Before the new days, ancient currawongs
hammering bells awoke me.
The new birds want my moto perpetuo,
my clockwork drive to nonexistence,
to eternal giving up before beginning.

~/~

I was seated at a table in bibliographic
co-ordinates, aligning ping-pong balls
in rows, to start and finish with the first.

I want to know you

in each of the seasons

Cool in the chaotic charisma

and way you have with worlds,

conversing in ruins,

tasting skin and naked poetry

swallowing you whole and deeply

The metronome of mourning

is our heartbeat, pitch and rhyme

and the missing

is our purgatory placement in time

Microscopic particles of time
rain upon our lives.
Paper promises grow brittle,
mapped forgiveness folds, unfolds,
frays and tears along the creases.
Our memories refract through prisms
until the brightest day is lost
in anesthetic runes.

~/~

I heard a motor revving in the carport,
and from my gate,
I watched my Kia Starfish drive away,
with the spindly legged carport
galloping behind.

I’m the man in the iron cage, the pilgrim with an unrepentant, unyielding heart, the prophet who has regressed into a poet with anguish breaking through bone, and then skin, the tendrils tying my tongue, muting my real howl and creating a soft shriek which they consider beautiful. I’m the Kierkegaardian stereotype, a freak tortured and tormented by his panoramic paranoia, a twisted, fucked up birds eye view of skulls and enemies, of corpses punching keys and hate, and I can’t see a horizon. I’m the label of everyone’s disgust, an animal in an asylum which sensibly speaks, but in alliteration—the zookeeper’s delight. “Look now, here’s Mr. Bipolar. Hysterically jump or flat line, it’s your prerogative, but make sure you entertain, because they’ve paid with their time and energy. Be Quick!” But the more I rattle, the more they rile. The more I lie, the more they cry, until I…

A detective, his client, the mystery of what lies beyond the quotidian sea, and a marginally relevant precedent.

The sunlight hurts my eyes,
I’m unaccustomed to the lack of walls,
and I miss the certainties
my office prison offered me.

My client gives me glasses, dark,
and thoughtfully plasters zinc cream
on my nose,
but the world is not as I expected.

It’s that time of the year when many of the streets in Adelaide are coloured purple.

As the flowers fall the streets below are carpeted in purple. Simply stunning, the flowering jacaranda is known by students to be the harbinger for end of year exams.

Jacaranda mimosifolia, if grown from seed, can take anywhere from seven to fourteen years before it flowers. For a jacaranda tree to be considered ‘mature’ it is probably twenty years old. They can live up to 75 years and grow as tall as 50 feet.

Interestingly, the jacaranda is not native to Australia. They found their way here from Brazil. However, our climate seems to suit them very well as they thrive here.

©  Raili Tanska

Steps for Peace

Let your eyes feast on the beauty of nature. It feeds the Soul. 

Let me bring you love from a meadow’s velvet floor; where the grass ripples from a summer’s breath and the bright flowers of purple and gold dance on its gentle wave. Their perfume glides through your childhood memories and heals your wounds.

Let me bring you love from a winter’s night; where the pale moon hangs suspended in a frosted glass sky and the twitching skeletons of lifeless Maples cast bewitching images onto the frozen white canvas.

Let me bring you love from a low fire at midnight; with you safely tucked beneath my blanket and the soft light of the last dying embers dancing smoothly in your eyes, removing all resistance.

Let me bring you love from my last heartbeat…my last breath…my last kiss.

Let me bring you love until my last heartbeat…my last breath…my last kiss.