Author and musician Toby Fitch was born in London and raised in Sydney. His chapbook, Everyday Static, was published by Vagabond Press, 2010. His first full-length book of poems Raw Shock is forthcoming in 2011 with Puncher & Wattmann. tobyfitch.blogspot.com
Light Switches
As with rocks emerging
in the lull between waves,
flourishing green, rekindled flames,
memories arise comets
with strangely familiar names
seen from the bottom of the sea like somehow
I stepped on a light switch.
But as with autumn’s
undertow of leaves, rained-on
letters, tumbledown dreams,
memories dissolve coins cast into the sea,
while the one I keep sifting for
is lost in the gravel at my feet, the swollen
waves engulfing the rocks.
On a night of fireworks veiled in mist,
of Ferris wheels burdened by clouds —
after hollow music beat down the door to my ears
and soggy bones had dragged me home —
I found myself on a mattress on the floor
in the middle of a pitch-dark room
awake and listening to the echo, upstairs,
of an old, upright piano playing grand arpeggios —
twenty- to thirty-finger chords,
friends gathered round in warm chorus,
singing old standards with abandon —
and it occurred to me I want to see daybreak again
having become both cavernous and water-logged,
more afraid of myself than anyone else is of me.
Bird in a Carpark
She saw this coming:
stealth bombers hunting bats;
hailstones and lightning;
shadows burnt into the walls.
The land has been lifted
from under her claws
and replaced by a
complex of rectangles
where fluoro lights flicker,
mercurial, sleep-deprived;
where spellbound lemmings
go further and further
down, seeking a way up.
Concrete warren, trap
of all traps — the future
like tarmac setting fast
around machinery both
redundant and indispensable,
hissing with oil, crawling
with sparks. Tangled in
webs, she cracks her beak
on the ceiling of black thunder,
her cry becoming a distant,
dissonant echo.