My mate and I left lovers

My mate and I left lovers
and hit the road.

On mountaintops we worked it out.
We marched back home
ready to love our girls.

We dropped our bags and told them we'd commit.

They dropped their eyes and turned away

and said they needed space.

Funny, really; that'd always been my line.

It made sense.
The roles must switch.
Love has a left and a right
but little else.

But oh how we dance:
she in, me out,
me in, she out,
around and around the pillar of love
that ceases to exist
once we take our eyes off our lover
and onto the pillar of love.

We amble by back roads
searching for the corpse of god,
flail down the rabbit holes,
try instructions
but plunge through darkness

and that's why we love each other

for we can't completely love each other
the way we'd like to think we can
- on this we all relate
on levels more unconscious.
We'd weep out storms
if we knew the depths of them.

Who, truly, could bear the task of being loved that hard?

So we pull away;
so the dance.
But I know she tried.
I tried too.

My mate and I came home
and the girls - well - they gave us
just what we deserved.
But it's just the dance.
Perhaps it's what we'd hoped for
all along.

A boy called Brad

A boy called Brad
was my first best mate
in high school.
We were inseparable.
It was year one of our teens,
we had each other
and the world
was going on summer.

At the start of the following year,
a boy the kids called Ruddy
- a fat little fuck -
claimed
to my face
that Brad and I were bumbuds.

It was the turn of the century,
it was an all-boys school
and for Ruddy, the ass,
to claim that Brad and I were lovers
was trauma
I couldn't process.

So I never did.

Instead,
I spent the year ignoring Brad.
I treated him like shit,
like we'd never been a pair.
He didn't understand.
Neither did I,
in truth.

I think this was
the crucial episode
of my life.

The subsequent twenty years,
with their porn addiction,
obsessive compulsions
and constant cheating

should be credited
to the way I handled
Ruddy and Brad.

Brad was a great friend
but life is like death:
you can't go back on it.

I hope that Brad
is doin' alright.
I hope that Ruddy is too

for we're all the wounds of an innocence
that never keeps its feet.

The great horror
is innocence dies
before the flesh departs.

So here's to Ruddy
- the thorn of my life.
Here's to me
though I didn't have the guts to pull it out.

And here's to Brad
- my best friend in Year 8.

We'd be close to halfway through our lives.

Perhaps,
going forward,
the pain will be smothered
now that the innocence
is too.

In order to live

I think
in order to live
you must learn to hate on life.

This is the crucifixion

or annihilation
of the Buddha.

The Whitsundays:
the islands,
the sun
- the world a crystal

bar the stings

for the world
yet knows
torture.

Campfires
- mates and stories and love -
are crystals too

but they blight
as we rot then die then rot.

It's not that love ain't a thing.
It's that love
ain't found in life
but despite it

by the naked nothingness
that's you

on that cross,
in that cave

with no one left to blame.

Our ancestors blamed The Spirits,
our grandfolk blamed The Jew,
we blame Trump;
bogeymen everywhere.
You've held your breath
for campfires
and islands in the sun.

But hanging off that crucifix,
it all seems such a farce;
you begin to hate on life

and breathe a bit
and feel
a little
free.

New York

New York,
I hit Time's Square
and Central Park;
I hit the blaze beneath
your ferocious ego.

And then,
New York,
I met with your nakedness.
I saw the tears that poured
down the sides
of your scars.
They cut deep in a concrete

that'd stood so self-assured.
I glimpsed your grief
and nakedness,
New York.

Passing what was left,
I thought the New World
and history,
I thought the rain.
I thought the subway,
the people,
the people who'd chosen to fall out the sky
to die
rather than be burnt alive.

New York,
I saw your nakedness
and stripped robes of pride
laid out
in the form of holes in the ground

that tried to make space for mourning.
Steel had risen here,
had waited for the day of nakedness.

New York,
we all arrive at the nakedness.
Some, through beaten, burning towers
sinking dust
through the narratives of life.

New York,
I walked Broadway
and couldn't find the words to work you out:
too large to fit an idea.

But when I saw your nakedness
- two holes in the ground,
the names of the dead -
I figured you're but human.

And now,
New York
- as large
as the rest of the world -
you carry your wound
for all the world to see
since your towers fell
to graves in the ground

and the nakedness came
in a way
it's never meant
to come.

To deal with devils

To deal with devils
or deal with silence,
to blind your eyes
or view the violence.

To chase approval
or meet with fate,
to limit hurt
or hold the weight.


To limp along
or blow your cover,
to bow and beg
or rise with hunger.


To sell a brand
or build your Zion,
to plead with lovers
or hunt the lion.

The hardest thing

The hardest thing
to accept about death
is sensing it takes
more than a lifetime
to grow up.

Art might be

Art
might be
the evidence of
god.

To explain art
is to kill it.
To live behind it
is to know the only side
that's not worth knowing.


Art
might be
the evidence of
god.


Both are felt
in cracks between
lust and sleep,
pain and numbness.


Both
are breathed in
but not exhaled.


Both are the jist
of something else
and the jist itself.


Both sound
like one another
but never like themselves.


Neither is literal,
neither is metaphor
for neither
is anything at all.


Both
are just dumb ideas
like life's a dumb idea
- at least in the absence of death.
Death
might be
the evidence of
life.


Art
might be
the evidence of
god.
For if it all made sense,
we wouldn't sketch
or curse the sky.


Is eating toast
or breaking an arm
artistic?
To clean a shoe:
is that artistic?
Art
might be
the evidence of
god
when we're cleaning shoes
for the feet of
god


whether god exists
or not.


For neither, really,
does art exist.


Art
might be
the evidence of
god
for we talk of art as if we can,
as if art's an actual thing


- we feel it, though;
we sense it's there


and sense it
might be evidence of
something else,
too.