11 July, 2006

after Olympia

a girl
caught in an upsplash
of sunlight

she frowns once
as if to make herself
heard

a slow squint
into the patchy consolation
of afternoon

Manet has
nothing on this subjection

only precedent
which is no consolation
at all.





21 July, 2006

the tyranny of
misadventure
spreading to fill the palate
a taste of things to come
an
equation
describing the odds
question the specific
the lasso of utility Japan 1 Australia
0 there is no such thing as equilibrium
only degrees of imbalance I prefer to get my retaliation
in second





7 January, 2007

AMERICAN CAMPUS NOVEL

characterised by the opened spaces, the
geography that is so easily articulated
by what is not there, where somewhere
isn't

(by floodlight and silence

and that careful longing, woven into
the pauses:

the dawn is ample for our
purposes, me walking to meet you
my bare feet discomfited by the coarse
decking

a handshake in the twilight

the survival of another day compromised
by the inevitability of another

what continues?
what doesn't?
the inventory is no respite

peace of mind reckoned instead in the perimeter, the

limit of what is useful, & enclosing

the known world)

the smell of trees drying after rain

the violence of it





25 October, 2006

all day on the lip
of my hangover
an echo I will not catch up
with
folding the silence to its
flimsy embrace
the empty handshake
training your mood
with words
a sentence measuring the
curl of you lip
a lack of tact
battering down the hatches
of your heavy conscience.

© Adam Burbage 2008