Bees Eat Time

The first week is the rush of students

arriving early, roses overlooking locked spaces.

Jo and her poem about beats writing.

the library looks like a library,

doors are stencilled:

Archives     I read    Anchovies

              No Entry    No Entry

The second week is Jo’s poem about dogs in green

pyjamas,

about kicking them when they’re down.

Twin bells are wrapped in strung out sheets, bees eat time.

A pitched cliff implodes in dark window holes.

Clustered antennas chatter in a vibrating dawn.

Satellite dishes listen for a group poem.

Week three sees a ladder leaking lights into shadowed

rivers flowing into dark

rungs chained to the wall, clutching her hand on his arm

heads folded in cobbled intimacy. Stones heavy with

the moment after.

week four dreams: Instead of following her lion I am

pursued by one.

Standing in an art gallery in The Rocks,

    I look past photos

       taken through

old molded glass –

     see a lion’s silhouette

         out on the street.

Week five is music.

Green monks singing with open mouths,

tongues black from the coal-fired freeway.

Strings and animal skins, fingers floating

through lit channels of tambourine light.

A static TV: atonal Cage column,

the hiving of bee’s digesting time.

An announcement roars like lion’s breath in a breeze of furnace

touching me ferocious with piano voices lifting to

crescendo

in this air-raid morning

full of wings wet with silver water,

feathered castanets

catching at light from the waiting Outside.