Two Poems
First published in Ibis Zine, Issue Seven, 2017
Meat and Nicotine
A piece of red raw meat and a cigarette butt
sit close together on the pavement at my feet, as
I wait at a bus stop. The meat, mostly cream-coloured
fat, streaked red between, veined and tendoned.
It is about the size of a child’s fist, discarded
neighbour of the common sidewalk ciggie butt, pointing
accusingly at the red hunk of dead animal, its shape
grotesque, the butt bending in kettle-black disgust.
A shoe kicks the meat away, as if by accident.
An obscene crow flies down from the towering bus
timetable, plucking the meat up in its dumb beak
and making off into the gum trees across the street.
I am the meat and the cigarette butt,
the shoe and the crow. I am the
bloodied butcher you will never know.
Prophecy (Anatomy of an Ibis Part Two)
It will begin brewing in the belly of South Bank,
on the winding, mangroved flanks of The Brown Snake.
They will rend their black beaks from the dirt and soil
and slick-cut grass slopes. They will rise from the earth,
ruffle feathers and take flight. Abandoning their pilfered
lunches, cold chips and warm bin juices. They will fly out
over the lagoon and sail above the stagnating river scum.
Circling in coordinated flocks of hundreds and thousands,
more than anyone ever thought existed on the entire planet,
let alone in little inner-city Brisbane. Great masses of ebon
scalps and scaled talons, hinged like worn leather, colliding.
They will crush together in their sickly white suicide
of twisted wings and hobbled beaks. Amalgamating slowly,
surely, into the largest bin chicken the world has ever seen,
with great pillared limbs towering over our humble bridges,
brushing ferries away with its claws, stirring whirlpools
when it drives its construction crane neck into the murk.
It will cleave its head back up, blink once, twice, clasping
in its beak a plug on the end of a long, serpentine chain.
Watch the river drain and gurgle and churn away.
Wait for someone to fill it up again, an old cup
that is always half empty but, without fail
forever full of shit.
