Moving

 

Leafy bark shredded from punk tree,

Tearing the fibres

Between home and me

 

Urgent and new, spinning stars,

heady

and needy.

Tabula Rasa; in a new land.

 

I’ve made this distance

I’ve made the rules

Becoming what I never knew.

 

Grasping at an old dream,

You know what I mean!

 

A tornado

The seabed

A new me.

 

¤

 

the Seahorse in my head.

 

The benign cry of my withering Seahorse,

Forlorn, an orchestra in my throat

Bubbling away

beneath.

 

Today I see little grey

Different from yesterday,

But still my seahorse withers.

Again and again, it tries to track back

Severed by self-contradiction.

 

When stars stand on stilts

And the seabed is still

all can be slept on;

 

a palpitating ocean

Darkens dreams.

 

Still a scion is my seahorse,

hope for redemption

with all that is remorse…

 

No,

A mirage against my seahorse

Drowning in the coarse desert

 

Please don’t cry my seahorse,

Please don’t cry,

It will only make you die faster.

 

¤

 

Moving, Again

 

Smiles beam like cadavers,

Hell from Sartre.

 

North flipped south

In my blood,

 

Good, I’ll utter

A lie to another,

 

That might be true.

 

Flip a coin

and head is blue,

But half is new

 

The tail end of what has come,

 

My two halves like a blood kiss

And ochre shavings of what has died.

 

Noting daily

Their eyes stop sailing,

 

Learning to read the map.

Again.

 

¤

 

a new pair of Breathing Eyes

 

It shone gold, once as was told,

Least spoke inside, some self-consolation

As soon forgotten as turns ill,

A dying veronica upon the mantle sill,

 

Other’s veins shine

Morphing into my golden infatuation

Peeling back all that had faded.

Grating away, those eyes that had jaded,

and gently inviting back

the silence,

 

A new pair,

Of breathing eyes.

 

A prickly woollen blanket is drawn back,

And all the angst is made to pack

And all that passed

cannot last.

 

With all this space

All too exciting,

I now can see

The malleability:

 

With

A new pair

Of breathing eyes.

 

And they’ll cry “I’m not ready”,

And you’ll whisper

“you can never be”,

Their seahorse in the deep blue sea,

 

Leafy bark shredded from punk tree,

Tearing the fibres,

Between old and me.

Old

And me.

 

Words and Image by Owen Gust.

By Pelican Magazine

Pelican is the second-oldest student publication in Australia and the only independent paper at UWA. If you like having opinions, writing, drawing, and/or free tickets to local events, then Pelican is the place for you! We print six themed issues a year, and run a stream of online content.

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