Young Writers Society

They see me rollin...

#1: the selfless act

i took myself apart;
spindles of bone
leaving behind trails
of superfine self,
and in recognising
i became someone
reconstructing.
In this self i laid
understanding
in simple layers, redefining
the person i used to be.
Can you see her now?
Collecting in the corners
of rooms she never entered,
she kept my face and not much else
and in that elsewhere
i watch her progress forward
alone.

#2: and so we trust

Mid-March the rains began
and fervour made it to our beds,
the humidity of your body
taking up space where it didn't belong
and mine -
and mine kept spaces between words,
one limb angled off the floor
even as we spoke of leaving
(you spoke of leaving) -
the trouble was between the headrest
and the door forever creaking
the trouble was my body
where it didn't belong
the trouble was in the forever
(I left)

#3: after the flood

The water is full of snakes,
as though up from the river bed -
you forget every year that they swim,
scales as fast in muddy deluge
as they are on dust.
That is the take away: reedy bodies
traipsing through the devestation.
just ribbons flailing in the wind

#4: in the deep

our hands keep touching
along the leylines
and i didn't know our lives
could reverb into the world
but each moment is
sulphur igniting
that bruise backed burst
we could call
your body against mine.

#5: blue poles

jackson pollock's number 11
bought for 1.3 million dollars
graces the national gallery of australia.
seven layers of paint
and pain
on stark white walls
not to mention the politics.

and when you see it there
(2x4 metres)
it engulfs the spaces you've ever seen,
and collects a stratosphere
from you and me and the looks
that continue from eye to print to page.

and when i saw it there
it collected from me the moments
in between every blue sky
i had ever seen
and reprinted a canvas
in through my bones.

and i am marked
by it i am made stone
by it i am incomplete

looking to the skies ive never known.

#6: in the moment of

wet hair is summer nostalgia on the back porch watching the sun fall down and shivering because you are bioluminescent only when around your friends. and the sudden cold calls to you , sounding like your mother in the kitchen but all it says is "I know where you have been and i have no gift for you, only time and silence."

#7: complication

the night stumbles onward
And I am reminded that
We are a catastrophe.

#8: soundtrack

the strings make my heart seize,
the sudden sharpness clarifies
a sense of otherness that lingers
in the tips of my fingers and toes.
side effects of medication,
of tiredness and of long weeks,
long hours, too little time.
i watched time shudder and clutter
and collect in fine china boxes;
only going back i see the empty insides,
false bottoms removed into the aether
and all that time lost to an elsewhere
that i couldn't reach if i had -

#9: an autumn wedding

in silence we watched
the sky lit purple and white,
thunder rippling under
the rough verandah slats
and somewhere in the clouds
the message broke
we are not alone
echoed around and inside us
as the rain finally fell.

#10: amaretto

six gun salutes line the galley
and every man wears his flavour,
an army of colour and contrast
leaving their allegiance at home
if only for the moment
to mourn a man they never knew.
and if he saw this display
on the cold, bright streets,
he'd sink the sour breath he had
into one last curse
goodbye.

#11: in this place again

we listen to the dark crested waves
sink again to their homes,
each one poseidon made his own.
the cold seeps here
and we lie in the cool breeze
that shudders over the dunes,
dreaming of sonar songs in long nights,
and the way their waning voices
carry ever outward in the deep blue,
and we know to call so loud and long
would break our cords and more,
still we lie in the thick waiting
to hear our song.

#12: spent flesh

carved from the bone
we are cartilage ripped raw
and left for carrion and more.
this is summer life,
a behaviour left behind in deep
bright heat - it does not fit
the salt spray that lingers on the grey
soft sea - we lay stripes of our skin
behind on decks we only borrowed,
that is the way of summer.
but this is autumn wind
and a chill straight off the cliffs
that siphons portions from our limbs
where they are left rotting in the swell.

#13: inconsolable

our hands are not claws
our hands are not claws
that rattle and shake and skritch
across glass and wood and skin
we do not make such things
as broken hours and beads unstrung
though we are there when such things
are made into being what they are
we do not make such things
as the echo of sunlight moves slow
into the horizon it falls to disappear
and our mouths do not open to swallow
the great sphere of heat and rage
that collects over the skyline in perpetuity
no our mouths do not open and our hands
are not claws and so we do not make
such things as have been living
inside us
all this time

#14: kaleidoscope

in the end what we have
is honesty wrapped tightly
in cotton wool and good intentions.
here we slide between
what we did and should have done
as though the abacus is multidirectional,
but we know - you and i -
that we step one way or the other
and nothing in between
when our mouths open and the truths
come rumbling out.

#15: this is this.

our mettle is tested
and we go free.