Sue King-Smith

Ivory tipped
and bricked with books
it towers within. I am crowded
around with ideas, sticky thin
and ropable that I tumble
earthward trying to
find the ground.

Words scurry in and out,
a hurried, impatient lot,
furrowed with self-importance.
I clutch at them,
these melodious notes of knowing
but they sift, formless, from my
febrile, filing mind. And outside
birds twaddle on in magpie
verse, and flying things flick
short lives against the glass,
and breezes waver through shadows,
making patterns on the bare soil.

Then he comes.

He battles through thorny
vernacular, crashes his body against
an undergrowth of ideology
and cuts an intrepid
path of metaphors that wilt
the hurting reason of theory.
Then he scales the sacred walls,
Marx and Dante as his footholds,
and I wind him in on a thin
sickly string of poetry that
survives despite…

He plonks a kiss,
and a cuppa on my desk,
tells me the baby needs a feed
and that the electricity bill is due
today, not tomorrow, and would
I like a sandwich, tuna and tomato,
to feed the body … the body?

Sue King-Smith is completing a PhD in Creative Arts at Deakin University. For three years, she was the co-editor of The Animist, an electronic arts ezine. In the past few years, she has had poems published in Famous Reporter, Mascara, The Paradise Anthology, Tarralla, Blue Giraffe, Woorilla, Pendulum, Oban '06 and Tamba, and articles published in JASAL and Linq. Her first collection of poetry, An Accumulation of Small Killings, was published by MPU in 2008.