Poetry
Music
Whenever I am away from it for a little while
I start to resent it
Even now in the clouds
With the clouds
Coming down as fog
In a season I thought was summer
Or even in summer
With the yellow tufts of grass
Strewn behind the mower
Like beautiful boys’ hair
Or a million coffee cups
Discarded on the street
The only thing I hate
More than playing music
Is writing
Which doesn't bode well for this poem
Or for you
For when contemplating your body’s variousness
Moving in white t-shirts
I am struck by the words
Not the thing
And I look at you
And think of phrases like
The sudden nudity of clothes
And how it is a joy to watch you sitting in them
I feel my life is full
Of little cruelties like this
That I can't tell anyone about
That there’s always a distant cliffside
Called Death
And somebody saying No on it
Refusing life
There are always those
Fabricates of memory
That lacerate the present
With reminder of the past
The flu that lives in the body
And fills up the jeans
And seeps out the nose
Yet
At sunset
When I walk city streets
And street lights come on
And there’s a tuft of yellow grass
Somewhere in the distance
I think for a moment
It might be your head of hair
Rising to meet me
My worsening nearsightedness
Indulges the worst
Kind of trickery
The optometrically explainable kind
That makes a mirage of your face
In the faces I meet
And I close my eyes every time
To a smile’s afterimage
Which vanishes slowly
As smoke from a chimney
Like the heavy way you breathe asleep
As if the trees weren't dripping
With post-rain exhaustion already
These are tremendous distances
And we won’t survive this life
I know this
I know
Privacy
The days of my extroversion are over
and I spend a year of life doing nothing.
The beach through the window cracks
with tidal justifications, in the air throwing those
pictures into movement, laughing as they come
to this lifelike knocking in the hallway— Memory.
Moving as great, sleeping statues do,
we make a year of life like this: hollow,
held aloft by the clock that counts it—
Nature like Night’s hands on the ocean
of an island we went often to.
Privacy of childhood, weight of another—
and surrounded by the multiplicity of it—
the bramble of holiday clothes, the point of no return
that keeps returning— by the sea
where houses gather to lean on the slope
and water comes to crush the idle boats.
Jackson McCarthy (he/him) is a poet and student from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He was a finalist for the Schools Poetry Award 2021. His work has been published in Starling, Landfall, Bad Apple, and elsewhere.
