Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: poem

  • crepuscular

    crepuscular

    As the evening creeps across the land/groping its way towards us like the bleeding protagonist stabbed who refuses to die/darkness is a promise/like cousin cool/do you promise? I have sweatered so much this day I can jumper no further.

    As coolth lays its stealth in a beam lowly under the trees/we stagger out/of the shopping mall carrying strawberries and tomatoes in my hat/swung by its string, a bonnet punnet/and all the trees/little and large and oblivious to cars one hopes/lay their shadows down/long on the green evening grass like ballgowns’ trains/everything wonderful cool beneath the branches/one by one the skateboarders pluck their boards out of the water and go home.

     

  • picked it up & have kept it

    Walking along a quiet street feeling grumpy I heard a loud, juicy burst of fat laughter. Coming towards me was a man on his phone, shortish, gleaming, African, with laughter rolling through him, like a wisp of weed rolling in the sandy sea. Further down the street I saw a dog waiting in the laundromat, wistful with big eyes turned to the door, and passed a middle-aged punk whose hair had almost entirely balded away. But he had worked the few strands growing over his forehead into a messy quiff, stiffened with product but still with his own native old man’s/little boy’s curls escaping, as though he were saying to Death “You’ll never take me alive.” Coming back to the house I found a small square of white paper stuck to the cobblestones, entirely blank on both sides, and I picked it up and have kept it.

  • campfire of the vanities

    campfire of the vanities

    To me facebook is like a cocktail party, a clubhouse, a series of treehouses strung out among browsing forested hills. It resembles a cache, a sparkling wet beach, a web. It feels like the old bone fires built on hilltop after hilltop where signals could be carried by the night itself, all along the coast from one community to another. It’s our love letter to one another, to the earth, after decades of exploitation and greed. It’s our way of waking up, not our only way. Corals under the water, refreshed by the deep stream. It’s a village of lighthouses.

  • tufty

    tufty

    Under the trees I saw two people riding side by side, holding hands between the bicycles. Not far away a duck plunged earnestly beak-first into the water, its tufted tail and downy bum held upright by the twin prongs of its feet on the scummy surface.

    H2O HoL ducklings

  • in kindly whispers

    Long night ride home between the trees, the trees, the trees. They are dark and tall and reach down into the night, yearning away wild from the centre of the earth its boiling core. They are reaching the night down for us on earth, in whispers, like kindly adults explaining something magical to children.

    My bicycle is silent and has no lights.

    You know that high still cloud at night that seems creamy and shattered like when someone, really stoned, showed you how custard powder is the only substance on earth that can be stirred, when mixed up thick enough in a bowl of water, and at the same time shattered at a blow from the back of a spoon. A liquid, a solid. Like glass. That was last century and in a different hemisphere but, yes, Gus, I still remember it.

     

  • that moon

    that moon

    Tonight I saw the moon for the first time in ages and my heart caught fire from its coldness. Only a more-or-less moon, more than a morsel and less than a round, most of its pearl face unhidden by us. Severely it rode the dark blackwater sky. All about me everything was frozen.

    H2O HoL lock on stumppost

     

     

  • the dreaming

    the dreaming

    You see, I am still living in the dreamtime, where my ancestors are my brothers & sisters and trees my playmates. Sometimes I’m wiser and sometimes they’re wiser. We hold hands on the street. There are streets everywhere and everything is streets. Sometimes the world overwhelms me. I cannot move & I cannot speak, cannot use the keypad & the online booking form & can do nothing to understand anything at all. Would follow a guttering candle flame for miles along the quiet river in the dark. Stare in through the golden windows, row after row after row after row, longing for a way into the wilderness. That is the only world that tames my heart. I’m so lonely, I’m only longing, and I cannot settle. Underneath it all there is a roaring like fire or water.

     

  • je dis, elle dit, edit

    je dis, elle dit, edit

    I feel widowed. I am winnowing. Dancing through this manuscript one last time with my tiny stave ~ of ink ~ finding out the hollow places where the old log gives ~ and pressing down ~ and crumbling those away, a crocodile who stores everything edible beneath the melted snowline, in a slurry ~ these are final final edits, so I tell myself, believing myself ~ and I glean the tiniest changes, like when an apostrophe is shaped to the wrong font, and must be corrected. I winkle them out & fling them far far into the shoreline glimmering dislodged like oysters.

    The name of this collection is Comb the Sky With Satellites, It’s Still a Wilderness. And it talks about the world we live in and how we have failed to wreck it.