Even now / its black waters / are tanked ’nd / safely intact. Pour / seeds or syllables / back down that throat / and all you’ll hear / are scattered ping-pings / on an iron roof.

begins with languor, / the past tense of caress / which, besides flies & heat haze / post stress, / the intense air supplies — no ostrich feather fans / or punkahs needed — just to be at rest.

we have a horse in our shed dad look dad me and gabe are feeding him grass he likes grass he eats grass and chaff dad gabe said his name is phar lap dad come on phar lap! i got some grass for yooooou!

Because after autumn there are / other autumns, / we learn to eat the wind. / This is what we shall do / with all our anger.

Repaying the debts of robots, / I see me in your screen fatally, which is / to say oozed certainty across a whistle of craft.

but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn

A new poem by πO

A painting I used to like a lot once & thought about / I haven’t thought about / for some time. It showed / Walter Benjamin at a table in Paris. / The artist’s name I can’t recall. Not Patrick. Not Paul?

pacific gulls carry tightly closed shells to a height then drop them to the rocks below I say I don’t not mind isolation I am introverted

A strong south-westerly cuts through the shutters and wakes me out of synch. Disorientated, I try to start a different story but have to secure the window. I am harried and haunted by the horrors of Du Pont. I cannot get away from them whispering at each node of modernity. Where will I arrive after this?

Growing up not comfortable exactly, there / were deaths and silences and other difficult things, / when you talk about that history later people / are sometimes lost for words. But as you are / growing up, things happen to other people which you / observe, not fully understanding.

as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem

If in future an image of mine— of course, I have made the if-ness of your looking a multiple Ferris wheel turned to trolley car trundling down the street. Damn, I will show you something all right here, inside the daily or what you call private.

Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready.

Futurity begins now with leftovers sunglasses trying too hard along with cheapskates a kind of pink plastic essence * Destiny stinks! * What if we went crazy in the carpark a scuffle on the grease The green bag is torn beside it, a line of ants working hidden in the glare * What now! The […]

& William Blake on the Manly ferry / shirtless at bowsprit, big dipper across the Heads. / the poem sought you out, / gullscreech in wide mandala sky, a ravenous / thing. lifetimes pass though art pretends not to, a burnt stub / on manicured suburban lawn, / once, almost.