To say just what you feel is never easy. A woman’s clothes lying by her feet in a pile might be the foam from which a goddess is born or the frothy breakers of a sea that might rush in and overwhelm us. We can think that our acts are not our own and rather… Continue reading Adultery

In the endless metropolitan grey, the weekend flashes by between two darknesses. Many wander lost in the pause: swimming, lying on the beach or flying, giving their bodies back for a moment to the elements from which they were made, while others die, going back to them for good; time has washed against them like… Continue reading another bright sunday

PASSENGERS ON THE ICEBERG Australian Antarctic Territory, midsummer Then in a patch of clearer ice I see him; a bearded man with an outstretched hand. I want to dig him out and ask him who he was, but then he’s gone and the ice is milky. Still, we’ve got months to go until the night… Continue reading a journey poem

SEVENTH VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS Machu Picchu, Peru, 1400 AD The world of the gods is yours, Chakana, yours and the condor’s. Even the mountains can’t lift me out of the puma’s paw; up here where the air is just the sigh of a dream I’m as far from you as if I crawled… Continue reading a star poem

AGAIN MIDNIGHT Through a thousand espresso mornings I’ve waited for life to make sense of a heap of melted problems; now I sit dealing out my tattered tarot of strangled, bleeding bank statements, losing lottery tickets and tiny scraps of paper holding phone numbers without names, putting the question over and over to the soggy… Continue reading a poem about making sense of life

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

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