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