Sacred. A universe that exists both nowhere And everywhere, That is just as real as it is Imaginary.

Transcription

1 The Dream There is a place far away, Where trees of living light send their rays into the cosmos above, Where the last of the midnight stars can be seen. I close my eyes, and I am there. Sacred. A universe that exists both nowhere And everywhere, That is just as real as it is Imaginary. The world falls into equilibrium As the colours blend to form Light. Serenity meets destiny As I realise The world is not split into inescapable earth and elusive heavens, Everything that ever was or ever will be Was born in the Souls of stars, the depths of a singularity, Dreaming of the birth of time. The ground beneath my feet Shimmers with the dust of supernovae, I am filled with words That don t exist in any language, But have glided through time For billions of years, waiting to Be felt. 1

2 The stars make people feel insignificant, But here I feel big. My heart beats the rhythm of the song we sing together, Ages old. Every breath I take, In, Out, Stardust fills me. My eyes are open, but I am dreaming. Peace, a sudden weightlessness, And Elysium. 2

3 The Truth of Writing What all these people do not see, When they look at me, Is that the words flowing from my hand Do not come from me. The pen is the vessel of the song, The liquid music singing along With the rhythms of my heart. But it came to my pen from the dark. Writers only tell their aching stories, Think of brains as observatories Where the words travel through To stop for a while to look at you. The words, the stories are their own, We writers have only known Their sweet love for an instant. They came from a far distance. We do not really know our words, The words chose us To give them to the page, And thanked us for an age. But really, the words that entrance hearts Were never really ours.

4 We will never know for sure Why the words of our stories are told as ours.

5 "I wrote poetry and I loved the paper and I loved the pen and I loved the ink then I met him and I loved the words I wrote all my hand could bear whenever I thought about his laugh so my pen never left the page and my fingers never liked me as much as I liked them I scribbled all my ink swooning over his smile but I never wrote about his eyes I never thought about them either yet all the love poems I d ever sighed to and all the songs I d ever cried to rambled about deep eyes and shades of blue you d never find in a swimming pool you d never find unless you scoured oceans and sailed seas searching was not enough you needed to submerge so I dived into his puddles of baby blue I poured the Pacific into my pen and tried to find the bottom I tripped on all his rocks and salt enveloped my wounds but I kept writing about the wave in his hair and the kiss on his lips I gave him my words and told him they were his so he read them and he loved them and I loved him and when I asked if he loved me he folded my pages gently and said he never loved the sea - giving but not loving

6 1 Emu Bizarre bird Your very designation a contradiction Casually prehistoric Made of bits and pieces From other elemental creatures Your bald, blinking eyes The colour of cumquats Your claws, like surgical implements sanctioned By a surrealist No doubt it is my own limitation That sees you as preposterous I am laughing (nervously) at your toneless hiccups Like a clarinet tuning up in a primary school band There is no great beauty That hath no strangeness in the proportion You would appreciate that Dust bathing nomad As tall as a tall man Your splendour creeps up on me When I meet eyes with you I feel myself trembling The word God

7 2 Is on the tip of my tongue

8 1 Family Snapshot Mum is fretting over Little One s decoding Dad is getting his head around the rise and fall of meritocracy Little One is hassling: are Barbie s ears implausibly small? Dog is exhuming forgotten sneakers And I am dreaming about Dance Moms Mum is reading about sublimated shapeshifting Dad is considering the notion of wishful thinking Little One is exploring a discord of bugs and beetles Dog is confronting his own reflection And I am pretending to be Jane Eyre Mum is explaining that garlic tastes like common sense Dad is dealing with Derrida, Baudrillard and Badiou Little One is insisting she arose from a bamboo shoot Dog is delighting in the here and now And I am ruminating on the word sequestered Mum is on the phone saying no to Telstra Dad is suspecting his last interview rambled Little One is maintaining a discovery of flying ants

9 2 Dog is contemplating his owner s imaginary friend And I am reflecting on the resonance of beating wings Mum is proposing that fashion is a language Dad is pondering the lives we live in other people s minds Little One is dreaming of her bamboo family Dog is revelling in his customary nocturnal frenzy And I am pruning away at this poem The raspberry jelly is setting in the fridge The floorboards are crooning to the moon The cockroaches are relishing their midnight feast The traffic is fading to the occasional swoosh And the stars are quivering with laughter at this funny little family

10 When Sorrow Was A Boy In the beginning sorrow belonged to man, a keening sort of sadness from the corner store, distributed evenly to the hearts of those in its vicinity. Nowadays sadness dons more feminine dress, face concealed behind a veil of lavishly tended hair, her inky wings of freedom formed, round her eyes with perfect precision, blurred by relentless tears, brought on by society s expectations. They stripped away her strong and unashamed frame, condemning her to only half a population, to a life lived with girls feeling a transcendent grief, and men none at all. After all, as everyone knows, boys don t cry.