park Zoo after
her dog was hit by a car.

IV.

on our wedding day,
when I tell you "I do,"

it's because I do.

it's because you understand
how ten-thousand dollar apologies
still keep fathers worthless,

it's because my ribcage expands
every time I think of you,

it's for all the things
you see in me

and pretend
not to notice.

ties.

eating a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my father
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of american chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of Iandolli's or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
& once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
& he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years

the ocean calls us.

© _barb_

maggie and milly and molly and may
e.e. cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

--

Off to Eildon for the weekend. Happy birthday, Calum. See you on the flipside.

that was yesterday.

Your breathing, whispering
through the pear trees

outside. Midnight train in
the distance hisses,

with longing. Memory, tissue-thin,
brushing against my eyelids.

in the distance.

I know loving Richard Siken is what all the cool kids are doing right now, but I couldn't resist.

Boot Theory
Richard Siken

A man walks into a bar and says:
Take my wife–please.
So you do.
You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her
and she leaves you and you’re desolate.
You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man
on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains
on the ceiling.
And you can hear the man in the apartment above you
taking off his shoes.
You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,
you’re waiting
because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be
some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together
but here we are in the weeds again,
here we are
in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.
And then the second boot falls.
And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.

A man walks into a bar and says:
Take my wife–please.
But you take him instead.
You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,
and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you
and he keeps kicking you.
You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.
Boots continue to fall to the floor
in the apartment above you.
You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.
Your co-workers ask
if everything’s okay and you tell them
you’re just tired.
And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
Make it a double.
A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
Walk a mile in my shoes.
A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:
I only wanted something simple, something generic…
But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

one-line poetry.

Taking a cue from Ian McBryde - one of my favourite contemporary poets. (Melbournians do it better!)

Curtains astir in the burnt-out house.



Light in the west, light in the east.



I am setting fire to the school gates.



It isn't the wind which moves the playground swings, by night.



The nightmare, again. No safe harbor.



A loaded quiet, before the spark.



The haze and mist of rain over an abandoned London.



Car crash on camera. Glass, metal, pixels.

hide and seek.

Stranger's backyard, unfamiliar
plum tree. Blossoms, floating in the wind. You
and the night's stars, my anchor.

february.

metal kitchen sink
open window; close, dense heat
distance, between us

the buzz surounds.

photo © rich74 on flickr.

Somewhere in this vast and
impenetrable night: a light,

switched on, a room filled
with the dull hum of a a

refrigerator. You, asleep on
the kitchen table, cloaked

in uneasy dream, awaiting a
call that will never come.

saturday night smirk.

Deception comes all
too easily to girls like
you. Filthy lipsticked

mouths, glass eyes, a cold
passion for nothing at all.
Pilot light sparks out.

origins.

I'm terrible at updating this thing. Have been neglecting writing; moving out, work, friends all conspire against me. Fate is a cruel and harsh mistress!

If you know me, you've probably read this poem before. I'd count it as one of my favourite poems, and it's what the name of this blog is taken from.

The Whisper-Stream, Ian McBryde

No city sleeps. Weeds defeat concrete. The blood
runs and everyone comes from elsewhere, citizenless,

without an address. The midnights pass. Wheels spin,
sleek vehicles peel off just before the lights go green.

Justice weeps for itself, alone at home, wherever that
once was, if ever. Blackness gathers, falling on these

red rooms, this darkened carnival. One will stay, one
hastens away. High-rises wait. Abandoned blocks exhale,

safer places hold their breath. That which heals us also
rips us in half. The cruel bruise, the rack, the broken

back. Scarred shoulders in mirrors. The slaughterhouse
calmness of tired men lunching with their stun guns

on the table. The cave, the castle; there is no difference.
Long splashes of shadow over single women breasting

their children close in cold, lonely kitchens, believing
nothing they are told. Racks of candles reduced to stubs

in untended empty churches where there is nothing left
to confess. Bandages, triage, sirens. The dripping wall.

Everyone in hell wears kevlar. We all are coming back
from nowhere. Regret. Revenge. Truth rules the gutters.

All of us arriving in from nameless, nightshift places.
Blood runs. The messages are banking up. No city sleeps.

thames river (for ruth).

Flat, gray river light;
ash-dark skyline. Postcards from
Paris, Prague, Naples.

12:18am.

Rain against the glass.
All is dark. Your voice, lost, in
a haze of static.

(Here begins my attempt to write a haiku a day. Watch and laugh!)

i still remember.

(Not quite sure where this photo came from! It's not mine, in any case.)

Nightly: a rollcall

of names, a medley of whispers,
sirens through the cold
clear night. Locked windows. Ghosts
in my bed. A blur of light

though the glass,
some distant dream. Fingerprints.

along flinders lane.

© emilly at deviantart.

Yesterday: a whisper, a stirring
along the pavement,

the movement
of cigarette butts, paper bags,
discarded faith.

Another step down this lonely
laneway. I tilt my face and

catch a first glimpse of sky.

that was just a dream.

© smellout at deviantart.

this shoreline, our shipwreck; our
only solace. the light doesn't

think to find us here. time's endless
drift, through my fingers. your

pale shoulder, your luminous
glow. nothing pains me, now.

---



I'm quite enjoying this already. This piece feels awkward and childish to me, but it reminds me of a dream I had and somebody important to me, so. WHAT-EVER.