Poems

GALLERY TICK TICK

White walls

Grow thin from exposure

Holes in the wall

Where light filters

Ash and charcoal

A fire dance

Gone cold

An exhibition of marks

And erasers

A curator of loses

And refrains

Where empty boxes hold

Mobile phones in detention

And post it notes mark

A demand on ones

Time

Here the clock tick tick

A death dance

One hour follows

Another – loss

And still a newly

Minted politician

Says that the school

Is remarkably clean

This stamp of approval

Leaves a strain

delia pulls threads

From an old school jumper

Knits a bandy-bandy snake

In her warp

Stick Mob told to disappear

to keep the narrative free from anomalies

pigeonholed as deficit data

in need of top-down remedies

stamped and stapled for conformity

in offices, behind desks

brutal decisions justified as benevolent silver bullets

where a clock measures all manner of maps and plans

90 seconds to midnight

ticking

the scene is set to stage an efficient obscenity

bodies repeatedly kicked, flicked, stabbed, left for dead

pigeonhole dead

tell the cost of this slogan rally

strategic documents sanitise retraumatise

creating success together

working like the best

Stick Mob do not forget

Arrernte Country and the cairns on the hills of County Meath

light boxes of impossible realities

Stick Mob do not forget

that we are quantum, sci-fi, everyday ancient shape shifters

listening out for ancestors across hemispheres

Stick Mob do not forget

that data is living, engaged with

senses through different methods, places, tools and technologies

woven

a snake slides

delia walks Antulye ridges

a wind blows strategic papers through Ntaripe gap

present tense choruses

hold the score

Here – the air conditioner rattles

stalled in a heat haze

dog, delia and i lie

chin deep on a concrete floor

bellies bare

beggars belief

cool air puddles

birds babble

thunder of a hundred brumbies rattle metal corrugations

moths eat the carpet bare

drawings loose their grip

drip

no longer square

delia eats a tub of garlic infused goats cheese

rubs her armpits across her genitals

snuggles in and snores

Caught in getting each chapter right, correct to a predetermined score

–  some entities move tight spaces – go against the grain when the status quo is far-from-right

Here-now spaces are in/determinate and roughly so. Rema(r)kable

Never done – doing it – checking it out

Never property, never properly owned or concisely laid out at a wake with(out) the dead to mourn

Each chapter, an iteration, ignites the underscore

Each chapter walks the Antulye ridges – same route, same discipline done differently.

Some elements, particles, presences caress bodies gently, repeatedly, never sure

The beauty of rethinking, rewriting, rewalking, redrawing un/knowns is the touch of im/possible

hospitalities of

rocks-wind-shedding

suns-fire-singing

Eking out rocky paths, head full of plans

Un/knows – compiling to-do-lists for the days ahead

Sunlight blind sighs, a swirl of mulga branches snag my shirt, prod my skin

Returning, repatterning the (ontological) terrain

I trained to be a weaver in Termonfeckin, Drogheda, Ireland

Another Cromwellian massacre site

This time gathering with a coven — just back from the sand dunes

The twists and turns are of weavings the how and then of cutting the double-weave cloth from the loom and putting it to reuse

No weave is ever done perfectly

I worked with male weavers in the Gaza Strip for a while

Lived in a makeshift parachute tent – just back from the sand dunes

I was raised to be tough — the ability to bend, break and mend with the soft breeze, the storm, the loom that I carry

Passing the weft through the treadled shed

Right down to sky weathered bones