A Skin Too Few

The Window Shakes

I woke up to autumn’s first cold snap.

My drawn curtains breathing then snapping shut.

While I gathered my conviction to get out of bed and close the window.

I reflected on the dream I was having,

You were sitting on my bedroom sill,

Peeling a Chinese mandarin, tossing its skin aside.

You asked that I leave you so you could change

Coming back in you were wearing new clothes.

While I thought about this my sense of smell came back,

And I could smell your hair over my pillow.

It takes two nights for it to disappear

A sweet artificial flavour, maybe mandarin.

As I got up I thought, Is that why I was dreaming about you?

Your indistinguishable presence has worked its way into my dreams.

I pulled up my blinds and closed the window.

Outside the cold breeze taped on my window rattling it softly,

Drawing my attention, it was then that I realised.

This is how I know myself

As a reflection in my bedroom window.

I’m a vague image transposed over the pane,

I look to close and I see only shadows of what’s there.

My eyes stay and my gaze wanders too deeply

Now it’s beyond the veneer, down the road where the river is ebbing.

My Unremarkable Portrait

Ellie I’ve reached a new low in writing, I think this poem is god awful tacky. But It’s probably best to keep writing tripe then go on waiting for good inspiration and while waiting go stale.

My Unremarkable Portrait

I often wonder how I’d turn up in a police composite sketch.

I’ve nothing remarkable to remind you of me,

Mildly handsome,

Emphasis on the mild.

Always unshaven,

My girlfriends chide me over that one.

Perhaps something like my voice?

Just putting it like that reveals how indistinct I am.

And I’m telling you I only have a degree of my father’s charisma.

A love of mine once remarked that I have a smooth back.

I can imagine it now – “I can’t remember officer-
I mean… He has a very smooth back.”

“Tonight on the six o’clock news,

Police search for purse snatcher;

Victims say he has a very smooth back.”

I think I will just start wearing wacky ties.

Untitled.

The drinks,

You ask me.

‘Have you written anything lately?’

The answer is ‘no’.

What is there to write?

The excitement of revolution,

Has given way to dead children.

I won’t document the suffering I don’t understand.

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve being too busy.

There is nothing to write anymore.’

‘What about this?’

‘Can you mark the passing of hope,

Against the urbane?’

‘Isn’t that what post modernism is?’

A facetious poem for every child solider.

The Bouquet

As I wait for you with the bouquet, I think:

These lilies have pollen the darkest hue.

And I’ve learned that there are colours beyond this spectrum,

So I cannot see the beauty that attracts the bees.

They have one chance to sting you;

Then they die.

Peripheral Limb Paranoia

I first noticed it when I was holding Laura on the couch.

Her lithe figure was a dead weight on my arm. It inebriated life in my tingling limb. I moved my arm to be underneath her neck but then my leg somehow became stuck in an elevated position; life drained away. I twisted my torso, lowering my leg but now my breathing became laborious. She turned around and looking concerned asked,

‘Are you okay?’

‘I just can’t get comfortable.’ She seemed pensive. ‘It’s just the couch.’

‘Do you want to go to bed?’

‘Yeah, I do. I’d like that.’

My frustrations didn’t leave me; I gritted my teeth and bore out the sensation of pins and needles. When I woke up early in the morning I found that in my unconscious sleep I’d slipped away from her. I reached out and rested my arm over her shoulder, than I gently tugged her, drawing her out of sleep. I whispered.

‘Hold me.’

‘What?’

‘Hold me.’

She didn’t seem aware, still asleep, but then she rolled over and her breasts pillowed against my spine and her arm bent over my shoulder and held my chest tightly. Everything eased out; fogginess and haziness returned me to sleep. In my mind I tried to see the image of us in my bed. Happily, she’s holding onto me, except something inside of me, like a cavity or a cold fire is consuming everything inside and if I don’t do something to stop this it will consume her too. The thought of her annihilation is too much to bear and the thought that I might cause it makes me sick inside.

When I Wake Up

I feel like a open cut Mongolian mine.
A missing pole on the sphere.
A conscious as jumbled as an Indian Jungle.
Endangered as a Burmese tiger.
As sick as a Chinese river.
As disparate as a Tibetan citizen.
A stray cat in Tokyo.

My love she is an Indonesian needle,
Poisoning my Timor heart.
She treats me,
Like a forgotten aborigine,
As an abandoned land owner.
We’re as divided as a Pakistani mountain range,
As lost as a Korean crane.

On the Train

We’re two old friends on the train from Harajuku going back to Khaosan and in a single glance we’d appear as two tired journeyman. For a while now we’ve been lost and in silence we wait until our journey will come to an end. I wait in a reverie for that last stop to come and reflecting I wonder when it was that we had become lost. If I asked you, you’d tell me that it happened when we went down that alleyway with the bizarre shops selling children’s toys. When we reached the end of the alley, you said the bar was down the lane on the right and walking down that lane and then taking another, I descried eventually that it was the lane to the left. Back tracking we went down that lane but we never found the bar; it wasn’t obvious to me then, but now I realise I was just as lost as you. When we gave up and found our way into the first bar we saw; I said to you what Beccy had said to me before we left on this trip. “We’re reaching a point in our lives where the only thing we share is how long we’ve known each other.” You didn’t take to that point. I tried to talk to you about art and the influence of Japanese prints on Van Gogh; but you weren’t interested in that either.

I’m on this train with you and we’re waiting silently for our stop. I look across at the window opposite us and in it I see our reflection. Translucent and vague like the surface of a tumid river; the world is empty and it moves on underneath or just past this pane. Then breaking my thoughts you say, “We look like two bookends.” And so you begin a Simon and Garfunkel tune;
“Old friends, old friends sat on their park bench like bookends…”

When I Remember You It’s Like This

I’m swimming in Tea Tree Bay.

You’re under a Pandanus,

Lying in the de jour rain, you sunbath in a sun-shower.

Are as distinct to me as the irony.

The shore is in constant metamorphous yet always remaining the same.

I come out of the water for my towel,

And handing it over,

You thank me for putting up with your problems.

And when you say that-

I hate the chagrin smile across my face as I have to empty out another cliché.

‘It’s okay- I mean; I don’t really know what you mean.

I don’t think you have any problems.’

Because at this point it’s too late,

You’ve become my noetic love.

Your soft voice and my anxiety,

It is as the cold rain that’s over this ocean.