Tadpoles in a shallow pond

Who doesn't want to scoop up
A slickly flabby school of tadpoles?
To run their oily, knuckle-shaped heads
Like balloons squeezed too hard at one end
Between splayed fingers—
We have webbing in common,
You, taddeus, and I!

It is the same urge, by my reckoning
As the dare-I-leap sensation
That tackles me, nudging my knees when I am
Toeing the line of a precipice, hovering a hairdryer
Near an unschooled body of water
A beyond body-ness,
The double-think of observing
The end as it occurs.
(While hoping for a sequel.)

Yes, if you ever want to feel alive
While courting the Schroedingery
Goodness of the mystery box
Come and find me,
And we can scoop tadpoles in shallow water.

I have a net if you need it.


Stephanie Campisi (Victoria)
Twitter: @readinasitting

Life goals

Well, since you asked:
I would like to climb atop
a fine-and-dandelion
and with an exhalation and
a carefully positioned
makeshift sail made from
a crepish plastic bag—
the tiny ones used
to ball the heat around
a slick market dim sim,
a hot air balloon of pork
and chopped onion—
tobble off into a Gulliver
world of wrongsizedness
and vertiginise at the
smashed white skeletons of
clover flowers, those pluffy
failed parachutes lost in
a spinifex cemetery;
I might even lasso a flagondry
with a shoelace of my own
tying and flue it up
the musky chimney that my
lounge room should have
but doesn't, but all in all
I think that I am quite
on track.


Stephanie Campisi (Victoria)
Twitter: @readinasitting