Les Wicks

Healed and Hurt

I blame you & the island. There’s an electronica,
champagne-strange tinnitus
that I wear like a lei. Feint complaint
from our hearts, all the uniforms are bleached.

We joke about hooking up a drip, setting oxygen tanks beside
your breathless bed. King parrots attend to the breeze
while afternoon storms then moonblaze
orbit that smile that we can make, that has never been photographed, you
sometimes so serious doctor
who can both navigate the veins & be pulse.

Knave of the candle stick, have I ever been here before?
Yes, the familiars
mammal blaze
plus our human excitability that builds & burns temples.

Forget about gods or love,
the scratch in the joints.
Who would have known
it was still there?
We forget the crazy precision
breathless scission
of gasped words, yes
a touch
our tongues are dancing they wear laughs, forgotten eloquence…
are we deduded, maybe langing in languor between kisses.
Will we eat, remember sleep? Mother, smother or slather me we experiment
& sweetly dement. This is it, this day at least…
the fires of your intelligence
when I am being stupid.
Wounds are sealed with diligent empathy. I am humbled
beneath your poems & palms.

Slipshod eucalypts clothe sky,
I bestride the obvious, the loveliness.
Shy beside lemons & fingerlimes
we ripen.

Les Wicks has toured widely and seen publication across 11 countries in 7 languages. His 8th book of poetry is The Ambrosiacs (Island, 2009).