A Hanged Fool’s Ode To Rusden:

I went to study Language and Literature

and fell like the Hanged Fool for the rope of theatre,

hung myself on that stage, dangled

upside down: Watched the world

slide by while thoughts in my head

were filled in with the words of others — had they too

hung and spun,

examined the world as if it were frozen

and the only thing that moved

was my desire

as it seeped passed flesh and heart and ear and lip?

I remember Visions.

I remember an apple

and the impulse to say whatever.

I remember the three-way script

spun outwards like a web to snare an audience in ways

I had never fathomed.

I remember I wrote a piece about Russian Caravan Tea

and listened to my words plunge as if I were a well

and (having filled the page) became empty and filled again

by hearing someone else speak my mind.

Once we travelled like beetles to Sydney,

listened to playwrights rewrite their histories

and then there was the tour into the countryside:

There was day in the middle of an oval,

the band through Paul finding a way to heaven,

the kids, the dispersing clouds that spun away

like the old sheets on mum’s clothesline, the sun and I…

I swear if I could I would hold that day forever.

And the time I watched Elena and Neil find and lose themselves

in The Woods

that too I would hold

and the Vowles, the Cliffs…

The very fabric of me

stretched out and tossed by the hands of fellow learners of the craft,

by dancers and singers and lovers and friends,

only to fall back again and cover my skin as if nothing had changed

and it hadn’t and it had

just like the very best of things.