THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW You must know how it feels by now, when all that’s left are the bars where we drank from long, cool glasses; when all the lazy weekend hours that we built up into jutting totems and soothing fetish objects have drifted out like coiling vapours through the cracks in life’s hinges.… Continue reading a poem about regrets

As you walk along the wide slow street at dusk you see him sitting in his chair; sometimes he waves, warding off questions with one hand while calmly taking notes with the other for an alternative history of everything. If masks could make us tell the truth, then his would still be hung behind the… Continue reading the town of retired war criminals

ANTARCTIC VOICES Australian Antarctic Territory Sometimes when the wind here talks it tells me things that science will never say: how long ago by different stars the gods of night and day agreed to split the year between them; that jutting rocks above the snow are the eggs of enormous stone birds and every iceberg… Continue reading an invented mythology

THE OXYGEN MAKERS Stromatolites in Shark Bay, Western Australia Midday, water’s edge Don’t take breathing for granted; it hasn’t always been so easy. The fresh twenty-one percent we live on was made by these slimy cyan domes over billions of silent years, puff by puff. Somewhere we’ve failed, made it all go wrong; but these… Continue reading a primordial sequence

WHERE THE UNBORN ARE I ride the world to the end of the line, a fragile thing under a hard metal sky, hearing the future say the gods no longer need us and heaven still costs what each can pay. It’s calling us on, but who knows where; when all the questions are answered, the… Continue reading a poem about not having children

THE GOOD THINGS A grey and heavy Tuesday sprawls to the horizon; the window might open onto a courtyard filled with colour and life, but never does. I want to drive a nail deep into the clouds and hang a bright canvas across the sky – a crinkled hymn to day and night – but… Continue reading a poem about making your own world

MELTDOWN The soft apologetic grey of evening squeezes me out from where I’ve sat so long safe from prying minds but close to the shimmering edge. A gaunt and prowling night cat, I stalk these polished streets alone, meeting the face of my fear in each gleaming surface. I cringe from the masses of promised… Continue reading a poem about depression