a selection of my poems
illustrations by Fito zangerle
salt carpet
I am this salt carpet
Grubbied by the years
I am this damp mattress
Jaded by the tears
I am this sugar cane ledge
Leaning over sweet earth
Basking in a cross section,
Of my saccharin molasses birth
I am this broken flame
Beneath a plant it’s dew
I am folding my lashes
Unribbing my chest
I am returning my under
Returning these old guests
I am a deep sink
Sinking into thought
I like to lick the hairs
That taught
The ridges to stand
The bridges to land
Between toe and ground
In between the marshes of my hands
I want to climb the mountain of my palms
Plummet out of my muddied shell
Wanna crawl like a preverbal pal
Wanna say ‘alright let’s take a trip around about now’
In through my shaky body,
Teach me how to be kind,
Take me through the open fields of my mind
_
on the beach
A thousand stones
surround my body
pierce my sides
but I keep closed my eyes
my delicate body melting into rock
held by the shadow of waves
upon the shore
I can see,
through a tiny perspective
through some tunnel-vision
thoughts sieve,
filtered by the time lines
and out into the big sea
I don’t know where they end.
dyke ~ what's it about?
It’s about wanting to bathe until my skin becomes sand
It’s about wanting to shit with the door open and no housemates around
It’s about wanting the empty house to hear my farts
It’s about wanting to write from a place I squashed down
so deep inside me for a long long time
For so many years I thought that I should do all of the-things on my list. I felt like going at life in a doing-way was the only-way. I didn’t know what a feeling-way-was. I-thought that if I-exhausted-myself-enough I could get-really-good-at-the-thing. I had no idea how-important-rest-was. Did not know, how to listen to my-soul.
It’s about wanting to just. get. me. And put you into my life. Drop you like a soft pebble into a rock pool of glimmer.
It’s about recognising I’m only temporary and some other mortal stuff
It’s about wanting you to throw me around a padded room, softly, dressed as bears
It’s about wearing your body with care
It’s about seeing the patriarchy on TV
and knowing it can’t fuck with you n me
It’s about being free from so much shit
It’s about being able to be close and share this deep and old gender pain and that being ok
It’s about knowing that I won’t be treated like a woman
It’s knowing that I will be treated like a woman
It’s about being able to have a girlfriend who’s also my boifriend who’s also a plant that I water
It’s about planting seeds of growth together in some soil which is truly ours and the world knows it
beyond trans toilet lines
It is easier to see
A mum or a dad, rather than a tree
A boy or girl,
rather than me
Here for the lavatory
Not an elaborately lavash glare
Into my hair,
My fair,
Soul
I care
But I’m not about to deter
From the alarms of the harm
The giant anti - stance
I’m just a gay plant
Who curves around the one who curved
To soften their edge-egos
To fluff and blur
Out the bemusement,
All of the confusement.
It could be amusement
To call to you and stare
‘Botanical creature!’ Really loudly
Making them now I’m proudly
Here to confudddle
Queer for a cuddle
Just popping to the toilet
No need to go an spoil it
Trans plantation
Saw a plant lay arrest
Your chest
The bones caressed
The leaves they nested
Like the beginning of a
Life
Sprouting up from the roots
Of a great breast
Or at best
The love of seeing a gesture without words
Up through your vest
Of essence
Languaged
By time
An inky body
Smells like soil and earth
Sitting on a restful front
Sleeping tightly
Upon your chest
There is a plant
Forging its way through the wreck
Of bone and blood
Like a ship riding through the green of you
And your dark place resting in veins
On top a ledge of chalk
The leaves they submerge
Into a soft pink dust
Smells of pine and iron
Drowning kindly in tissues
Falling onto the inky road
Trickle down a wondrous spine
Arrives the plant in it’s new home
dance want to dance
I want to dance
Like the sky,
It falls
I want to scream out, great
Boarder reaches
Burn my toes
I want to take the hole,
Jump in,
Take some fish
I want to spin flip me round
Until all edges
Are gone
I want to dive into the night sky,
It falls me
Into mourning
Dry my eyes,
Make a cast of my body,
Make a world my size
Make the leap into the
Endless summer lights
With my sides
I want to wake my throat
Clear the drive airway,
Clear the roads.
Learn to talk
In the other
Tongue
I want to kiss my life
Bitter and creased,
I want to dance
Spit,
Salty breakages of fire
And yes
The greatest
Things to do,
I will dance them too.
green ship
I could ride like this
Into green gates of charm
Harmlessly
Me harnessing
A breeze of discomfort
A past of me [you]
I could ride like a trailer
Of acidic trash
That carries my old bodies,
They rot
And rotate
Holding many mossy forms,
Inherited
By clouds
Covering the blue
Muddying that moon
Unpacking things.
I could ride like this
Into my new
Wavey way
I am curving
To reach a deeper part,
To draw some water from this heart
To hope,
On the other side, there is
An infinite wave
A seabed
Greengage
Earth and olive.
and me
I hope that on the inside
There is an ocean to be
Where I could writhe
Like this soft greasy package
Writes onto skin
I could ride this Green Ship
Through the quiet gates within
the ocean from the car
Out there is the deep
It’s the deep black ocean
It’s the middle of the night
While in here I am a monster
Out there is the sea
The dark space that fills with light
And then disappears into more life
That is full of hardship and pain
That is tough to turn by
That is smooth on its edges
But harsh and abrasive too
A deep hole that is full of water
A long liquid that can hold so many things
A wide open space closed off by the burden of the land
And in here
In my car
In here I am a monster
A monster of modern life
A monster of the insatiability
Of breaking people’s hearts
Of pain and hardship
Of luck and drive
I am the driving force of a mighty wave
The drowning force of being vain
The drowning force of water in my veins
And temporal life
teasing me
Breathing air and the fire of the hot sun in me
Out there is protected
Sealed and held by itself and everything within it
Weighed down by the pull of the moon and struck by an active belly of fish creatures
In here I am always hungry
And bored
Always floating around
With these wandering eyes
God damn it, I wish I was mighty like the ocean
I am a flakey flake
A flag from a place
A few years of life on some legs
A few bread rolls and takeaways
A few things from Earth that now seem shitty to me
My human nature sucks me
And every day I am a bit afraid
So I wrote a mantra:
If the oceans can take it
So can I
So can I