poetry

Just found a line in a notebook which I wrote, on July 15 last year, and I’ve no idea what I might have meant by it. ‘In the mornings/we are proud of his everyday miracle together.’ Is it about sex? I guess it must be. My relationship was in the throes of some difficulties and […]

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Autumn in Berlin and the grimy guy begging outside our supermarket is absorbed in a book. When I come home he’s set it down to thank a woman who dropped some coins into his smashed paper cup. It is Sylvia Plath. I prefer him to the punker dude who spreads himself with a large dog […]

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Walking through the park in the unexpected sunshine yesterday I realised suddenly: strolling through summer in Berlin is like strolling through an off-duty circus. People are riding bicycles with no hands, they are taking turns practising walking slack rope, one man is playing the tuba and another is set up with his slap box between […]

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Thinking of love today and how it has such deep transformative power in our lives. I so long longed for people who would understand me and be willing to be understood. Those friends and those loving acquaintances are everything to me, the topsoil on the earth’s surface or maybe the oceans which caress its journey, […]

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Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself in the dark, on the way home, on my bike and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire for you, the trees which flicker over my back like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light and heavy, all three at once

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At ten o’clock at night I went out walking round the curve of the road under bright green trees lit from the lamps, everything beautiful, hot and radiant. A bookshop was open, or so I thought. When I pushed on the door two guys came running out from the rush-bottomed chairs where they’d been chatting. […]

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I have no depth and everything within me is shallow and small. I waste this only thing time. I spend it as a charity on stultifying trivialities all pettifogging at the window’s pain like untrue love. I show off and on again. I’ve nothing. Not even that nothing. Only what is left by boiling too […]

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I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and […]

Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, […]

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I went to my parents’ place to bring them a copy of my new book. Afterwards I left the house and drove uphill, as though I were coming up out of a valley, though my parents do in fact live on a hilltop. During the 2009 floods theirs was almost an island, floodwaters drowned the […]

I can’t stop crying. A friend of mine, a musician from Berlin, just wrote to say, do I just use your online postage calculator to pay for a poetry book? I’d like to pre-order. The books themselves are sitting tidily by me as I write, in four perfect cartons, we picked them up a few […]

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When a poet walks into a printer’s and says, I have written a book, I want to publish it, their eyes light up like neon stars. “It has to be on sumptuous papers and beautifully bound,” says the poet, and the printer’s salesman purrs, “Right this way, madam,” and leads her into an impressively empty […]

I found a little seed in my pocket. If I grow it, I wonder what it will be. It seems like a bark of mahogany, polished, washed in from the sunny outreach of the starry sea. I’ve carried it everywhere. I simply forgot it was there. So it what. Sow it in water, sow in what soil […]

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I have this really long poem which I have rewritten decisively – indecisively – thoroughly over about four or five years. It’s five pages long and it’s called Reaching for the Remote – about our longing despite celibacy for gods. Did I say celibacy? I mean atheism. This poem is one of three reasons the […]

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. today the way the world is run and the people who run it making me tired tired of not saying “you make me feel” tired of I instead of you statements. You make me feel tired, I’m tired of you all and your folly footed in the mountainous earth on such a very large […]

Ok, so: imagine you have a lover whose second language is English and who one day refers to you unexpectedly as his spoose. Your spoose is another word for your beloved or your partner and rhymes (conveniently) with caboose. I can tell you that any little irritations you may hold against this person are going […]

Finally, bodysurfing. It must be a decade since I have surfed, maybe since before moving to South Australia where terror of sharks somewhat put me off. That feeling, you know that feeling? Carried by water, gasping for green. You invite the water to take you. The water picks you up and takes you. Rushing with […]

Visited my twitter account & brushed all the cobwebs away. I could write a book: Twitter, I’m Doing It Wrong. See I set up umpteen channels, so as not to bore people who don’t want straight poetry, no chaser (@cathoeljorss), or neologisms (@inventedword) or neologisms by other people (@inventedwords). I made @exmalcolmfraser to share wisdoms […]

As the evening creeps across the land/groping its way towards us like the bleeding protagonist stabbed who refuses to die/darkness is a promise/like cousin cool/do you promise? I have sweatered so much this day I can jumper no further. As coolth lays its stealth in a beam lowly under the trees/we stagger out/of the shopping […]

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Today my hair kept tangling in the buttons at the back of my coat. I spent a long time standing in doorways or under trees, thoughtfully fishing there with my fingers, dreamily, gingerly unwinding. I’ve been spending time in a cafe that was opened “ca. 1930” by the stout pretty dark-haired woman whose blurred photograph on […]