The Dreamworld Murders

I

If you like
I will take you to him
The moment I saw
his body on the news
I suspected myself of murder
I will take you to the swamp
with the concrete blocks
along the bmx track
dogs chase your bike down
and show you the black water
where his face sings still

II

Who funded these tunnels?
Who cut these stairs into the cliff face?
And where would all the water
go without these weirs?
She is heavy in this water.
She is heavy on these stairs.

IV

Spiders camp
in her mouth.
Time's bride yawning
in her wedding webs.
Roll her over to see
the young feed on her spine.
What flame through the enfilade?
Hurry, someone approaches!
Put things back the way they were!
It must appear as though
we were never here...

V

(death by naming)
Behind the brick wall a dead tree
whose leaves are hundreds 
of vagrant butterflies.
This then is the wardrobe
where the darkness begins
and out there are the many things
the summer day discloses, things
the light touches and lends
existence to. Herein I hold your name
the way a spider tends
an exhausted glasswing
but it slips from my web
and shatters on the cement

into a thousand tiny eulogies.

VI

I swear the weapon
is around here somewhere
deep in the burgeoning suburb of the past
I intend to spend my last days here, fossicking
only the rumour of the ocean
its dark unsolvable crime
and the sky littered with clues
that corroborate my alibi

VII

I have been weak
but now my strength returns
Someone else's comics 
in the letterbox
Planes blink in place
of correspondence
In the red house across the road
a family of raw meat
There the world's last
sidekick lies unconscious

VIII

One by one you killed-off
all your fathers
The flexibility of bamboo -
you choose to wear no uniform
A small faceless
animal faces me
A corpse in loose cerements on
the back seat of the getaway car

IX

Pastures of nightshade
The rain's faint pulse
The pain of knowing objects fades
In the end we do not need them

X

Death is in the bone
the wind picks with the leaves.
You've come so far
to discover all this 
could be blown away
in one unimaginable gust.
Time becomes
a simple case of being
backed-up against the wall of death,
an indefinite series of last chances.
Death comes soon enough
which must be worse -
for then one's forced to say tha
yes, they were lost
who did not know their way
among the vanishing.