Poems From the Archive
The One Hundred Petalled Rose
The one hundred petalled rose
unfurled,
like one hundred hands reaching for another in the dark.
Petals on petals on petals.
One hundred blinking eyes:
Twenty-five fluttering shut while twenty-five burst open,
And another twenty-five look to the sky,
And a final twenty- five shed a tear.
One hundred petals is far too many
For a simple garden rose.
Too many soft limbs,
Too many attachments,
Weighing down the heart.
The splendour makes me sick.
Knowing that the rotting will be long.
Knowing I will have to watch each one darken,
and drop.
One hundred
pretty petals.
One hundred
pretty deaths.
Dead World
When I go home it feels like a dead world;
Wide open plains of bone-white wheat,
patches flickering gold only for a moment,
before the clouds render each stroke colourless again.
I know things I never should have known,
from being the only human standing in these fields.
The blades let the wind braid through them chillingly.
When I go back home it's a dead world.
A beige sky overhead that stretches an infeasible distance,
staining everything beneath it in
Sublime nothingness.
On Sundays I meet with God dressed up as the rotting pastor with no teeth,
who begs for gold with outstretched hands, bloodied
from the bull he slaughtered that morning.
A hawk flies above the crucifix that sits on top of the church
Its vane, a spiked needle, directing it
towards a dry forest of invisible denizens,
where trees bleed with petrified black sap,
and small insects pierce the air with their deafening chorus of screams.
I follow the hawk inside.
The heat from the earth radiates up in waves,
obscuring my sight with foreboding refractions,
and in the mirage of brown and green I see a person,
awaiting me,
on the other side of the path,
standing very still,
tree roots of sweat on their collar.
Uncanny how she looks like me:
no blood in the face, pale sunken cheekbones.
I realise this is her home too,
Maybe even her home first.
I didn’t even wait for the sun to rise next morning,
to escape back down the highway I came in on.
My home is strange, almost an afterlife,
a long black road leading from it with roadkill and skulls
As if afloat on the Styx
and in the unquiet darkness I can feel the ferryman
urging me to come back.
Desert Prophet
I think you to be some kind of Desert Prophet,
Draped in opal beads
and weaves of emeralds and fuchsias,
golden flecks of sand
forming a tunnel of soft wind
around the damasks of your abode.
I think of you a Desert Prophet,
existing in a vacuum of time.
An antiquity contained in grain of sand,
an Arabian apocalypse, empty dunes.
I think of you the last man on earth,
perhaps also the first man too,
my prince of time.
You have the answers
concealed in the lustre of a jade stone,
or the twinkle of a needle
of a silver star cutting through
your midnight sapphire sky.
My desert prophet,
Tell me when I die.
Koukla Mou
I want to make you mine,
I want to dress you up,
My pretty little voodoo,
Koukla mou, koukla mou.
I want to bring you gifts,
I want to braid your hair,
I spend my days adoring you,
Koukla mou, koukla mou.
I want to hold you tight,
I want to kiss your cheeks,
my love for you is true,
Koukla mou, koukla mou.
You think I don’t know,
But I saw you blink,
Your heart beats too,
Koukla mou, koukla mou.
Arcadia
On the morning’s eve when I’m alone,
I dream of an Arcadia of mines own,
Hidden in sweeping fields are impossible unknowns,
Of an Arcadia of mines own to which I hold the throne.
When I am alone is when I see,
My Arcadian mass sheltered by sea,
Dripping Oceanids twinkling and free,
A Dryad transformed into a sweeping olive tree.
In my Arcadia everything is alive,
The morning sun is beauteous, and the farmer’s crops thrive,
No pirate ships which at our shores may arrive,
Will impede on this world which my fingertips have contrived.
No; Arcadia is mine.
The sheep, the stones, the hanging grape vines,
which bear the sweetest Arcadian wine,
All mine, all mine, all mine, all mine.
I dream of Arcadia on the morning's eve,
And when the day breaks my dreams don’t leave,
They linger and taunt me yet bring me ease,
Imprisoning are my Arcadian dreams.