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."