'Of fruitful flow'
If photos are your saviour, then mine would be found
in tragic words, underground, buried in lead,
dismissed with a trumpet's call.
You say I'm a mixture of
seventeen year old precociousness
and sixty five year old staggered wisdom,
a recipe calling for a quick whisk,
a patient eye, and a mouth that's tasted
countless times before.
I say I'd bury myself in philosophy
if I knew there was one sparkling incentive
to know the difference between right and wrong,
between oranges in Seville looking lonely and pregnant,
between the grapes down in the Marlborough Sounds
picked by a fussy vintner's hands.
See? I dream of volcanoes erupting;
of the pyroclastic flows enveloping my senses,
I'll taste willingly. There, over at Mount Merapi,
whom they worship as a God, they pile baskets
of banana leaves with vegetables
and fake money.
If you must click a hundred times
to find that perfect shot,
do it now; do it
while this earth is yet fruitful,
a trial of perfection and love
a yearly labour for sunburnt lands.
I shall visit there one day.
I shall till the fields and dance amidst
their circle of drums, beating me onwards,
skyhigh, skyward into the lofty reaches,
into that mix of filth
and life.
'Veritas'
I knocked on her door, left orangeblossoms
on the varnished floor. I could see my reflection,
all flustered-eyed and mussed-up bed hair.
But that's irrelevant, a petri-dish of unreturned calls:
somnambulance. So, wish for ocean and spirals in your sleep;
that's where I've always been. It's my stream of condolences
given form: winged bravado, machismo flatly run over.
Why do birds sing when I'm continuously quiet? To blast them
out of my sight: I'm sorely tempted some days. Some days.
Of maroon and burgundy, of plastic wheels on a Tonka truck,
squeaky-rusted from the sandpit it's always resided in.
This youthful lozenge I spat out years ago.
This toast I buttered and threw
on that same floor.
I wish for hollandaise and bechamel sauce. No mint. A touch
of tarragon and music from Vienna, pure and forlorn. Somehow,
these wishes become three kisses I've yearned for.
Eternally.
Windswept caves with anemones at its gates. Flax
and Pohutukawa lining the edges. That was Christmas
all those months ago.
There, I spoke of roots and waves returning, of sunsets
rainbow-runed and benevolently stained. Here, it's rain
and endless rain, polished stones in a crystal bowl, shivering.
Today is a muted aria cut short, left reeling.
What fish in this world could overcome my temptation to join
sea and sky together, to obliterate the lines of earth between?
What world of lips is worth all of this?
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Submission Name: Of fruitful flow/Veritas
