Month: October 2010

In my secret garden

In my secret garden

there are vegetables with peculiar names, strange shapes and foreign heritage;
twisted herbs whose leaves and buds are functional in particular situations;
fruits that are an acquired taste;
contorted bruise-coloured blooms.
I love and love and love them all,
talk to them, irrigate them,
reconfigure their habitats,
fertilise them, preserve their vitality.
Certain hungers need specific foods.

In my secret garden
all the plants are beautiful to me,
always, always, and occasionally
a wanderer appears who has been initiated
by genetics or experience
into the appreciation of the unusual, the non-obvious —

but most of my visitors don’t see a garden.
They see a collection of quirky spiky things,
dangerous cycles, dizzying fractals, transmuted dreams:
the frightful unknown.
That’s ok, I guess —
I don’t want it crawling with people all day, anyway.
That’s why it’s a secret garden.
But it gets lonely.
So I visit their gardens.

But their gardens are so alike!
All plush swards, sculpted bushes, splashy petals
and I get bored and uncomfortable and hungry
so after a while I come home
to this odd foliage
and silence

(First published in Positively Geared Anti-TaxPax 2010 by Perth Poetry Club)

q finger

I want to lock my face cams
on your chocolate-cake eyes
ski your hardline nose with my q finger
swipe your plush-ice mouth with my spacebar trackpad thumb
examine with my i finger
the precious folds and little faint hairs
of your pinna
trickle my j finger down the long line
from the left hinge
and my f finger down the long line
from the right hinge
of your jaw
to the sharp tip of your chin

and breathe on you like I breathed
on my babies.

Make that word
— ‘sensual’ —
mean something.

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