Niyyah for Wudu

Do you intend
Go wash your hands
That you intend
Of the smut of self-love
What you intend
Your face of its tarnish

Guidance System

The lookout tower is useless as a lighthouse
And yet the ship makes landfall
On a branch of the light rail that shows the tourists around
It ascends the steps, the dunes, and the embankment

Where a mural is painted of oceanic cryptids
As caryatids. Later, among half-buried pallets
Site of an historic disaster when
The world was bigger and under

A different style of management
Like a dwindling country school except
With fewer enrolments then than now
Rabbits read signals

And thistles extend down to the chainlink fence
That stops the fog coming further inland

My Children Are Older Than Me

                                                 Ever heard
Of the Yonaguni Monument?
                                                 Well
There is a polyp lives in the abyss
For millennia battening on foul detritus
Until just as a bushfire germinates
A wattle seed, volcanic vents
Erupt and the great migration
Begins, the freakish things purpurescent
In decomposition, beached in bulk
Slimy as boiled okras, the size of men
To be studied by marine biologists
One of whom, a young childless woman
Is found in the midst of a personal crisis
Drawn to the specimen
With more than scientific curiosity
She does the needful thing
Then takes a nap lasting several weeks
On waking she thinks, or would if she was able
My children are older than me
I must obey them
I am thirsty for salt and salt and salt, and death
Cannot be nothingness
If it be the condition for their arising
And even if it be so, so be it!

Thus begins the apocalypse that ends
The Kali-Yuga, darkest of ages

Three Chimneys in a Paddock

The first wore a cartouche charged
With a human face that wore in turn
A sorrowful expression

The second performed a miracle
Whenever it rained
Its hearth would blaze up

The third was an active volcano

Inclusivity

Astride a dark, clear tributary stream
She sat side-saddle

Attendants weaving reeds and flowers
While lounging together on festal barges

In the shape of horses
Horizon so high the aspiring eye

Couldn’t climb the hills to reach it
And in midst of the procession

On elephant back, she danced as if to say
I’m just here to demonstrate

How beauty comes in all shapes and sizes
So let fall your scales from

The highest window!
Further to which the child in her arms

These freckles of mine are to remind you
That other people around the world

Have darker faces. And they expanded
More and more until at length

They filled up all of space, receiving
Worship of all, even

The rain gauge and weather station