Living Dead

Why am I still watching Zombie movies?

1

We’re always surrounded by difficult ideas

vivid and pulsing, the insides of things,

barely concealed by the outsides of things.

It’s nice to know there’s some kind of order:

Follow the rules. Lock the front door.

Keep things tidy. Keep yourself nice.

Have a plan, stay close to home.

That’s what separates us from the monsters.

It’s not what your hair looks like,

it’s the effort you put in each morning,

it’s the time you spent on your hands and knees

scrubbing the blood out of the carpet.

2

It’s not about surviving, it’s about love.

I mean sure, sometimes it seems better

on the other side, the elegance of pure appetite,

the momentum of a single relentless idea.

Sometimes you gaze out the car window,

the engine running, outside the seven-eleven,

and wonder what it’s all for, the instinct for living,

startled by your own pinkness, the flush of mortality,

the sweetness on the palate of the tongue,

the prickling of the skin – heat, cold.

You wonder what it’s like to be dead.

You wonder what it’s like to be alive.

Kristin asked the question.

Helicopter

In the middle of night’s

expanding hours,

light sweeps around the room.

I am woken by the sky machine,

dreaming my dream, searching

the river’s dark unconscious

for the shadows of hidden men.

Fairy tale

A wound, drawn by hand,

spilling the memory the body forgot,

insides and outsides, all of a one.

She considers her own image,

the book is a mirror.

The crooked scar hums with possibility.

The poem tastes salty, sweet.

Manifest destiny.

Fluctuations in heart rate and breathing,

visceral sensation and so on.

There is a crossing over, a voyage,

and a world beneath the world,

not a retreat but a way of negotiating pain,

negotiating with the Agent of Pain,

who tells her she’s done nothing

to earn her own suffering

and puts her to work

witnessing the suffering of others,

day in, day out, until her jaw aches

from the horror she doesn’t have the language

to expel.

New Year, Alphington

The river runs out of time,

which is the source. 

A memory 

held in the body

not the mind,

the slow ease of pain

always below the surface.

The river is fast

and slow, new

and old.

Light, light,

the dappling of time.

The body is multiple

with surfaces, leaning in

to listen.

Where there is time

there is always music.