My Spine, Your Pillow

Daniel John Pilkington

When the sun sets and everything is cellophane

Exquisite adjectives

Velleity

Thoughts that make us feel younger

Names for stray cats

Dumplings

Psilocybin

The significance of hair

The heating should be more than quiet

A hierarchy of self-contradictions

When a man lives alone

The most common dreams

Humidities

Theories of why we laugh

Artifacts we dare to call natural

My favourite apocalypse

Plums

Things once thought to be aphrodisiacs

Things that suggest hidden worlds

Possible bookmarks

Hypocrisies

Numbing things

Once when I understood my anger

When I was the first to leave and the last to arrive

Whales

Conspicuous absences

Circular stairs

The solitudes of correspondence

New years

I remember a strange warmth

Coming out of retreat

Long distance strategies

Stringed instruments

Things you wouldn’t expect to float

Things that would be mirrors

Eggs

Perfect replies

When we vindicate didacticism

The most beautiful buildings in the world

Magnanimous people

Near death experiences

Grounding things

Things that fill me with voices

Things to approach indirectly

Freckles

Meteorites

Fashionable assumptions

The archetypal tree

Everything I know in reference to metaphor

Propagules

Invisible deities

Paradoxes of time travel

Things that can only be obtained by virtue of a request

Birds that eat snakes

The generosity of gratitude

 

Daniel John Pilkington is a poet from Melbourne. He is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. His poems have appeared in Meanjin, Island Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, foam:e, and otoliths.