I don’t want to mask my poetry

I want you to understand me

Curse your perfect rhythms, rhymes, haikus

Your lyricism, your literary

When I try to adopt it, I turn mute.

Something channels through me

(I’ve never really found the root)

A demanding stream of consciousness

That cannot stop to breathe, let alone

Wait, conceptualise, draft, redraft

I can’t!

...

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Road by road I turn the car

and travel a phrase to a line,

move a sentence to plural,

then to verse to vent a thought,

but within the limit,

as speeding is futile anyway.

[2020]

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This piece comes from an exhibition of the work of celebrated Australian artist and sculptor Brett Whiteley. Parts of his enormous masterwork "Alchemy" can be found on the cover artwork of Dire Straits' album of the same name. A long-term drug user, he died in 1992 from a heroin overdose.

Retrospective

A metaphor for clear technique,

the Gallery (patrolled, secure,

well-scrubbed, ...

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