BESPOKEN

Bespoken was funded by Regional Arts Victoria and Regional Arts Australia

in 2021 as a Creative Recovery Grant on the theme of fire and loss, and is dedicated to my family and friends, those here now and those who are not.

Bespoken

ESPIONAGE

This is a scream toward the firmament from where we called frontier-land

A pressed butterfly of permanence, not an urn of ashes scattered over sand

Your death note said that love eluded you; this was the end of the charade

You made yourself new enemies amongst the close friends you had made

Afterwards I stood beside you: you, you lay a grey silent lie within there

It was a shock to see you in a box that in an hour had billowed into the air

Your father said to me that he would take his son’s words to the grave

As he did in less than two years, yet your sheer selfishness he forgave…

I am alive, I am alive, I am alive, and you are dead, dead in your defeat

Your disconnection, used protection, black lack of belief in resurrection

Your sick extremes in your dare not to dream, your derision of vision

Debase

Jumping

From 3 feet

If I was there, I’d have held your ankles and lifted your mind upwards to the sun

Though the truth is I was here = not there (and even so, you would have used a gun)

You asked us ‘to treat this not as a sadness (sic) and to see it as a kind of liberation’

Yet the sight you left a girl (on her way to a pool) is of a blue-black-bat-damnation

You were a car crash for the future with your built-in-auto-mode-self-destruct

You felt loved, wished love, which makes what you did mind-numbingly fucked

Because the burden you left your brother, I know I would not be able to bear

Did you not feel how others would feel, as you stepped off into thin air

We’re alive, we’re alive, we’re alive, there’s death in your defeat

Your disconnection, used protection your fade to grey visage

You, self-hater, you tortured traitor you, identity-incinerator

You cut the cord for brakes to fail in this act of espionage

Now I’m a speedball (hurt) hurtled forward in a horizontal free-fall

An adrenalin rush - a split second from bitumen to blow-torch crush

I’m your spiritual song-screamer, one of the dangerous dreamers

And the money that you left me burns a brilliant blue as my fuel

Yet you cut my brake cord in a duality so cruel

[ c o m p o s e t e x t s a t 1 5 7 k m / p h ]

[So, I love, and I love, and I love, and I love

In defiance of you and your espionage

I love and I love, and I love, and I love

And I love and I love, and I love

And I love and I love

And I love…

THE BEAUTIFUL DARK

The front of change is on the air, summer is in the sun’s orbit curve

Our days and nights were beautiful, a testimony testing our nerves

Comets shoot across night, once sending water to Earth they skim

Was it the outside bulb catching on my broken reading glasses rim?

Once we cracked hailstones with our teeth so they would shatter

We laughed in an invincible youth when nothing seemed to matter

No fingertips on touch screen, no profile picture to upload to space

No memory card to hold brightness of your smile, for time to erase

There are seven of us recalling days, laughing in diminishing hours

Those who drifted in updrafts seem to give our sun resolute power

If we surrender, we are frozen, from warmth of each other’s arms

If we unwind time to infinity - not one of us would come to harm?

Sun penetrates reflector glass, Alpha Centauri in dark eyes

Decades ago, star-drops to hair, mouth, shoulders to thighs

Once we cracked hailstones with our teeth to make them shatter

Now a storm on the horizon sends lightning spikes into dark matter

On an ice marble my molar cracks, a super-cell shivers through black

Time a fractured compass, we can’t seem to navigate our way back

Windows forced inwards, fragments; yet we are the ones shattered

Where’s the sheltering elm where we talked of things that mattered

Remove fingertips off touch screen, sunset profile upload to space

No phone capture, powering off, bright smile, time will never erase

The beautiful dark of your eyes, nor the beautiful dark of your foals

The beautiful dark of your hair, nor the beautiful dark of your soul

To defy pain in celebration of your name, in teeth hailstones shatter

Beneath a sheltering elm we talk of you, about things that matter

[Bespoken: a definition formed from fire]

1. a. To make known through external signs: b. To have foretold: 2. To arrange to have

something held for future use: 3. To have spoken [From bispeken, to speak out,

or besprecan, to speak about].

EMBERS FALLING ON ROOFTOPS AT 4AM

My father’s coat he wore at age fourteen, walking to my mother’s house on Surrey Road

Where Grandpa Franz returned from sending morse code in a harbour that had exploded

His Grandfather had presided over the building of a fire station tower out in the goldfields

Nana’s ship sat in the bottle on a bookshelf, given by the Henty brothers to their overseers

My Father’s coat cinders Sun Striated Moths glowering wings scorch holes in woolen cloth

Embers falling on my rooftop at four a.m.

The encyclopedia dictionary Nana had lovingly wrapped smouldering in definitions aglow

The celluloid of 35mm picture slides as those she would from her fold out card table show

She would set up her projector in the front lounge room, metal stand, and pull-down screen

What we thought were frames between thumb, forefinger, were worlds she yearned to see

Tasmanian rainforest blistered from existence; the fields of harvest lost without resistance

Embers falling on my rooftop at four a.m.

The best days were when my grandfathers, grandmothers sat with us, generations together

Warburton, Blackburn, Grandpa Dent’s tale how as fire captain his back-burn broke its tether

I never envisaged they’d be lost nor irreplaceable things I kept of their earth-bound memory

Now, my father and mother are mid-seventies, my sister forty-nine, my brother fifty-three

I’d rather spend time with them than be alone in a homestead breathing the dust of poetry

Embers falling on my rooftop at four a.m.

The blue thesaurus gifted from my friends, who ensured that a first book received its bind

The mother listened to new wave words as cymbal’s crashed through a neighbour’s mind

The daughters wished their mother well for America, from where she would never return

The last day I had seen her, waving from the porch; I had never known to once more turn

Her eldest daughter’s husband’s fire command quells blazes that pull sky to river-lands

Embers falling on their rooftops at four a.m.

Are embers falling on my rooftop at four a.m.

BESPOKEN

The decade begins and ends with a fire, a family runs through grasslands to escape

Nana’s encyclopedia dictionary has not got words to save itself from racing flames

Eyelashes singed, I wake at four a.m. to lost things, yet I am three hundred miles away

She wrote with love and respect, as I reflect, circumspect, at her dedication to my name

A phone call disconnected from a forgotten world; a signal lost in firestorm swirls

Across vast mountain surrounds, showering valley towns, radio towers melted down

Blackout of stars iron sparks from blacksmith gloves, I fear losing the ones that I love

A sleepwalker awakens at locked door, luminous thoughts of those spoken with before

Seedlings rupture hectares of black abyss, cosmos through a canopy of branches white

The sun earths itself at dawn as Yellow Paper Daisies, igneous boulders blasted to light

Charred trunks split, green seams the length of trees, the past cargo of vanished birds

Black soot spots as ink, rivulets bending cursive between skull bone-white ghost herds

Fiery tornado in power upturned a centre pivot irrigator, metal centipede on its back

The last resort for those in Biggara Valley, to run with precious things to river tracks

The tree that crashed through their fire shed roof was in a storm borne not from sea

Now haybales harvested in hundreds are symbols of defiance to wildfire’s ferocity

This is not the time for resigning from days, we are closer when told to stay away

A phone call returned from a forgotten world, of ochre rapids black gnarled burls

Where a woman in her nineties pushed pianola pedals, dusk gold molten medals

A sleepwalker awakens before open doors of those to be spoken with once more

For Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, friends who travel with me days unknown:

Bespoken; betokened, devoted, disclosed, evinced, evoked, foretold, foreshown…

BILLIONS OF WINDOWS BIRDS FLY THROUGH

Black world. Charcoal frame. Black metal housing the invisible pane.

Black universe. Onyx room. Black luminous as glass beneath new moon.

Black clock. Blackened hands. Taupe uniforms once yellow. Blackness spans.

Red stumps. Red coals. Red madder of boulders. Glowering wombat holes.

Red imagined. Red vision. Cinnabar peeled. Reddest shadows revealed.

Red pinprick satellites. Red bar emptiness, tankers fuel indicator light.

Outside the billions of windows that birds fly through

Blue flame. Blue mood. Blue stratosphere of ash billows from fuel load flues.

Blue mascara. Powder blue. Blue titanium in heat reducing I-phones of glue.

Blue chemical residue. Teal blue twisted contorted distorted in tourist views.

Zero curtains. Zero stereo speakers. Zero lemon chiffon dress. Zero sneakers.

Zero kettle. Zero soft toys. Zero wineglass. Zero Smart TV. Zero security pass.

Zero spin-dryer. Zero healing. Zero touchscreen. Zero posted emoji feelings.

Within the billions of windows that birds fly through

Yellow safety uniform. Bulldozers raze. Yellow paper daisies. Mountain gaze.

Yellow bells, petals. Nectar from xanthic seeds. Yellow box trees bees need.

Yellow, black stripe barricade tape. Yellow, black detour sign moved to escape.

Green roadwork traffic glow opens valley routes. Of celadon-coloured shoots.

Green handled shovels, chainsaws. Emerald oaks, a football game at Cudgewa.

Green playing surface. Greenkeeper tractor. Gunmetal sheets. Survey protractor.

Outside the billions of windows that birds fly through

Clear echo of hammers reverberating mountain to mountain, of houses rebuilt

Clear the river rages in circular currents to stream their minds of the blackest silt

Clear drop gum leaf to forehead, metanoia; beyond thought, from lightning’s wilt

[Bespoken: a regeneration from fire]

Bespoken; bared, disclosed, displayed, exposed, foreboded, evoked, invoked,

Manifested, presaged, revealed, unbosomed, uncloaked, uncovered, wished

STAR DUSTED FIELDS

Where is the sable of your free-flowing locks of hair?

Where are your eyelashes curved towards the air?

Where is your petal bottom lip below your smile?

Where is your velvet voice sounding out for miles?

If I see white pollen drift as I drive, I am alive.

If I hear bees returning to their hive, I am alive

Where are the fields you ran through without your shoes?

Where is the white ribboned silk of your lightning moves?

Where is the key suspended above your bosom as a dare?

Where is the secret door that will take us everywhere?

If I see white pollen shift as I drive, then I am alive.

If I see the bees returning to thrive, I’ll survive

An hour has gone, a day has gone,

a week has gone, a month has gone...

Static electric January dusk sky

Danger in the swimming pool

Disbelief before my dark eyes

Stars blur focus, a twirling key.

I seemed to miss the moment

When from gravity you were freed.

Through these star-dusted fields I drive

As I daydream of the Summer of 1985

The night’s gone

Tonight’s gone

Tonight’s gone?

Tonight’s gone

If I am alive, you are alive

If I am alive, we are alive

ASTONISHING TALES

My friend would laugh

As if he laughed for tomorrows to come

The next day hide from people's shadows

Casting himself out as a recluse from the sun

Phone calls, texts unanswered, beyond his apartment

Came a day he deleted us, when we'd know what apart meant

My friend's clock ran out of forward motion to see through dreams

Within her a vortex expanded, as if she had once suppressed a scream

She sang electric, an amplified bird, her tone in flight was astounding

Above the earth she belonged, belongs to, the woman gave us grounding

In this dangerous world...in their lives they were their father’s best friends

I waded the streams of tears, mortal fears when their love came to an end

My friend KC had a heart of oak shape, for friends in her lifetime to share

She was full of mischief, yet in one call to me, she was the one to care

When the city world was asleep, in her home of her husband and sons

She drifted slowly into snow sleep’s down of eternity’s softest of suns

She gently gave her passionate heart to those who had loved her

And she made us realize, heaven was not always above her

I remember my car outside the oak trees before her house

For in her life, she was my young brother’s best friend

She knew to call him rather than a text message to send

She was a singer of my words, someone we still admire

When propulsion fired us toward stars, ad astra per aspera

The call is now ringing, let go, get singing, let’s go out singing

In this dangerous world...Where time begets, then becomes our enemy

Sound’s waves swell in the crimson wind tides that cover and covet me

Hours within the lake swimming Summery days, glasses brimming

Youthful sinews glowing immortal Blissfully unaware of dark portals

Hornet's nest within a hollow tree as seconds of night’s minute clay

By day as thoughts encircling me their possibility of deathly stings

As friends, stolen of their footings the tower of their father, grieving

Hearts heaving in the stone church photos remind of a sudden leaving

Duet songs, once sung, are sheets of autumn leaves warming from his spark

Golden gift moments, that are never lost in defeat to the universe's dark

A space on a seat, in an invisible guitar he plays around her beat

She’s safe in the chords with which he taught her to dream

Beech trees never break yet into sound they bend

A lover to a mother, his daughter’s friend

Wherever she sings his memory

Brings a melody to play

Harmony Home

Keys to Houses

He had built

She loves...

Sings away

Receiving...

Singing in life

To light astonishing tales

We’ll go singing...

Go out bringing....

To light astonishing tales

We’ll go singing...

Go out bringing...

To life, astonishing tales

Let's go out singing

Let's go out