angels speak in fingers and tongues like deaf people. you are secretly suspicious of the handicapped. refuse to learn their language. still their sounds loop through your mind like a skip rope rhyme. your shadow slumps in the corner, exhausted, the little egos that you nurture in the window box are struggling in the winter sun, your guts feel like a traffic jam of fire engines. oh the humanity.

plagued by impossibilities, you obsess with pretensions at company. leave the door creaking. read dead lovers love letters. use comfort puppets around the lounge room and as occasional dance partners. put pillows under the doona, roll over and pretend that someone’s there.

loneliness, like pornography is an art form.

winter walks behind me but is sympathetic to my needs as foot falls echo off deaf walls and the gutters give nothing away to the full, fat moon hanging belly heavy in the early sky, mocking my moods and the decisions i make. but, girlfriends forever i never hold it against her even though her body is very beautiful.

desire comes too, clinging to an unfortunate chain of events that eventually show up in my underwear and inner linings. she is slow and chooses the shadows since being wounded in the war that nearly bought the whole house down. i wait for her because her dreams are strong.

adrenalin from within gives me speed, gives me needs that i cannot put names or faces to. and when i see my brother standing by the road i do try a little kindness but that only winds up as another meat hook moment – i just don’t know how else to end it when tender doesn’t cut it and nice doesn’t have him begging for more.

vibrations shake each footstep is a beginning and an end, a moment and a memory making tear drops mix with beer slops as i bumpy ride my way is long, longer than either road travelled no matter which route you take helicopters circle in a serendipity that rarely touches me but shines brightly through the eyes of others.

if it’s my way or the highway then i try the middle of a green lighted george street – rush hour pushes trucks thunder rumble through my every membrane where the word of the day is alert to flirt with danger no stranger to straddling the thin white line that is over in a footstep, in a heartbeat, in a sigh.

About Kerryn:

i am an adelaide poet, spoken word tourist and current secretary of the friendly st. poets committee. my publishing credits include paroxysm press anthologies, vernacular, sidewalk, friendly st. reader, releasing my first book “adventures in captivity” in 2004 through paroxysm press. my poem “cigarettes and speed don’t work anymore.” placed third in the melb. poets union international poetry comp. 2004. currently i am putting the finishing adjectives on a novella and planning my next trip to the overload poetry festival in melbourne. i like my poems to have a short attention span and sharp edges.

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