Ferry Rjeka to Split, Croatia
Lights into the black
Like cigarette ends smoldering on the horizon
Adriatic sea pirates
Listening like thieves
Australian refugees cast to emergency pylons
Mental arithmetic
Automatic capital

Lightning reaching shores
Warm Mediterranean breezes through
Hair giving crystalline visions
Of soft Scandinavian luster
To shadows on cruise line notes.

Odessyian verse composed over
The red cans around orange vinyl
Communist décor listening to top forty
Creation pop at low volumes

Maps read upside down
And fortified by Slovenian wives
Spreading dip on rye bread
For incidental consumption

Shawn headed Italian Che’s
Smoke and share wealth of knowledge and misinformation

Slip barrel chested, handkerchief shirted
German strolls casually along a pea
Green deck craving bratwurst and naturism

And the ship is a vessel
As a craft is a journey
And the night is a nuance
Of the passage we take

As a single star rises
The sea is lit purple
As a fork hits our road.

Vengeful Albanian twins transporting China white
On public causeway
Split to Dubrovnik.

Fat German man lover
Sweats brow
Next to American lawyer professing to becoming
Christian missionary after two years in the service of mammon.

St Francis in a series of baseball card frescoes
Illuminates those who sit in the garden of tranquil, serene, acquiescence

The fortress walls that surround the city
Carry the new pilgrims,
Clutching tattered guidebooks
Who flock to see heaven bought down to earth

Perched atop Cobalt Blue Ocean
Where you could believe that natural order was reversed and the sky became nothing and you looked down upon sky crossed with beams of light.

God’s fingers must have worked nimbly
To create this other Eden
Coursing throughout histories labourers
One stone begets another
One step begins a two thousand year journey

One butterfly flaps its wings
Above the ocean ramparts and creates chaos of the divine

Aviator sunglasses, thick black unruly curly hair
Held back from the forehead by a mauve exercise band
Thrift shop Italian 1960s Roma football shirt
Lens reflecting high cliffs to be jumped from
Into deep Adriatic water

Finely crafted coat of many colors of setting sun
Secured by a safety pin
Black American denim jeans
Cut off below the knees
Raggedly by an army surplus knife
Tan leather woven belt at the loosest eyelet
Holding the pants a good six inches lower than the boxer shorts
Simple sandals favoured by Jesuits and Amish share croppers

Pink soft cotton shorts above the knee mid thigh
Ivory polo shirt adorned with a small Latin crest of Che Guevara above the heart

Reading Japanese death poets
Coverless Cervantes
And Gaskells sweeping north and south

The ocean is their highway
Jadrolinija their greyhound bus
Hopping from town to port to island
Sleeping under pine near water on rolled up clothes talking
God and Muhammad and Pasolini and girls
The bag of Sicilian cancha
Surrenders the consciousness to Jung’s mandala house by the lake

Shooting stars are guides to the oracle of Delphi
As the pot is boiled on a camp stove for another round
Of treacle like coffee

Like the three antipodean boys I know
Sharing sweet tea on the smaller highways
Which crisscross the mystical primeval forests
In the southern alps of my backyard

No relativity piece adorns the wrist
The sun of ra is the timekeeper.

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