Thomas Seeks Belief - edit 2

Thomas lifts his hairshirt, touches, gently,

the lesion beneath. As he stands beside the diligent bed,

hidden in the tall, thin shadows

cast by a crooked lampshade, he recalls
how his chest was once wound free.

That was when he was young, blithe,

inhabited the Tao moment,

uncluttered, free of the need for belief, the future –

a thread yet

to be woven - unhindered, unkept.

Then came the children.

Now his heart is constantly exposed, a deep gash
unable to heal - a place for all manner of things
to visit, to perch
on fleshy lips or enter and touch
the heart within.

Thomas lies in bed, bare-chested, misses
the kiss at night when his naked wife
would lie by his side. Her wound and his
shared solace as they
wondered what the children were up to.

His wife buried, children grown
into their own spasms

to navigate. In the dark, Thomas slips
his hand into the gap and touches, gently,
his own beating centre.

He stares, opened-eyed, up at the unseen
ceiling, seeks assurance, a belief
that all would be well
with his children and theirs
long after his time has been and gone.

The magpie’s canvas

Before the curtains are drawn

and light can enter the mind -

the day fresh and uneaten;

before the lover’s hand

can alight upon the shoulder’s blade

and stir sleep into action,

the feathered artist

warbles aural paint across the world.

Ears fill with the gravity

of a planet returned, a promise fulfilled.

The eucalypt are greened and greyed,

the sun given its yellow haze;

the sky, with each trill and cadence,

returned from night into blue.

Head upon pillowed dreams,

I hear the artist’s work;

know the world

is made whole in the dawn.

Thomas Seeks Belief - edit 1

Thomas lifts his hairshirt and

touches, gently,

the wound beneath, recalls - as

he stands in the tall, thin shadows cast

by a crooked lampshade beside the diligent bed -

how his chest was once wound free.

That was when he was young, blithe,

inhabited the Tao moment, free

of the need for belief, the future -

a thread yet to be woven, unhindered, unkept.

Then came the children.

Now his heart is constantly exposed, a wound

unable to heal - a place for all manner of things

to visit, to perch

on fleshy lips or enter and touch

the heart within.

Thomas lies in bed, bare chested, missing

that kiss at night when his naked wife

would lie by his side, her wound and his

seek solace as they

wondered what the children were up to.

His wife buried, children grown

into their own wounds to tend, their own

spasms to navigate. In the dark, Thomas slips

his hand into the gap and touches, gently,

his own beating heart.

He stares, opened-eyed, up at the unseen

ceiling, seeks assurance, a belief

that all would be well

with his children and theirs

long after his time has been and gone.

R.I.P. Seamus Heaney

Great poet, a friend of mine Michael Keaney first put me on to him in the 70's. 

North is my Favouritte collection

and I loved his collected prose work  Finders Keepers.

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand

Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

Thomas seeks belief

Thomas lifts his hairshirt and touches, gently,

the wound beneath, recalls as he stands

in the shadowing lamplight before bed

how his chest was once wound free

but then came the children and now his heart

is forever exposed, a wound that cannot heal -

a place for all manner of things to visit, to perch

on fleshy lips or enter and touch the heart within.

Thomas lies in bed, bare chested, missing that kiss

at night when his naked wife would lie by his side,

her wound and his kissing, seeking solace as

their hearts wondered what the children were up to.

Thomas is old now, his wife buried, children grown,

having their own wounds to tend, their own spasms

to navigate. In the dark, Thomas slips his hand

into the gap and touches, gently, his own beating heart.

He stares, opened-eyed, up at the unseen ceiling,

seeks assurance, a belief that all would be well with his

children and theirs long after his time has been and gone.

Is There A God For The Beard Worm?

Before wood became skin

I went for a swim in the ocean

but my stone for a heart

anchored me to melancholy.

I sank so deep

I befriended the beard worms,

allowed my feet to become buried

in the sand at the world’s end,

lifted my face in the darkness

while from above fell

the histories of plant and animal;

fleshy manna - the saddest sight

my wooden eyes had seen.

It was in that darkness,

with my face lifted up

and my wooden lips praying,

I first began to doubt.

Cove At Newhaven

Between rocks the colour of dried blood -
the colour of her lips - the cove recollects.

Empty shells drag across the brown sand,

writing messages eyes will never read.

Waves gather to the cove's heart; she
embraces each prodigal laughing as he 

races into the sandy bosom then retreats 

with flooded memory of why he first fled. 

There is a time and a place for everything - even regret.

We parked the car. Slipped on our bums down the dead
grass slope to the lip of white foam water pursed
to spit us out no matter how many times as pale seals
we dived into the underworld and laughed in explosions
of surrender. We watched the drops of seawater -
speckled diamonds that hung in the watercolour blue sky
to catch the sunlight from your turned away eyes - fall;
languid fingernails of a god’s sad hand as he lays down
his trident, collects stories as seaweed to stroke between fingers
lost in a time, lost in the erosion of once powerful words.

The small cove, naked between mangrove’s hunger
and rock’s anger, a kiss of sand, a memory
of what has passed, a soft invitation to stop the journey
and immerse forever in salt water’s promise to cleanse.

Thus Spoke…

There is more to this

than the way our tongue moves; the way it

approaches or retreats from teeth, or our lips

shaping themselves first as sly, sunlit maid

and then as aching mother.

The chords thrum as breath weaves a wand

and turns into sound - the voice in the dark

catches light eyes cannot see

if we but pause and listen

to the tone; never the words,

the words

are the illusion, the packaging.

In the room, or out and about,

we several lay ourselves down or move around

and breathe - imagine the world

as small as our heartbeats, as large

as our minds

and we let loose a conversation…

It travels into a space

none of us expected -

not even the finest of poets -

the way a dance becomes something so much more

than a body moving from place to place.

Odin, wishing his son was not grown:

In Asgaard, when it was young and the wolves 

had not yet begun to howl nor my eyes 

begun to dim,  we would walk, you and I, 

down by the river where it was always raining -

the water sunk deep into the weeds, and the bank 

was overrun with activity as everything tried 

to get in or out of the churning water -  I remember 

that your little footsteps squelched as we trod.

My hand clutched yours and we peered into the murky water, 

your eyes constantly drawn by the lure of frogs 

or the shimmer of salmon. In those days you paused often 

and let my words, like that river, wash against you, filling you, 

I hope, with some of the wisdom I had found in my travels.

When you were three you hid a duck under a bucket

that day you clomped down the stairs, a brush that dripped 

paint like laughter, and the time you sat on the window ledge 

and leaned too hard against the fly wire. We all laughed 

when your head popped up from amongst the pineapple sage.

I wish you’d come home, son, but not all grown-up. I’d like, 

just occasionally, that three old to visit me again so I could 

hold him close and maybe try even harder

to imprint what I know must fade.

 

As it is, standing by the river, the rainbow bridge

shows signs that it fades, and my empty hand throbs with memory -

I feel like I am a duck under a bucket, waiting.

Final Edit of the Accelerator Poem

The Adolescent Particle Accelerator

Born before the Higgs was theorized, born
before that moment when man questioned
if we had the right stuff, born
before a giant step and a flag that did not flutter...

It is adolescent dreams
that are most missed - how each day
is revealed in the pain; the swirling
forces that bind and unravel
playing out again and again in kisses
and drinks and mornings waking next
to a breast or hip of someone unknown
only hours before. It is the howling
at the night, a bottle in one hand
and the masked future, a raging trumpeter,
stirring the forces to live on despite it all.

Now contentment, a sated cat, laps
at hours and happily watches
children grow while weeks are worked
or novels written, well-worn paths trod
and gardens replanted until the evenings demand
to be snugged up to with a classical book.

Everything we are remembers who we were -
all our bosons and all the convictions they carry,
all the gatherings of leptons and quarks and their anti-cousins
remember…

Remember those wonderful mad and out of control
years when we were hadrons flying towards
the many collisions of our particle accelerator years.

AS MONTHS PASS

In limbo you swim,

bedazzled by sounds heard through the stretched full moon of stomach skin.

Your mother and I dream.

Mine are technicolour catastrophes -

so much could go wrong!

Your mother's -  a yearning for her first kiss

(and the smell of your scalp).

And you?

What do you dream

as you drift in that amniotic ocean of possibility?

Do you study prescient lessons

to help with the final preparations?

We wait,

your mother and I,

bloated with expectation

while you kick and

silently swim towards us.

An afternoon with Visions:

 Page ready and empty -

 hands fiddle with the ribbon,

 a yarn tangled around the steadfast ‘Z/z’.

 My mind pretends a search

 but truthfully conjures visions

 of your straight spine: imagines the steel rod

 implanted within to keep it straight,

 and your perfect breasts and nipples

 seen whilst performing a Louis Nowra play

 titled ‘Visions’ in which you played my sister

 though secretly I was never your brother.

 We lay together, another sunny afternoon -

 but not fully together;

 the journey never went so far, words and time

 seem to make us stumble and splutter

 like a fire that almost catches

 yet for reasons unexplained does not.

 Now another afternoon

 I sit at this computer writing words

 that somehow have the shape, these years later,

 of the underside of your ‘b’ breast,

 the gentle curve of your ‘l’ neck,

 of your thin, soft ‘m’ lips

 and long, long gently clasping ‘w’ fingers.

 This ‘s’ is your bent leg, the knee a valley of ‘v’,

 this ‘o’ a cheek soft as a baby;

 a remembered smell sends me reeling

 into that almost moment so long ago.

 I wonder these 27 years later

 what has happened to you and that steel rod

 or your sea green eyes

 and utterly sad heart that would not let go

 to come a’ journeying with me

 on a sunny afternoon similar and almost different

 from any other and I wish, as I have some times other,

 that I might have had the courage to face your temper

 and in its tempest shout like an undaunted sailor

 the ‘I love you’ that dwelt in my heart

 that moment, on that particular afternoon.

High Class Books: Author Interview – Danny Fahey

High Class Books: Author Interview – Danny Fahey: How did you come up with the title? Catalina is a play on cat, which is where the main character began. She was the cat; Peter (another cha...

The Third Muse and The Clayworker

The third Muse

The first Muse,
clear-sighted,
free from judgement,
a camera,
captures the model’s face
as Madonna.

The second Muse,
being human,
understands the model
as lover, child
and sister.

The third Muse
demands the clayworker
opens his mind to the place

he keeps hidden, the dark room
locked, blocked yet there,
down the long hallway,
waiting.

Inside this room the clayworker
takes his model
and abuses her
kicks her off a couch
acts a child, spits at her
throws punches, weeps
and presses upon her.

Sex has no boundaries
with this Muse
who creates crevices
in the scrotum and breast
of the clayworker.

Everyone admires the statue

never seeing the model’s bruises.

The third Muse
forces the mind to open that room -
allows the darkness
within to escape, occupy
pride of place
in the clayworker,
allows severing of an ear
alcoholic despair
and the eyes
to see God
in the movements of a tiger.

She must be embraced
with hard cock, never tamed
though claimed,
ridden like a beast
in the early hours
of morning when civilized brain
weakens
so clay
can speak to all of us.

She is destructive
and in her fire
the phoenix rises -
a masterpiece born
in the bloody battles
of the clayworker who
throws tantrums
like a Lenny Bruce on the floor
of a radio station,
chases the flesh like a Marquise
to maim and slay,
drinks or smokes or injects
to escape her clutches
and burns to kiss and fuck her
to death.

The clayworker

            I

Even as my fingers unlace

the dress that keeps your hot flesh
at bay my hands, browned in earth, itch

to mould damp clay.

While my lips kiss your abyss

my tongue tastes your coming screams

for in the morning I shall abandon
your sweet nest and as I wrest

with memory to produce an after-image

of your liquid sensuousness my ears,
lost in creation's delight, shall not hear

your voice cry out and my soul,

empty as night, shall devour our final embrace.

So one final time, as my fingers trace

our passing along your white spine,

remember this - do nothing,

nothing, but forget me!

Do nothing but forget me!

Like the ocean's spray,
let me envelop you, let me caress,

excite and elicit
the secret responses hidden

from common view.

I need nothing. I grip nothing.
Everything slips through my fingers.

Do nothing, nothing, but forget me,

for though my hands work miracles

the promises I whisper in my need

are as binding as daisy chains

while your hindsight reproaches

wreck havoc upon my innocence.

I seek nothing - the discipline is to listen.
The clay sings - the dream is revealed.

            II

Everything passes through me!

I am nothing.

I take everything.
I slip into ancient warmth

to discover your secrets.
I see into your pain, make it mine.
I feel your heat beat, match it, change it,
lead it down sodden paths once hidden from all.

There is no safety, no logical progression,

no calm expression, there is only this,

this tempestuous unearthing,
this explosion of fragments and hidden meanings,
this collision of myths and insights

as muscles and tendons
lose conscious direction, strip back the layers
to reveal visions –

the melting pot is stirred to action.

                        III

Each tired movement struggles against

the growing current
as thick reeds catch hold, threaten

to drag me under - only the clay brings relief!

Only the clay’s touch succours me!

Thoughts unbound fly in the face of protection -
a hard, wet slap to force clay into shape.
Thoughts fill my hands, fingers stab the clay,
become sharp knives to slice the morals

off stiff upper lips and hypocritical redemptions.

I am not redeemable!
I float, lost and passionately angry, in the space
between acts inconceivable. I caress,

I force, I manipulate and the clay breathes,

exists in shimmering propinquity to that which is!

Sometimes my ecstasy dominates, a storm,

a raging wind rending roots and leaves impenetrable

as I struggle to find an escape from the fire

that burns deep inside my chest - then beware! Beware!

For though my flesh may seek your embrace
my thoughts lie elsewhere and my hands,

as they dip into your lavic heat,

already ache for the clay's cool touch.

I need nothing.

I grip nothing.

I take everything.

While my words seduce

my eyes appraise;
I take what lies hidden

and follow the inspiration.

                                    IV

Sometimes I long for you.

Sometimes I even love you
but darkly, secretly, sometimes

I wish badly for you
and my fingers wriggle like snakes

spitting venom in The Gorgon's hair,

seeking a return to the clay’s lair.

I wish you begone!

Begone from this time and place!

I wish more, less, difference!

But only sometimes...

Sometimes I gentle flesh,

I caress and softly seek the recesses of delight.

Sometimes I erupt
to rend a vision physically unto existence.

Come my sweetling,

my sparrow,

my sacrifice,
come seek my arms, my loins,

my embrace.

Discover that though the flesh

may sate
and separate,

the passion that compels us
can invest us with a truth

so vast everyone is touched.

Sonnet composed in the stomach

Inside the whale’s stomach I wait

to be set free by Fortune’s breath.

I listen to the waves; futile fists

that beat against the Leviathan.

The candle I light at the moment

I deem to call midnight shrinks hourly.

Scattered bones of eaten fish remind me

of a bare tree carved into a son.

After fourteen days bright Pinocchio

arrives in a wooden boat, swallowed

whole by the Leviathan - it is

more welcome than a joyous Christmas,

his wooden face had found a smile

no hand of mine ever had the grace to carve.

An Artist paints his Lover. Edit 1

Saturday morning in The Punter’s Club -
strips of amber morning light cut past the old blinds
that have seen a thousand drunks urgently knock
at the doors, impatient with the opening hours. Tony enjoys
a quiet beer in the swirling smoke, pungent hops atmosphere.
His sad, moist-grey, clairvoyant eyes watch me leave.

I cross Brunswick Street, coolness as thick as the fumes
coughed from cars so old students wear them like badges
on tattered old jackets. Towards me, Veronica storms
the road - her face a cocked pistol, her lips pursed, words
poised to be fired – eyes focused with intent upon the Pub I had left.

I pay the five dollars, enter an exhibition; wander past
paintings of tumbling buildings and their broken windows
staring blindly into the white light of the exhibition,
hidden paddocks littered with oily puddles that seep
rainbows. Beside the pools, syringes, silvery and still,
emit air bubbles – fish gasping for breath.

I reach Tony’s painting, a galley ship, sails stretched
taut in a gale wind, the sea-washed prow crashes
a wave higher than man’s folly. Everywhere the vicious
deep green sea wild, wet, Mistress of the ship’s fate.

The picture’s violence leaps out, punches me
where lunch would be if poet’s had any money. Beneath,
written in black - the painting’s title ‘Veronica’. I remembered
her face crossing the road and Tony’s aura of sadness as he sat
on a barstool sipping beer, nodding farewell as I made my leave,
his cigarette turning to ash in his quiet, unsteady hand.

The Adolescent Particle Accelerator - edit 4

Born before the Higgs was theorized, born
before that moment when man questioned
if we had the right stuff, born
before a giant step and a flag that did not flutter...

It is adolescent dreams
that are missed most of all - how each day
is revealed in the pain; the swirling -
the forces that bind and unravel
playing out again and again in kisses
and drinks and mornings waking next
to a breast or hip of someone unknown
only hours before. It is the howling
at the night, a bottle in one hand
and the masked future, a raging trumpeter,
stirring the forces to live on despite it all.

Now contentment, a sated cat, laps
at hours and happily watches
children grow while weeks are worked
or novels written, well-worn paths trod
and gardens replanted until the evenings demand
to be snugged up to with a classical book.

Everything we are remembers who we were -
all our bosons and all the convictions they carry,
all the gatherings of leptons and quarks and their anti-cousins
remember…

Remember those wonderful mad and out of control
years when we were hadrons flying towards
the many collisions of our particle accelerator years.

An Artist paints his Lover

Saturday morning in The Punter’s Club -
strips of amber morning light cut past the old blinds
that have seen a thousand drunks urgently knock
at the doors, impatient with the opening hours. Tony enjoys
a quiet beer in the swirling smoke, pungent hops atmosphere.
His sad, moist-grey, clairvoyant eyes watch me leave.

I cross Brunswick Street, coolness as thick as the fumes
coughed from cars so old students wear them like badges
on tattered old jackets. Towards me, Veronica storms
the road - her face a cocked pistol, her lips gun-barrel
straight – eyes focused with intent upon the Pub I had left.

I pay the five dollars, enter an exhibition; wander past
paintings of tumbling buildings and their broken windows
staring blindly into the white light of the exhibition,
hidden paddocks littered with oily puddles that seep
rainbows. Beside the pools, syringes, silvery and still,
emit air bubbles – fish gasping for breath.

I reach Tony’s painting, a galley ship, sails stretched
taut in a gale wind, the sea-washed prow crashes
a wave higher than man’s folly. Everywhere the vicious
deep green sea wild, wet, Mistress of the ship’s fate.

The picture’s violence leaps out, punches me
where lunch would be if poet’s had any money. Beneath,
written in black - the painting’s title ‘Veronica’. I remembered
her face crossing the road and Tony’s aura of sadness as he sat
on a barstool sipping beer, nodding farewell as I made my leave,
his cigarette turning to ash in his quiet, unsteady hand.

the lure

The woman wipes

floury hands upon the thin floral

apron tied around a waist

still small enough

to turn an eye, the left hand

hooked like a bird’s claw, brushes

coiled red hair

away from eyes

faded as the sun hanging out to dry

above another day.

The man holds

the chook between fingers

hard as a dog's jaw; places

its stupid head

upon the wooden block

rusted deep with the fragility of life.

A sudden thunk, a headless gallop

and the head, startled

as a cheek slapped out of the blue,

is tossed aside for the dog.

The child sits

on a concrete step

so hard his bum whines, listens

to the kneading

of dough, the sound of his mother’s shoes

skating across the linoleum, watches

the half-moon axe

descend – he wants to move

inside and across to the man; is forever

trapped between the two.

We are vessels of time

A single word -

slide the tongue across lips, moisten

the twin sisters coated with the accumulated dust

of a day’s travel, pronounce ‘Tripoli.’

Feel vocal chords thrum over sounds

the mind makes in an absence of consciousness.

The plucked bass causes lips to vibrate,

the tingle, an anchor moving up through water,

bursting free as the sound moves down the ear canal

and into the open sea of memory.

The experience of associated consonants

and vowels trip the senses, conjures images

of a time displaced in the shifting sands -

the sounds of the word, the timelines

that tinkle, an Indian girl dances, head askew, hands

at the end of a series of angles, fingers clap symbols

in the synaptic paths

paved first in sandaled feet, dreamt of in caves,

before spears became bombs and fire, the flames

to sear the flesh off differences.

We all speak in tongues.

The single word, loaded with past periods, prods us

on a journey to a place

that exists in our minds, a contemplation

of a time displaced in particles called children

who experience the world

upon the humped-back voice of preceding epochs.

Words make sailors of us all; we travel

upon sound-waves back to moments

where histories rise up as pyramids, where

fading events, like the rusted, scattered, bloodstained

remains of battles, first entered language.

The starting point’s faint echo

conjures up visions of sand and animals

eyes of now have never seen. We feel the imprint of feet

upon a landscape lost through choices

or the avalanche of planetary forces.

Once uttered, words defy

a short trip between two points. Dictionaries

hold only a fraction, cannot define

wrinkles casting us back to places we have only seen

with the clarity of the mind’s eye. Language

moves outside the flimsy barriers of the here and now -

we are the flesh and bone singers of history.

Words are not a journal of the distance

lost, they are a ripple of the effect

the shifting landscape has had upon us.

The span stretches back to the unknown, the landscape

seen, is fragile as thought. If the light shone

is too harsh, if truth

is too brightly sought, the listeners

do not leave their lounge room, minds do not fall

into the tunnel of imagined connections.

Displacement is lost in facts, but a whispered moan,

a faint, modulated call, a certain pitch,

becomes a vessel upon the ocean - water

flashes faint on distant waves - draws

the ear, draws the mind, makes the body thrum,

brings images closer to the stroking oars -

flesh stretched tight over the hollow that is history;

a father’s sad, lost eyes, the sound

of time’s echo, a mother’s quiet voice

calling, ‘Come, come, come back to me now.’