Andrew Darling


Pay Up

this is the freedom that makes you pay / wild nights fearsome eternities / suns rise whisper hieroglyphic knowledge / cavernous transmissions / oceanic silences / just slightly ahead of unquestionable facts / the bliss of doing anything to your body / self jettisoned in search of self / launched dispatched cast unbelievably adrift / the saying yes the saying yes / this is the freedom that requires payment / un-assuming quietly persistent / you learn to embrace so much more though / pure understanding of your very own every nuance / any kind of inherent design you want / tenderness of clouds / cowering hatred small and cornered / spectator in a theatre of one / mind tumult mind tumult / instinct in revolt / with these payments you did buy something / you lost others / transactions of beauty heresy power death fragmentation breech birth / you want to pay / long white streaks of fire / irrevocable momentum until smash-landing / a horizontal plummeting / dire evolution where you become more or less squared off with death / the weakness the surging the catastrophic power / this is the freedom that makes you
pay

Before Entirety

Despite a slow bleeding away 
      from barricades of broken past,
                      ghost entrapment of your longing
           follows you everywhere.
                   Dream sibilance whispers at the ruptures
                                         of your life,
                                 clambers through fault lines 
                                                                                         of notional reality.

                As you enter 
         the forbidden places
    of your history,
           clarity wavers –
                 escape has thrust you further in.
         These rooms were locked
                          behind your brittle back.

        Things are badly damaged.
                               Parts of yourself are 
                                                  just wasteland,
                    demolition site, 
                            draped with dead echoes. 
           To take down the boarding hurts,
                                          like removing body parts.
                  The desire for completeness 
                                                                               could almost kill. 

Andrew Darling is a poet, jazz trumpeter, singer/songwriter and music educator. Andrew has performed throughout Australia and internationally, and has recorded as a session trumpet player on many albums. Andrew performs with original band The Anecdote, and is a part of improvised poetry/trumpet performance-art project Illuminous. He resides in Warburton, Victoria.
 
 
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