exercise 3.4.4: kitchen jigging for the tame and carbon-neutral

hard shoes for strangers and swift blades for friends:
kosher betrayals while industry ends
at a danish meridian drawn on the sea
where the last crippled man fells the last standing tree.

acrostic exercise 2.5.6: rachel, fifteen

risk every notion which your catalogue
accumulates: allow fit lambs their legs.
contest the unexamined truth, first dog
his heels who claims your bent knee, or who begs…

endure the small weight of an empty sky.
live this your life, with your own heart comply.

acrostic exercise 2t.5/5/2.3: chloe rose, thirteen

clocks and calendars - machines which capture
hours, and cages for our bird-free days -
let these slip by

(overlook, in their precision's rapture):
every unguessed laugh, spontaneous phrase,
resistant cry...

once you've found your own path and you've mapped your
self's course, freed from time's and custom's ways,
expect to fly...

exercise 2.5.6: mirrorman

[for francois wherever he is,
the original mirrorman]

this silvering of beards, these graded, guilt-edged
archaeologies of self, re-readings
of our texts of love and vague displeasure:

the mirrored man, confronted with his silt-dredged
simulacrum, shrugs, the sins conceding
of which he alone can be the measure.

exercise 2.5.6: anna

she'll be presenting for their wry approval
(who built camps too) her post-apartheid pass.
they'll let her through, impose no forced removal,
to fill with boland wine the london glass...

and here i wake like lennon, twice alone:
this bird, already distant, now has flown.

exercise 2t.4/1.3: elegaic

take this burning filament
and douse it,
the apparati deconstruct
which house it.
strip of fire the working wick
and douse it.
nor try to rouse it.

exercise 2.5.4: starling

you starled and then you lawnded. i breathed smoke
and, while you floraged, drained my coffee-cup.
you startled then and, fleeing, rooted up
the quiet thing you'd come here to evoke.

[subsequently published in The South African Literary Journal, NEW CONTRAST 142, june 2008]