The Desolate Garden

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The Lightness of Moondust

The universe will hold you – let breath spin its soft cone of life.Filigree stars wreath your brow,whether or not this is your last hour,

your echo will resound among green-crazed trees,reflections of you glance from shady, shallow pools.

Your footprints have colluded with the dusty earth,and we have done our best to hear you in our all too human way.

There’s a twinkling of moondust at the deepening of nightwhere you hold a placeforever filled with light.

Waiting to Die

We eat sliced strawberriesblazoned with cream, chopped nuts,and thick curls of chocolate.

The gardener doesn’t leave her bed now,cannot see the bright lips of fruit,but eats the bloody flesh eagerlyfrom the spoon I offer.

The doors to the garden are open,the settle of birds feathers acrossjasmine’s buttery scent with its azalea and daphne garnish. The sky boils to embers over night shade and twitchthat encroach on the water feature

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where a stone maiden watches carp.In the distance a stallion screams.Death is a blue man with ulcerated cheeksfalling slowly.

Curing the Thief.

When I trained in hairdressingI hated doing my mother’s hair,inflexible twigsthat sprang back from the rollers.

Now it ripples down her back,in silver mist trails,bundles into steel wool pads in my comb.I sneak them to the bin where she can’t see.

The illness steals her life,the cure steals her pride.One hair for every day,one for every breath,

until only naked skull is leftin a tangle of rose bush roots and soil.

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Another Mother

iHere I sit with this pale womanwho looks elsewhere,forgets my name,and tells me there are creaturesgathered at my feet.

Her face has slipped sideways,her fingers have lost her mouthand the mouth searcheseverywhere,but finds only conversationintended for someone else.

iiMy mother has gone away,an Indian maiden, stars of lobelia and moonflowerwink from her lightless hair,eagle feathers paint her feet.

iiiA carved jade bird sits in the windowand wishes he could lift his stone wingsand fly home.

Mozart Seashore

My mother sits in beddancing her hands.Mozart’s sonata, first movement

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in C major twirls beneath her fingertips

seeding flowers all along this wasted shore.Her roses flouncein ballerina skirtsand tight tutus.

Driftwood bonesentangle limbs, overcome by pianissimo fingerwork,tiptoeing among shells.

Each moment drawn beneath the notes hisses like sand in swan necksround her feet

Sweet Dream

Sleep deep and dream let your eyes, gray-blue sky,linger over lush fieldsand long limbs of youth.

As you run through this final night,silver hair flowingon the breath of gravessweetened with rose,your days tumble like petals in the last spring breeze.

The river’s whispers kiss your toescalling you to fresh water.

Memory sparkles along streamsas your ferryman slowly rows,his mossy boat tangled

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with iris and wild poppies.Fragrance of lilies bathes the air,birch leaves turn in slow whirlpools alongside.

Maiden drift and dreaman endless dream of paradise.Stars alight on your fingertips,this river returns youto arms that rocked and cradled before you knew.

Loose Mooring

Tears slip beneath my skin.My sorrows sail therein little boats.

The doctor says when the leukemia’s white fingers reach far enough into my mother's brainshe will go unconsciousand

when I think of itall my little boats go into a frenzy,run pennants up and sail in circles.

The woman with two-colour eyesand the dark northern womanwill join hands with me.

We’ll cast spells,weave baskets to carry shellswith my mother's music carved in their grooves.

We'll sing the ocean and shorewhere she can run barefootand send messages to her in bottles,float all of our sorrowful little ships to her.

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Breakers

Watching you, I return always to the sea. You seem to have cast adrift already, as if by accident slipped your moorings.

Your attention is focused on an alien dimension, though you come back to me in occasional waves.

Your familiar hum, no longer the comforting mother's croon to her child, still strums sonar chords along my bones, strokes a memory deep as the waters of my birth.

I watch you float softly off and try to catch your hands as they flail like startled birds;try to fix your face in my mind,like the back of my hand.

The things that make me cry –

finding the first poem I ever wrote carefully folded away in your desk,you catching my hand to stroke my arm –

are sudden and surprising.

When you're gone there will be no one who knows the scrambled lace of scars fretted beneath my skin. An ocean wave rolls from my eyes and you sail away upon it.

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My Mother’s Hands.

When I was a child my mother’s hands had ivory fingers, wound in wood.

Rooms filled with sound,classical masters all around.

Strong and supple runsdown the keyboard and back,

Moonlight Sonata flowing out,background for childhood play.

Smooth brown, with half moon nails,her hands would mend a scrape or sew a dress,

but music hovered always,like the heat shimmer on summer days.

Now weeds bind and trap,music imprisoned within.

The fluid runs that danced so litheare slow and gray with age.

My mother’s hands are silent now,when anyone can hear.

To mar the sound she loves so much –is more than she can bear.

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The Shadow of Death.

I saw a woman todaywearing my mothers dress.The white one, with birds and flowers.We chose it together,she said I had such good taste.

This woman was big and healthy.The dress looked good on her.She reminded me of my mother.

Hair dark and whiteswept together in sweeping linesto a knot on top –awful hairstyle.

Dress falling in draped foldsaround curving brown legs and arms.

My mother is tiny now,a birdlike creature with a shadow upon her,that walks, now beside, now behind herand mocks her movements.

Her rosewood Indian skinhas subsided into tree-rings,a line for every year,seventy now –

I hold my breath and cross my fingersfor seventy one, seventy two

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Bouquets.

The women in my family grow flowers.Rainbow colors bowed over ocean gardensand fresh young girls in hand stitched frocks.The fragrant scent of germinationwashes across velvet lawns.

Careful hands tend the earthand teach the love of seed and sprout,coaxing forth tender morsels and bouquetsof fresh faced daughters wreathed in petals.

Tigered lilies, ivory arum’s,flexy vines with swanlike necksthat stretch and twine in floral divineof chiffon, silk, and denimed prime.

The women who tend flowerbedsand daughters, deeply-earthed,content.

The Ring Gift

As blood contained by skin, so these rubies are held in gold.They encircle my finger,a precious circle that binds mein debt to the ring giver.

Bound by frosted diamonds,in allegiance to childhood memories, forgiveness of past and future sinsis purchased with this band.

My inheritancecomes wrapped with strings.

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The End Game

The colours of deathpaint your face.

You walk this corridor alonepast beckoning fingers of ancestors.Your path is laid with torn pagesof Holy Bible written in Hebrew,indecipherable, but magnificent.Angels await –

you could stretch branches to the skyand blaze gloryin the orange spiders of hell,

spit serpents from your mouthand seed poison in the garden of God,

or cringe whimperingto a soft hollow of earth,and concede to divine superiority at the last breath.

My money is on the serpents.

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Openings

Fingers brush my heart,feel for easy openings.

They hover over the dark creviceof my mother.Her feet open wounds,she is crystal petals beneath a hand.

Stone eyes of death glitteras the smooth granitecurve of his palmlowers to crush.

A seraphic smile,metamorphosis of acquisitiontransforms his face.

Pines Beach Domain March 2004

Pines needle the skyalong the edge of the domain.I sit on a benchin squinting sunlight and think,if you were herewe’d giggle about Zac last night,telling me girls at schoolnicknamed him ‘teddy bear.’

I’d show you the poem I wroteand you’d make me feel like Maya Angelou.

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We’d talk about story ideasand you’d pretend to frost your wordswith lilac tints, all the whilethe flame tips of your phoenix feathersreaching up so brightthey’d make the sun seem to dim.

But a cool draft shimmies the dunesas though someone left the door openand the seat beside me is gray with ash,gritty on my fingers where I sit trying to create feathers.I should have gone with you.

Slippery Edges

six feet down the worms whisper

as I frost another blossom colored cakeand weave a swift netthrough the streets of my day

from hospital’s spitshine waiting roomsto doctor’s germ centralglancing at my watchsprinkling children in my wake

strands tightenaround woven edgesof the hole growingin the center of my spherewhere I slither and clutchnot to fall

and six feet downthe worms whispersoon.

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The Bird

In dreams I take your hand in minelay my cheek against yours,loved, loving.

But reality is a bird of hardnessthat pecks my eyes.His dense neststacks around me,metal twigs and concrete lined.

One small opening of possibilityfor blue sky widenessbefore all is lost.

Terminal

I’m watching you go,feeling you fade.

Clutching tightwith both fists,

still you slipthrough my fingerslike afternoon sunlight.

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Razor Trains

I sit here fallen open,counting razor blades,metal-bright in sun,

slender against the redpetals of my fingers.So light

against the dark weightof secrets in locked drawersthey fly in circles,

higher and fasteruntil they are a silver tunnel.In the flickered sound

like rushing trainsI journey, travelhome again.

Erosion

She is becoming one-dimensional,wafer thin to float upon airand slip more readilybeneath heaven’s door.

Small bruises mark her.Places where night has touched his fingersimpatiently.

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She cannot save herself any more than a rockcan save itself from water,or sand from wind.

She will be erodedand only her echo will remain,sounding around the hips and thighsof her daughters.

Wildflowers

pink blue whitewildflowers

soft disarrayon granite angel

small pearldropletrollsgray on stone cheeks

a summoning spellto call lost love backit spills

spins

down

singingits sticky chantof longing

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through warm earthto sound in tombsrouse sleepers,

rings around bowls of boneand echoes back from empty halls.

The secret of the deadis that they are not thereat all.

Oyster Children

As children, we shuffled over foot-hopping sand on towels.

Mum slicked us with Coppertoneand fed us sand-grit sandwichesas though we were oystersthat might grow pearls.

This February, ducks swimin rain-filled car parks. Windties my skirt in a reef knotaround my legs, and my mother

has abandoned her babiesamidst the clutter of empty shellsand gone to reside in memory’s beaches.

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Blue Frost

A chill seeps into me,begins at my fingers and toesand moves glacially along my spine.

My nails sparkle with frost,hair tinkles icicles.

I feel my blood thicken,breath whiten,my eyes reflect snowflakes.

When the coldness reaches my heartI will be the snow queen,

lying to a small frozen childin my ice castleso that I won’t be alone.

Feathers

My mother has become a baby birdbeak open, tongue exposedbeseeching sustenance,her bones hollowready for flight.

I gather her into my arms and pray,ask the great eaglefor feathers to weave her a cloakso that she will soar.

iiHer talons rake my heartthe gray lines hold seeds of loss,grow a flower of emptiness

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that sheds momentswe might have sharedand casts off memories like pollen lost in a low wind.

iiiEssence ascends lightly.Spirals in streams of rose goldwinding through fieldsthey expand and disperse like feathers into the sky.

Coffins and Roses

The sky is patterned with cloudlike the spread of eagle feathers,and colored with a scarlet flare,a bloody opening on the curve of bone at the base of the throat, rising across frosted blue.

It changes to diamond bright, as day leaks into night. White as a single button-hole rose placed on a coffin, petals dissolvedto ash in the crematorium incinerator.

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Lonely

A woman standson a black needleof rock that spearsinto the marbled seaand empty charcoal sky.Ice paints faint trailsunder her feetand sleet furrows her cheeks.

Slivers of glass are embedded in her palms.They sing a grinding song

as sand trails down her fingers,her open mouth is an abyss.

My Mother’s Tongue

Sometimes my mother opens her mouthand makes a sound like a breaking bone.

Words poke between her lipslike skeletal splinters through skin.

I try to push them back,stretch edges across the woundto seal it shut.

But my child hands are not enough.

Sometimes I think I hear that soundecho in my own voice,touch fingers to my lipsto hold them closed.

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Last Long Tunnel

The entrance to the netherworldis a mouth of stonesthat chews us through.

Wild dancing toys jerk and sway zombie steps.

Our feet try to turn us,double back,induce the mouth to regurgitate.

The toymaker winds our keysand drives us on,silver tongues spat to pay the ferryman.

No time to haggle,the songs of the dead are not sung by silent mouths,

but brushed on bonesrolled down eyeballsand gurgled in a cup of hemlock.

The slithering sound of the serpentine Styx.A river of worms,

where the ferry boat glideswith the steady business of death.

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A Dream to Grow On

I float like milkweed,face up on a green river.

Hope braids my hairwith dreams and secrets I dare not speak.

White flowered upon my breastlight burns, opens blue ribbons of skin.

No pain only light,then lighter,as though I could raise the dead with a lift of my finger.

I will seep into deep and deeper green,till I am moss on limestone,lichen on pine,beyond time.

My fingers spread through soil,quicken seedand fire it skyward.Ascendant dreams reach for moonsand freedom.

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Sepia Road

This copper road patched in penny puddlesstretches into sepia distanceinviting incandescenceand the flurry of wings.

The pins that hold my life togetherrattle loose.The four cornerstones stand,backs together,ready to march asunder.

A foot tap begins to dance in my middle.Not peeking around doors that were slammed shut,but opening new onesto look into the garden.

My arms are spread.Like great eagle wingsthey reach to glide,scoop up thosewho have the courage to fly alongside me,far above this faint gleam of pathwayinto a larger vista.

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Minute Rains

Her life slowly leaks from beneath my eyelids.Her garbled word saladof past and future twist together like cat tracks across a lawn.

It’s 2am, I’d go back to bed but every time I move she wants her drink again, tips it over herself like a two-year-old. When I hold the cup for her she strokes my hand.

If I close my eyes, her touch is still my mother’s,familiar as cotton against my skin.

I crouch in a chair as the clock ticks on and rain fallsin the water-cylinder beside us.

Snow Globe

iThis house,swathed in a winding sheet, smothered with weed enmeshed miasma, waits, breath suspended.

iiDeath is a spindle-legged insectwho walks lightly enough not to disturb the skin on water. What chance to escape the embraceof one who steps so softly.

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iiiSnow falls in polystyrene chips,spinning through silver liquid night,as though we are within a glass bubble,turned upside down at the whim of a child.

Dark Flowering

death is a dark rose that blooms only oncethe petals fall forever

Rice Paper

he still carries the markhis father’s hand madeon his cheek

now imprintedon a rice paper memory

when he talks about his fatherscarlet fingers blossomrain-fresh petals

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About Lions and Dragons

Death exhales lion’s breathand glares from dragon eyes,squinches hold above ground,dallying over his errandfor the brief moment in sunshine.

He opens a red tulipon the tip of polished collarboneat the base of the throat and draws back slowly,

an extrusion of soul.He’s left a look in my father’s eyes,like the one in my mirrorafter seeing pictures of Indian womenlaying in snow,babies frozen in their arms.

Like the one I saw in the eyes of the slave in a sepia photographsitting, shirt off, back to the camera,looking over his shoulder at us looking at the signature of a whip signed over and over itself in his beautiful skin.

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Harvest

A pearl nestled in a brittle shell of sheets,my mother awaits the diver.

Here on the ocean bedangelfish flick by.Coral wreaths amber armsto catch the liquid breeze.

A cathedral of light stretches above us.At the top of the spire there’s a clock drowning in minutes.

Gather Flowers

When I go to my mother’s house now,I want to gather flowers from her gardenand bring them inside.

I choose royal blue Dutch iris, soldier straight, turkey-giblet heads vivid against leaf blades

and dizzy roses flouncing voile, layered petticoats,littering petals in sudden falls.

Gypsophila trails between like white veil. Each scissors-snip of stem begins a slow floral death,

an inward curl amid the over-ripescent of decay.

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Jokerwoman

I am my own cliché, a joker of a woman.Running through my day like sandoff the back of a hand.

A hand across the back of my head,always my mother’s last resort,never a woman for inappropriate humor.

And what could I have done differently?Realized they weren’t that funny it seems,T.V shows and magazines.Life was a far more serious business

of good china, properly washed dishes,men, the enemy,and the possibility of pregnancy,not to be thought of frivolously.

But you could have a good laugh over tea,with the bones of small daughters trapped in your teeth.

Small Book

I sit beneath this blossom treewriting on petals

one word on each

they have to be small wordsor they won’t fit

they have to be written gently

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or the petal will tear

eventually I hope to have a bookof fragrant pink

bees will love it

perhaps someone will sit here after meand know that I loved you.

Five days latermy words are gone-

bruised fragmentsin the nor’ west.

White Shadow Songs

Specters sing around me,creep fingers beneath my eyelids and pass white shadows across my dreams.

They hide in light,bring flowers and tap their bonesagainst my forehead. Great-grandfather

in his ghost-dancer shirtspeaks in the chirp of morning birdsto remind me loss is bitter seedfrom which memory grows.

My grandmother’s hand blends with mineas I sew; guides my stitch, bindingskin and blood to our family quilt.

My shadow hostshow me futures with their spider vision, roll from my tonguehalf-remembered wisdom,and forbid I should come to harm.

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The Breakfast Shift

Elton is playing Your Song –piano tinkles of glass threadsadrift on the breeze.

A woman in front of me gives Eftpos instructions to her Mum.I keep my eyes down so she can’t see the saltwater sparkle in them,

a wave that suddenly threatensto wash small villages of frecklesfrom my cheeks.

They watch my fingers forget themselves, stumble over everyday tasksas small-town New Zealand rolls pastto purchase toast and orange juice.

I weave my way between tables once weighed with plenty,now laid to waste, and rememberlast night’s dream –

a ghostly mother playing my son’s toy keyboard,a song she used to play with him.The sounds are sharp, like glass threadssnapped in the breeze.

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Last Ember

Mist licks dusk from your lipslike a cool drop of night.

You embrace the silent waterwith open arms

breathe reflectionas evening light drowns your eyes

their silver floating seapebbled and bottomless.

Necromancer

Here in these stone fluted catacombsyou rest amidst dusty ribsand winding paths.

Commune with bones,your dreams mutated,fossilized in the stasis of graves.

What do you divine here mage?

Whispers of Morpheus,songs of derision,or the drum beat of demon chantsto bind you hereencased in marble.

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Night Genesis

My face reflectsfrom the car window beside me.I gaze into my dreaming eyes,pupils fat with dark as it falls in fleshy folds around us.Car lights finger the road aheadas I wind down the window and disappear.

Night licks my cheek with a cool tongue,winds herself through my armsand pulls me into her silky womb.

Curled, thumb in mouth, I floatbeneath the moon,a pale circular paradox,simulacrum of myself,nose pressed against forever.

Lifeline umbilical cord Tugs me through darknesstoward a thread of light.

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The Gull

The flight of the night seagullrustles gray stippled trees below.

His wings catch every liftand push of sky trails,their satin strings ripple pleasurethrough his feathers

and carry him over the boyeating fruit on his patio,hair faint gold as his head tips up,imagining the swift, soft rush of ghost to grave.

The gull flies on rejoicingin the hollow song of bones,dark curve of beak,as his glance farewells the moon.

In the wild teeth of the seasirens sigh and monsters risefrom storybook depthsat his passing.

He alights on the great treein uncharted sea, amidst branches broad as highways.Home nestled around him,he folds feathers and tucks head,once again a pale egg.

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Your Lucky Green Cap.

Across a field of grassyour trail spins out. Stars light tips of my hair and swirl behind your absent face,suspended in crystal sugar sky.

Love sits on my head, like your green captwisted back. My happy thoughtsin the peak, bereft of you,your residue residing in the sparkleon the dew, and the echo from this favored shell that cloaks my memories.

How can I believe youwhen you tell me you are dead?When you’re here with me, so real,and I can touch your smile inside the floating espers of nostalgiathat melt their slender tapersinto shallow bowls of loneliness.A fat and sluggish waxing of forgetful flame.

It’s not the same I know,but the pain destroys my freedom and confines me here. Across this field a warm wind blows and teases through my quiet wounds, blood still fresh.The bitter howl of empty airpasses over bones you left;this cap, a ball, a thumbprint on your bedroom wall.I can’t believe you’d leave me here, alone after all.

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Dusk Draws In

Begin with an outline in lead.A woman walks along a road,leans into the wind.The bamboo along the roadsideleans back the other way.A child follows behind her.

I shade a little with a softerdarker pencil, add depth, curves;smudge in with a fingertip.

If I add some color,the woman’s hair will still be dark lines,white interspersed.Her clothing beaten and dullagainst the clay road.

She is yesterday, walks toward her sunsetof pansies and marigoldsvibrant behind a landscapefaded in shadow.

On the land, only the child is bright,fluttered behind her like a silk scarf.He carries green seeds in his hand,flowers of dawn spring up behind his footstepswhere he scatters his seeds.He is tomorrow, yet to arrive, full of promise.

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The Seventh Scroll.

The echo of a word hangs in the silence between sleeping and waking.

Were you conversing with Godor some subtle spirit as you slept? And what was the word he left –

if you could just remember.

It might be the secret of the seventh scroll, seal unbroken as it waits to unroll.

Dripping slowly patterns repeat, cycles revolve history echoes, genetically.Lip-locked, land-locked, time locked, dead-locked, we slide into eternity,

and into that silence the echoed word falls –

if you could just remember.

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Magpie Pines

I stray across the rosy screen of my eyelidsto a sun-dropped parkof childhood.

A wooden raft suspendedfrom iron barsbig enough to hold twelvesquealers, clingingto its splintery wear-shined surface.

Such lion-tamer adventurers,higher and wilder we dared swing,past the tops of magpie pines,till it seemed the sky must crackand God spill upon us.

The Sea Will Give Up Its Dead.

Shingle shoals rattle ashoreturned beneath bare toes.My legs veiled by a net of spray, I playa necromantic tuneto summon the rolling thunderheadover haunted steps of those long dead.

Directed by the black silk brideof Morpheusa finger glide across a lyrewill bridge the drear unbent divide of life to death.

The sea gives up with baby ripplesall the breaths therein expired.The many-headed beastie’s hoardsare forming in the foam and frothexpelled by the Behemoth Sea

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my song returns them home to me.

Elixir

Open your mouth to the rain,suck its silver darts into yourwet-speckled throat.

A taste of wild, snowballing to luxuriant lifein a race of green.Steel hubcaps spin out of control, a molecular surge of spicy fire.

Freedom’s flavor,down the road at ton & ten with starsfalling row upon row.

Spread your glistening wingsand rise into the redwine heart of the sky.

Passing Time

Why are you so sadwhen time is woven fine as silk,and you are just a glisten on a teardrop passing clear between the strands.

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The Child of Me

She lies in darkness listening to the unspooled thread of myself;a magpie’s fluted warble in her ears.Her limbs are green stone beneath water where trees crack the sky.

She is so smallI wear her like sackclotha benediction to heal wounds.

She is twilight mothand dawn star;her eyes are burning white ocean,the journey home.

When I fall deepinside myselfshe is my staircase.

Dancing in the Storm

I am writing this to you from the eye of the hurricane,while you are in the hot breath of her face.

From black countenance she spits teethand flicks her hair,la Donna Isabella.

I am writing to you from the calmwhite eye, the immaculate heartof the hurricane.

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You who dance through the frenzyof the outer edge,while I scoop fallen corpuscles into my left ventriclein an effort to resuscitate.

Tomorrow’s Child

Dance in the pleasure of your skin,palest camellia flesh.A spring garden glistened with rainbulbsand cobweb skeletonsagainst wet black boughs.

Feel your body bloom in expansion,ticklish fish slip between cells.You are the powder of stars,in the course of your dream tuatara and deer spring from your feetswallows and marigolds from your palms.

You are the child beyondthe seventh scroll,bitter belly soothed and sanguine,the trumpets of angels silencedin your hair,your song a circle of memory.

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The Gift

Breathe and breathe,pull silvery air into you and feel it melt the sweep of storm, stigmata banished.Love does not depend on this,to cut or slice,no sacrifice.

For blood the treasure,gifted from the dragon's tonguedrips into your flesh chalice.Hold it, tender sweetest brewthe essence and the mysteryof only you.

Power lies behind the blade.Beneath the slide of red a lotus blooms fresh and strong, petal open,the wine of you cupped inside,so precious none would ever dare to tear or cause a tear.

Beloved,hold yourself in your arms,tender-wrapped in sable, gowned in satin. Lilies wreathed around your breath,defy that bastard deaththe way you would for any other helpless babe.

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Night Roads

Entering evergreen forest now, trees encroach on the verge. Roots protrude through the outer rim like toenails. The night road is black velvet ribbon we slip along.

My sisters draw closer,limbs pale and shiny.Our farewell song comes piecemeal from cracked lips.

Power thrums as we interlock,our chant spins above treetopsand blue haze descends.

Wraiths weave among the trees igniting memories –the Selwyn river, sunlit in soft leaves of childhood.Wet day indoor picnicsand Slappy Duck storiesflicker from the branches.

Our mother etched symbols into our palms and around the edges of our nailswith fire-dipped ironso we cannot lose our way.

We color this roadlike flowers refreshed by rain,breathe the scent of bark and gumas air thickens with goodbye.

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Fifty Meters From the End of the Earth

There are snow flurriesand rain in bitter squallsfifty meters from the edge of the earth.

A boy in a red t-shirtbeats a drum, tapping off minutes,now fast, now slow.

Time is an idea that breaks with speed,like glass in heat. We’re exceeding limitsrunning parallel to the edge,our arms steel girders,we try to buy ourselves time with speed.

Black masts of ships wreck the skylinerising above the broken border.Junk machinery skitters pastsuicide victims trapped inside,those who choose death over life,

love is the grit that stops the rest of us slipping over.

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Previously published poems

Another Mother, Mind Mutations Anthology, 2004Slippery Edges, Verse Libre, 2002, nominated for Pushcart award.The Bird, The Green Tricycle, 2002Terminal, Peshekee River Journal, 2002Feathers, Blackmail Press, 2002Lonely, Verse Libre, 2002Dark Flowering, Lotus Blooms, 2002Rice Paper, Lotus Blooms, 2002Gather Flowers, Gold medal NPAC, January 2004The Sea Will Give Up Its Dead, Blackmail Press, 2003Little Princess, Two Moon Quarterly, 2003

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