A Frank Ocean
Pretty fucking pink and white under moonlight, a
Ferrari cloud and tech company throw big shade.
Chandeliers in pyramids and the cyanide in my cup
tremble from the force. Breathing pheromones, I
forget my first love—your eyes haunt the bathwater.
Aliens are watching this live.
Out by the pool little mermaids gel like twigs in
lemonade, green leaves turn to vapour, weed
crumbles into glitter, the acid rain’s blue.
The only human in this humid Facebook story, in
these Balmains, in this domesticated paradise of palm
trees and limes—is me—but my whole body’s see-
through, you know, a virtual thing, and yet still the
showerhead feels amazing, like cheetahs on the loose.
Can we make love before you go, eat some shrooms,
maybe have a good cry? I don’t know what it’s like
with a skirt on but Jasmine fucking wrecked my heart,
waves sucked the air from the pool, the kids off the
roof, a tornado shed tears into my room. I woke and
you were planets round my forehead.
The pink and purple matter of sky and stars, quiet
like a quaalude, will keep me warm and transmit the
waves back into the grapevine of my spine.
Hey do you think my brain’s just a container for
peaches and mangoes? The way you say my name
makes me light hangglide off the moon.
The whole galaxy wants to see nirvana wet your lips.
Hand me a towel, a bucket of bleach—the truth is
obsolete.
I watch you fix your hair, put your panties on in the
mirror—like a kid Cleopatra—then your lipstick.
Your wet dreams, brash as fuck, breach all these
aquaducts, and I’m a nervous forest.
Memememememememememe
you’re a ghost driving
a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust
riding a rock hurtling through space
fear nothing
i’m a hurt spaced-out
a driven rook made from the skull of a teen
star-riddled in the dust-coat of your ghost-mates
near frothing
oi Darcy / meet your derivative
skulling ten riddles your constellated face aghast
hunkering down in its ruts
freezing now
this dastardly place reeks
goats scale the coastline arriving hot
in the past we dive
free zoning
like a rattlesnake / guts consternate
cut to the skin tone of a dribbling writer wracked
heart in a moat
phone home ting
coagulating in the Metro gusts
hightail it thru righteous cups the stars spill from
haunting at water-over-rocks pace
enough things
i’m baroque / tarring the dark
a Goethe riding the coat-tail drivel of aces
my skeletons’ll mete out
fairy tongued
as in a cat / skilled
in spatial awareness yet gauche on a hotrod
en route to meat you / a dove in Ryde
nether fling
you’re dirigible / like methane goes to show
Kurt’s killer tone stunned us
rude Hz dead rocket face
night feeling
i’m inchoate / a goner / your ghost
all surface / matt & not cute / not deriving from
stardust / cotton / road / horse
from no thing
Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland. His most recent book of poems The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau is out through Vagabond Press. He has lived in the inner west of Sydney for almost exactly half of his life.
marrickville pause 