Time Machine

Here is the memory

of the sound of childhood as origami

each note folded underground

and repeated for seven years.

Such perfection has a price

beyond the time lapse production line of earth

           breaking down

into the subterranean sum of its parts.

Emerging from cellophane envelopes

like body-shaped consignments pinned to trees

with incisions in the final flourish of an address

the folds emerge and unfurl

as discordant music, as notebooks

their end pages thumbed repeatedly

master works of crease and axis

turning sunlight to noise.

And in each wind-fall of silence

There will always be a bird to interrupt it

           flying off

                with a completed download

of a drumming ensemble going berserk in its beak.

What it carries remains outside

comprehension

          as when a branch

                    has worn a groove

in the back of another

and we hear, in wood-worked vowels

          contained hysteria

                    the voice of someone

long since gone to memorial

and still in thrall to the elements

         a bequest

                    we’ve been gifted

as scars in the music of living timber.Description text goes here

The brindle horses have been put out to pasture wearing their golden

plumes. In certain light they appear as muscled apparitions out of a

pop-up book for those who love equine folklore with a deviant edge.

This light, for example. Over there, by the entrance to an indoor

climbing wall with its colour-coded resin fingerholds, two brindle

horses, their flanks lathered white from galloping in heat. One kneels

like a trick pony in a pink spotlight, the other bites the hand of a

climber who has offered her sugar. Both horses will die before

morning and a climber will fall seven times the length of her hair. A

famous brindle horse can be found in a ballad composed by a retired

rodeo clown who lost an eye in a fight over the etymology of the

word sprawl. A climber wearing nothing but a leather horse mask

will be arrested when she comes down from the summit of a

decommissioned electricity tower. The word stirrup means climbing

rope.