Every boy has an empty house.

The stairs stare to open sky.

Render is rendered into sand, tiny beaches

at the edge of each 90°

sometimes 70°

the retained hope of wall meeting floor.

It wasn't mine alone.

Other kids who I somehow missed,

homeless men with their biographies of bottles

the incomprehensible allure

of abandoned women's underwear.

This husk was a busy, but discreet disunion.

As each wooden step swooned me up

I felt the life abandoned,

then caught in spider spin

that trailed higher and stronger each season.

Mark my height in what was once the master bedroom

and everything falls away.  Decay was play as day ducked

into the shadow of a parental jacaranda.

Purple, beside bruised gold sandstone

North Coast cedar is stolid beneath a chemise of dust,

the damp wool of throwaway dandelions

and the greys of my abused school uniform. 

I lived in colour

and coughs... amazed at molecules. Cringing poplars stood agog

as stray dogs declaim on a dry December.

Gut rush.  White medicine.  Hobo motes in afternoon sun. 

Kissed Rosie.  There once.

But I always remember alone

in the song of the scree.

Glass Arrow, White Page

Unhappy the land that has no heroes. No, unhappy the land that needs heroes. ... Brecht

David, we shared a trade of sorts,

veterans with soft hands, bad backs. Whilst I pretend

hiccup hard hippy

woodchipped words,

you wrote of brave men.

Your ink was the blackbird, stalked the pastel stretch.

2003, said you gave up smoking

and wrote crap for six months.

You lacked the heart

for any more poison. It gave you up -

myocardial infarction beneath a breastbone shield.

There’s the valour.

Was it the price of smelting steel swords

from pigiron thesauri? A blacksmith cough?

Readers soared as you typed

implausible courage

that would have soon withered outside its covers.

I was marooned on the bus

until the wheelchair guy takes up a staff.

His wound is sealing. Flesh holds in confederate comfort.

We need to pretend

that this exists someotherwhere for

our eyes to surface above pellucid commutes.

Someone else will write it.

Go freely to the Heroes’ Hall

puffing those leaves and

pricking demons with your pen