Dear Mouse-Pad

Small rectangle pillow for the weary writer such comfort you bring to my slim wrist each morning in the spring in winter in every season here upon my desk you cherished, water-proof spawn of a silicone machine. Sweet little mouse pad, I lean into your colours the black and gold of you the skin and sun of you the hot red earth bearing Aboriginal shapes and symbols waterholes and campsites rocks and rivers, reminders of being outdoors—not sitting writing to what and for whom is often unclear.

Some days

I skate across your surface —tiny ice-rink for a hairless mouse. Left and right—forward back—round in circles in some manic dance.

You lead me on a path towards elusive metaphors and hidden similes. I shape-shift and twist around your willing surface seeking inspiration. Some days you are Loki the trickster promising Valhalla only to pause somewhere between the sticky work of coffee stains and procrastination.

Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems and collections have received various awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, John Shaw Neilson award and the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. She has read her work widely and it has featured on ABC radio programs Poetica and The Spirit of Things. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. A selection of her poems was published in an English/Chinese edition by Flying Island Books in 2017. A song cycle composed by Andrew Aronowicz, based on her collection The Abbotsford Mysteries, premiered at The Abbotsford Convent Melbourne — now an arts precinct — in 2019. A podcast of this work is available on various platforms.

Graffiti grammar jabs the dawn platform cigarettes writhe under dearth skies it’s the outskirter way to interrogate signs left by the previous

I know her uncannily the passenger in flight from her roof her eagerness to alight in a metropolis that magnifies a wish to be among, only to be mirrored in faces that fail to detect her. She morphs is morphed, sloughed amid the skin-cell jostle to admix intimately with other cells, city grit, until the last train blinks away via the underground the silence an hiatus pocked by shadows each an atoll, pulse as passage, timetable, offspring of the engine weak, strong.

No names, mere whispers only the kind you find slipped under the corner of old lino in a vacated house such became our sub-genre the vacate orders issued always by our father pack your bags, we’re moving tomorrow: there was a home before, when she, our mother was still alive, until spirited away in daylight by shadow men the black spider in the ceiling’s darkest corner too small to prevent them the jabberwocky house next full of wind-up tensions, mattresses in tight spaces, a kind aunt unable to add more walls, windows, doors the magpies at least were continuous a new home nest each season pack your bags…tomorrow turned out to be an orphanage the weather a battery the wind choking as if on a lead ball a picnic is rarely short of subscribers even dead leaves crave to join in like we orphans in our spent frocks who were no longer asked where do you live? but instead were sold Paradise as the most joyful of homes as if all an orphan needed was a door opened by an indebted religious key now a litany of old addresses, outworn voices stored in an opaque jar to break it would spill the unfound, versions still to be inhabited, endured? welcomed? Home?