Death Metal Yaris

Death metal Yaris

Being obnoxious as it pulls away

From the curb of the Parramatta RSL

Squeaking as it accelerates

Dropping behind most of the traffic

As it pulls along Church street    .

Someone pulls out Busta Rhymes

And I begin to feel exceeding white

We're on our way to the Hills

Past Jimmy's kebabs

[where his Dad took us for chips once]

Past lots of construction fences

["nothing can get colder than... 

hydrogen is probably only just frozen at zero kelvin... 

nothing is greater than all of... "]

Past Holy Trinity Anglican Church

And the Bull & Bush

Where I saw that band who had

A drummer that played

For three songs only.

I feel that I am spinning faster.

Spreading roots beneath my feet

In all directions.

Grasping at fortitude and 

Hoping that I find worms.

There is nothing left to see here, boys.

We shall fight them on the beaches,

We shall die out on the sand,

We'll aspire to big smoke,

Take pictures with the man.

And we'll call out for equality,

And they'll call back you are white,

And I don't know if they're talking bout

my flag, or skin, or fright.

And he'll say:

"There is nothing left to see here, boys,

There is nothing left to see:

We are young, and we are taught,

and we are read, and we are free."

We are holding out on someone

But they're somewhere out at sea

And we'll all march on blindly

Under mediocrity.

So mister minister of the ministry of women,

Can I hear your last decision without an editor's incision?

I'd hope that I'd get paid the same if I were a politician,

Or perhaps a business woman striving for a big promotion.

What I don't understand is no wave of a commotion,

Have you satisfied our hearts with your two daughters as your token?

Are you scared

We'll stand up?

In public?

On podiums?

On television?

And you'll say:

"There's nothing left to see here,boys,

There is nothing left to see.

They don't need the right to marry,

It's not like it's a universal plea."

I know I don't have the right papers,

But you can tell that I'm in need,

And you'll create an iron fortress

Around the country's corporate greed. 

But you insist: 

There's nothing, boys,

There's nothing, gentlemen,

There's nothing left to see.

Dream

And I can't get it out of my head, even though it's in my brain's created voice that doesn't quite sound like yours. You're screaming "You're a liar, you're a liar" at yourself to no one, but I think I can see who you're talking to.

And how your eyes bulged when you realised I was still there, you'd think I was a piece of meat. Or a car crash. How you looked like Nathan.

The cicadas have dulled over this short Spring. At first it was so loud, I'd wake up to their raving, I'd see them scattered all over the place. Numerous times did I have legs, wings and crazed eyes smack into my face. Yet recently, I can't hear them over my head phone. I see them, legs twitching, belly up on my parents driveway. Throwing them out with the water used to clean cars, drowned and floating in the soap suds. There is no amount of cleaning I can do to erase the thought.

I just want to hide in the sky, with all the breathing, living cicadas. But I feel I'm belly up. I don't wanna be belly up.

I feel overwhelmed.

I just need to swallow.

Pie counter dog man.

This evening I served a man so drunk, he had to hold onto the counter as he attempted to speak (he swayed so violently that I began to feel queasy myself). He pulled a sticky ten dollar note from his pocket and bought a melted Cornetto (our freezer is broken) and a pie. He then proceeded to unwrap his pie on the counter, dropping the wrapping on the floor. His next request was tomato sauce. I think. Anyway, I gave it to him. He dispensed it onto one finger, and proceeded to smear it on what he intended to be the top of the pie. In reality, it crossed into the realms of mostly the sides of the pastry and on the bench itself. He leaned toward the bench as if he was going to be sick, asked for me to call a cab, and with my back turned, began eating the pie (like a rabid dog) without the use of hands from the counter. As I turned around, his dentures promptly fell out and he stuffed them, uncased into his dirty, sticky top pocket. 

He spent the next three minutes scooping his pie from the bench, ambling to the door and being sick into the front garden.

We shall fight them on the beaches.

I am not going to lie to you,

or to anyone.

I am scared.

I am glad that I do not have asthma.

My car is loaded with instruments,

jewellry, photographs and my mother's wedding dress.

I have a gut feeling.

And it's making me feel ill.

I can't concentrate. 

I am standing on a death trap and we will not close.

We will go down fighting in the end. 

My boss is Winston Churchill and I have never resented the Commonwealth more.

"Get your British Petroleum here!"

I feel as if every bird has flown,

all the trucks have gone,

and I am standing alone,

behind the counter,

waiting for the heat to set in.

The Big Smoke.

At the beginning of this evening, I would have told you that the feeling that was consuming me was 'displacement'. That I was waiting for this fire to whirl up around me and make all the things I hold with determinedly rigid hands crumble. My dad has told me that the house is a death trap. My mother is sending me messages from South America, asking me to locate pearls, and tax documents, and that photo of Uncle Peter that made him look really well just before he carked it. You'd find me sitting on the leather couch of a friend's lounge room (I board here permanently, but home is just not a word I can use), and a blaring of orc-slaying and Sean Bean death scenes provided little distraction. The street lights brightened the outside so you could mistake it for mid afternoon, trapping the light in with the smoke. I haven't seen stars in four days.

I received a message from a friend who asked me how I was. And not the 'Hi, Good Evening and Welcome to Kmart Katoomba, we are making the evening announcement that our store is preparing to close in ten minutes time. Come to the register late, and I won't even make eye-contact with you when I ask you how YOU are.' He sent me an email, and retreated into the darkness of wherever he stays now (I assume it's dark, as there would be nothing to trap in the lights down there in the city). And the big smoke doesn't seem so dense, but I still have all the light.

Snapshot.

I am currently sitting at the computer in my parents house listening to hardstyle and cicadas. My shin is itchy but I am attempting not to scratch it. I have particularly weak willpower. I am planning possible Korean food for dinner. I am staring at a man's face who says he's from Austin, and says that he knows famous people, but I am unsure whether to believe him. There is a cheese knife, a broken phone and a canvas of Nixon & Churchill's faces next to me as I type. British history and dreams of someone making tea for me.

Vast Differences Between Fingernails And Toenails

There are vast differences between my fingernails and toe nails, and I feel that it boils down much more to exposure than biology. I have small feet, that are broader than usual, with toes that look like people cueing at an airport in summer. There is a large man at the counter (the big toe) and he is sweating through his business suit, and it's making the tall, occasional tennis player behind him uncomfortable. That is why there is a gap between them. Third and fourth in line are a couple- two lesbians about to go on holiday. One jutts her head out of line, ponytail swinging to assess the hold up (the fourth toe). At the back, resting on this nosey woman for support, (a prearranged agreement, don't you worry) is a leathery old woman.  

My feet spend most days seeing the same pictures in my shoes, house, garden and shower. So they reinvented themselves. My fingernails have got it pretty good.

Stakeout

It seems after, all this time, I have forgotten to write about them. The two that sit in the car outside the LPG vault, that shudders and creaks when gas needs to be syphoned through big pipes into hungry motor-vehicles. They sit in their gold car. Gold that is faded, but not as if of former glory, but as if a cheap spectacle that has rubbed off quickly and leaves residue on your thumb. They sit in their car, and do not speak. A man, and a woman. One Caucasian male, with short greying hair, perfect teeth, with smallish features. One Asian woman, little English, probably 50, probably lonely, no rings, no jewellery, says that the guy in the car is "her friend". Both short. Both spectacled. Both slow speaking, but only ever enter the shop alone. No sudden movements. Everything is like slow breathing to them.

[Not quiet breathing though. That was a long time ago. That was someone else. We don't talk about those breaths. They make my heart heavy, and my body finds no way to replicate that solace in adulthood.]

When they sit out the front of the gas tank, I lock my console door, and turn the automatic doors to exit only. I try and look for knives, or guns, or lipstick marks on cheeks. Anything with motive. Anything for hints. They sit there, and they do not speak, and they watch me through the window. As if a stakeout, where the suspect knows he's being monitored but cannot move in case of possible arrest or incarceration. My boss says "People like those are the ones that abduct people in America. You know, real weirdos. We don't get lots o' that 'round here." He asked them to leave once, and not come back. Said we'd call the police if they did. They disappeared for a while, but now they're back. Smoking. Eating icecream. Bottles and bottles of water. Not speaking.

Duckeye Draws Blood

I'm pretty sure

I just put my hand in blood

on the bottom of the soap dispenser 

at the Gladstone Hotel.

The feedback filling the building,

piercing the usually muffling quality of bathroom retreats.

A bunch of men

on a shitty stage out there

are screaming about ballsacks.

I really need more soap.

Emotive Memory

Most musicians have an extended metaphor that they continue to fall back on that runs as a link and works as a humanizer between their albums. Conor Oberst has his Yellow Bird, and Lorde has her thrones. Jamie T doesn't have a single song without the word trouble, or at least one of its many synonyms. I am trying to place my metaphor so that I have something to fall back on. Two years ago, I would have said that it would be to do with the action of swallowing: a stifling of swells of emotion, or a method for the ease of absorbing information. In my head I dream of houses. But they are never mine. I write of roots to ground me. But the ground is not mine. Nor is all that I touch, or see. Perhaps I lack the possessive nature that comes with music. I like to observe, as if a writer taking note to preserve emotive memory. Emotive memory finds its life in many funny and distinctive ways. My eyes are attempting to shut as I type this. I will draw on some emotive memory of today: The heat that was making me pace, and want to melt at the same time. Trees that smell like sperm during Spring. We Have Always Lived In The Castle. French Onion Soup/Sour Cream/Cracked Pepper Watercrackers. $4.95 and the change I had in my pocket. "Please, pay me tomorrow. Please. Please." Paddling pools next to the bowling club. Note. Wine, Noodles, and Vampire Sex. Oliver growing up to quickly, and they don't even know me. They don't even know me.

Teeth are bared to assert authority, but also, to guard the tongue and the throat. I am angry because I need to shake this out of me. Shake everything out. Even if it's not the reason I am angry. Phones break. Sometimes I just need to be reminded of fragility.

Both Hands

Sometimes I feel as if we're holding our fight out 'till someone has something real to say. The piano made me say that. The piano makes things shift and I can see things more clearly as if I had a fully body grand infront of me and now I have only its strings. Like I've pulled the thing apart, to know how it works and I'm waiting for my brain to switch from hearing the music to only hearing beaters upon strings. When I am in deep concentration, I either have my brow furrowed or my mouth hangs open letting everyone see my crossbite and lack of wisdom teeth. Instead of concentrating, I am going to talk it through because the only words I could find in myself to sing this evening were 'I'm holding my fight out, I'm holding my fight out with both hands.'

Teeth.

There is an Aboriginal man

that comes into the store

and smiles so widely 

I can see all of his teeth.

He calls out to me, 

6 ft away,

"Sis! I haven't seen you in ages!"

and I reply,

"Bro, it's been a week!

Just a week, you drongo!"

And he laughs, 

and laughs.

Townsville

And I can't remove

this nervous energy

that swept over me like nightfall does:

gradually shifting, like all

my colours were blending,

and darkening, 

and the stars came out in brilliant form

(like they did on New Years)

(and frankly, as they do every other night)

and I couldn't unsee you.

Your expression never changed. 

Scott says your insides have, though. 

Bats

I am petrified of the sound that escalators make at night. It's as if I'm in a dark cave. Filled with bats. And all of them are discussing my presence. It's cold and my way out is delayed. My guide is preoccupied and the mode of transport, delayed.

Bed.

(Acutely aware)
This is a long train journey
Reading about 'Nazi book-burnings'
And solving newspaper puzzles over a lady's shoulder

Quietly

Orange street lamps and cracked pavement
Are the only things that keep us together.

It's all staggered, this journey, as they bring in new stop signs, new moments, new punctuational errors in notices and announcements. The mountain has grown larger during the week I have been absent, and in the night it yawns a blackness to swallow me: promising the shuffling of trees feet in its depths. I do not feel home anymore. I feel displaced. August brings a wind to answer home's question, home wandering haphazardly in and out place: "Where am I? Is anybody there?"

The wind replies, "You're where the beds are free, my dear. Nothing here can hurt you."

Upsidedownspacevirus.

My night has been filled with caffeine, potassium and nicotine. There are too many people stopping to use the bathroom. I have to constantly check it for vomit, as there is a weird smell coming from around the corner that I am yet to locate. I am waiting on a phone call. Almost anxious. My hands fumble with my phone as I slide it around my pocket. Tonight there was a sky big enough to swallow everything whole and I could see all of it. The clouds have nestled in to the mountain's toes and skirted around the rounds of tree trunks to find resting places near their roots. Nothing obscures the sky, and she shows me stars that I can't recall but I'm sure I've met before. I imagine that Vertigo has taken on humanity as a zombie-like virus (contracted from cleaning that fucking bathroom, I'm sure) and it has flipped my view of the world upside down. The sky is a sea and I'm cannon-balling head first into a dark blue of obscured truths. [Obscured truths in a way that these truths are known to someone, but that someone is not me, and I have yet to meet them, or ask such detailed questions.] But because it is space, I am falling, and falling still, and I crash toward space and wonder when the quiet starts. They say that there is only quiet in space. That's how I know I'm not there yet.


The phone call I took directly after this moment hand very little to do with space, or quiet. But I'm glad that's the case. I couldn't have heard many long distant, crackling reassurances and devotions in space. I'm glad I'm not there just yet.

Crazy, Wild, Sober-minded Things: like reading, and running up mountains. like not coming home for dinner, and finding dancing men with kittens in their pockets at festivals. like changing grammar structures, and hoping and

Dingy Service Station.

When I was 19,
I worked in this
terribly dingy service station.
It was open all through the night,
and drunks would flock to it at 1am,
when the trains stopped running
and they would buy
all manner of
hot bakery goods,
to sober them up
(i think, at least)
enough to handle the sway of the taxi cabs
in and out of deserted lanes.

I could barely take a breath
between the drunks
and the smokers
and the tourists
and the tattooed
and the gold-toothed, (possibly) dealers
who would show up with wads
of fifty dollar notes
and the next day beg
for a loan of five dollars for milk.

"Where'd it all go?"
I'd wonder.

Winter in the early hours.

This evening, or perhaps it is early morning now (I had no clocks to consult and the moon is obscured through the window), I have been reaching for the stars as if they would allow my fingers to scrape their toes. All my wanting, it seems, is unattainable and obscured by a vast distance. It's as if you leave kisses of orange light to remind me of you in the skyline. They don't ever disappear fully. Not even in the dead of night. The night's fingers drag long nails down my shoulders, red marks stretching to the small of my back, soothing me to sleep in your absence. I've left the heater on. The gum trees wave like they have secrets to tell, but whisper amongst themselves, dragging long, chattering tongues against the iron of my roof. And the creaking of the walls calls out to me, warning me against their idle gossip. The stirring structure purrs of it's stability, and speaks a few audible words within its ache: "Walls only ever move in close enough to hold you."

Vince.

Vince bought a pie
and shuffled off home
(not telling anyone)
only having brief conversation with
the girl that worked at the service station.
She had pretty eyes.
"It'll get you in trouble, one day"
he said to her,
as if knowing all too well.
He went home
and wrote her a poem
on the napkin she gave him for the pie.
It was about knocking, and his name:
Vincent.
showing
feeling
hoping
Putting it in a draw with all the other napkins,
he turned off the light,
and smeared sauce on his pie
in the dark.

Greying, but not balding.

This place is full
of sweet Italian men
greying,
but not balding,
who wink with their exchanges.

They smile as if
"delighted"
to be paying 149.9
for their non-ethanol fuel
and amble off,
unperturbed by disatisfied wives,
unaided,
homeward.

City Lights

I can see your house from here. It's a little orange light amongst thousands of others, but I'm pretty sure it's yours.

I wrote this two autumns ago.

I love dwarves.
They seem ever so
sure of themselves.
They can feel the earth's rumble.
Hear it's heart beat.
As it tears itself.
Mends itself.
And waits.

Terraforming

Terraforming is a word that always becomes confused in my brain as two separate ideas. The dictionary identified idea of terraforming is the shifting and shaping of other moons or planets to make it suitable for future human dwellers: modifying it's atmosphere, ecology and temperature to recreate an Earth-like biosphere. Most people would think of it as a copy and paste function. There are the people that imagine terraforming to be a gradual shift toward a greater more adaptable society. That environments aren't being destroyed or conquered, but teased, and persuaded and accelerated into a brighter, more diverse and adaptable ecological vantage point. Then there are people who think of it more like Delete and Place in Trash. Where one man in a grey suit sits behind a dusty 1980s Mac (because it's retro and he's hip and young and alone and needs to prove himself as he has anxiety issues about the suit which may be the wrong shade and that his mother keeps calling him in public places and why he hasn't had a date in six months and why he hasn't met a girl he's liked since 12th grade where he caught Mandy kissing Tom behind the bushes of his house, "OH WHY? WHY ME" he thinks as boots up his computer) and presses a button and it deletes a section of the planet he didn't like. How very meta of him. It's this view that lays blame easily.

Sometimes I think of terraforming like a shadow that looms over a new project and makes you feel uneasy and sweaty and creates a racing thought process to whether you applied enough, if any, deodorant that day. Perhaps I should have stayed sitting at the bottom of that shower, watching the water circle into the drain. At least it can see it's final destination. The shower's glass has fogged up. All I can see is my knees, and I have a strong suspicion that the water will turn cold soon.

Red shoes.

And tonight I had
the strangest dream.
There was nothing
up ahead
but the big blue sky,
that stretched and
collided into every direction.
And you were there,
And you,
And you..

Coveted.

I have this overwhelming desire to be coveted. And I know it's gonna get me in real deep trouble. I can feel it in the carriage shakes, and the flickerings of the Penrith street lamps.

Vogue

My Nana was a model
for Vogue, or similar.
Courted by rich Charlie Evans,
but married lucky Bruce
after the war.
Her brother Jack had the shakes
and she lived in a two bedroom house
with Bruce,
and her two daughters,
and her five sons,
and their dog, KB.
They lived on scratchings,
and piled into the family van,
and had enough members for a family team
of anything.

She potters 'round now, in a house with more bedrooms than before, and seven less companions. She still looks great from every angle.

Mother May

Voice filling rooms,
Hands snuffing lights,
Laughter, bouncing and
Eyes smiling:
My mother is a sun
that refuses to set.

She wakes us, in new places.
Always on time.
Ready for adventure.

Lipton Iced Tea.

This peach iced tea* is
making me forget the bruise
that is slowly blooming on
my bottom lip.
*[Lipton.]
You bite my lip to keep my attention.
Or is it to remind you
that I am still solid?
Either way,
the flavour fills your absence,
and the tenderness makes me turn
(on my heel)
and run back to you.

I never found your god.

It is the early hours of the morning and I have remembered that I am godless.

---

I remember days in a tin ship that you and I went exploring, through Blackheath, and secret lookouts in Katoomba. You dug your worn fingers into grooves of rock faces and climbed all over the goddamn place. Pulled yourself close, and held on for dear life to those products of nature's wearing. A gift from your god, you'd probably think to yourself, as you'd grasp at a new hold. I would always wonder, "a hold on what?" I would search the stone cliffs at our horizons and find beauty in the moment. You'd find it in the material.

I don't exactly remember the moment I began to carve you from the marble. I chiseled to find the refined jaw, and admirable features. I carved you as my David. I built your plinth and excavated the floor from under you, flinging myself to my knees at the bottom. All I saw was the light, and all I felt was cold stone. You said I was godless. Your Delilah. No intent toward a god filled life. I believe those were the words. I cut from you, your strength. You could never have been more wrong. I just never found your god.

---

I now find myself comfortable in my agnosticism.

amongst the thousands

I wish to be astounding.
The brightest star
amongst the thousands.
Alive in my well wishes,
my sympathies,
my congratulations.
Little fingers would point
into the black
at the light
and ask: [with a whisper]

"Who is she?"

And their fathers will reply,
children high on their shoulders

"She? She is astounding."

Please

hold onto my words
when I am tired.
they slip from my mouth:
and if you don't keep them,
I don't know where
they would go.

"home," you would expect,
but I wouldn't think
to look there.

Into the city, I run.

Women don't love, they just try to be fair,
And the ladies will pick you apart:
It's the girls that you need
With their tangible hearts
Who'll run to you, no matter where.


Into the city, I run.

Lull

If you were here to guide me into a warm sleep, I'd hold you very tightly. Hands softening the stresses in your neck. Toes curling, reaching for yours, but falling short to gently stroke your shins. But for the main event:

My lips rest against your cheek. Slightly parted. Warm breath. Keeping pace with your heart beat. At first staggered.
And then slowly.
[Slowly.]

Steady. Like a soldiers drum.

I wish I was a snake.

Beneath sheets, I bare
no arms,
no intent,
only a limp acceptance of the days
movements, and skin.

Freckles dot my shoulders,
more recently exposed to what was arguably 'summer',
and the bruises that bloom on my thighs from work are
worn as yellowing trophies for
"Most Improved" and "Team Player of the Year".

I wish I was a snake.
Belly flat and slithering,
and shedding, never old.

Out into your peripheries.

You are, you are the sleep that holds me
tightly to my bed as my limbs are longing to wander.
And you can't hear me through the bad reception
But my voice is tremblin', full of wanting.

"Honey, can't you see out into your peripheries,
that it ain't just you and me now, it ain't just you and me:

Do you hear the sound? Hear the sound? Of the sea?"


CAN YOU FEEL IT ALL?

These are clumsy words.

I will find all my pieces
locked inside the gifts I have given
as I have aged.
Everything you take from me,
shows me I am more whole than

ever before.

English, Texts and Writing at UWS

It seems that the argument is the main event. We need to show that the tone of voice you're yelling in, and the grammar of your speech are the clinching features. The medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan. The form is the creation. A frustrated Mr Conti tries to explain the foundation of Romantic debates in regard to Rousseau and the anti-transcendency that formed modernism. Words are exchanged like "dynamism" and "rapid change". But it washes over my head like the steady weather change that is consuming my home town as they speak.

They claim "WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY - their stupidity, animalism and dreams." But what of this unconsciousness? The mind numb I feel brings no enlightenment like it had intended to inspire. And what of dreams?

Yesterday - Now

Yesterday

I have this unshakeable sadness. I can feel it welling up in my head and spilling out into my insides, dribbling into and filling my limbs.

This morning

I am in the deli, our only deli, and my coffee tastes more bitter than normal. I find this extremely satisfying. I have begun to enjoy bitter things. Sour. Tart. I need things that assault the senses because I'm afraid that I won't feel anything at all if I go back to the regular. That I've dulled my capabilities. Sensibilities. Senses. I have hot, cold and bitter. And tired, so very tired.

Now

Two phone calls and now I'm hurtling through slow motion. I'm ready.

On a train from Parramatta station

Join me on a train to Wentworth Falls station every time you feel smaller than you are, and I will find a way to fill you up with what you need. Nothing more.
-
Lurching forward into the dark, under stars I could see if I squint harder, I can hardly sleep for thought of you.

Eating

My friends tend to think that I'm a small eater. That I'm finnicky. Well, here's the truth of it: I'm terrible at eating. In public. With people. Nothing terrifies me more than the concept of a dinner with a boyfriends family. I can do pleasant conversation. Heck, I can even do extended outdoor activity. Movies are a breeze. But dinner? Gives me the willies. Everybody watches you eat. I'll drop my food. Make the wrong order. People raise eyebrows at my weird allergies. I'm much better with a piece of toast and a glass of water, thankyou.

Hathaway.

I dreamt that god would be forgiving.
You know what, Anne Hathaway? God isn't forgiving. But I am, SO COME HERE YOU BIG LUG. Mwaaaa.