Category: Poems

As of October 2011, I’d posted over three hundred poems on this site, including many sonnets and search poems, as well as numerous poems that didn’t make it into chapbooks such as Abendland and Morgenland. I then ceased posting poems here, choosing instead to distribute them via my poem of the week newsletter. Then I stopped doing that too. Every now and then I post a poem here … but not as often as I’d like.

  • Lieve

    Lieve, the day we found out that you were here, and on your way, it was a hot summer day in December. Kathleen and I were in Sydney, Australia, staying in a little old surfer’s apartment at Clovelly. It was warm and probably windy that day. It was certainly sunny, and the sky was like…

  • This is a rewrite of ‘imaginary cities: auda—’, a prose poem originally written in a PC Bang during my Asialink residency in Seoul in 2005.

  • there has to be an invisible moon over on the other side of the sun gravitationally drawing me to you how else can i explain these forces lifting me out of my dreams to float like a silver balloon out our window behind the dunes & under the beach beneath the pavement & the rocks…

  • This poem was first published in Page Seventeen (2010) and also appeared in my privately-published chapbook Final Friday (2010).

  • This is possibly one of my oldest unpublished poems, probably dating from around 1992. I remember showing it to a girl I was going out with in the late 1990s; she read it and then exclaimed “But what does it meeeeeaaannnnn???!” We broke up shortly after that.

  • This is one of my all-time favourite poems, mostly because it’s just so daft. I think I wrote it in the late 1990s. It has a real ‘I don’t give a fuck’ feel about it. I remember reading it at ‘Chapel off Chapel’ at some point, right before the release of The Happy Farang. Good…

  • One of the things that I’ve been quietly bitter about for a long time now is the fact that the Wikipedia page for David Prater redirects to the page for Dave Prater from the soul duo Sam and Dave. Some time earlier this century I attempted to channel my misguided anger via a poem on…

  • This poem has absolutely nothing to do with me reaching the end of my time as Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review.

  • just not possible. it’s not possible that the heart could heal itself (within days the way a novel does, metaphorically, or the way a tree heals the wind as it sways not likely. not in my lifetime, or yours will we live to see the human heart sing the way a pop star does having…

  • no he’s not dead yet (as if he ever could pass on or away from this winged world Ephrem Tamiru! tell us what you think re Anchin Kalmeselesh or else just th sax (sax slow and shark-like snarls through an Asmara bar to hit Thomas Keneally cold in the nose like a sweet tea might…

  • I think I must have written this poem some time in the early 1990s. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about but I really like the concluding couplet, for some reason (and in fact I think I’ve even re-used it in other poems over the years as well).

  • starsigns

    star swinging so slowly spookily seven signs say someone’s sleepy saying so so softly somnambulent shredding sorrow saxily swaying snakes simmering so snowily sad so smitten saying sutures shiny someone’s sax subtracts sneezes singly singing sinew shutterbug starsigns signs so slender star so saccharine so slow so stunned say something shattering slowly sing something sad…

  • start: doo-wop is the new ter-weetie: sheet iron rules the world of river commerce, still maniacs wander the streets of wood mill towns aimlessly, listening to portable transistors, waiting till their batteries run down to nothing. sometimes, i wonder what it’s like in pittsburgh, or anywhere, really, sited on the confluence of more than two…

  • Bara de döda stiger av i Kymlinge … Only yesterday I thought it was a great idea; The trees were still covered in cutesy icicles, Dead birds lined the footpaths & I wanted to Get on at a mystery station – or at least leap Off into some great unknown, wings attached. At the T…

  • ik breng dit voor mijn gappies maar mijn valentijn is wel de liefste liefie, liefie … waar ben je nu ik ben hier maar jij niet (waarom zeg je daarom iedere keer? hoe kan dat … nou, weet ik veel (ik weet veel van mijn gappies maar darryl ja klopt hij weet alles tenminste alles…