engine




louise carter



but cold has a way of infecting us all
and cold pulls your heart from its silicone mould

and cold is the rain-slant that jabs us and prods us
and wheedles its way to our warm weeping souls

while men in red t-shirts walk proud through the rainfall
and girls and their blondeness blaze hard past our doors

the night is an etching of charcoal and white chalk
the night is a drawing that hangs on your wall

the beauty of fluid of limescale of carbon
the beauty that comes from your festering wound

the beauty that sounds like a sandpaper siren
the wavelengths, the sound shears, the sizzling slaw

and here I'm protected I'm warm with my love doll
I'm winter I'm springtime I'm summer I'm fall

I'm honey I'm everything, imbibing oxygen
flooding our bottomless basins with suds

the art deco windows, the streams free of impasse
the spattering smearing of stringy black leaves

the Sydney the Christmas the blank-faced absorption
the sickening reverie, kneeling to crawl

the sweetness the sweetness the echoing hallway
the sinewy solitary soft silken cord

oh autumn oh conquest oh kindred oh sister
oh humming oh grumbling garrulous call

the solitude sluicing through slanderous meadows
the synchronous symphonic sinister claws

oh sweet how the music of memory lingers
oh sweet how the resting note mellows the chord.

more by louise carter

memory box

compulsion

inertia