"We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name."

   "'Thought' sometimes means a particular mental process which may accompany the utterance of a sentence and sometimes the sentence itself in the system of language.
   'He said those words, but he didn't think any thoughts with them.' - 'Yes, I did think a thought while I said them'. 'What thought?' 'Just what I said.'
   On hearing the assertion 'This sentence makes sense' you cannot really ask 'what sense?' Just as on hearing the assertion 'this combination of words is a sentence' you cannot ask 'what sentence?'"

Wittgenstein, Meaning and Understanding.

signs & portents - a weta on my toothbrush, insect eggs on my fresh-from-the-line underpants.... no, not incubating those for you, whoever-you-are.

dream of a butterfly that lands over my open mouth. how beautiful! wings get stuck to my lips - close my mouth and crush it, or open wider and tear the wings?

soft shroud

2

THE BOOK OF DEBT

deep in the Impress

Council of  Knifebeaks

slow                perfect agreement

red eyes

in self symmetry

regard

necks feeling out in self puppetry

some fingers dip

deeply

into your old helmet

& come out smelling like death

which begins

at the top of your head

some hand dips deeply

in a pool of plasmic extension

shining cells take the form of the head

of a wild buffalo

body hidden well

bluebells

hollow dell

                on high

image cast in the inversion pool,

      pool falling all the way up

      to the horizon of its record

waves of bodiless

      blue space of former space

Council of Knifebeaks

regards

 in spacious disinterest

compression of the

Great Lung

& there you are

                        vasoconstricted

how did you come into this debt?

                        breath

how did you come into this debt?

                        breath

how did you?

                        the icing tears open the lace working

 the upright blood that swarms into animal forms on a white verandah

where the sun grows you amongst yielding wood, carved flowers’ shade

for a soft projection –          uncantileverable

the belly of her sun, shining camera growing

a turn to face           sun blooming gorse

                        herringbone child

passing lead subtraction up to her mother’s arms

   the feeling is of dropping while the arms themselves lift

the sign of the feeling of lifting arms when they drop is sewing through

the positioning of threads given the through of a thread

   whether the thread’s there, or

an I pouring in sand for a funnel of itself

is sewing the proposed revision of

   how it would have that it had been

how it would have that it had been

satining a pure formerlism

buttonhole of gone kitchen’s

last enamel baby’s feet in the soup

present a shining cap for distress

   the wing of a birdhole

an inner distinction made in limbs

   foreshadowing

   the systematic use of force

whose aunt secures

a clean place to end the confinement

white corner

between family lodgings

trapped

and drowsy on the sunstroke veranda

halfway down a fitted hole

I could reach up among the branches and my fingers would find nests.

eggs fell into my palms.

I ate eels with thrush eggs. I tickled trout

and ate them with thrush eggs.     

I stashed my dress in a saddle-bag and I rode my horse to dances 

and I rode home in the moonlight.

                

I rode home in the moonlight there

the great flock covered the moon it drew my breath’s tide out

sucked every good of my household out                           

into a full collapsing arch of goods      

all go hungry. council comes.

feathers stanch and their necks come

nakedly, the necks of cameras

into tubular halls. 

cleanly the necks of the assignee can

perform assessment and withdraw.

wings for the sunlight can

repletion

arrange

incidental warming

shade for a shame.

for grey lips

fused to the breast

come

the sun can

stanch and draw

extended pause

on the crumbled

edge of the hole

for women

whose arms will drop,

council 

slide apart

then for cleaning

turn the whet edges of tongues

over the knives

and cleanly back upon themselves

tongue

the skin of the necks

hole is a well wall

against her back

pooling in the black

accumulating pupil

from the bleeding breast comes nothing

but hairless doves falling down

the roe of a night window

falling down of there a wave

composing a lowering for embrace

of the horizontal pressures which make combs

a site of musical reversal

this wound is producing

something ceaseless

a wave

pouring sunlight

through its water and

evaporation

perth, then tom price, 1980. that i couldn't sleep for him snoring
that I couldn't wake him. shy to shake him. that I didn't used to be.
shaking him and he doesn't wake up.
you could have woken me up! you should have woken him up!
you could have given him a poke! (he's still your dad.)
like coming down the slide, hoping the emu will move, and it doesn't.
can you please play it again? the one about them cooking the baby.

soft shroud

1

once a thief stole from a thief –

stole the thief’s ring, so the thief

stole the thief’s finger to get the ring back.

the ring rattled on the bone, the bone rattled

in the hand. the hand rattled in the hands

which rattled in the arms of the handless thief.

a thief came to scoop up the bones of the thieves

who were stealing the silence of the night

with their clattering and cries –

came to scoop up the bones and put them in order,

sorting arms from arms and

ribs from ribs but the rib bones

hooked at his own rib bones

it’s still raining. floodlights go on

under the bridge so that the excavation

can continue through the night.

we dig so deeply now that the skulls

are black and heavy as stones,

and sometimes the stones

crack open like skulls, empty.

the rows of tibias are arranged.

the femurs are labeled and arranged.

the piles of hands and feet

bleed their mud; these will take some time.

traffic proceeds on the bridge above us

and the bridge     shakes in the air

soft shroud  - kissing the freeways quiet

                                    raintrees float, islands

wild burial grounds        I carry you here

years when the shroud wrapped the wound

it was vague, scratched out pill-shaped

blank on summer stairs, a white spill

in the fragrant night, outer warm whispering

drunk colours & at immunity’s edge

the white flower

shriveling up

white persuades

the mouth white

sealed the pinched

face blunted anaerobic

WHITE tachycardic gulp

face instanced on the STAIRS

WHITE force gape squared tongue when

the pill is in a fork extracts

wet marrow scrapes

through

corrugate

clean up

sealed

sarcophagus speech slides off it

thought effectively

slides off it

white is a vitreous

relation to the world. K Rd’s

freezing wind at the crossing

encases thigh bones

hips adhere to their own

sealed up

mouths

isolates frozen

we don’t remember this together

your inner ears

burnt black

your funny mouth

stitched closed

women come to the sunlit lee to volcanic ground women with heads down hips shoulders en bloc women carry the serious body

women come to the sunlit lee to volcanic ground tethered to dumb adductors inch through stone skies women carry the decaying body

women come to the sunlit lee to volcanic ground arms erect encrusted women the bones raise onwards through the ether of the former body

women come to the sunlit lee to volcanic ground sustaining the very last syllables long beyond the given road

keeping even the well’s very last tears drawn through blood’s black dust

to wash

for the turn of the waist, its easing

for the relief of the lime enclosure

we don’t remember this together

inner ears

burnt black

drunken beast

in yellow plastic

roaring operatic

roaring door

open to the night’s

drive and

this is what you did

you do this paintcan

falling

from the roof

splattered

drive destroyed

attendants wheel

the motorbike over

the bridge

is operatic

coins on dirty carpet

stripped wires by the socket

here you write as a woman

name hovering drunkly

over a piece of paper

& come

to give the things away

not your

dirty things

hands and imprints

overlain

name hovering drunkly

over a piece of paper

appears to be your name, you bankrupt

it is not

it is not

hands and imprints hovering

hollows of crashing dirty skin’s

best shudder how was that

for a fireplace how was that for

your love hurts so I push up

into its chimney-ice face

drips my full mouth

will we seal it off and listen to a bird die in there

banging tin walls echoing Christmas making

the cats go crazy in their lustful listening

hand over the opening the white eyed

skin speaking dumbness

attendant stumbles

across a full wet field

under a box of books

greasy shawl sun-cooked

heels slice grass

into the mud’s suck

coming to the pavilion

to give away your books

if I carry you here

you’ll germinate in green stars

through shroud unwound

wound unwinding as pelagic sky.

a skeleton arm

hangs from a star

the fingerbones

droop to my earlobe

touching a sex arrayed

 as small blue fish

twisting gorgeous at the waist

which doesn’t know you

or your death

on a balcony of iron springs

wormeaten wood

spills into woods

a carpet for sleepless roots

here rest’s the waking

skin as an eye

blue as a bridge of small blue

fish tremble the fluid between

studio full of stiff-hipped women, wriggling like blocks of wood. like someone pulled one log from a pile of wood and now the rest fall into the same. no no, keep your heels grounded, your knees straight. straight! not locked! what is that? where do I feel it? how do we live like this? how do we fuck like this? unable to feel the difference between one hip and the other, unable to tilt the pelvis or lift the chest. where's baby's nose? here's baby's nose. no, that's not your nose! that's your cheek, silly!
woman born under a pile of wood, grew up there. never knew the colour of her hair.

if something, then something he does not have. there's a whole ground of it right here. existing outside ownership.