She’s been trying to

break away from it

for months now

Keeps coming to my house

and sitting on the mattress in the back room

Telling me how

this ain't the lifestyle she wants to be keeping

and the people she meets

are nothing but the drugs that they take

That she’s afraid of the

way her hair looks dirty to strangers on the street

How she’s really gotta split

break up the scene

study for a degree

play on weekends

outside of this town

Tonight she tells me about her plan

to throw dinner parties where

wine is the greatest deterrent to it all

How she’s no longer going

to answer the 3am calls

from the boys across the street

wanting a cute young thing to do lines with

Where the only sound in the night

are noses

down a run way

with a $50 note.

Tells me she dreams

of the other city calling her

And I sit silently

as I always do with her

knowing that when

the next weekend comes

she’ll be sitting with the boys

in some bar stranger’s back yard

grabbing at anything that’s offered to her

waiting for the

sun come up

Sitting in the lap of

the new young boy

who’s sporting a pocket full

of that white powdered goodness

Where she’ll be straddling him

like a dirty and torn Bukowski novel

Her thighs screaming at the moon

hustling for

that cheap fix

and a taxi ride home.

Bad poets
want to be all of Bukowski
Fuckingthe living daylights
out of the young girl across the way
Drinking till they
vomit up all the pain
of being misunderstood
Poetic and tragic
Ploughing through tales
you wouldn't wipe your arse on
Screaming strong
at lame poetry readings
deep in the bowels
of open age bars,
where lesbians and bad looking aged men
in rock and roll T-Shirts
smoke cigarettes
in the only place that
makes them feel worthwhile
I say,most of you pricks who give good poets a bad name
tell us Buk was your hero,
taught you everything you know
and showed you that hope rests in poems.
Showed you how to toucha woman's cunt
with gusto and write all night with nothing but a half bar of chocolate
and the smell of the deep frying and sadness
happening up your American street.
But you'll be finding that for all your wishing
and writing on the walls
that
cunts don't want to be touched
by paled hand ended poets
wristed up
from paper- thin poems
They're aching for the good
fisting love /ready to roll around in their lips/of a hard lived man
Waiting to wipe grease up their thigh
spelling out dirty
one syllable words.
For all of you,I'll sit here and keep writing on
stolen sour
coloured thick paper
about all the goodness and glory
that I find in the bottle
and wanting to fuck
all these women up my street
with not an ounce of Bukowski on my mind.
And when you start
writing your
lame arsed poetic verse
about the hero
we could all be
if we wrote like him,
up boils the imageI have of that old bastard
/when once a movie was made/
with him sitting softly under a tree
reading Rimbaud waiting to die with the daisies
and tears
in his Herpe laden eyes.
Thinking about the love he had missed
on the way to his lonely silence filled grave.

Assume the position
Assume that everyone here wants you
and that the stomach of an angry man is riddled with cancer
Assume that your smoking habits annoy others
Assume that in close encounters, others will notice your flaws
Take night time hours as your own
Assume a safe distance from falling romances
Tell strangers that all public places hold stories
Assume that your childhood memories are your own
and that no one knows how much you hate yourself
See yourself as the only sane person in this room
Assume you can have it all
Tell others that you will
Hold your throat open with metal bands
and swallow the conversations thrown at you
Stick notes with clear tape in busways
to remind others that it is a long way home

Assume the position
Assume that this is
never
gonna
end.

And you ask me if i like it
when i watch you
your brilliance smashing out
the sounds of street cars
and the great weight of the moon

Here we are
I think
/tonight
in the centre of the universe
beginning

Where’d you get those bruises from? They look like they’re the shape of your lungs...

Dirty romance on your boots
kicks. at. my. knees.
I.cant.breathe.

at night with her skin
he starts drawing his demons
one limb at a time

at night with her skin
he grows wild in her
as she lets the folds of her
open to him
stains his lips with her
aching romance

at night with her skin
he asks her quietly
to tell him of poems
small poems of heat
that he can place
in a curve under her breasts

at night with her skin, he feels
the ripping of flesh onto her
/soft and magnificent/

“The hollow of my hand was still ivory full of Lolita – full of the feel of her
pre-adolescently incurved back…” Lolita – Nabokov

In a moment she stands leaning above me
her lithe skeletal frame exposing the
inward crevasses of her coming years

In the corner of the dark midnight room lay
my scuffed brown moccasins, a silver pipe (a present from the year past)

My lips lacquered with honeydew / hands rested on middle aged knees

I bow forward to smell the sweetness of strawberry lollies and unsettled patience,
Rest my lips on the warm sheet which is her childish chin

[We have silence between these walls]

My Lolita’s straight awkward legs surround me
as I sit in my red silk robe
she is warm, settled
she is mine

An erotic [tragic] scene affronts you, dear reader

I want inspiration
anticipation
I want hard fucking
blood draining
asphyxiation
Real love smells:
hair bleach
semen
stale beer.

these things always seem to happen to me
in the front seats of motor vehicles
When heat strangles the air
pushes moments upon my acned skin
and lets manufactured relief rest on feet
that walk abandoned sidewalks at midnight intervals
these are silent moments
when I laugh to myself and say
‘that’s not going to happen,’
but then the gesture opens up-
fragments of sharp light brush my forehead
and the scenery changes
like a good healthy surge of reckless sport
it hits like an arrow that cannot be pulled from the flesh
and I note the red marks on your neck impressed by want
a week after consumption
/back room glass canisters filled with tales of you by my side/
we meet again
You will take note of oncoming traffic and quietly ask me for relief
which will drown out the silence that sits between us
and often gets lost at traffic lights

I am the long mouthed southern girl
who dreams of Dolly Parton excess
and softly spills dirty wordsl
like –
come down
and tequila breath
and
for money, milk is waiting
down the throats of unsuspecting
beer drinking cowboys.

She’s sitting on an afternoon
Seeing shadows rolled outside her window,
where cheery bright arsed men in day suits
walk over the dreams and promises left on her cities pavements

She reaches out to some dirty floor t-shirt and her last cigarette
bedside manner mess

-she’s the woman you would have killed for once-

She’s muttering to herself
To
the sirens out her window
To
the cold that creeps in under the
back door that never locks

She’s opening her mascara soft eyes
To
black stars on her pillow
To
an ache in her lungs that
feels like fire should

-she’s the woman that used to look with childlike wonderat the curls on the edges of your temples, and think that she could fall hard into it all-

She walks to the only mirror in the hall
and looks at herself
Naked and pressing down finger blue
onto her heart
She reaches for organs
that she is certain could stop at any moment
from the breaking that she hears in the silence of night

Last week she wrote on a small piece of paper;

“It hurts so much without you waking with me, that blood wine bottled heat we shared”

She placed it above the mirror in the hall
She looks at it every morning
like this
whilst her fingers turn blue.

You got that…

At 75, I’ve got a fixation for death and how many moments I’ve got left until she comes a’ knocking at my chest. I’ve got a case under my bed stored with my best suit, clean socks and a dirty movie for the man that reads me my last rights.

I’ve got cold night shivers.

Fourteen years of a government hand out and I tell you – this man ain’t leaving you anything but some kin of a lover that you never met and a collection of green bottles in the yard shed next to the radio playing Dixie tunes.

You’ve been thinking that for all these years, while I’ve been giving you hot milk bedtime stories and sending family Christmas cards to your sisters in the States, that I’ve been saving these small cheques, thinking that I’d be the first one to go. That out of these living in fibro units and in places where I move you too, that you’d get some kind of windfall – a jackpot – a shot at a better life with a better man and buy that house boat at the Marina that I promised you for all these years.

But you got it wrong, fucked up your odds, got a bastard that cashed away every god damm cheque for a home visit from Tony’s Whores every time you went away on your girl’s bus trips. And there ain’t a penny left. Just some disease ridden hands on an old man, that have held down the noise of woman half his age in our bedrooms front window for too many years.

You got that…

She’s been trying to
break away from it for
months now

Keeps coming to my
house and
sitting on the mattress in
the back room
Telling me how
this ain’t the lifestyle she wants to
be keeping
How the people she meets
are nothing
but the drugs that they take
That she’s afraid of the way
her hair looks dirty
to strangers on the street

How she’s really gotta split
break the scene up/
study for a degree/
play on the weekends/
outside of this city

Tonight she tells me about
her plan to
throw dinner parties
where wine is the greatest
deterrent
to it all
How she’s no longer going
to answer the 3am calls
from the boys across the
street,
wanting a cute
young thing to do lines with
when the only sound in the night
are their noses
down a run way with a
dollar note

Tells me she dreams of
the nearest city
calling her

And I sit silently as
I always do with
her
Knowing that
when the next weekend comes
she’ll be sitting with the boys
grabbing at anything
that’s offered to her
and seeing the sun
come up with strangers
in
a West End back yard
where she starts to
hustle for her next cheap fix
and a taxi ride home.

Crashing into you
is only hours away
Like whiskey hitting my lips
Drugs hitting my blood
Reckless/Sport

She fell a great distance
for him
Spilt the noise of her
heart on his chest
Left the beating smell
of her sex
on his hands
Flew into
a storm
that left her
wet
with tears
With an ache
so harsh
it made her weight
heavy
drowning
slow.

Man burning
from view
on my balcony
all of wire and long limbs

Sky so stoned
it relaxes and ends
at my feet
so high

Man burning
from view
and tangled into
an unforgiving crowd

Man standing still
and holding on
to a railing
/to save him/to save him/

Man in front of
faces screaming
All of alcohol
and excess of
lived in dreams

[women,
wonder,
street corner heartbreak,
morning ends]

Of
fearsome loathing
burning flames
into the nights
simple cracks

Man begging for
someone to stop the
heat
that is hitting his heart
so strong

Man standing

Burning for his lover
Burning for his anger
Burning for showing you
He hurts

Man looking at me
on balcony
so high

Mans tears
getting lost

Man falling

my love...

In moments
when i only had the dark
it was within the line of short love songs
that i found you
Within the warmth of woolen blankets
that I held you

When midnight broke open/
unfolded
it bruised my heart
waiting for you
Made a rash on my stomach that
would itch for days

Now in the dark
your love
cracks over my knees
at night as we lay

It falls into my hands as we sit
Its weight erotic in my palm
Slipping through the
slightly open window
A gentle wind
handling my skin like a lover
and splitting a season

I find brilliant poetry
under your heart
as the heat collects
on your skin
and lays between us forever
in a fiery concentration

my love...

And the heat
and the beat
roll over your tongue
A rhythm like slow lemonade
falling
where
i want to sit,
soft and still
holding at your edges
for safety

All ageless and warm
and rolled into
every memory
i've ever
had
of
feeling
right

*Inside all of this i have images of beautiful high falling clouds from the sky and a great fear of loss

She always told him

that her heart

belonged to

Coltrane's notes,

to train station loud

heartbreak held

breath moments

That her heart

only knew

the blues

I let him slip fingers
into my coin purse
feel around its edges
/a soft butter silk/
find three dollar coins
and a half beer coaster
stained and inked with numbers

I let him slip past with a light hand on my shoulder
take a sharp left into a crowd
stumble over a pair of shoes
fold back his hair

I let the jukebox song of a
73’ romantic rockabilly
crash my boring chitchat with a young girl

I let the stares from and older woman
who has always loved me
be ignored

I sting my throat with
a strong spirit
and I mouth to him from
across the room
that my chest is tight from a fear of being found