ABSOLUTE ROOM

Indoors, faith's crumb turned my without force
as a red need - the language, the locate
plan. No hurt making the fine blades, the
later strides and over-praised hinder, nothing
all over it and months of sinecure. Still
standing and plain words.

Next version, the reason phrase
referring preys and blows knives into eyes. Looks out
about, grip's hear unclouds and goes back
into morning's shrug. So coldly hard, and yet
by then a mind into what. The yawn is a
beetle-eye into a stare's kitchen.

We were others lacking forebear's hearth or
nature changing. Arpeggios of staying and
murder and hope's maze pungent as a creature.
In bent roots through seasons propped on
ashen stocks of risen winds, and silken the
monuments of innocence to a silence.

The leaving as attachments to flying less and
less minds, the subway's fact. Picked themselves
to vastness, the rows of solipsisms and threads
- cast a hearkened cool. As great unemployment
loves, we took our nights to the offices of wracked
waking and windows of the haze.

Iron hopeless, gleaming smalltown place with my
trapped goldens and verb holes. Slapped face
shaking with shame. So then a lonesome crash
through bad, my life's furniture broken as the ground
and until moans of filthy intelligence unsheathe
a good cathedral, there is every day.

THE SPACE

1
Between what is arrangement and its yester-touch,
and a new-made neither that undoes what returns,
is all expression, all consequence, all springing back
and main faiths; against these, there is the Entrance.

2
The Entrance is like a faithful matter lying on the floor
with its throat cut as the division. When aversion
bestows beauty to another hour, and entreats it,
we have what we saw and what will never close.

3
If the Entrance closes, as a consolation,
as a rushing riot that rushes too-far past;
if its moralizing leaves no hope for the luckless vessel;
if it does this then association lingers round my ancient.

4
The ancient waits as a guardian over the advantage
of absence, its ceremony of kind and its bound ankles
that own friendliness, ignorance, and the wronged.

5
To remove it, one must scour all intimacies
that move through spaces as cats do, with
purpose their proven whisker. In this dependence,
will is a servant to the crooked moth.

6
The moth flies over the space.

May 8, 2024

About the writer

T.A.R. Wallace lives in Bendigo, Australia. His first book of poems ‘Postmortem for an Institution of Madness’ was a semi-finalist in the Verse Magazine Poetry Prize 2000 (USA). He’s had poems published in Verse, Conduit, Slope, Volt (USA) and in Australia: Meanjin, Heat, The Age. He recently won the Lane Cove Literary Awards Poetry Prize 2023. He is a Yoga Therapist and Disability Support Worker.