Poem 1 for The Gamut

Sydney-based artist, Gilbert Grace, has commissioned three poems of me for his social change art project "The Gamut" (link to The Gamut's blog) to be showcased at INDEX. art space, Sydney.

Poem 1 for "The Gamut"

(Medium)

The geometry of eking a living -

a harvesting, a seeing, the sense of air, 

a body clothed - whether the temperatures rules us 

in wide planes, and whether we sleep

in an open sustenance of breeze

Protection to play the while as a mimick-bird

lyres and lazes in flight’s reach - a garden to scarcity,

love to the aimless, fire and plant to the broth

here, take this, this is love, and fire and plant -
conflicted prehistory stains perception to hesitate;
when running, riding the outline of a horse to certain shores,

sand ushered smiles are the sureties  

the common of touch to a shoulder

of accord – an agreement of limbs,

a lullaby of hands of hers and his - 

waving words that were primarily song, 

that  became trust by sun ray then grew 

as animal proximity to the

green weight of ka-buzzing night,

the fixity of crystal telegrams
found in brimming deltas transmitting from
their internal elsewheres nouns that

blanketed shared landscape and system

to signpost past jagged meanderings.

Wirehaired John near drowned at Point Immediacy
but surrendered to the nets, to familiarities,

to consignments of waking, dreaming and descriptions

that said “this one I didn’t know, this one I let go,

 this was one was not captured”

all this struck me - the unrelatable, the fish that

escaped leftwards in invisible moves. We knew

the chapters of escape – you and I landed

that role too and lingered in pages of clouds

whilst others sought to wake us with

the common of touch to a shoulder.

Our then-returned simplicity wrote signatures

as generous as broad summer.