Blackbutt
Enveloped tightly
in food
mingled with indigestible sand.
Eat, the only way to move,
randomly, enticed by a crack here
a succulent morsel there,
infinitely flexible,
deflected by a stone,
a fork, a spade,
menacing vibrations
from some other living thing,
no backbone for a fight
in the black back lanes
of the earth.
No advertising space
no subterranean billboards
no missiles on bitumen
no beauty no ugliness no vision
no ethics, for what do morals mean
for a living thing,
meandering at digestion pace
alone, in the damp darkness,
trailed by
a labyrinth of excrement.
Few pleasures,
the massaging slip of moist clay,
a tasty nematode,
the frisson of meeting by chance
a fellow creature,
a slow glide along the parting
between flesh and bone of a buried thing,
recently deceased
( Quadrant)
Many international visitors came
to the mathematics department on study leave the secretary told me of one...
They are here in hundreds of thousands
padlocks with names inscribed or printed bold in light-fast ink. We imagine couples pledging...
Saying goodbye at the train on his last visit to Brisbane
I remember my father fixing me with steely eyes, as if he were...
Frequently I pause at a regenerating patch of bushland seeded
with surface soil from a not far distant forest and guess at the identity...
first I saw the dog then the form of a man threading its way noiselessly through the close-packed forest of gym machines...
The tub in our shared bathroom would have a waterline rim of grease and flakes of black skin if he bathed before me...
Enveloped tightly in food
mingled with indigestible sand.
Eat, the only way to move...
In general, none of the things with a given natural property can be trained to acquire another. Aristotle Ethics Book 2, Ch. 1
While I’m sitting at the kitchen table, she comes bustling through...
The sky is always dark and heavy as a stone, the streetscape is unlit,
inhabitants, it seems, have no desire
to have it any other way;
Were I buried unconscious,
face downward, on waking I
would think the sky below me,
for normally people are
buried with respect, face up...
While we supped the soup, my mind was wandering as usual, only fragments of conversation catching my attention...
Body still, tense, only his
eyes danced with the fly until
it paused. Too fast to follow,
his cupped hand swept like a swift