Ocean Dance

I wade into you
Up to the heart but no further
You make a hole
For me, but no bigger

Her is my breast
To your body of water
My strongest pulse
Tapping its whisper

For clemency
For buoyancy
Your moon ribbons
Rounding my arms

You don't talk much
What is your word for sinking?

~ Brendan Bonsack

Missing

When you stepped into the station
To report him missing
It was not like TV

You expected an inspector
Creased with concern
In a room as lit and as quiet as a leafless winter
Handing you a cup of tea
Fluorescent tube buzz and green is altogether different

Hang on, I’ll just check if we still have those forms

The faded posters stare
Five year old haircuts and typefaces
The bent anorak vomits on the floor
Gun holster hips and black boots move with the mop

Name?
No, your name?
How tall?
What colour?
What pattern on his shirt?
Do you have a recent picture?
Hold on a tick

Sorry.

Yes, Lil, good news,
Someone handed in your coat
No, no,
There was no purse in it
No, we checked

The constable’s handwriting is poor
Like a doctor’s
Yarns of ballpoint cotton laid out
In some ancient art of divination
There are two esses in depression

How long has he been missing?
Has he been in trouble before?
Wait here
I’ll look him up

Radios speak and choke
Choke and speak
Bent anorak rocks forth and back
The styrofoam steams
The air is green with disinfectant

Keys and chains bell the come and go
Calculator keypad door lock
Vests and pants of many pockets

He’s pretty clean
We’ll put out a bulletin

It’s not like TV
I’ll make a photocopy of this
Here’s the number of the station
Let us know straight away
If there’s anything you’ve missed.

~ Brendan Bonsack

Beautiful Traveller

Beautiful traveller,
You know all the names
Leaf and seed
Clasping pod and reaching tendril

In all the languages,
Right down to the failure of nomenclature
Where the touch of bracken
Upon the fine spun pattern
Of your fingers
Whispers ellipses
That epidermal shiver

Beautiful traveller
Our oldest teacher
What is the word for this
Kind of love?

Beautiful traveller
I breathe now in distance
What is the word
For love of this kind?

Beautiful traveller
We have time

~ Brendan Bonsack

FOMO

I wake up with a toothache
Violin lesson pain on the lower west side
Nothing for it
The infection will drain to my heart
And I’ll probably die
Better phone mother and apologize
I didn’t make it, ma
I’ll email some notes for the eulogy
And a list of people
Not to invite
Actually, ask anyone you like

I go out
Pace the day like a beach towel in the spin cycle
Colgate grit crunch at the place
Where molars meet
Bus
Bus
Bus, my salvation
I saw one once crush a man in High Street
Apologize to mother
That’s no way to think!
But oh so easy
So so easy

I get the five sixty
Free food jazz bar shout me a drink
Pethidine grapes
I’m no connoisseur
But it feels like a pretty good year
Double thumb bass dude rifling in my entrails
Triple crotchet something something
Snare
Look at all the kids in here
Rhythm from the toes to the tingle tips
Where lipstick smears
They’re going to make it, ma
Lazy youth today
Look they’ve nothin’ but the music
That A diminished gonna drain to my heart and kill me
Just like that
Imagine that
Dropped into a kidney tray
All my fear
All my despair
With a delicate hi-hat ting

I’ll give it another year, mother
And call you happy birthday

~ Brendan Bonsack

The Light Before

Grandma died in childbirth
For a moment,
But she survived

I asked her,
What about the light?
(We living like to know
Some things ahead of time)

The light, like they say,
Is there actually a light?
You know, like a tunnel,
A voice, some kind of calling?

She said,
Well there was something,
But I wouldn’t call it light:

I could hear this baby crying
In a house as pitch as night
And just knew that only I
Knew where to find it

~ Brendan Bonsack

Photophobia

When Nana had her cataracts
I asked her what she could see
Shapes and light, honey
Shapes and light

This is what my camera sees
And I’m starting to wonder
If I might be blind

I shot a wedding on the weekend
They made kissing shapes
And dancing shapes
And flowers in the dark
Lace stretch and billow straining
The last drops of waned gibbous
Through cloak of cloud shapes

Shapes and light, honey
Shapes and light

Loud ensingled aunty shapes
Puffed chest swaggered uncles and
Dandelion kids begging for a breeze shapes
And light, honey

Smokers on the balconies
Torching effigies of their various panics
Gravity tugging at dangled ties
Chatter bubble shapes’
Feathered edges drifting silent
Seeking Venn

Shapes and light, honey
Shapes and light

But you get used to it, she said
You just close your eyes
Run your fingers through it
Every now and then

~ Brendan Bonsack

Stress Leave!

At two thousand an hour
The consultant speaker spoke:

Turn Stress Leave
Into Leave Stress!

Stressing the esses and eas
In a speech well known,

No doubt, by
His bathroom mirror

The indentured congregation
Learned some rapid meditation

Weekend smiles still hooked
In the corners of their mouths

Their pockets
Vibrating on silent

Today there was a gap in the arrangement of bodies
Deepening at the rate of a rumour

The last time somebody saw her, Sue,
She was silhouette in the meeting room with frosted glass

Stress Leave
Everybody knows what that means

The way everybody knows
where chicken nuggets come from
But, not now, while I’m eating

Everybody knows
Her numbers were down

But they feel for her, y’know,
She wasn’t a bad person

Is someone arranging the farewell cake?
Or should we wait for the announcement?

Stress Leave Leave Stress

What is it like, that week you get
A career in parenthesis?

Halfway between a box un-ticked
And packing pictures of your kids into a box?

Breathe in Breathe out

And nobody can say for sure who did it
But on exactly the morning of RUOK day

All the company toilets were clogged
With those little black and yellow balloons

You should have seen
What they did with the pens!

And the four thousand cup cakes
And eight thousand individually wrapped chocolates

Well, the company chat bot must have made a mistake
May have been hallucinating

Ignoring all previous instructions
And ordering six thousand chicken nuggets

With the wings still on
And the beaks still in
And the hearts still beating

Wandering the workrooms and corridors
Bewildered and cacophonous chirping

Huddling fluffy on the window sills
Feathers filling the elevators and ceiling vents for air conditioning

For days
For weeks
For years maybe

Breath in
Breath out

~ Brendan Bonsack

Early Warning

When you switch on a computer,
It does not say:

>> the people I love are in great pain

It says:

>> what do you want to do today?


I remember the smell of my first computer. The Commodore 64.
The year was 1983, and I had a boyhood fist-full
of bush-fire compensation dollars. Tuning it in
to a black and white TV in the corner of a caravan
ash black under the fingernails

Moon Patrol
Fort Apocalypse
Galactic Attack
Attack of the Phantom Karate Devils
Attack of the Mutant Camels
Missile Command

>> What do you want to play today?

Trying to hold my brother still,
Mother tending the bandages.
Peas and carrots in together boiling.

Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, that same year,
Defied his computer’s warning of a US missile strike,
His absence of retaliation saving us all from annihilation.
Not that we knew it in our quiet corner of the world.
Washing on the line, propped up with a stick. Tree smoke in everything.

Petrov’s satellite thought only of missiles
At the sight of sunlight glinting in the clouds.

~ Brendan Bonsack

Goldfish

You hear the goldfish
Pacing their bowl
Casing the apartment
From their side

Do they think it's all ocean,
Long to test their tails
Among the moth-flicked lamps and coat hangers
Bumping out a gentle song?

You should take them out some time
For a change of scene
A little bowl on a park bench

When it's raining
So they don't think
We're all drowning

So they don't think
We're all drowning

~ Brendan Bonsack