7/4

The sky blacked out over Bill Pullman, then Will Smith, then Jeff Goldblum, then everyone else.

this suburb

1.
The owls were grizzled from years of molting. They folded themselves on cylinders of tamed wood that hadn't been axed under old air. In some light, months ago, they began dissolving, marrow first. Beads of calc grew stray around the organs' pulsing. When their beaks went, canals formed around each throatspanned gargle. After that, every stray passage loosened its architecture. That day, their remaining materials splintered into phosphate, feeding black into the rain. Inside, you could hear the drains tackle the weight of the new runoff.

2.
Some days, when I get home, caked in a twitch, I look through the window, above all the metres of purple-stained tiles and try not to smell my stink. If it's bright enough, I can blind myself for hours, peeking the blackness out in the night.

if i were a whale... but i am

You’re more than hidden
under my moustache.
It was minutes ago that
you called my new
number from facebook
again and again
and watched me try and
fit through my bedroom
doorframe.

I know it, you’re still some kid
I watched from a distance, one day,
when other boys were in school.
Hours later,
you were wiping all the sweat
from under my bellybutton
off your high cheekbones;
you thought and I thought
hopefully nobody just saw that.

Sometimes, when I was younger,
I thought about how my surname
would have been terrible for a
fat kid to have. Now, I’m too large
to be defined as ‘obese’,
towering over thousands of
light asian salads I have taken
with cream
every morning since

I last saw a boy.
In the evenings I look at
nudie calendars of twinks from
the new season.

You could be in one of
them now, 30 looking 20,
and the swallowed up, sad eyes
that get me off so easy.
But you’re perched
in my sheets now, making me
engorged again. It’s
too late to wonder how
you got here.

jaundice

The light shed over thin marks in the soil. It wasn't daytime enough to eat the chill but you could still feel the sea aching its breadth closer. It was the grass I tried to stain myself in when Jake folded the dialogue in what sky was left. We hid from the skaters, how they cemented their bodies around wind. There's no vertigo left, I told myself. Not in the evening. The botanical gardens were too open, like the playground rocketships only a foraging away from Babel.

His neck folded when I kissed him under the cheekbone. He was slender at the peak of the day, I kept losing parts of him in tea next to the open street. There was disorder -- I wished I were another boy from commedia dell'arte masks behind a junkyard trailer. I might tell him to speak slower and enunciate, but i can't hear those sentences anymore.

There were always other boys but I dropped the characters. The composites have dissolved from me. The next week I found those parts drowned at the pier in St Kilda still, out from the cold wind with the boys I don't reach. Jake never wanted the villainy, how it felt like vertigo to see the world close up again. It felt good to be on the underside of what that meant.

The stories didn't end for hours. Later on, sitting empty in the evening over the black glass of river traversing the city, I kissed him. That was something.

seventy two (again)

when i said i was going to run away i didn't really mean it i mean it was late in the day and i had very little sleep since that's the excuse people generally give for when they say things like that not like when i was seven and packed my lunchbox with junkfood and walked to the corner and back i'm teenaged and i'm temperamental you should know that by now.

seventy two

In a deep lane between two factories, past the yolky bitumen, I heard men intone off concrete. The roller door blocked most of that interior, except the gleam off the floor that spilled into the back lane. I hoisted myself into the mesh over a window and saw their backs. One turned, sweat-lathered, and swallowed, grinning at my right eye through the chipped paint. I watched for a moment. Eating breaths, pulsing.

mapped

Out from the road, you could've baked a rainbow from the dead newspaper rolls. Lachlan blew tight into the space between his hands and rubbed them neatly dry, passing through the chipped doorframe. The mattress in the corridor had taken on years of rain. The two of us slid it off the wall and felt the mould. Where's the light, he said. It's black in here.