Last Chance to Lose Control.

Switchblade
Fight/flight
Say, you might
Find

A sudden evacuation of -
- Air
- Gravity
- Fleeting sense
Of sanity

All overrated phenomena.

Your life in details
A man, a wife
A child, a life
Home - three storeys up
By the folding stair
The wind - her hair
Flayed to the strands
Caught to reveal its deep brown hue in the dusk light.
Though black it feels
In the deep night.

It is not the minute details
The placement of a chair
Or a bed lamp or thrown sheet

No, what you remember -
A silk sense of slippery recollection
Bare skin, a grin, a kiss

A rush of blood
Yes, to the head
A song, you know
That played between you
Cued to candle flicker-light
Of a room service dinner
Those little table trays, with fold out wings - left/right
Blackouts
Emergency lights - then
Finally
Candles

It was 1998. The hottest summer
In KL, the hottest metropole
On this mad planet.

You remember, remember, remember
Even now. 6.16AM
Deep in winter
One spin of the world away

Sydney.
Film-makers shun this city
Its basking sunlight
They claim - "so overexposed"

Like an X-ray
As Sylvia Plath would say
You loved those burning words of hers
What a model for a life.

What a wife
You might have been
What kind of happiness
We might have known.

One spin of the world away, you're -
Locked in a glass case museum
All our memories
Under guard, lock, key
And always out of reach.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

From the city, the sea is seen
As a value
Measurable
Saleable
Waterfront property
To be career-climbed
The rightful prize
Of the inheritors of this material world.

It is not -
A tempest
It does not -
Swallow your lovers
For ten years or so
Odysseus to the nymphs of the sea
So succumbed
If briefly.

From a stranglehold land
We imagine
Ourselves impossibly
Conquering

We tame seas to cross them
To raid, to love, to bleed
To believe and find new believers
In savage lands.

The sea between - submissive.

We imagine our return
An inevitability.

I walk out now
Each step I take will fall first
And end there.
Each step will not be retraced.

Down the dawn street which dips
To the bluff
Beyond, the plunging deep

The Pacific
Which swims and swallows
All kinds of life

Which meets other oceans -
The Indian Ocean

They meet and nod
They wave
They acknowledge similar predilictions
Life - and their tastes
For the giving and taking
Of life.

The sand between my toes
Grows damp the further I go
To the very edge of my world.

To you, you know
To sea.

...