I

              If you like 
              I will take you to him.

              The moment I saw 
              his body on the news,

              I suspected myself of murder.

              I will take you to the swamp
              with the concrete blocks,

              along the bmx track 
              dogs chase your bike down,

              and show you the black water
              where his face sings still.


              II

              Who funded these tunnels?	
              Who cut these stairs into 
                                         the cliff face?

              And where would all the water 
              go without these weirs?

              She is heavy in this water.
              She is heavy on these stairs.


              III

              Step with me into the massacre 
              of shadows, my carport, where 

              thick sweaty ogres of darkness 
              elbow unremittingly.

              I caught you earlier, prostrate 
              before the matron of the moon. 

              I overheard you asking 
                                             to be spared.

              Step with me into the car
              and I shall spare you.


              IV

              Spiders camp 
              in her mouth. 

              Time’s bride yawning 
              in her wedding webs.

              Roll her over to see 
              the young feed on her spine. 

              What flame through the enfilade?
              Hurry, someone approaches!

             Put things back the way they were!

              It must appear as though 
              we were never here…
 
              
              V	(death by naming)

              Behind the brick wall a dead tree 
              whose leaves are hundreds 

              of vagrant butterflies.

              This then is the wardrobe
              where the darkness begins,

              and out there are the many things
              the summer day discloses, things 

              the light touches and lends 
              existence to. Here I hold 
                                                your name 

              the way a spider tends 
              an exhausted glasswing, 

              but it slips from my web
              and shatters on the cement

              into a thousand tiny eulogies.


              VI

              I swear the weapon 
              is around here somewhere,

              deep in the burgeoning suburb 
                                          of the past. 
              I intend to spend my last days 
                                          here, fossicking.

              Only the rumour of the ocean,
              its dark unsolvable crime,

              and the sky littered with clues
              that corroborate my alibi. 


              VII

              I have been weak,
              but now my strength returns. 

              Someone else’s comics
              in the letterbox –

              planes blink in place 
              of correspondence.

              In the red house across the road: 
              a family of raw meat. 

              There the world’s last 
              sidekick lies unconscious.


              VIII

              One by one you killed-off 
              all your fathers.

              The flexibility of bamboo – 
              you choose to wear no uniform.

              A small faceless 
              animal faces me.

              A corpse in loose cerements on
              the back seat of the getaway car

             
              IX

              Pastures of nightshade.
              The rain’s faint pulse.

           The pain of knowing objects fades –
              in the end we do not need them.


              X

              Death is in the bone
              the wind picks with the leaves.

              You’ve come so far
              to discover all this 

              could be blown away 
              in one unimaginable gust.

              Time becomes
              a simple case of being 

          backed-up against the wall of death,
          an indefinite series of last chances.

              Death comes soon enough
              which must be worse –

              for then one’s forced to say that 	
              yes, they were lost 

              who did not know their way 
              among the vanishing.