Or for something to

I am stuck within a constant. An invariable. A waiting. Like a Migrant Hostel- radiating transience, yet stifling all movement. They casually clip the homing pigeons wings as the residency is claimed. Perhaps they only wanted to stay the night. Or the afternoon to see Uncle Petyr, and to remark haughtily on the journey home of how his face grows thin. The lines that approach the corners of his eyes are deeper. That "he looks tired." As much as Petyr, they are stuck in the constant. The wait in the heat.
Summer brings sweat and forced family gatherings. Competitions for affection. More sweat. Maybe a little cricket. And a waiting for it all to be over.



Or for something to

Sometimes, you find that you're seriously unhappy.

ALEC #2

It's awkwardly long eye contact. The kind that stays with you.

We were tying things down. I was getting rid of the space that seemed to have been left with me. Happy that I'd been allowed the opportunity, to be quite frank. I was climbing up the sides of my ship and tightening rope. [You preferred rope. More reliable. Steadfast. Tested.] We were saying nothing. Not that I can remember. Perhaps it was of no importance. Or implication. After a couple of mangled half hitches and reef knots that were convincing enough to tie down the cargo, I look across deck. You're staring. Not casually looking over, or past. Not glancing. No blinking. With an expression that I still can't place. It seemed distant. Or perhaps, lost. They're very different things.

Jono told me once that their difference [the difference between lost and distant] was the clincher here. The breaker. One has movement. Direction. Placement. There is a wholeness to it. Someone who is distant does not connect with someone who is lost. Lost is absence. Looking through things. Grasping. Clutching. Willing, but only reaching the penultima.

I am lost in my syllables. And in the deciphering of your [perhaps accidental] stare. You are just as distant as ever.

There is a very large storm approaching.

I am sitting on my verandah, and there is a very large storm approaching. It's lighting up the evening sky. I appreciate its smell. And the heaviness of the air has gone too. You can hear its stomach battles: the retching gales that are of loads of water, and the sighs of dissipating queasiness. The rumble echoing through an expansive ribcage. The sky is a man struggling to hold onto his insides.

Perhaps it's pathetic fallacy. Or perhaps I'm a microcosmic replica.

String Theory

Say everybody is a piece of string. Those who reach their limit to learning have their reel cut from them and stop unravelling themselves. Because their connection to a wider perspective has been severed: through overbearing metanarratives or unhealthy obsessiveness over particular ideals. You are severed when you prevent yourself from learning. You try and meet with other reels of string, perhaps of the same colour wheel or same brand of string. Maybe you started unravelling at the same time and you take special pride in that. But one day, you're heading down the haberdashery aisle to go see Aunty Sue and you see another reel. A mountain of information. You wonder if it ever stops. Whether it's possible that it could just keep unwinding forever. Whether they'd be protected and soft at the centre, or rough and gritty. You hope that they unravel toward you. That you'd studied hard enough to impress them. You wonder whether you could extend yourself, give yourself a couple more yards on your legs that you aren't entitled to. And then a fear catches you like the plague. Bubonic. Small pox. The Black Death. What if you stop unwinding today, or tomorrow? Will that be enough in the end? And then you've been severed by a self-constructed metanarrative.

Or you could consider that particle physics stuff.

Messenger

I spent the evening chatting to a man who cannot get up. It must be terrible having your legs bound to your chair.

It's dark and all I can taste is Indian food.

Sometimes you just wanna curl up and cry. Or kiss a cute boy and forget about it. Jump ship and take a holiday. All of these things are ideas I have caught in my throat. Prospects that are never gonna make it past the cutting room floor. All I am is desperate for a reply. For someone to tell me that I'm not alone.

In Regard to "Oh Captain, My Captain"

That was an old post that never quite published. This is accidental and intentional metafiction.

Oh Captain, My Captain.

I hope to kiss you behind the boat shed one night. After we've stacked and washed the canoes. Hands still dirty. Stomachs full of pasta that we didn't make. You'll tell me about living in Baulkham Hills and how it helped you learn to tie your shoelaces. That you've been knotted ever since. Tangled. Roped up to something you're not quite sure about. You're piling things up on your head, and hoping that you won't drop them.

I have a spare hand you know.

We'll get in our favourite vessel and set sail, and you'll sing loudly to the lion king as I navigate by starlight. Hopefully we'll discover something. A sand bank or school of fish. I'm not fussy.

Vroooom

Last night I drove very, very fast. With intent. Not to get home. Or to get dead. Just to get... something. The faster I went, the closer I came to a realisation, but I couldn't make it. There were too many corners. And I was scared.

An Old Journal Entry

It's nice that I can feel my toes again. Comforting, almost. I'm all about seasonal metaphors today. The table I am sitting at has more women at it than I'm used to. But that's alright. I'm learning: slowly. Perhaps I'll find out some tactics. About tact in general. I have very little of it, as seen through my engagements last night. I'm an Estelle from Big Brother. Or perhaps, a Bradley.

I cornered him, last night.
I put him on a pedestal.
I said "You listen here, I'm the bad guy."
And then I ripped him off like a bandaid. He seemed to take it well, you know. They always said that hobbits are adaptable. But it was quiet. The unatural quiet. There was no off-putting winter howl, an absence of crunching autumn, and spring's usual chirp was completely out of the question. It was the dead heat of midday summer. The roads are abandoned and everyone is trying to lock themselves in air-conditioned safe rooms. The room was hot, and heavy, and dead quiet.

So when he downed his whiskey and placed it on the table, in one swift movement, the noise rang in my ears. I jumped a little. I surveyed all the exits. One was plausible. I retreated to the kitchens comforts, of tea and less sweat under pressure. Rather, just sweat of unregulated room temperatures. The tension didn't pass. I don't know how long it will take to do so. I don't know if it will.

It will. It will. It will.
Threes are magic like that.


--------------------------------------

Sometimes you speak a little too soon.

Brief.

You had your quick, Keats death too. Lacking beauty. Lacking distinction. Brief. And I'm left with letters in my hands, books I need to read and piles of unwanted conversation.

Still full of quiet breathing.

Who.

It's the inward focus. Most have it. I just want to know what this is to you. Keats spoke words like you speak them. Beautiful words. What makes you different is that he spoke them often. And I feel lonely in this blank space. Does your sister even know? I'm like a Mary Shelley piece! Who am I? Fucking seasonal metaphors, that's who. It's always fucking winter.

Heart of Darkness.

Achebe suggests we should stop reading the novel altogether. He compares Conrad to Nazi sympathisers, who directly call into question the humanity of black people. Africa is to Europe, as the picture is to Dorian Gray. And I don't blame Achebe, really. It's a scramble to justify English colonialism. Perhaps not European, but certainly English. It removes the personal from the African people, allowed four lines of pigeoned English and a tumultuous amount of prejudice. It manifests unconscious derogatory ideals, marginalisation on people who are barely there in the beginnings. Bullied down to the bones. 'Till you see the skeleton.

"Mistah Kurtz, he dead."

That's the only moment that I really comprehended, and it's sad. Sad that even then, it was on the wrong front line. Tunnel vision is so hard to shake. We bully, and belittle Africa, and send in our help like divine creatures, but we forget that their resources are making us more capital than we pour back into their economy. It's a nice little charade we've got going on, the WEST.

You know, after Achebe said these things. These truths. All that came of it was a polar opposite. The indulging in Conrad's Heart of Darkness skyrocketed.

Voting 1 for Greens.

IN ALL OF THIS, I GUESS I SHOULD FEEL GUILTY. i put no real thought into it. THEN AGAIN, THE CENSUS PROVES ME TO BE A CAPITALIST CHRISTIAN STUDENT WHO DOESN'T NEED GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE FOR STUDY. SO I THINK I'LL PASS AND HIDE THE GUILT FOR NOW.

Keat's house.

This house is filled with quiet breathing.

Most of the light is blocked out by wind-down shutters; maps and propaganda posters visible by the workings of a desk lamp.
I wish I could stifle my coughing.

The bed is twice as large as my own, which is convenient in the off chance that it'll be inhabited by two people. Two sleepy people. Drowzy. Dozey. Dopey, as you like to say it. Breath.

Your hands are routinely cold from the bathroom, and my skin boils under the covers while I wait for you. You slip in and off, hands around my waist and lips against my back. Breath. Breath.

You draw in deep the scent of my hair: "to make sure it's not an impostor", you say, "you have a Sally smell". The idea of even having a Sally smell makes me nervous beyond repair. Don't forget to breathe. Breath. Breath. Breath.

I like run my fingernails along your back. It's all those noises you make. Small, satisfied, almost triumphant. And you twist, and you bend, and you shudder at this movement. At the drag of a fingernail, well positioned. You bite your lip. You stop. Stare. Kiss. Mumble sweet words. And we breathe. Quiet breathing.

Breath. Breath. Breath. Breath.
Snore.

Wattle Season

I'm starting to feel the heart-rising-in-my-throat queasiness again. I feel tired, but it's a satisfied tired. A tired that has some purpose to it.

When I walk along roads now, I count the wattle trees. I hope to grow older. I listen to your quiet breathing and avoid Keats for the sake of minimizing unneeded cliches. It's the small sounds you make in the dark: the yawns and the groans and the side comments on civil wars. They fill the space. Sometimes it makes it easier to sleep. Sometimes it makes me restless.

Moon-town maker.

Moon-town maker.

I hope you know that since you've been gone, I have seen six incidents of highway roadkill. I've almost been in two car accidents. Only one of them was my fault.
I've cried a little and I've sneezed alot.
Things have been building up.
Building up like skyscrapers.
Overpopulated cityscapes. Where the hustle is barely distinguishable from the bustle, but nobody gives two fucks about it anyway because they're too busy with their noses in their newspapers, or drinking their mandatory coffee, tapping away on their Apple branded anythings. God, I hate Apple Macs.
Now, you're just a lightswitch in a Dulwich Hill apartment block. Things were just so busy and you gave them so much light. And then,

you just went out.

How amazing it is to be anything at all. Perhaps I need to forget it all, and just be.

Re-arranging Wordsworth: The Ruined Cottage (Tuesday)

'Twas summer and the sun was mounted high.
Pleasant to him who on the soft cool moss
Extends his careless limbs beside the root
Of some huge oak whose aged branches make
A twilight of their own, a dewy shade
Where the wren warbles while the dreaming man,
Half-conscious of that soothing melody,
With side-long eye looks out upon the scene,
By those impending branches made more soft,
More soft and distant. Other lot was mine.

I found a ruined house, four naked walls
That stared upon eachother. I looked round
And near the door I saw an aged Man,
Alone, and stretched upon the cottage bench;
With instaneous joy I recognised
That pride of nature and of lowly life,
That venerable Armytage, a friend
As dear to me as is the setting sun.
The old Man said, "I see around me here
Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him or is changed, and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left.

Why should a tear be in an old man's eye?
Why should we thus with an untoward mind
And in the weakness of humanity
From natural wisdom turn our hearts away,
To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears,
And feeding on disquiet thus disturb
The calm of Nature with our restless thoughts?"

Wordsworth, W. 1799.

Family ties.

There is a history of tragic death, you know. It's in our blood. Blood and water and falling. Adam fell, from very high. A story for every year he lived. My great, great grandmother strung herself from a bridge, swaying and feet kissing the waters surface: for her husband, for her children. My great uncle an imitation of Tolkien: a Drogo like drowning on a summer trip. Uncle Jack had nerves from the war, a gunner in a fighter plane: he drowned too. Some say he threw himself out.

Hitting the big one.

I know that a summer-boy will come along; he'll thaw my limbs and melt me sober. Sweep up the woods that are slowly edging toward my battlements. The leaves will turn from crunching to a softness underfoot and the autumn change will fade. Spring will bring with it the smell of winds from high seas, the late afternoon dinner preparations and a lakeside of freshly mown grass.

We'll jump fences and fish from jetties owned by vacationing locals and we'll pool our money in for a dinner of hot chips and a couple of $2 lotto tickets to try and hit the big one. (Your Aunt Margey won the big one off the scratchies you got her as a birthday present. The Christmas turkey that year was something else; nothing like the normal Ingham in-the-box business we had previously.)

The local kids'll ride their bikes around the carpark and press for false land rights over the swing sets we've laid claim to. And the sun will be the greatest wingman I'd ever had.

Afternoon Coffee

The trees in the front of my house are diseased. Bare from winter urges, they show off their limbs: marked with green and grey. Reaching out for something that they can't quite find yet. Having trouble dismissing. And as they make their advances, hands groping for something high up in the air, they are met by the cool touch of the rain. It's taken its time. Mustered its courage. Rallied its troops in thick cloud banks and paraded down to my doorstep. It sweeps over it's targets, blanket-like layers of water creating disturbance over the radio: "It's a treacherous, treacherous afternoon. Stay indoors! There are power-lines down and..." Thank you ABC radio. I've taken your advice and not left the house, whether that was your intended message or no. There is not much for me out there. I need a bit of paper. A chewed pen. A coffee. And just little more time to rest the green and grey of my insides.

Underhill.

There's a man that I met, you'll hear of him soon. And he's filled with the Black Snake Moan. And from his beard, and his scowl to his shiny, pointy boots, he is a shakin' with the blues. The dust makes its home in his bones. Filling him up, slowly. But surely.

I'm sorry that I can't fill that void for you.

I slept on your shoulder from Central to Penrith today. I don't even remember blacking out. I must have really needed it. Whether 'it' indicates sleep, or you, I'm not even sure. Even though I wrote the sentence. I'll leave it open to interpretation. A post modernist approach. I believe they've dubbed it the 'death of the author'. You can do what you want with my words, that I painstakingly write, and criticise that in which I did not intend. Perhaps it's for the best.

Things that I have not intended have made me happier. I did not intend meeting Mia. I did not intend on joining Mike White's group. I didn't intend befriending Bec and you were the greatest unintended event I have ever stumbled into. I think. It's hard to know yet. All I do know is you make me happy. Your shoulder is comfortable. And I am content.

Coastal Landing

I'm hanging on the edge of my seat. Perched. Listening hard. Waiting for something to break the silence. For words, that I've been waiting to hear. It feels like I'm underwater. All this content is washing over me. My ears are plugged, my brain waterlogged , and it hurts to open my eyes. So I stumble blindly forward with my hands, reaching out for anything, hoping that I'll make it to the surface and I can see land. End up washed up on some beach. With my fingers crossed that I'm on the sands of Hawaii instead of the stones of Southern England.

And still I wait. Wondering whether I should dive in and open my eyes, or swim to unknown coasts.

I'm trying so very hard to be all those girls you loved before me.

Murphy's Glen.

And you told me I was beautiful, in the dark that night. I asked how you could be certain, and you remarked that my "silhouette was enough". And in the dark that night, it was cold and it was hot in our everythings and nothings and the rain disguised the summer's night we had created in our beds.

SUPRISE

I found you, out here in the nothing. I found you. You didn't expect this at all; didn't expect me. Did you?

Life is good.