Snailshells and freezerfrost

 

I am Cinderella and I’m looking for my pumpkin

I’ve time to wander, ponder, I’m not looking for a prince

Rather the rolling joy of shiny orange curves

My preferred mode of travel

 

I try to explain it to my friends:

‘A pumpkin? is that what you’re really looking for?’

‘Is this some kind of metaphor?’

‘-A simile?’

‘-Analogy?’

‘Do you have an allergy to normal ways of getting around?’

‘What’s wrong with a nice, orange ACTION bus?’

-

In someone else’s garden

Musing among the vegetables- was that it?

A zucchini, bin bag black dirigible, to float over the landscape like a squash balloon

Staring down at cities, up at the moon

But there is no room in this world for that kind of princess.

 

So I went to see the Bone Mother, best I could do,

No godmothers’ set foot in the place that I live.

Baba Yaga had eaten a snail out of house and home

Made a nest inside the shell

Wobbly juices still dripped

Off the walls as she dipped

Her finger in a pool of fat and wrote on my outstretched arm:

 

dig

 

So I softly shrieked and left at once to scrub my arm with seven kinds of soap.

-

It was spring and neither supermarket nor vegetable garden had the right kind of pumpkin

I bought myself a MyWay card and contemplated lettuce as a means of getting around.

Slimy.

When I could bear it no longer  I found myself a raincoat and thick rubber gloves and knocked on the freezer door where Baba Yaga was hanging out these days.

 

One bony arm unfurled from the ice and threw a handful of frozen peas at me before pointing to the ground

 

dig

 

I dropped the peas and they rolled away

Down, along, around the garden path

And around behind an abandoned oven-

A giant rotting orange pumpkin carcass.

 

Removing my rubber gloves I dug into the sopping flesh

with my nails until I found seven seeds.

-

I am Cinderella and I am waiting for my pumpkin

It’s not about the journey, but what gets you there that matters.

I’ve pressed seven shriveled seeds into seven kind of soil,

I’ve borrowed a bicycle and painted it orange.

 

And the seeds that don’t turn out to sprout paisley couches or hills hoist clotheslines, just might become vines with furry leaves.

And the ones that aren’t eaten by giant snails, or killed by freezer frost,

Might one day bear me big round fruit

And the ones that aren’t hollowed out to be lived in by witches

Might one day take me places.

This Blue Earth Planet

The things we play with on the surface of this blue earth planet
Are crystal rocks for looking through
Are melted sand-glass jars for holding liquids in
Are fermenting fruits and clocks for counting cogs
and each others’ rhythms and tunes.
Some times we can catch hold of these knots of existence,
see them sewn into a line of a song
a glance of an eye, a smile or stare.

.

Hold them to your chest and let them beat there against you
pump their tune, through your blood and through your body,
let them move the single cells inside you who organise themselves
into organs and thoughts for the ringing of bells.
Hold these tunes to your ear, press the glass jar and thin tin lid
close enough to listen to this whirling, suspended
in this moment, that we all are alive enough to hear.

.
The things we play with on the surface of this blue earth planet
Are threaded thoughts for weaving together words and worlds
about being creatures subject to believing and sleeping,
finding and needing, destroying and keeping.
The things we play with on the surface of this blue earth planet
Are molecules for breathing in and eating.
We take up, recreate, discover, alter, change and make space
on the surface of this sphere
all the time wondering about the cogs of ourselves,
and the keys of the others who inhabit this blue earth planet.

boston marathon bombing

Sometime
In the year
(Every year)

 

In the spring
When the trees
Mist green

 

Or late summer
When the trucks
Leave red dust
On the rails
Of footpaths

 

We learn words
That go together
Holding hands
Like children do:

 

nine eleven
fukushima explosion
tube bombing
boxing day tsunami
bali bombing
canberra bushfires

 

My childhood is
Carved with them
The memory
Of first hearing

 

Those words
Together like
A child being born

 

boston marathon bombing

 

Is another to add
To my memory

 

The dates fade
And faces and the
Places you sat
When you found out
How your legs
Were folded and
Who you were
In love with but

 

The words
In the manner
Of words
Remain
Carved into us

 

Like nursery rhymes
And fairy tales
Like an eight year old’s
Life spread across a street;

 

When we are altzheimers
And bones
We will remember
And sing
Under our breaths

 

boston marathon bombing
canberra bushfires
bali bombing
boxing day tsunami
tube bombing
fukushima explosion
nine eleven.

Woden, after work

 

I like to run through
Woden Bus interchange
after work
tired legs flying past commuters and highschool kids
freed from a librarian’s subdued decorum
leaping strides down the hill
to the city-bound 300
that is just about to leave
or running just for this
waiting bus or not
passing the tangled shopping trolleys
and cigarette stained cement
people made inert by timetables
stillness their tithe
for moving other places
blood pumping to my thumping feet
I’ve made my pact with gravity
Woden Bus Interchange is best taken at a run

Robots

We’re all too human here
To write good robots more than twice a year
Beware those who do it often or for fun
Push their minds into metal sinews and square boxes
Thinking in walking in jerky calculated steps and seeing only through red red eyes
Beware the way they relish the tidy needs of the android
The hard-edged want-get-want-get
And the way they see the world as a series of things they can achieve
Want-get want-get want-get
Robots, the problem is that they can be trusted
Not to try and second-guess you
But to see right through you
To distant things
As they walk away with their precisely practiced steps
Want-get want-get want-get want-

Kissing & Form

I want to kiss you again
I want your raw smoke breath in my mouth on my tongue to breathe the fire inside you
tastes like sadness and hazard
I want to feel your lips on my lips so warm but not drunk this time

 

I want to share in your mind again
I want to take your unfamiliar heavy-like-some-metal thoughts and weigh them in my hands
feels like Port Royal and architecture
I want to feel your ideas with my brain but not tired this time

 

I want to touch you again
I want to peel off layers of cloth and meaning until we find our
inimitable bodies
feels like inhaling warm smoke
the smoke from the fire that burns at the end of the world, the end this time

Touching and Talking

Touching and talking
that’s what our time is,
touching and tucking up fucking
oh and then we talk, we talk about and out and around it. touching and talking
remember when I would wear nothing but bellbottom jeans and
they were pepetually getting chewed by cogs on my bicycle
and I always had rubber bands around my ankles to hold them back
rubber bands all over my floor
I never wear jeans any more, now.
I’m wearing your dress which came from her and it never felt like my kind of dress, or like I even wanted it untill tonight when I saw it, cos it’s green and I knew and I’m wearing it and I don’t feel like that person, in the jeans, any more.
And there are people here who I want to touch
and there are people here who want to touch me
there are people here who are touching and talking
there’s a pretty girl, I’ve forgotten her name because there are other people who I want to touch talk to
remember when we made that list
who am I kidding, we make lists all the time
remember when we first shared clothes
itenerant desires, an ordering to the mess of want, lists
remember when we first shared clothes, cos I don’t
sharing skin, sisters, cloth-of-kin
remember when we first forgot where your wardrobe ends, and mine begins
because life is a nostalgia factory
sit fat on a pile of memories
but, whyfor for what
living in the past tense
but I want to touch
and touching is now
fucking is now
speaking poems is now
reaching with words and fingers and hearts to touch the now

Riddled Reality – Sans Sanus

My spine is made of stones
lined up in single, smoothed, grey pebble file.
My stomach is hollowed out
an empty cavity in a tree.
My eyes are morphine
blind with bubbles bursting behind them in
my sandpit mind.
I dig until my nails get gritty
finding treasures, fossils, toy soldiers
and bottle caps, silver thin and glinting in the afternoon sun.
My hands graze and strain
digging up the black box
which, locked inside, stores the secret,
a small, blunt, heavy gun.

 

Legs drunk on the scrambled time
Move, stumble-run, without me.
They stagger together
taking me places before I have thought to go.
I have been hungry for so long
I have forgotten how to taste
how to think about the bigger smaller things
I have forgotten how to wonder about the waves
and weather.
I have been tired so long I have forgotten
how to dream when I sleep.
I awake now immediately with the dawn
crawling out of my hideout in the bough
of high up trees.

 

My mouth is dry with flies
and I keep repeating days
circling between visions of past and present
I lose which hour is now and which was then
I have broken out of tense and
speak in broken sentences to myself
I do not laugh out loud.
And my hands are rough with wire.

 

I am alone and those who do not want me
walk the city streets.
My hair has grown and my body cleans itself
incompletely. But I do not have the
strength or energy to notice smell.
I must follow the instructions.
How long has it been now?
Days or years alone?
But I cannot break, I cannot let go.
I must work, protect, stay alert and
vigilant, not let myself get hurt
keep myself awake and with it
away from other visions and words
I must remember to remind myself that
this is the only,
This. Is. The. Only. Real World.

 

Dehydrated days and signals and secret messages
of salvation left hidden in places
where other eyes might not see them:
curled in leaves, that align only in the
breeze at the right time, from the right angle.
Written almost as though by chance
in the scrawl of a bark
bitten out by grubs and ants
I must stay awake and not miss any signs
That may help me close in on their reality.

 

I will chase those voices who always rearrange
sticks just ahead and around the corner
pointing towards doorways I would otherwise
choose not to enter.
I will obey their signs if only to meet their challenges
and confront their form.
I will struggle on to show them that I am stronger
then they who visit in my sleep and
change the realities around me.

 

I will stay awake I will stay away from the wrong reality
I will stay strong and sane.
I will learn to tell the real from the fake,
I will struggle on in silence but not in vein,
I will stay awake
I will do what I must to stay awake
I will cure the hurt and wrongs of this world one riddle at a time
I will stay awake
I will take as much as I can take.
As long as I can just stay awake.

#Revolution!

We fuck the system man

we fuck it through our LCD enhanced visions.

Take your positions, falling into pose for

various petition missions

turning up our nose,

We fuck it up like this:

Click click click!

To your indecisions

We’re taking down the empires and

Roaring as the dissent grows.

There goes, New-Rome, the US and old Great Britain

collapsing into the dust

coalescing into the hands of us;

one online opinion at a time.

Have you got yours, – ‘cos I got mine.

 

Down down down!

go the barriers,

the colonial lines, are disintegrated into pixilated

shrines of antique tumblr reminiscence

hung drawn and quartered clones

now kitsch in their antithesis.

 

We’re taking down down down!

The walls of the old masters with

photographs and videos on our mobile phones.

Suddenly resistance has risen in an instant and

Berlin, border-security and the banks are ours,

won with button mashing passion,

the power of reblogging until 3 in the morning

And the persistence to ignore

personal hygiene and a corporate- Friendly

online personas.

 

Pow pow power!

We’re looking at the bigger picture now

On our higher resolution screens

We’re kidnapped social media

and we’ve spiked your dreams

we’ve got no end goal yet

but we’ve already stolen the means.

Medaling with transmision of cilycon scenes:

with witty captions we’ve crashed and crunched,

jammed and flunked consumer cultures,

we’ve sunk the signal ship and

spammed the vultures.

 

We get strip-searched

and we delete our internet history.

We write forums and we

dissolve the mysteries of physics,

essay questions and music genres

one open-source Wikipedia page at a time.

 

Down down down loading

the letters that connect us

into collective consciousness

cascades of critical clicks and

networks exploding like fireworks

blinding servers and online services.

 

Reblog, repeat, skip letters, delete.

Share, refresh, splurg, retweet,

confess, converge, but never end sess-ion.

This revolution is up to your anonymous

proxy server’s discretion

So stay on, whatever you do, stay online.

 

We have pow pow power! We the boys and girls

who take

Down down down!

the censorships (who hoisted their sails

and once fired cannons into the sea of surfed urls)

now exterminated

information barring now terminated

corporate cookies now confiscated,

and the end of power trips taken

as they anchored

their ways into our

pirate bays and on line islands.

 

Pow pow power! Has fallen to us in just hours

As we steal back the social sovereignty to

intellectual commons property that was never ceded.

Pow pow power!

Stolen through signal scrambling of specialized

Outsourced, enforced, work

monopolies profiting from information poverty.

 

Now we are the ones

Seizing synthesis of the simulacra

Simulating situations to satisfy

stimulation-saturated dial up dilations

We are the ones making our own

kitten gifs and photoshoped imaginations.

 

Pow pow power!

Taken from towers who monitored and

trademarked our time

Imposed ads until they restrict minds

Forcing us into broadband attention spans

That have now lost their patience

 

Down Down Down!

go internet spines who Copy-Righted lines,

filled instead with

Creative and critical information watersheds.

quoting Chomsky, Swartz, Galliano, Assange,

and our favourite porn movies.

 

Because we have won:

Sprung the leak of intellectual property

Sharing the no longer privately owned

digitization of our own DNA,

and plant genes that are part of us, not patents.

Reorientating flows of information

We are the active mimetic generation

discovering direction

Now now now!

we take back government schemes

storing secrets about war zones, torture or chemical agents

and we dissolve them

one online action at a time,

one nocturnal night at a time

one online life at a time.

Have you got yours – cos I sure got mine.

Parentheses

Sunrises Sunsets.

Old songs, hanging out with other people’s pets.

Solved problems, stolen groceries.

Not being on the internet

alone again at 2am.

Dancing until you break the heel off your

favourite boots, until you break into sweat;

until no one else is left

on the dance floor beside you

except for you, and you, and you, daggy music

and the light of the 4am full moon.

 

Warm afternoon bike rides beside friends

winding through suburbs between

group-house, dirty-dish in sink, dens.

People in Pyjamas still at 5pm.

 

People gentle with one another’s love;

giving and keeping gifts of collaboration

tangled in the sheets of other people’s ideas,

time, stories and beds.

Swimming out behind the waves

that roll and break on other swimmers’  heads;

lifting, your body away from the centre of the earth

up towards a belt of stars;

the milky-girth of the swirling

universe.

 

Sex followed by scrambled eggs.

The wicked grin that comes from drinking other people’s gin.

Everybody’s’ cooking,

and all of the legs -

because it’s not your fault for noticing that

everyone is just so good looking.

A dance in the pasta isle at the supermarket,

not caring if there’s anyone that’s going to stare,

while your housemates

grab the eggs, detergent, party cups and camembert

three isles up.

 

Open eyes and open irises

Open minds pulsing with idea viruses -

Curiosity catching on like an enquiry

inspiring contagion.

 

Climbing on sculptures,

getting naked at the Carillion.

All your friends

swimming and splashing beside you

with the lake burley bends:

flashing cyclists and buses,

public servants and politicians

on the way home from work.

 

Being on the internet

alone again at  2am.

 

Old friends, new faces.

Back yard music and singing at the sky

to let it know that we don’t care

if we can’t get shelter from its rain,

We don’t care if it is going to pour down upon us

again and again and again,

and make us cold, because we have

hot drinks, dancing and whisky at home.

 

Smiling at strangers, hands in hands

and hands through hair.

And then:

Howling at the moon.

Howling at cars.

Howling at anything until

you’re left wondering what kind of

dog, or chimp or animal you are.

 

Falling asleep with the world spinning the feet

off the end of your bed.

Awaking to wonder about the adventures

As they slowly mosaic their way back into your

unwieldy head.

Waking to walk the mountain,

starting all over again,

with its sunrises and sunsets.

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