Tomorrow the Westgate
Lullaby teardrops
A drift down the coast
Or a bed for a weight
In the awful season
An anchors delirium
A clandestine frown
In my room for the day

The close mellow slumber
A voice on the outer
A windows reflection
In winter I sleep
An old Catholic chapel
Tears stain the alter
Hard wooden drums
A candle-lit gaze

Tethered to infinity
Floating through airlock
Wasting the hours
Sediment for the veins
A desperate struggle
A cold kept for her
The glint in my eyes
Paints the portrait I save

This open Australia
Detuned paranoia
Alarmed with collusion
A cellophane dream
Brought up the sciences
The dust on her eyelids
Her poloroid pictures
How they leap from the frames

Scars on my hands
These harbour-eyed glances
A paradoxial vision
Of stolid decay
Once conquered mountains
Now I’m pouring the ashes
Burning the meadows
Swimming rivers in rain

Her pastel blues eyes
And I looked away

A startled light
Fixed with the aimed precision of an arrow
Glowing helplessly with the same purpose that a night owl would veil its snowy face
Where wolves and tigers would go to die
And upon the last step of a spiral staircase
The blood of a old man will spill and dry
Tears evaporate like the dreams and wild expectations he had
Years before a poison spread about in his withered veins

Were we just flying kites in an endless field of despair?
Oblivious to the notion of an impending fate that could only be bestowed upon us
Clouds gather but show the same patience, the same determined face you could show
Only hours before the breaking of a final dawn
For had some brilliant storm come and drenched the ground beneath us
The ashes washed into the earth, blood rinsed from our faces
And yet we continue to slip into the valley
Into a stone cauldron melting away the the tears of all the unspoken

And my dreams are like illusions
They flicker with the same transparent drone that echoes through the winter
They radiate every caution, every fixation, every limitation
And I’m never quite home
So does this vacancy instill emotion?
Do these sad stories lull all that once could have been?
And when the path becomes slippery and unclear
Does it coil and harness the aspirations put forward in the months of collusion?

Your heart is like a prison
It’s always open yet its doors remain centred and focused and pulled from devotion
All that is let in is the worst that could be
And the chains pull into the garden
Every turn of affection that would spill and carry and fade
Every choice of words that would galvanise the occassion
Every mark on your skin, the air that I’d breath, the colours we’d spin
The white light drips and kills all momentum

This is arthritis
The marrow of bones, the death of conversation
It is all unnecessary tension, all momentary contention
Why would I only fall for the sound of your voice in all it’s eternal confusion?
Tomatoes rotting in a untended garden bed
Their soft centres blister and spread its nectar
To be picked off by crows in the summer
Under a weight of harboured life

My shelter was burned in time
It’s four walls lit up upon a kerosene sky
Everything held tender disappears
And our own coloured portraits drip memories from the frames of grey and white
I once walked upon the forest and whistled for the birds
Who’d stretch out their muddy wings and land on the side of blackened trees
Charred Unaccomplishement. The scent of acid raid.
Their singing like an old treasured memory locked away in the furnace

There’s a glass room
Under the staircase in the abbey
Candles lit
It’s walls reverberate
Quietly, never more than a whisper
Is passed between two strangers
Giving into temptation
As their bodies collide in the dark

“I’m an orphan”
“I’m an executioner”
When I could stand the sight
I’d close up and stare into the night
Is this existential?
Time ticks and we’re fine
The hours drown themselves
Into an ocean of self doubt

Hold your fire
Hold your head
What are the colours of a polograph
Broken on the bed?

Hold your fire
Hold your head
What are the colours of a polograph
The colours of a motions path

Oh to be a cancer
The only surety’s there’s no answer
To be a dice
Or a deck of cards in a businessmans hands
Money expended in his veins
Carrying a burden worse than pain
So celebrate amongst the men
And ask “Where’s our carpenter then?”

And we’re all enclosed
Animals rolled into cages
Or a prisoner off to war
The beating of a young girls heart
Where does it end?
Upon what does it depend?
Day and night I dream
And when I wake she’s bursting at the seams

Hold your fire
Hold your head
What are the colours of a polograph
Broken on the bed?

Hold your fire
Hold your head
What are the colours of a polograph
The colours of a motions path

Like a mute in a monologue*
Your lines will be cut*
So give me some diction
Give me some direction
Love are you alone?
Love are you still breathing?
Need some help with your predictions?
Need some asthma for your sleeping?

I know a man
Who only speaks in four letter words
Cancel the bridge, cancel the taxi
She’s pretty young, you’re pretty wealthy
Was this your only miracle?
That you could drive her round in a stolen car?
Well you don’t walk on water
Your can’t even tell the time

Hold your fire
Hold your head
What are the colours of a polograph
Broken up on the bed?

Hold your fire
Hold your head
What are the colours of a polograph
The colours of a motions path

There’s a glass room
Destroyed to its frames
Abused and transparent
A light shines right through it
Opressed, counting stars in a mine field
Lay me down
Trading swords for stone
Trading junkies for ale

Hold your fire
Hold your head
Give me some diction
Give me some direction

*Lines taken from Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’

This orchard I have found
At the edge of my town
With it’s optmistic beauty
Coloured from the sound

So in summer when the fruit
Would dry upon the trees
We would climb to the crown
And we would pull apart the leaves

So won’t you run whenever you’re able to
Run from the flood and once it’s done you can tremble at the window

This orchard I have found
With its silver blue lining
As the hills upon our step
Would descend into mountains

Where all that I could tell
Lays safe upon a cloud
And we would beat upon our chests
And send smoke into the air

So won’t you run whenever you’re able to
Run from the flood and once it’s done you can tremble at the window

And when our old man walked out
He left her cold and broken
He slandered our good name
And he set fire to the ocean

So I followed you home
Played your piano set for hours
Just to fill in his absense
And the notes they deserted me

We looked so very pretty
And we are so very pretty
We looked so very pretty
With the bruises on our arms pressed up against the bark

Brother I can see your face over the horizon
And our mother could never love another half as much as she thought to you

So when you slipped into the river
Your body filled up with water
And you called for your father
But he was drunk at the armoury
And your head it slipped under
An apple fell from the highest branch
And he grabbed at your ankle
And he tore my heart in two

I starting planting the seeds in my own little garden
When I could wash all the soil off my sunburnt little eyelids
Drink from the well where she put up the fencing
Staggered from the bar so alone and unwilling

So won’t you run whenever you’re able to
Run from the flood and once it’s done you can tremble at the window

So won’t you run whenever you’re able to
Run from the flood and once it’s done you can tremble at the window

And I still need her close
Still keep her pictures near
As I’m drifting to the darkness
Waiting for the light to reappear

In this open space
Where once stood an orchard
The abondoned little saints
Drew blood and left us hoping

So won’t you run whenever you’re able to
Run from the flood and once it’s done you can tremble at the window

So won’t you run whenever you’re able to
Run from the flood and once it’s done you can tremble at the window