Daniel John Pilkington


First Syllables


apple (red)
Baby,                    our lonely
appeals read
Babylonian –

chasing mean
desire’s                sea creator
chancing (green)
desecration.

Eat it,
forgetting            the dead
earth, bite
for getting us said –


grave &
grace                    (ample and




                even if the glances


/ glyphic
                highway streaks of
                cleanliness
/ blur
                the jars in which their brushes argue
/ order, age, thickness

                the paper bag syncopations
/ triangulating
                what none can see

                yet, they diagram


                their charcoal obsolescence
/ squeaking
/ soft
                exotic blurbs, that I might
/ torture them
                with an eyelash of divinity


/ thus
                I pretend I believe I am
                your ceiling
/ foam, the air in your red
/ heart
                to hallux, hallux to heedlessness: 20 seconds and
                I love you


/ my kimono
                opens at the chest
                like a feminine aphorism

/ my translator
                washes me in antiseptic
                joie de vivre

/ my animal
                snaps for the singularity


                the elephants singing in their graveyards
                the wolves distributing their income

                the memories of bone
                alleviating
/ mandalas
                from the imperatives of European vacations

                never
/ bin
                the attitude
                the aviators
                the avuncular Americanisms


                show me your need to evaporate
/ quote
                your anesthetists
                your fascists of the imagination

                show me
/ their feet
/ their hands
/ their swallowing

                hunger for the black fruit
/ the stone
                greener than the shadow
/ ripening
                their intestinal inferno
                with mesmeric impatience


/ my kimono
                opens at the chest
                like an evangelical agitation

/ my animal
                snaps


                entropic bliss, the moth that
/ burns
                a facsimile
                of the last Malevich icon
/ burns
                a facsimile
                of your right thumb

                as the streetlight palpitations
/ palpitate
                where my armpit spiders


                what we think is
                what we could never admit

                what we could never admit
                was
/ who it was
                who gave birth to me



Daniel John Pilkington is a poet from Melbourne. His poetry has appeared in Cordite and Unusual Work. He currently studies writing at the University of Melbourne.
 
 
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