Poems

Gallery Tick Tick 

White walls grow thin from exposure
Holes where light filters
Ash and charcoal
A fire dance gone cold

Exhibitions
Mark and erase
Curatorial loses and refrains

Empty boxes hold
mobile phones in detention
Where
post-it notes demand time

Here the clock tick tick
a death dance
One hour follows another loss

And still newly minted politicians
say that the school is remarkably clean
This stamp of approval
leaves a strain

delia pulls threads from an old school jumper
to knitsa bandy-bandy snake
in the dark

Watch This Space Gallery, 2024. Spoken work poem performed at the opening of Stick Mob’s ‘Portal’ exhibition. See Pigeonhole Portal 

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 clocks measure 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 re-traumatise

    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 with ancestors across hemispheres

Stick Mob do not forget
that data is living, engaged with
sensed through different methods, places, tools and technologies
woven

               a snake slides
a dog sniffs
delia walks Antulye ridges
winds blow strategic papers through Ntaripe gap

Inspired by: Victoria Alondra’s poem ‘Nobody’s Performance’, sub-terrain conversations with Craig San Roque, writing and illustrating with Stick Mob, daily walks of the Antulye ridges in the company and counsel of ancestors, delia, and Racy dog.

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
chorus of 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 goats cheese
rubs her armpits across her genitals
snuggles in and snores

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 when 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 Gaza City
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

Passed the weft through the treadled shed
Right down to sky weathered bones

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 snags my shirt, prods my skin
Returning, repatterning the (ontological) terrain

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

    wind-rocks-Shed
fire-suns-Sing