death of a brakeman.

nicole whitelaw.

He had to get back to trainee nurse xx's adventures at the royal hospital for romantic diseases.



when he looked up, he saw an expression of pure absorbed joy and luxury had come over the boys face at something in the book. D looked away hurriedly.

if wash jones were more like sutpen, he coulda got his own back at sutpen
by planning ahead to have one of his nameless brute descendants
sign on to work with the West Virginia Mountaintop Mining project
And thereby literally undermine Sutpen, symbolically,
at his very foundations.
Such that 2000 years from now
Thomas Sutpen whom Faulkner's novel addresses
Will have sprung out of a black hole.

He tripped by chance the hidden wires of her anxiety.

The aeroplane shook hard, and the calm blue announcement came that the oxygen masks would be dropping, but when they dropped they were plaster death masks, each slung on a calm clear noose.

A calm noose of airpipe.

in pursuit of mythic sustenance

her telescopic spear

stabbing the hot hearts of

the wildebeest whales

drenched, dead reckoning

murder. murder and loss.

Adam realised late in the day that what felt like a thorn in his side was only the hatching open of his incubated rib.

hollow, caustic

holler, costly


hallo, cast


horror cost.

she ladders and asps
she ladders and asps
for hours she ladders and asps


she snakes on down to him
her viper eyes vituperant
her wild smiling snaking



onto him.
she lathers he gasps
she lathers he gasps
he riddles her slitherwriggling
organism. organist.

"I will not be made responsible for any injuries resulting from my beauty."

He laughed. "All right."

She studied his throckmorton.

"I mean it," she hissed. But she was smiling.

on pigment beach
on a sun-gulled day
watching the light's glut glutinate
on wheaten waves

i approach the sea
i feel the sea
its sunlit icesharp stun

the air above the water below
the air above the water below
the air at eye level
the water.
the water above the water below.
the water above, the water above.

the drowning.

i was told the deepest mountains have their base in the deep sea floor:
kilometres of dead rock
drowned
kilowatt hours of dry sunlight
up above

up above the water which runs up above
the water which flows up above the water

which waves up above the drowned.

from wuthering heights to withering depths

cracking the oyster's world

he was the world's oyster, the oyster's pearl

guzzled in salt, grizzled in the drift.

i have forgotten how to salt breezes.

i have forgotten to let kathy in.

i am the mobled queen! the mobled queen

is good. we all are good.

is the gleam of breathless eyes
the sightless cry of chance?

that one eye
the soul's wet cloaca.


i want to grow a second row of teeth, and a second row of eyelashes, like a glamazon-river shark.

We emerge from love, gelatin-silver luminous.

her yellow cough.

I am Adam's Eden leaf, censorious

Or a widow, my censorious sensorium

Empty of the light of life, the lux of lust...

I am there all the time without me

Which means flesh.

I am often asked if there is a 'good' screen
version of MD. I say "no." I would love to make one. Stylistically, it
would have to take some queues from Winterbottom (in 'Tristram Shandy'
mode), Sally Potter, Greenaway, and the guy who attempted the b/w film
of Ulysses. And it would be FUNNY and make creative use of voice-over,
montage and cutaway.

the jekkyl breeze hydens into a gust.

exquisite little distinctions between nuanced moods.

I've been reading "the wings of the dove."

sad with sadness

tired with tiredness

the yearnverbs flat

collapsing

into adjectives

sad adjectives

sad, sad adjectives

trailing their adverbs, sadly.

his wordhammer shattering / her petroglyph

the day will come
at a loss in the nude fog
and soon the sun will start
the starving light will feed in the thick trees
glistening

The fanged wind snaps in, lassing.

The mix and match and lips the pick and mix kisses

The green lips of the spun bottle spitting the foamdregs.

Throughout primary school and then high school she'd had to hide this terrible secret of her brilliance, which lurked behind her eyes like a ghastly deep-sea fish, horribly luminous. She was constantly afraid someone would see it, anxious it should never surface, lest the bends should explode it into light.

i am understudy to a tired organ-grinder.

* *

I was fifteen when my seventeen-year-old sister Kaitlyn had her baby. I was sixteen when she and my brother Josh moved to Victoria.

I remember her lying in the ward bed, the thin blue hospital sheet up over her loose form, her eyes down in the baby's face. She looked deep in the baby's face and then she looked up at me and said, "Mickey, he looks just like you." Josh and I went over and looked down into the clenched little face. He did look just like me. Josh grinned.

It was my sixteenth birthday when I learned who the father was. I remember Josh standing over by the kitchen window at my grandma's, the curtain lace pattern cast on his cheek like gold stubble by the sunset. The small fluro over the cooker was flickering. Apart from that it was dim.

The aporetics of travel.
Elizabeth Bishop; the touristic world is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”

Even as I type he is cockoo-cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo-crroo-crroo-crrooooooing AND my dream was full of pigeons, and also baby corellas that you and I were feeding microwaved broccoli, while we were AT the Brighton pavilion Prince Regent residence which, bizarrely, had Town Hall station mall and woolworths built on top of it, AND an old apartment by the woolworths where our mother was moving in with reeeeece and a gay couple - one of whom was young and clever but ugly - the older one of whom was better looking but moronic - and reeeeece was being strangely nasty about it.

Indeed, every night this week I have had a dream where you and I are in some strange place together playing with animals. Ask me about my octopus epic next time we speak. KRAAAAKEN! Actualyl, I don't remember that dream enoguh well enough to tell you by now I don't think but it was amazing. We were in the Hamilton hills, run through with motorways that cloverleafed through them, and the whole things had a sortof perspex roof over them because the rest of the universe had been filled up with water - the whole universe! - like some massive deep sea aquarium - and two things that were swimming RIGHT over our heads while we were running trying to get somewhere fast trying to dodge the cars, were a BLUE WHALE and the BIGGEST OCTOPUS EVER, like insane, like the size of a football field, swirling and curling itself, amazing fluid movement, sweeping right over us like a storm, coloured this deep blue with these darker pink spots down its legs, and then when it came right over us, swirling and dilating, we could see up its black hole, and that was when we realised that the octopus was the soul of the whale we had just seen.
SO strange!!!! and meanwhile there we were in these grassy hills - that looked like banks of seawweed under the perspex dome-ing - and yet the roads, the roads!
which, incidentally, were marked just like our old Lego ones - the same road markings.
xxx
Sappy
PS - incidentally - we thought that the whale had its penis out - hard to work out.
= =
Every night this week I have had a dream where Kit and I are in some strange place together playing with animals. The one the other night was amazing. We were in the Hamilton hills, run through with motorways that cloverleafed through them, BUT the whole area had a sort of perspex roofing over it because the *rest of the universe* had been filled up with water - the whole universe! - like some massive deep sea aquarium - so we were under the perspex that held the water above - and amongst the many mysteries of the water held just aloft, two things that were swimming RIGHT over our heads while we were running trying to get somewhere fast trying to dodge the cars, were a BLUE WHALE and the BIGGEST OCTOPUS EVER, like insane, like the size of a football field, swirling and curling itself, amazing fluid movement, sweeping right over us like a storm, coloured this deep blue with these darker pink spots down its legs, and then when it came right over us, swirling and dilating, we could see up its black hole, and that was when we realised that the octopus was the soul of the whale we had just seen.
SO strange!!!! and meanwhile there we were in these grassy hills - that looked puny, like banks of seawweed under the perspex dome-ing - and us scuttling like crabs - and yet the roads, the roads!
which, incidentally, were marked just like our old Lego ones - the same road markings.

your violent smile.
toothed with blood.

your violent smile.
toothed with blood.

how she loved him,


her defrosted mammoth


how she wept


when one morning, once more, he froze over.


== ==


how it felt

in the morning when she woke, and

felt the brontasaurus licking her breasts

with that rough rawhide tongue

and that scent of cyclad,

evergreen.


== ==

"A fascinating woman. Nipples the size of dinnerplates. An excellent mathematician."

i will always always always let you lie
my sleeping dogs

While we conflate about this bleating flame
Let us confute, confound
Compound our guilt, with lambent blame,
Rake our ribs. It's not the same

Let us gather round this tawdry flame
And tell sad tales of language acquisition.

Tell, all told, until our simple circuits break
Our soldered sections, crumbling genuflections
(At the heart of every circuit is a crucifix).

Tell, and tell, until our simple hearts break off:
A dot dot dot
A stop stop stop

Oh this gay addiction!
This discontinued continuum
This stopstart flataback
This jumpstart startagain
This jumped-up uppity
Bust dusting of grunt, this grill
Of stitches, steel, and mousse
A vomit laughter.
A puke opera.
The lovesong of windy beaches
Belching bleach.

Such magnificent augmentation!
Magnificat! Magnifico!
Oh, keep me wheeling...

== === ==

For Deremaindered:

I am heavily Catholic.

'Paradise Remaindered' - Nicholas Milton. Distant blood relation - maybe. May as well be. For all we know.

The developing world? The overdeveloped, artificially augmented world, more like.
The only axis of evil I know is the crucifix. Or that little line that strikes through the dollar sign. The cross barring of all open doors. The barring of ways. The gold bars, brick solid, burying all of us alive.

The Chancellor of Brown.

== ==

...there to press
her prescient breasts!

he hated the taste of his tongue.

green dress and catheter.


= = = =

not augur, augmentation. not prophesies, protheses. calendar and calculator. catheter and calibrator.

the fifth plinth

we bore out our hundred days
at the microwave café

coal is at the finest level sunlight
when we let loose aloft.

For Deremainderer:
Ritner - A Protoretrospective.
(Plate I, above): Herculists. Plate II: The Herculisa. Plate XLVII: Herculisa with Green Dog.
A Brief History of Brevity (Complete and Unabridged) [Sequel to 'A Short Guide to Length']
The Scent of the Hypotenuse

Trapp's Last Crêpes = the protagonist, Bruno von Trapp, is referred to throughout solely as 'The Spoonerist'.
(his slysdexia)

the groove vinyl diaries

It was endowed, emboweled with great girth -

to kiss not her but what moved in her and waited, her protoghost -

giusto ciel

we can all dream. i do sometimes. i fantasise about my inner man.

giusto ciel

Inoculate Your God!

if you want abs of steel/ check out my iron lung - here in this prufrock honolulu

the graphic panic. the tragedy of haddock.

== === ==
the wife-twin story:

he'd been acting funny about the lunch since the day she first mentioned it (the twins)

she had spoken to this Nadia over the phone, a few times. A deep, pleasant, motherly voice that suggested an older woman. Probably a handsome woman. The phone itself was four years old, but it had never lost that new smell. The whole office had never lost that new smell, a little like rubber, a little like baby powder.

he returned to the office. he wore that epidural smile. She would not let him pacify her.

== == ==

for the infinite sadness:

NB "smacked up on my side of the glass" to end?

or maybe use the convenience store boy?


== == ==

the list
there is a debility in breath
there is a livery in skin
there is a litany in breasts
there is a library in life
there is a genesis in debt
there is a michaelmas in love -
a reckoning.

*

there is a hunger that is dust
that is not dust
there is a dust that is dust
and is not dust. there is a sheaf of wheat
set in stone and it makes men doubt
shakespeare.
there is a plethora of self-styled bards
their barks worth than biting - their wounds self-inflicted
for art. with a view to art.
which fails as art.
meat is murmur.

== == ==

these slow sheathes
his yelp was urgent, jugular.
he juggled his feelings
pacing, apace
the microwave hummed
he heard the soft egg pop.

her eyes seized on his.
they built on his gaze with gazing.
she saw suddenly how old he was.
she hadn't felt youthful in years but now she felt her heart's green beat, alow, alive, the keen hello of youth and strength.

and there were his poems,
other people's poems hacked and spat out:
you my woman hot. you my woman cold.
you my woman falling down, down and out and old...
he could have been a little more sympatico.

== == == ==

when you pressed my knees
that blue ladder | struggled up my spine with your blind chameleon tongue
eyeing my innards, out. we gouged
love from the black medulla of blent flesh. our eyes
would not admit the sun. i remember whispering
it is late. how did it get so late?
where did the day go?
where did the hours go?
i remember that fuck:
a slow protest, scornless,
not unlike childbirth.



== == ==


why did i dream about him? his hand finding my hand his hand finding my hand his hand it has been so long since i have fallen in love.

== == == ==

He wrote anonymous reviews of his own work.

She put out her hand. "Trudi Naylor."
"Bob Allcock."
"That's a pretty name," she smiled.
Allcock looked stuck. "Thanks."

Then there was his friend, Baxter the Bodice Ripper. Hum hum hum. The bodiceripper came over. He wore his shades inside. He smirked like a player. Parsley hooked around his snaggletooth. She hated him on sight, and new that she would screw him. She felt a strange urge to see his underpants. Once, for revenge, she had sewed a little name tag into the CKs of her ex-boyfriend.

still when the last of love is dashed
there is a litany in skin
and in the blush and flex of limbs
the blunt percussions of blind trunks
the budging bludgeon of bone
and bone
on bone.

in our last deciduous visions
deciduous evergreens
in the vast brush of trees
in the clip of wind
in the wild, fast flush of the spitting breeze
there is an acquisition that is loss
a promotional valediction, hawking mourning.

Hello, how are you? I am writing this killing time at the zoo in the darkness of voodoo light
And I will see you at the zoo, the dead cup full of whooping, the cold zoo
Our bodies full like zoos with jibbering and shrieking and disease
And pacing felines
YES! We are making our brouhaha quietly inside
It's all the rage, it is no scowl, no, it is like whispering dimly "hi" and slipping out
dark as loam. If i were to go softly from this place
To go softly out of this place squeezing shut my eyes til there were no more gaps left open
In my fool heart (a heart ajar) would they observe me?
Instead I will start jumping, whiling my will away
No stars to watch cold through the blue day as I whirl
No stars to open between the leaves, instead
we will be surrounded by little blue gaps, hard leaves of sky pattering
down on us through the canopy as if the wind were an "as if"
as if the the wind were a senseless thing outside of time.

i loved that mouth. i wet it with my joke cold teeth, tongue
dreaming of lethe wharf and queen mab moistening. inside she was as coal.

i was full of impressions - i could not remember if she
were my wife or my sister, that cool dove.

Thickly alive he leaned greasily in the dirty café chair. Wearing the complex bead necklace that looked like a swarm of locusts feeding at his neck. There is time with every piece of writing when it is time to let something *in* he said, though he had not read it, leaning in. Paragraph 3 for example. That was going to be your aleph. But you lost it. *Here.*

From her vacant yet engaging eyes, stilled beams of empty, ossifying light. If only ice could bend. He has a mind to lash out. He feels like a boy in a zoo, at the enclosure of some dull animal, wanting to throw a rock to make it dance.

From her pretty lips, spilled beans.

The hedgehog and the badger lie together, wildernestled.
Restless and passionate stars holepunch the hard hull of night
Exploding in their millions in his head, a wildernest
Her touch nettles through him, in his lungsblood he feels a huge vocabulary of different sighs fight for breathingroom. He can feel it is about to hurt, he can feel so little but he feels above all things this love like mutiny, or the theory of a rebel scientist.

A story, The Million-Dollar Clock. The college. She's just a receptionist. Call her the receptionist. [Write this out, as instruction to reader]. Use the infinite sadness. The dropped plums. The barge of aisles limbs the drained straining of the autopilots, the shoppers, their bulging plastic baskets and emptying eyes and there somewhereelsetobe and the loudspeaker colleague announcements and the two-for-one three-for-two reaching of the toomany women and the sexless men and the tumbling through the fingerdirtof mushrooms for those that frown least. And the baldness of the balding woman on the checkout with the hairnet holding what was left of her hair in place so you had to stare, eyesnared, netted, lost in medical speculation and nameless regret.


On a sudden impulse, taking up the apple:
"Oh, this one is my apple, I bought it in another store." The lie feels right, wild on her tongue. The shop girl hasn't the least interest in suspecting her in this, the pettiest of thefts. She feels the thrill, an airless rising in her chest. She feels the pressure of her bra's underwire gudging into her ribs.


Inside her, he was a speculum, obtrusive. She could not bear the sweaty scrutiny of sex.

The scotch poured in the petal cracked the pot calling the scald scale the rabble the sable scrabble the circus fish with their bright hard mouths the sea mice with their mouthtraps the clowns with their gapemouths
Gary quite contrary how does your garden grow with silver cells and pretty wagers all in columns and rows
Under the river tavern where the death barge bobbed, flippant shiverlets of light
His brackish accent racketed in the dockyard beams.
Outback, the pitched cicadas and the fluent huzz of bees.

A solarium of earthquakes.

new plan...


1) Introduction. Introduce the basic terms of comparison, and give an overview of the dominant historical discourse of each author's period, to suggest what they were writing against.

2) Rather than treating Absalom discretely (perhaps a summation via Forter given intro) move into Absalom and Moby-Dick together, for a comparative treatment. Suggest that we see Melville beginning to use narrative technique 'historiographically', as ideology critique, in ways that would later intensify. Treat the emergence of:
i) discontinuous/multilinear narrative as implied critique of linear progress narrative; calling attention to that which is excluded from the mainstream of historical discourse, and the complex causation or overdetermination of history by a multiplicity of structural factors (versus individual agency or unilinear development).
ii) the use of a submerged or sotto voce narrative undercurrent to suggest the repression of traumatic aspects of history, namely race and labour conflict.
iii) destabilising racial hierarchies, blurring the boundaries of race and class categories, to suggest interdependence, interpenetration, dialectical relationships. Suggest, in concluding this section, the increased pessimism seen in Pierre, as disillusionment set in, and the intensification of racialist thinking in the antebellum decades of debate over slavery.
The above work will be split over three chapters and will mainly focus on MD and Absalom, but will have reference to other Faulkner texts (especially GDM) and will look forward and back to other Melville texts where appropriate to support interpretations offered, or to show further development of an idea offered in MD.

3) Treatment of Benito Cereno in light of the preceding, exploring Melville's more intense focus on the politics of inexpressibility, on race/labour issues, in modelling the thinking of history. Suggest that, by this stage, Melville's resonance with Faulkner is highly visible - attribute this

4) Conclusion, suggesting how the Melville/Faulkner comparison suggests the persistence and pervasiveness of particular American historical problems as ideological contradictions, in that each treats similar problems in similar ways but writing at considerable geogrphical/temporal distance. Summarising my arguments about the movement in Melville's writing, having reference to his continued interest in challenging the American national success story seen in later texts (Confidence Man, Israel Potter), the haitus after CW, and his return to these questions in Billy Budd with even greater subtlety and complexity - contrasting Faulkner's development in the opposite direction (to more straightforward, direct engagement with traumas of Southern history).

Labels: i

nada surf

afx leaving song

him join me in death

sclerotic.


==

The father hopes his son will pre-decease him.

He himself was raised in luxury, slurping at the oystered world. A golden boy, gilt if not gelding.

In dreams he sees the finish line, already spattered with blood.

this was the dream:

she knew her mother was coming, soon but not yet.
the threads of web stretched from the sill to the pillow. the spider web in the corner of the window, testered to the bed, helped her distinguish between this and yesterday, for in her head they were reduced to little snapshots, jpegs almost.
in the web, the little spider with its deep red back was moving, housekeeping, making adjustments.
did she mind that she had slept with her head near the spider? should she kill it, remove it?
she had a fuzzy, sunny, frightening feeling in her head. the light weighed on her, the morning.
she went to the phone, and when she checked back she could not see the little spider at first. she could see the bee. a big bee, lodged in the web. the web seemed to have thickened. then she saw the spider again. near the bee.
she thought, now, with fear, that she would definitely have to remove the spider.
but already there was a cockroach next to the spider, next to the bee, and then there were two spiders, she saw at last - one must have come across from the space beneath her pillow and joined its fellow in the web. they were either sisters or identical lovers, she couldn't say, but she realised, with a kind of basking horror, that there were many big insects in the little web now.
there was the big hairy bee, the cockroach - immense beside the spider - and a blowfly, a moth, and other large insects (maybe a beetle or locust) too large for the tiny web or the tiny spiders
it was as if the big insects were not simply becoming trapped in the web but had flown there on purpose, flocked to it, lodging themselves on impulse, in abandon
and the tiny spiders were moving about them, curating, checking threads, adjusting
and they were still, and they hung impossibly large - the black roach, the big round black and yellow bee - with the little red-striped spiders moving about them
not hungrily, not to drink
but as if they were curios in a museum, or exquisite artefacts, or totems.
the little incestuous spider couple moving with that calm, molesting silence.

she didn't just want me tamed, she wanted me topiarised. if she could, she would have pruned me into shape, choosing on purpose some ridiculous design: a teapot, maybe.

Picking at the scabs of the bleeding obvious.

when he kissed her suffering lips
he couldn't hear her heart scream like a little sprayed spider.

through the slobbing water.

breathe, keep cool,
for you are what you are.
keep breathing, cool,
what will be will be.
stop no clocks
and start no stones rolling
spill no milk
and don't split your tongue.
rug up, clam up
for the coming winter
for winter's dells
and the hours deep.
breathe, breathe, breathe
be alert, not alarmed
for the day's awake
though the night is dark.

now we're sleeping
and the wash of words
the worn, washed hush
is gone from us,
gone from us
like god in a car rally big money rat crash
now and here and loud at last
then silent and in flames
like lush, hushed tongues
white hot, laid flat
with spittled heat
with specks of silence.

his house was so huge he had a room for blue nudes.

it was her heartsleet, drumming the deepfreeze
the heart's cold propulsion into slush

he didn't dare a glance
into that harassed vacuum

the mushrooms, blind grey blooms - blank bulbs, nudged up white and rude around the earthy roots.

through the throbbing star
through its bleared trajectory
bisecting.


*

he was six when he realised that the smell of the sun was really the smell of dust.

he did not build a snowman. he built a snowmannequin.

*

the snowdoll:


was living and breathing.

he painted the lips of her snowfilled mouth.

but how he loved her bottom-heavy body!
buttressing her bottomheavy body
the white bolsters.

**

on the boredom of wise monkeys

He said, "You can hit me if you want."
But she was looking at him instead. It hurt worse than hitting.
"You can hit me really hard," he reiterated.
She just looked.

*

The first time he saw her, the train. He couldn't stop staring, he had to say something. The first week he let her go, Monday to Friday, but the next week, the Monday, he made eye contact. He smiled:
"What are you eating?"
"Imitation peanuts," she said.
He let out a friendly scoff, "Sorry? What are imitation peanuts?"
She didn't answer that, she said, "I have a peanut allergy, so I don't eat the real ones."
"But what are they? What are they made of?"
She still didn't answer, she said, "What was our last stop?" And it was only three years later, when they were already married, that the moment came back to him, and he thought to ask again,
"What were those, the day we met? Those things you were eating."
She looked puzzled.
"The peanuts," he pressed. "The imitation peanuts."
"Oh! They were peanuts."
"Just peanuts?"
"Yehah. It was a trick I picked up in high school - every time I had something nice packed for lunch, my friends would nick it, everyone scrounging in for a taste and none left for me, so I took to saying everything was something else. If I said chocolate was chocolate substitute, no one would take any."
"Jesus." He's shaking his head. "All this time."
She let out a giggle after that. It wasn't a girl's giggle, it was different. The jibber of a bored monkey.
It seemed to pass judgement. On him? On this moment? Their past selves? But he let it pass.
"So you're not allergic to nuts," he said through the silence, watching her reach for the crisps.
"Nope."
And he thought aloud, "No you're not, of course you're not... When we made those brownies..." He trailed off remembering.
The giggle again. He looked in her face. As she aged, it was gaining lines, wise ones. He thought of her back then, smart and bright on the rattling train.
It was not something regularly pornographed, wisdom. There were the topless bimbos in horn-rims, the kinky librarians, sure, drooling into Ulysses, but the mags never showed this kind of face. A sage face, or a shrewd one, wise, or whatever it was.
She crunched chips. "Want one?" she grinned at him, chewing.
This was their Valentine's Day.

**

The snowman was caving in now, smiling its frowned drizzle of sauce towards its belly.

i wanted to make your dreams come true
hoping you might love me like you used to
a tit for tat, a that is that - but i
fell flat, i stumbled. pawing at
the slippery walls of your left ventricle,
i found it steep, i slid
into the deep deep blood of some stray vain
and i was strained away, remaindering.

i am cold and i cannot stop smiling
i haven't smiled once.

**

he ran his thumbpad down her spine
and whispered, that way danger lies.

**

a short story
the tigress ate the afterbirth. but afterwards, she could not bear the night. she paced her cage and tremors filled her skin. she could still taste the blood along her gumline. the red gums ached. in her belly, the meal churned thin. the afterbirth had come and gone before, but afterwards, there was no infant. she did not want to ask herself why. she did not think, it might be that i have bitten off and chewed up more than i can bear. she lacked language, lacked any sentience of the subjunctive. she paced through the thin churning and remembered the paws in her belly, the rolling of the cub, and her guts rolled down, and soon it would be time to take some water.

non fiction:

It might puzzle others, if they saw them, but I know what they are straight away, I'm used to them. These white irregular patches I see sometimes on the black desktop: the salt dried from densepuddled tears.

His eyes appeared on screen and he came at her with his whowhatwhywherewhywherewhen and she could see from his slack shoulders that he was still fat.

After the sexy angst of angry sex, the sobbing. After the sobbing, the cider and the television’s fizz.

The snowman had kiwifruit for eyes and his smile was ketchup.

I was surprised when I saw the time. The airports were all closed and so was the sky, with its shuttered dark.

From her eye, the tear blimped. It dropped to the tabletop, flattening. In the garden she heard him still swearing, his throat roughing air up at a high pitch, the shreik of a skinning cat.

She thought of the next house, the quiet doctor doubtless inside at his desk, with his quiet evening disrupted. She thought of him stubbing his pencil led out mid-crossword. The cryptic clue squinting up at him and the shreiking from next door and the doctor looking from the crossword to the window, seeing only that incongruously peaceful apricot tree, pallid with blossoms.

you smiled at me for a long time, yes
until your smile seemed something slowgrowing on me, like moss

and with this kiss, a loss, no less;
the most of things is such - a fading frost.

They were all around, these arty lizards, and there was me with my Health Magazine, my 'Your Tooth Enamel and You.'







[fictive]

seeking smile
starry smile
starless smile

the labour day rain
the gushed quick Styx
flecks of ice cream wrapper
weeds of crud.

that eye-gouging sight!
his woman, her dress
are drenched.

she will always hiss a little when he smiles
at these moments of meeting
he navigates only by sonar
blind love's blindness.

bound south as night
piles high like a whistler nocturne:
dark. and her hissed laugh

sharp
from between the teeth of the starlit
smile that he can't see.

subsequently, at sea
something happened, yes...
i felt that satin relapse
of sigh into heave,
heave of the sea and whelm
of ropes, and wind,
and shanties spurted wet
from the dead lips of popped kelp

[or: of popped kelp pods].

as he talked
she watched his pink tongue
and thought how it might feel
stroking, strobing on her own
with his body thrusting, threshing into hers
like a storm through bracken.

happy christmas to you, from the portable isle of complexity i take with me everywhere!
big hugs, hope everything goes right today, from a fun-filled kind of angle

i am in sadness, the whale's belly.

the hideous flower paintings would be there awaiting him like last christmas.

her face is a little porthole
where a stowaway peeps out, forlorn

i pine for sixty fife men

all ninetee fore years old.

the torn rough plum
its cheerful terror of skin
its sweetness of wetness on lips:
upbeat electrocution:
a whole orchard of eden apples.

the sky peached through moving clouds off west looks quite beautiful

a cold crayon drawn up her spine

The next time she was in the store the American was there, the New Yorker, with that voice. When he spoke it was like all of new york had died and been buried in his voice.

that girl at the gym, that Eve, her knowledge appled forth in wry remarks about his fitness.


===

Preceding scene to terrible sadness:

general store or mini supermarket. Man cat food (?) jellysnakes? Short. Offered coins. All this direct speech. Then: He heard her voice. He looked at her. He told her to eat shit. [END sec - back to house alone, sadness]

all hell

away from the sand
in a room rife with light


he said
he would write from life.

He watched the tragic blooming of the frail umbrella.
Beneath, her face appeared in a blank daub when she turned.
She said nothing.
His heart beat.
He missed the jagged little sallies of her imagination.
He watched her quiet lips for a hint of motion but saw only hesitation.
She did not smile, and his own smile was gone. Sunk.
"Delilah," he said, his breath visibly hanging between them. for a space.
"You—" she started, but didn't finish. Characteristically. But he had seen it when her lips moved—the pearl gleam of her teeth, the suggestion of wetness and breath. On his naked neck and hands the faint rain was cold. Pricked specks, precise.
Her umbrella was patterned with flowers, pastels—lavenders like early dawn or dusk. It was an old woman's umbrella, through which the winter glare lit her youth strangely.

already in the slow decaying orbit of menopause.

Well to begin by agreeing on something, I will tell you what pisses me off: that they avoided making the race issue central (in my opinion) *during the campaign* but the second he was elected, they felt they could start hammering away on the issue as if it were the sole purpose of the election - at least on the BBC. THAT I do find cheap.

Once more I reiterate, I don't think many people *were* voting based on race - but I have to say, I still think that even if they were, they'd be quite entitled. Are the sins visited on the next generation? Well, if you take an individualistic perspective, looking at particular mums and dads and particular kiddywinks, it seems a silly idea - why should I feel a legacy of guilt about the genocide of Australian aborigines - I wasn't there!, right? But there is the fact that in nation-building in Australia and United States, the oppression of subordinate races was an enabling condition, and the vested interest of the dominant culture in legitimating its power structures and its very status quo leads to a perpetuation of that dominance and oppression which is as visible in the US in relation to so-called 'African Americans' almost as in Johannesburg. Just a generation ago, Welly, these people could not vote. Can't you see how history - a history of generations being denied the very liberty and political equality for which the US has always so ostentatiously celebrated itself - their exclusion from those rights occurring not just legally, formally, but at ground level through everyday people's attitudes - including people of McCain's generation - might be entitled to find it inspiring, as a symbol, that identifying with the historically-abused, dehumanised demographic minority had made it into the "biggest, whitest house in the country"? Culture doesn't die with each generation - we're born into it, inherit the structures past generations developed, put in place - and we benefit from them - or suffer by them, depending. So yes - the sins can be visited to some extent. In my opinion : )

I DO however see where you're coming from -like, I understand the spirit in which you're saying what you're saying. So yeah : ) But as I study William Faulkner and Herman Melville, I'm kind of permanently immersed in centuries of American cultural panic over race - over how to make black people seem a little less than human - make them something that is "not us - not American" - and so the symbol is inevitably amazing, to me. Personal view : ) But happy to differ. Thanks for taking time to respond. Oh, and Danes are racists. It's because they're closer to monkeys than us. So don't let them lead you astray.

Threadbare from multiple washes, her leggings were getting see-through, but she owned no full-length mirror, so she didn't realise, and she didn't notice people looking in the supermarket because she was too busy squeezing the underripe plums.

*

In a sense she didn't feel like her mother was dead and gone, because when she looked in the mirror she could see her mother's face in her own face, but at the same time, it only seemed to confirm the loss, for it was her mother's dying face that she saw in her face.

It is only when she's at the table, leaning forward on her elbows, wrists cocked and getting sore now as she peels the sixth stiff potato, that she senses the beginning.

It is slow, but entire, and it will not be slow for long - it will come all at once, any moment. But slow at first - the slow and silent stormtrooping of the pall across her body, down her corridors, into her core, that stormtrooping of slow snow, filmic but without soundtrack, a dense spread, a dead wet billowing, and one second more and it has taken hold completely, surrounding, swamping. She is suddenly caught inside it, a big white puffy astronaut suit suffocating her, but without which she knows she could not breathe, and already she cannot breathe.

Her heart. Her heart. She lets out a little laugh, gasless, barely a gasp, and under it her heart begins its throbbed drumming, hard and neither cold nor warm, only sad, with that sad lukewarm character of sadness, that dense infertile weight. She seems to feel the red cells run her bloodstream like lost bees, travelling from weighted bloom to weighted bloom without finding pollen, dragging their unpollinated bodies through a thick molecular air, but it's only her blood, that blackish lightless liquid, its insipid trickling running the same course of terrible sadness to which there is never an answer.

Not a question, sadness. No shape to it, no phrasing. For a long time, now, she will not move - not unless the telephone rings, in which case, she will start her screaming.

There was a kind of snow that only fell on warm, grey days—on days without air, where space was never quite space and light was not light. A pecking, specking snow inside that could neither melt nor evaporate, because it was never really frozen - it wasn't even cold. It came in slow determined billows in flakes like washing powder, flakes like chips of marble, white phosphorus, or napalm. But it didn't burn her. Its textured absence had no taste.

The thlupping bubbles of hard-boiling water rail at the saucepan's brim. and she reaches for the heat knot to adjust it down. She hears the tightening sigh of the gas withdrawing its breath. Its light blue burn beneath the saucepan looks somehow imagined.

A few minutes later, she is straining the seven potatoes, seeking the peeler. She glances at her wristwatch, her grandmother's wristwatch, and sees the digital time, and knows there are probably only a few minutes to go now, and it isn't so much that the drumming is louder, or even nearer, but just that she has pricked to it. She has begun to wait.

Always, the kids at school, would wonder aloud how they would meet their ends. Some imagined murders. Most predicted cancer or heart attack because it required little imagination; it agreed with statistics and their own family records. She herself predicted cancer. No one said suicide and no one at all said revolution, military upheaval. They were seven, six, eight years old. Death was grandparental.

Sick of waiting. She looks again at her watch. It has got to the point where she wishes the doors would hiss open, let the sadness rush in. It occurs to her, though not as a realistic possibility, that it might not come today. It is late, although it has been later before, and still arrived. It is delayed. Trains may delay. Signals fail, and are serviced, and corrected. It is not timed like clockwork. Not exactly.

No it didn't belong to her, it knew so little about her, she knew nothing about it, she did not belong to it; they were like two persons sitting awkwardly together in a rail carriage for a while, that was all, knowing it was only for a time, not long enough to bother exchanging more than a quick glance, and eventually one of them would get up and depart, and it was always the sadness that departed, leaving her rattling on, and it seemed perfectly natural that it was the sadness that should go first, that she herself never departed. She stayed by herself in the carriage, alone, saw other passengers come and go, until the train would complete its circuit of the track and pass back through the same station, at the same time, and the terrible sadness would come.

Sometimes she would find herself on her knees, on the carpet, with her knees scratched up, white bloodless knuckled clutched hard on her thighs, with her lower lip sucked back hard between her teeth, groaning like a nun in immaculate labour.

Enora waited for the hour when the terrible sadness would come. She knew it would come, knew when it would come, and even now she could feel it drumming up, with the slow caution of water towards a spill. And she knew it wasn't really hers, the sadness - that was the funniest thing, how it would rise and descend (both) out of nowhere, coming over her, up from under her, a cold electric blanket, failing either to stifle or surprise her.

the green wheelie bin was brimful of topshelf pornography.

dark without noise, the blue-beaked night
off the radar, with a vast expanse
empty of its own urbanity.

A short story:

"I'm gonna kill myself," my mother kept saying. "I'm gonna kill myself." I'd listen, but I didn't believe her. I didn't believe her because I used to have a friend who was always saying that, a good friend who went funny one day and started telling me all the time "I'm going to kill myself" and at first I took it seriously, got worried, but then time went on and she kept saying it but she never killed herself, and after that I stopped listening - we drifted apart. So I heard mum when she said it, but I didn't believe her. Then mum killed herself. Hard to believe, but she did. And it was only a couple of months later I heard that my friend had topped herself a year back, too. I'd just never heard.

Harding's most famous "mistake" was his use of the word "normalcy" when the more correct word to use at the time would have been "normality." Harding decided he liked the sound of the word and made "Return to Normalcy" a recurring theme. Critic H.L. Mencken disagreed, saying of Harding, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

"I suppose you like to read." The voice was a cold shred, a rasp.
"I like books." Then, as if to excuse himself, "My sister likes reading too."
"Yes, I supposed she would. Of course she would."

..

"I don't read. I was what you call an 'avid' reader in my youth."

--

Africa for twenty years.
"Which part?"
"Does it matter which part?"
Not to him, maybe. He didn't know enough - not yet. But surely to Eudora...
"I suppose they sent you over here because I'm old - they expect I will be able to tell you stories, like a grandmother in a book."
"I don't know."
"They think I'm either old and wise enough or old and silly enough to be full of things I know and remember and tell them to you. So we will be like family. Well. What I know. What I know. I don't know what I know. I don't know them, the things that I know."
Her dry little eyes were pinned to the window. He could see her gaze cutting at the glass, her eyes etching jagged little patterns on the pane, sharp little scratches.

yes, I do, generally, then I quit my job and i revel in unemployemnt
2:56amSSS
: ) bless your buttons
2: T
How are you?
2:56amSSS
i'm getting a job
i'm ok!
pretty healthy really
: )
marking essays
plus i have a supervisee
a honours-equivalent gal
writin on faulkner
2: t
it's 3am after halloween I'm a bit drunk
2:57amSSS
lol
bless you
happy halloween
*cuddles*
2:57amTTT
ah, faulkner
2:57amSSS
in theory, i am "working"
touch of burnout, tho!
2:57amTTT
I must finish one of his books
2:57amSSS
lol
2:58amTTT
yeah...
2:58amSSS
i think he probably used to say that.
any money he never read one.
2:58amTTT
hahahaha
!
how is the UK at the mo?
are yougoing OK (health aside)
2:59amSSS
pretty good -
i got meself a
new supervisor
which scares me a bit coz
2:59amTTT
wow
2:59amSSS
she aint the critical kind
she's more the "yeah that's so fab you're so fab" kind
which some might find reassuring
but i find deeply scary
think i'm an academic masochist
2:59amTTT
yeah I get ya
2:59amSSS
crave punitive but productivwe ciriticism!
2:59amTTT
HAHA!
yeah
2:59amSSS
had kit over here bout 3.5 wks
was awessome
2:59amTTT
your are fab though
2:59amSSS
had fantastic time
3:00amTTT
oh cool!
3:00amSSS
gallivanting over the country on train passes
3:00amTTT
just had dinner with ness and now
3:00amSSS
yeah shux honey i hemidemisemi-fab anyway :L )
3:00amTTT
hence v drunk
nou, I mean
3:00amSSS
quality!
but no kit !
she's up w
our mum
miss the family and the boyfy
3:00amTTT
yes, in coffs
3:00amSSS
but hangin in there
hey -
3:01amTTT
i bet
…
3:01amTTT
is it all OK?
3:01amSSS
oh yeah, it's totally good
we worked crap out a lot - we had
couple of months on the rocks there,
3:01amTTT
yes, i thinkso
xxx
3:02amSSS
how's the writing : )
3:02amTTT
but write her an email
3:02amSSS
lol facebook
students
3:02amTTT
ah... yes... writing...
3:02amSSS
it must be strange, to be teacher, suddenly feel like a big grownup person
i still think im 16 sometimes
not being doing a whole lot hey?
3:02amTTT
I thinkshe [Br W] alsways felt a big grown up person, and Being Young was off
3:02amSSS
i try get back into it now and then but theres far too much else going on i long since lost the thread, or the plot, or whatever : )
3:03amTTT
no, I'm doing too mcuh
3:03amSSS
yeah she kinda implied that to me once
3:03amTTT
aha
3:03amSSS
bout her time at summ hill
3:03amTTT
what are you writing?
mmm
3:03amSSS
when i was at summ hill with her i remember i didnt know her very well btu i was ragingly jealous of her hair and her singing voice : )
couple of loooong short stories
3:03amTTT
3:03amSSS
that don't seem to want to get in shape.
3:03amTTT
as in, novellas?
3:04amSSS
i sort of have this strong 'aura' of what they're about and how they would be shaped
3:04amTTT
edit edit edit
3:04amSSS
but the specifics keep eluding me
: ) yeah.
3:04amTTT
"kill your darlings"
3:04amSSS
well, novellas, makes em sound, too like, proper
3:04amTTT
I've been told
3:04amSSS
indeed - in fact
i love "hacking"
i call it "hacking" not editing
its so liebrating to highlight a whole bunch of paragraphs and instead of editing hitting
3:04amTTT
yes, and also slashing
3:04amSSS
the "delete" button
burning i havent tried yet : )
3:04amTTT
YES
no need
3:05amSSS
no, too teenagd : )
3:05amTTT
it's all soft copy
3:05amSSS
do u write on paper? i do everything
on computer
it's a problem - my computer
performs every function in my life
that the microwave doesn't perform.
3:05amTTT
I write poetry on paper
3:05amSSS
Shocking way to live : )
3:05amTTT
heheh
so coz I wrote poetry onpaper, anything I want in that vein, I write on paper first
I dunno why
3:06amSSS
Did you ever read any swinburne?
it's probably a good idea, ur paper thing
3:06amTTT
writing on the bus? at work?
3:06amSSS
i do a lot of writing on the back inside covers of paperbqcks and on bus tickets lol
3:06amTTT
but it's not the means
3:06amSSS
both phd and creative
3:06amTTT
it's the words
ha
3:06amSSS
all i ever come up with these days is fragments and ideas that trail off
useless.
sometimes i miss that feeling at school that there was budding talent and a future in which to develop it
3:07amTTT
not useless ifyou put all the fragments together
yes
3:07amSSS
instead of now, when u feel like you should have 'arrived' and didnt and are no longer a budding renaissance woman
3:07amTTT
Iknow
I miss the feelingof poetential
3:07amSSS
but just, like, well... apathetic? or, seemingly so.
SAME!
sigh.
3:08amTTT
it's not tho, for you, it's the sense of Middle
3:08amSSS
maybe.
did ur course finish sweet cake?
3:08amTTT
in the middle there's little excitement'
and little pay off
yes ish
one did
another didn't
I'll see if I get a PHd next eyar
3:08amSSS
still enjoying? at all rewarding?
3:09amTTT
yes and yes
3:09amSSS
awesome. that would be fun - sense of expansive time.
fantastic to hear!
3:09amTTT
I find, in writing, the oddest things can be rewarding
a line
3:09amSSS
there was a writers discussion group today for anyone who idly writes crap and feels like whinging to others about it or boasting or sharing or whatever but
3:09amTTT
a poem
3:09amSSS
sasddly clashed with my supervision
yeah a single image!
3:09amTTT
a single comment in a semester
damn
I want to read more of your stories
3:10amSSS
really? awesome!
we shold trade some time... a nice little one so i aint swamping you none!
3:10amTTT
just writeFrom Your Heart
if you know what I mean
yea please?
3:10amSSS
totally.
3:10amTTT
please!
3:10amSSS
i loved reading your poems : )
3:11amTTT
you would never swamp me
3:11amSSS
the marrickville et al.
shux little button.
3:11amTTT
yay
yeah, I like that one
3:11amSSS
well i gunna rattle on my merry way coz duty calls me alas
but let's do a trade.
3:11amTTT
I was meant to write 12 poems, ad I wrote 50
3:11amSSS
lol
3:11amTTT
yes let's
til soon
mwah
3:11amSSS
you are miss prolifica prolix
xxxx
smooch!
xxx
3:12amTTT
as are you - you just hide it
smatch xxx
3:12amSSS
i am miss scraps. the bubble and squeak of the written word
xxx
3:12amTTT
til soon xxx
3:12amSSS
xx

"She made a slow mash of her life with soft gums. Eudora Welty was getting old. But in those moments where she closed her eyes and stopped croaking - in those slow, slow moments where she would sit shut-eyed like a pendulum without motion - he thought he could see the shragged tatters of something like youth still [[Scraping by//shrieking past]] under her eyelids."

add anything!

she could no longer write or even read in a linear way

instead a panicked scattering of her eyes across the page

having nothing to do with sentences or

paragraphs.



==


her black translucent throat pulsed, trolling.

defied, deified

but there the thing is, fatsolidblundrous.

lodged in the catchment area of my soul.

sick of my own hold music.
sick of my own hold music.
sick of my own hold music.


and sick


sick too

of not being able
to tune between my stations
my endless headstatic
of too many frequencies
twiddling the anxious dials

and then

sick of my own hold music.

When we have thrust our metaphors aside
And looked at things as they are
The land is still a dead man
And the ocean a stagnant dead woman.


*


Behind every great man is an exhausted illusionist.

In the correlated, corrugated corral he slept on his feet, nose down in dreams.

Outdoors, his groomsman railed hard—spat puns in a vacuum.

=

First of all, let's not pretend that it's realistic. It's not supposed to be realistic. I don't expect you to believe me; I don't think the thing itself expects to be believed. It's just what happened.

=

(in a passionate whisper)


"You are -- maybe you always will be -- my Damocles."

He wrote to Bob and John only because he wanted a second and third opinion on just how gruesomely awful and terribly wrong and cruelly disgusting the whole thing had been.

So I was just thinking how the stars are hot in cold, cold space, like Lawrence's whales in cold water.

And the girl, the slot machine, stood in the night store's cold breathing, like ice. She could feel it still lodged their in her chest. Her heart was a five-pointed star with the spars snapped away.

Something that was possibly once beautiful. Something that could no longer even be fragile, because it was already too broken. It was like her blood was spiked, running cold with a substance colder than cold blood, a substance cool and alkaline and niggard. And from the gravel her shoes crushed light sounds; the gravel like cold cash, dry ice.

It was when the middle distance ceased to fill and empty itself of the sound of passing trucks, when her watch beeped the late hour, that she peeled back the wrapper and started to gnaw.

Stars that will each one day age and die. But not 'one day' for they make day, stars do, or something. Orbits that will in time decay; the planets stray; stars that will some time age and die and new stars and too many infinite billionsof years likegasps of god lapsing neverelapsing i cannot believe they will die yet they will swell red giant pustules of light and shrink and die and the days die with them and one day, no day, dayless dark.

Is the love worth the money?


===


I just crossed to the road's bright side, but the light has thrice denied me.

my misanthrope

she filled up her memory with hate
fifty terabytes
like years, lost
in facing back, despising:
loathed hours
loathed love lost
and when i try to help her trash it
it recycles:
cached, bitter, black.

dragged her bagged sack of bones
up too many stairs, too much money
spent in deadbent gasps
of living death, until the till told:
TOLL.

the long toll suddened on her deep, white
ear. the earlock opened, all
the mortal coils unwound
with sound. that "it is time", that

TOLL.
the simple fee appalled her
with its simple 1, 2, 3
a simple rhyming scheme of heavy beats
bowled in her chest, a bolus lodged, dislodged
a boulder, and it dropped.

i am free, she said. i am not free.
nothing is. we pay, we pay.
it keeps us safe, that $, $, $,
that 1,2, 3.

the cruel addict
barked her smilebite
vast gnarled harping breath of siren-singed
calumny, calumnia, "HARK."

that slow joke, "HARK"
as if, in one wet breath, all hate,
all hot, the slotmachine of life
would rain out change, as if to hear the scream

I WON!

earthed and fused, i was
safe, safe, safe
the electrical fault
would have to wait
the fire drill
the fire drill
the little hiss
would have to wait.

i feel it wait
i feel it wait
i feel tight light
i sense the wait
i tense its weight
i have to wait
my electric fault
will have to wait.

earthed and fused
it keeps me safe
the drug retards
my fire escape.
i cannot snap.
i cannot flake.
the burning wire
will have to wait.

why is the trauma of static so dense?
i never liked those mosquito coiled
illusions
of safety in stillness.
alarmed the silent fire?
caged unconducted energies?
wires won't touch.
wires won't touch.
sparks don't match.
i won't wait.

She had this wonderful, matriarchal, magisterial way of cherishing each of her perceived inferiors as a Child That Would Never Grow Up. That way, she could play mother, without the threatful implication encroaching that these little people might someday grow up to be *just like her*, equals.

More for urban mermaid:


loan sharks

Did I ever tell you about the time (king neptune, sea) [[ to the cowfish, who was somewhat bovine and rustic in appearance... [the sea pastoral - vs urban environment]
The cowfish was sad, but accepted = when she leaves, his wife would be pleased - jealous of his attentions to the beautiful mermaid - said real women had curves, never supposing it best that curves looked better when they were not, like hers, all convex (concave)

In her negotiations with the crown of thorn starfish, mermaid had managed to calculate...

So when she washed up on an obscure beach near palm cove... [Sydney exec conference - first guy who saw her whipped out his iphone rang 000 - thought having heart attack, rushed off - the 2nd, the 3rd all screamed panicked ran... Happily, the first guy came back from hospital, false alarm, armed with new mental strength and a plan... He a hypochondriac, hallucinating. Thought saw mermaid in youth?]
[The guy who gets her used to swim we later learn, but feet too small to keep up at prof level - big pool at his posh place]
She keeps asking special shampoo because ppl at JW Walker don't like the algae/seaweed smell - she smells like the bins out back of a sushi shop.

He could hardly carry her because he was not a big guy and complete with her well-muscled tail, scales and a hefty tailfin she weighed in at an uncool 93kg.

Her shopping list:
Seaweed (fresh)
Seaweed (dried)
Sushi
Caviar
[[he starts sending lots Ashfield for the range of asian groceries, Chinese supermarket... Expensive taste for abalone!]

Her love of numbers.
Anyway, maybe if I get my nose in business there (ashore), I can get us some attention - some help! (not well liked by other mermaids, not even her brothers and sisters... hoarded shells as a child; tried to institute standardised shell currency versus current casual barter system...]]

He hyponchondriac... She describes coral, millions of tiny organisms - he, a being composed of millions of tiny symptoms...
(gave up swim because busy at work, and that is when the hypochondria set in ... he "felt" things, something "wrong" - she picks it's the work that was wrong.
He webbed toes, perhaps?

She: "At sea we don't tend to get married," she told him... "We sort of just do what comes naturally..."
He: "And have you done... what comes naturally... much?" he asked, nervous.
"How would I know!?" she exclaimed, "I'm a fish, you know? I've only got a 3-second memory for these things." She watched his face a long moment, then burst out laughing: "Just kidding!"

Her name; Jingilli? Jingilly?

for urban mermaid:

way with numbers

swimming pool

blue green algae hair - antidandruff shampoo?

petwash mobile to work

disability pension qualifies




against the garish farce, her unfazed face, unsmiling, tight, blotched with rage.
The open bill lay on the table.
A fight to the death with debt. Fighting debt with debt.
Envy the green-lipped vase.
A docked dog.

a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains a will !—and to say at the end that which I said at the beginning—man will wish Nothingness rather than not will anything at all .

subterfugit

simmering, shimmering




shit glitter

the misleading errors of language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become petrified therein)


= nietzsche

i guess i guess i am, or was,
electroloved?
electrolost?

i will be staying tonight, and hopefully seeing nanna or at very least you for our famous late brekky tomorrow... How are you? Excuse my crappiness of getting in touch this week, I ave been behind on some things and trying to catch up. How is work, and the 2nd Empire indulgence of home? I hope you are not, like me at times, feeling a little remaindered and redundant?

I had a dream... many, in fact, most of them horrifying, but on this occasion I had a dream with a sparkling interlude; I dreamed we developed a new 'cultivar' of ladybeetle. We had an ordinary red ladybeetle with black spots, and grafted it on to the legs of a bee. When the grafted bee/beetle had babies, they were not red with black spots but instead were yellow with black stripes (and some with black spots). It was sort of beautiful - the dopiest thing about it being, of course, that there are already yellow and other colours of ladybeetle, so we weren't even doing something wild - just a variation on a theme. They thrived at the back of a garden, brightening shadows.

i should add: it continued slightly like kit and i were joking a few sentences to each other i said "ok so he's a really ugly baby - but you know, when he gets older—"
and kit laughed "—and starts breaking things—"
and i said "—and becomes a delinquent thug moron - "
and we both just started laughing in a funny despair.

my dream last night
horrible
we got rushed into having our wedding with liek one morning to prepare for it
and we were sort of part of a queue in this ugly space that didnt look anything like th epicture we'd chosen it from
and i didnt even have time to put the lovely dress id bought on or i got confused so i ended up wearing this little silver cocktail dress that looked trashy
and we sort of were pissed off still about the venue and wed run late and missed the dinner by the time we got called up and rushed in there and there were liek 3 other bridal parties crammed in the one space
so we were sort of too pissed off to pay attention and anyway the ceremony litterally consisted of "do you take this woman?" do you take this man"
and "you may kiss the bride" and we sort of missed and half our party was too far away finding seats for the lunch we'd missed anyway to see
and then i stormed away screaming i wanted a divorce (jsut so i could do it again) then someone told me married people werent eligible to renew their scholarship for a second year or something
i couldnt believe that was it and that i was married.
and i went in this little room and found the dress i wanted to wear and was about to resentfuly change into it then kit came in and i was screaming at her
next aprt of dream just a sudden jump to the future where i had this baby and i was in our garden at 21 west street and anyway there was this creepy man inside doing the floor or something and he had no chin at all, his head just sort of fell into his neck, but a sort of little cleft bum chin sitting on his neck, and he looked all skinny and weird and gross
and i was talking to kit who was disapproivng of me for something
and we strolled down the back of the yard where there was an empty aviary wnear the humpy with dead sticks in it
and it was only then when i asked kit to hold the baby
that i noticed it had the same chinless bum chin
and these weird rapist eyes.
it was so so so so so horrible.

pugilant purgarotio.

insolent inferno.

pharisaical paradiso.

an inferno inferred!

a paridise paraded!

purgatorio's purrs!

and what happens, what? when they realise that the Babel Tower *is* Mount Purgatory, and that both, that all - heaven, earth, hell, purgatory - are all in Sisyphus?

pugilant purgarotio.

insolent inferno.

pharisaical paradiso.

From Dante's inferno:
The souls frozen in this circle of hell are immersed [in ice] so deeply that only half of their faces are visible. As they cry, their tears freeze and seal their eyes shut- they are denied even the comfort of tears. (Canto XXXIII)

[via wikipedia - of all things]

to whom my death will be as stars on a dead field
large and unmeaningful

dumb and dubmer

dumb and dubmer

he, he, geddit?

from website 'indecent images':

Rossetti's life fell into an ongoing cycle of drugs and alcohol, and his household was an icon of domestic disorder. He had affairs with a number of his models. Among other things, his personal zoo is legendary, including owls, wombats, parrots and peacocks, among others.

The first of his wombats, named Top, was a frequent guest at his dinner table, where it habitually fell asleep in the centerpiece. Top is believed to have been the inspiration for the character of the dormouse in Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

In 1872 he tried unsuccessfully to end his own life.

when we got back again she was still in the chair.

she was still in the chair when we'd put the things away, and unpacked the dishwasher, squinting perhaps without knowing it, in the downstairs dim.

she was still there when i went to the back door through the stink smoke and opened it a little.

in a few days she would still be there, her brittle back braced hunched she would still be in the chair.

she was still in the chair.

she was still in the chair.

she is still in the chair.

life, life, life.

the long of it so long.

the short of it so short.

the monotony so deadening.

the variability so disorienting.

the fear and want.

the apathy and willingness to lose.

fold, strive, collapse. lie still.

feel fat.

fade.

long. hate

yourself

the world

wonder if it matters

know it does not matter

if it matters.

and after the last laughs of lust have left
there is a surreality in skin—

Hopefulessly

But doctor, this operation... is it reversible?

As reversible as life itself!

I've never forgotten the day I was on a train and a man wth his toddler saw his toddler licking the filthy disgusting train window. He immediately snatched the child back, grabbed out a napkin and - to my complete perplexity - began urgently wiping at the window.
Rather than the child.
I personally feel I'd be more worried about the train filthing my kid than my kid filthing the train, but I like the non-anthropocentric priorities there.
Anyway.

the devil went and did some soul searching
found it hard to think of search terms so he threw in some wildcards
came up with a few hits
few broken links
few fansites about other devils with the same name
but nothing specific.

there you are, strung up high
in the hung jury of my heart
ready to drop!

and me in yours too, i bet
me in yours too.

definitely a word that should NEVER have been lost from the english language:



"glowffin"


means: blinking on awaking.

as in, "I woke and did glowfinn, thinking how i missed my Admiral"

Anonymous. c. 1300

5. This World's Joy

WYNTER wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare;
Ofte I sike ant mourne sare
When hit cometh in my thoht
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht. 5

Nou hit is, and nou hit nys,
Al so hit ner nere, ywys;
That moni mon seith, soth hit ys:
Al goth bote Godes wille:
Alle we shule deye, thah us like ylle.

Yes, daddler your theory is correct but not complete - it's survival of the rattiest, the fittest - but the particular survival strategy is has developed is to sleep in the jutting lower jaw (aka lower bunk bed) of the permanently open mouth of the cat, snuggled on the tongue. this keeps it warm, slippery, and well-lubricated for fossicking in tricky bins, and also imparts something of the cats 9 lives to it, though in the case of the deformed Lewisham cats, their genetic mutations means they don't get just 9 lives, they get fourteen, but seven of these are what are called "part-lives" in that through each must be endured a congenital affliction so profound that its chromosome deficiencies mean the cat cannot be classified as part of the feline species at all; indeed, some taxonomists (and taxidermists) believe that during these half-lives the thing that the cat is falls outside the animal kingdom altogether.

to thinky hazzy:


i dont know, im ok. as i get one abit, grow up or whaterver, is ee thourgh a lot of stuff. i sort of had my heart broken mashed about and vaguely reassembled into a heartshape past fwe weeks. yeaht thats quite a goof summary. distactng myself tright now in useful anger about the corn price crisis and its lack of basis in physicality, bgad. i hate the capitalist marketplace. ok rave done.
"as i get on a bit" that should have said.
maybe if i could just get myself and pound myself flat and then take a humanshape, a cookiecuttermanorwoman, and stamp the man and woman shapes out of the dead dough, make the little toileticon simplified images out of my yeastless flatbread unleavened pounded pounded limbs
smile like a flatfish out of its sidelong eyes
the smile involuntary, a mere factor of the way the sharkmouth or snakemouth or dollmouth is set in the head.
so the radio helps with its worldwide horrors of scale.
sad, to be so solipsistic, as to take comfort in the shockingly disgusting,
sad, sad.



[largely respecting das fambly]

Like the 'sad-eyed maiden' in Melville's Mardi, "I am afraid to think."

we are the only 2 green stars in the whole huge sky
and our little starpoints are touching
with an overlapping green starlight that says
Go!

I AM WONDERFUL
you are WONDERFUL
we are two stars in huge weightless sky
like gemini

A Year

I swear I swear my heart was getting hard
Getting edgy little edges, like an urchin only
Soft inside, with wanting.

I swear and I wish I had something to swear to
Maybe you’ll do -
I swear to you I love you
Whatever that wild word means
Because only my wordless thoughts know.

You make the small world wide
But bring it closer – at the same time -
And I want to sleep and wake and sleep
Beside you, with our lives
Between us. With our whole wild rolling life
Ahead of us.

and passion and commitment.

and academia and how to touch hands talk through aura but it went away.

well you see there was no one i ever had that kind of connection with over words and poetry and beauty, ethics and emotions, and still be able to flirt and laugh amidst all the serious talk

I'm not sure which is likely to be printed and bound first, my PhD or my microwave cookbook (provisionally entitled 'What Not to Microwave' but more obscurely known as 'How to Not Blow Up Your Tame Oats')

and giving myself the deficit of every doubt... not only am i just something dreamed up by a butterfly, but i'm not even one of the bits it remembers in the morning.
alone again, naturally, but failing to develop a corresponding philosophy (solipsism perhaps?)

the bright hallucination that was sydney's flying trip

and ireland, and my mother, and the night in Derrynane, literally having the stained tablecloth of life swiped from under me and the identity theft of having the last remaining (always-already imperfect) illusions you have broken open and crapped on in the foulest and most horrific terms so you don't even cry you just sort of fail to respond soundproofed within yourself a swimming sickbag filled with someone else's vomit diorrhaeic rubbish understanding really truly now if only in a narrow familial sense that thought of Quentin's in absalom: I have had to listen too long.

On my way to you

The early morning frost, cow, sun
Sidesun
Hot on this train
Shot like a bullet chameleon’s tongue
Fulla mixed blood
To hit the spot: King’s X
The change
For Heathrow airport.

i am very good, as you know,
at staying in love with things that have insufficient intrinsic merit or
that it would simply be healthier to forget
and i totally understand the minds backreaching anemone tendency
12:40 PMbut yes.

so charlton heston finally died?
how FINAL.
how epic.
did he have to die peacefully?
cdnt he have raged raged a bit more against the dying of the cinemascopic gunbarrell of light?

big lies or lots of little ones
==
oh to me there is big diffrence
if they make up their tissue to you out of lots of little woven together lies, and make the fabric of our interactions threaded through with little pointless lies liek metallic thread in a gaudy dress
then they are projecting a deceptive THING at you and when you find out
you're not sure they
re who you love
whereas
when it is just one or two great big lies
told obviously to spare you pain or because they thought they would lose you (e.g. i murdered someone when I was 16
or
I had an affair and I really really wish I hadnt)
then they are usually going to appear to be
the same human
just one who tried to bury a mistake
And shouldn't have.

Beauty murders me.
Sometimes I want to
Bend down over a table
For it to rip my knickers down
And get stuck into me.
Other times beauty leans back
With legs spread
And I don’t know what to do
In virgin tremors.

Stop love. Stop love.
It hurts me to lie in its cuffs
With its gag in my mouth, biting down
Not wanting to ache but
Not wanting to stay bottled up.
Wanting to burst.

Maybe it is beauty to waste away
To lay waste to love
To lose even loss
To loosen with the lesson nothing matters
Only this.
Only this?
Only what?
My boiling point:
Beauty’s absolute zero.

lol bottom of my web window just said
runscript: false=true

york
like small winding leaning streets, a mash of poverty onto frippery in the shopfronts
with the skeleton of a medieval walled city jutting up through it
like the lower jaw of something prutting up through the new flesh it pierces

it was
weird.
a parable of the changing nature of themusic industry, perhaps?
god knows.
peian
lol
ok
or just that Michael Jackson is past his prime and should retreat gracefully

yahoo
yeah that too
well it was relally arrogant of him to think he could sing the song the other dude had already just sang
who incidentally, i forgot to say
was black.
and not in a michael jackson way.

its not really early
i know i was up late
and i feel wretched
but i wanted to get up before janet comes etc
brb uggggh need coffeeee blurrrrrh
last thing happened in my dream was me tapdancing for you lol
peaian
sweet!!!
On our wedding day you can tap for me
yahoo
lolyou will be tapping me my darling
if i have anything to do with it
that was the other thing
we were kjinda having sex in public
we hadnt got all that far thgouh
when i woke up
they were talking on radio about closing 2,500 post offices round england coz they are "not profitable"
and all these callers were gettingfurious saying
"it's a public service! do you expect profits from schools? from hospitals?! it's supposed to be a government service, not a business venture!!!"
and i so bet
the govt is lopping off the most financially unsavoury parts
of the post system
so it can privatise it, and have a more tempting package to sell
peaan
thats a pretty bold statement to make
but nevertheless..........an acurate one
yahoo
lol yeah well its transparent to me.
oh michael jackson was in my dream lol
him and the australian idol winner
the latter sung this song that was going round and had been number one for nearly a year
and then after a few other Australia Day acts
(it was this notverycrowded australia day gig with the major of sydney at it - classy stuff)
(not)
anyway after some other acts it was micahel's turn
and he started singing the song the idol winner had sung
and everyone was rapt when the idol winner sang
but when michael sang everyone turned their backs
so he trailed off, and the mayor said
"michael jackson everyone! what song would you all like him to sing?"
the major's face was being rebroadcast over screens so the public further away could see, but it was so unneccessary coz
z
hardly anyone had turned up anyway
and there was this void of painful silence
and michael looked about to sing into microphone
and a few people started quietly slow-clapping as though he'd already finished
so without singing he stepped back in line with the other artists
shortly after, the idol dude left on a helicopter

but she couldn't eat. and as she sat staring at the impenetrable surface of the soup, a gluggy despair came sluddering up in her, filling her throat, and she had to close her eyes to hold it in, hold her breath.

bed bed
I love you my sweet bunnybear honeypot
you are my world in a person
Every minute I wish I was with you! I feeel soooooo alone when your over there
you are so beautiful, I adore you!!! I long for you and everything that you are
please love me forever and ever and ever and never hurt me
and I'm so proud of you for not drinking tonight
so so proud
I want to feel your touch
I am aching for your touch, aching so much, I want to hold you close

liek the robhert wyatt song i used to always get stuck in my head once a load had been lifted
fluom
yeah i can actually concentrate now
yahoo
"at last - i am free - i can hardly - see in front of me - i can hardly - se in front - of - me"

the boat rose up one day to examine its underbelly, gazing for a navel.
it found the rudder.

with a barnacle saw, it cut off the rudder, let the violent shreds drift off, and settled again on the water.

now he would just spin like a compass needle.
and sometimes not like a compass needle. sometimes just moving.
or not moving, sometimes.

I hear you sing and i think
god I'm so lucky
and I sit back and listen to you when you are in the bath
yahoo
!
im the lcky one
BP
I beg to differ
yahoo
lol
ok we both lucky
2 coins in a fountain
thats us
and one landed clinking on the other

i made up a little song about u this arvo
brb
BP:
yeah
I cant wait to hear it my dear
do you accompany it on piano or violin
or is it just you lovely lovely voice that makes me feel so lucky
and everytime I hear you sing I am reminded of how much a beautiful person you are

[sic]

i can feel the thought in me, crouching low, sullen
like a roach under a glass

i can feel the thought within me, tapping its feelers round the sides of its prison, feeling for a way out. But there's no way out of the brain. Not even talk. Words only describe the malady of thought. They don't cough it up like bad bacteria.

There's no way out, not even trephineering.

I had a lovely dream about this amazing animal enclosure that was only about the size of a large two-story rabbit hutch/aviary, with an L-bend, mounted on stilts, and they had contrived to make it so that every kind of animal (bird, mammal, fish) could live in there - and pass by each other throgh a system of openings, hidden floors, etc, so that it looked like they were all moving freely by each other, and it was such an explosion of colour in there, i was looking at little fish and suddenly i saw a parrot behind them, and i realised there was a palce for birds to dive and wash (i know parrots dont dive but they did in this dream) and then one minute your view through the glass bit would fill up with fish then the shaol would subside and you'd see a water rat swimming, then you could go look back to the dry level on top left where the little shrew and hamsters and sleeping guinea pigs were and everything, and it was in a garden that was full of pigs, and one of the pigs was pale pink and he let me hug him and turn him belly up and hug around his tummy. it was so beautiful but hard to describe!

I TRIED TO PUSH MY FINGERS INTO LOVE'S PURSED MOUTH
SHE DIDN'T WANT ME TO SEE HOW OLD SHE WAS

my jagged origami heart

unfolded when we kissed.

you took the paper and wrapped yours

like a gift in it.

then you gave it back to me

and it was edgeless, warm,

with no sharp corners. now


we fold
together, paper dolls,

boy and girl joined hand and hip.
and we make paper planes

and chuck them at the day -
and i have neglected my in-tray

so completely.

paired like living birds let’s mate for life
and then let’s live forever like
we’ve folded millions of paper cranes
out of archival paper.

cranes made with archival paper.

a quick wind, stettering. the water blisters.

and you could maybe add to that, if you cd control gag reflex:




then paired like living birds we'll mate for life
but live forever with millions of paper cranes.

at one oclock in the arvo today, i basically closed my book, and with my head at a funny angle and my fingers twisted back under my folded ear, fell asleep for two hours straight without moving a fraction in all that time
so when i woke up my fingers esp my little finger were completely white and sort of numb and really painful at same time, as was my ear from being crushed
so yeah
i musta been pretty tired
felt much better after the dead sleep.

my jagged little origami heart
unfolded when we kissed.
you took the paper and wrapped yours
like a gift in it.
you gave it back to me
and it was edgeless, warm,
with no serrations. now
we fold together, paper dolls,
boy/girl joined at the hip
and the wrist. and we make paper planes
and chuck them at the day,
and i have neglected my in-tray
so completely.

when on my back i wake up and growl like a dog
stretching, unconscious, then arriving at myself to think
'what time is it?' or 'breakfast!' or
'is he awake over there?' but then

all i really know is that i could be next to you
right now, right now, i could be next to you
and the only question left is 'what am i doing here?'
'what am i doing here when i could be with you?'

the mirror squints at me; her eyes
lonely, underslept, are darkly underlined
as if to emphasise that something isn't right
but i just wash my face.

it doesn't wash away - the hefty sense
of time passing too fast, and distance remaining
between us. i can't dive
into your electronic eyes. the camera hates me.

i love you, love you, love you.
sometimes it's almost a relief to be alone
because i'm used to that - feeling locked in,
cold. it is

too strange to be so happy
too strange to feel so alive
too strange to see this huge future
and then breathe your name.

i've got this little laugh
all hutched up
happy to wait.

One Flesh

What have we done? what have we done?
You stopped my heart like a pub raffle meat wheel
Spin and win! Spin, spin! You spun and won.
I laughed. We barbecued
Ourselves, on the spokes of each other's loves -
Turning, turning
Golden brown with the heat of zeal then
Char dark - popping in our fat,
Getting stuck to each other,
Burnt on.

you have my heart, my true love - it jumped, and when the parachute failed to open it went falling into you and it is falling still for you, forever

Pablo Neruda (edited, to my ends)

I remember you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
...Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me:
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

i pissed off a guy once,
yep,
i climbed up on his shoulders and pissed off him onto the sidewalk.

the most radical gestures are those which exert energy to no apparent end; with no apparent meaning; waste and excess (as the ultimate Sign of Life).

He collected soldiers' hearts from the battlefield and dropped them in a bucket
Splunsh. The plishripples settled. Blood blushed up.
Then he waited behind the door of the gym for a girl any girl
To kiss and feed.
Dreaming like he dreamed of how he would wind the place around in barbed wire so snake-thick
That the barbs might have been plucked from a crown of thorns made to top the Earth
So - to pass the wait he thought ahead
To the softness of her breasts
Big or little
And how long they would hibernate hotly
In the locked down shut up gym all coiled tight
With metal muscle: chains.
Link chains of red-dripping thought slid round lubed pulleys in his mind with the tinktink of tin on wet tin
And he was already hard by the time the buzzer
RANG
And he went to let her in.

Thinnned midnight 00:00

Brain, down. BRAIN, DOWN:
Fall and skatedown,
Minxy. Without brakelights
As the breaklight's
Hot dawn dances
The knotted tightrope skyline
And somewhere else, the sea.

Ears flushed - ears filled
With a rushing, rushing
Storm spree
Deep from my shell
Deep in my shell
My slow sea foot
Treads me
(In my shell
My own private ocean
Of speed).

It kicks in
It kicks in
The laughter I'm risking.
Not moving,
not ageing
No skin to live within and
No madness -
Roped varmints!
Restrain this gushlost kiss bliss
No panis
No no nobis
No pacem pacem pacem
No damn No angelicus,
Just ME.

Fall and skate down
Fall and shake down
Through me. The ice
Recedes, and no clock heeds
The time.
The frozen hands
Point north to naught
And stand:
Past 12.

Come feel these trade winds blow.
Come break my chains

You pandaemonium varmint.

forever locked in
forever logged in





no, not really
(something to avoid)

So anyway I had a bath in my crappy bath which continues to be a bath and has failed to magically sprout a showerhead in my absence, admired and then spoiled the neatness of my room, collected my wads of mail, and have yet to buy food, or sleep. To those vital matters, I shall now proceed.

xoxoxox
snatschel
PS. the other day i covered myself in vegemite and made a video singing "we're happy little vegemites." i thougth a serious overdose of aussieness might help me wanna come back here. it didn't. it jsut made me wanna aeroploane jelly wrestle, and dress in a weetbox bikini.

I have to say, I found McEwan's comments idiotic. The art (NOT science) of theory is not to slavishly analyse the conscious intentions of the author, but to detect/recognise patterns, usually unconscious, in a text that allow relations to be drawn between that text and other texts; between the literary and the nonliterary and very often this is all about discovering what the author has done without realising it; what has been done "through" the author not necessarily "by" them, so yes, those interviewers were idiotic to ask McEwan for his "theory of the body" but on the other hand McEwan was idiotic to criticise PhDs sent him from the perspective of what he himself had in mind. Anyway, what sort of fuckhead writes with "conscious intentions"? I thought the light was just sposed to pour out of you. And yes, anyone who tries to apply the ideas of theoretical thinkers programmatically without flexibly allowing room for dialogue between the author's text and the ideas they are checking out with it is hardly a paragon of contemporary academic excellence - anyone can criticise such a fuckwit; nice work McEwan; but actually engaging with what might surprise you about your own thought as it is inserted into a collective takes sensitivity McEwan (due to an inflated and vainglorious will to power, an overmastering ego, pretensions to unprecented control over the effects of written language) evidently lacks.
YUK.
- Hide quoted

black cats are lighter
because they absorb more light

Yesterday, BA brunch, egotistical wit:

R: "Did you say her nickname was bubbles? Oh damn! I've always wanted a friend named Bubbles..."
A: "Sascha's nickname can be bubbles!"
We laugh. Me: "OK! I mean, I am pretty vacuous."
A: "You, vacuous? That's not the first adjective that comes to mind when I think of you."
Me: "I'd say there's a fair degree of vacuity there." Laughter. "Not absolute, or anything though—more just a sort of aeration." Laughter, again.

so i'm thinking maybe vegans don't really shit. maybe they just do these round, dark little goat droppings.


i write this because the words came into my head suddenly:
"i opened the door and sniffed. it was there. the stench of his vegetarian excrement. he must be home."

my dad was a pretty hardcore guy. at work, where other guys would have just one teaspoon of instant coffee in each cup, my dad would have two. And these were heaped teaspoons, mind you.

I was naked at first but now I feel the silkworms on me
Threading around my body a silken bikini
Threading their ghostly strands in silver, white
Along my skin as light as breath
Then dropping.
Slipping in the slit to thread a gusset
Banding round my buttocks in a phantom mist –
A netting of mist threads
Translucent, almost invisible
These cool ghosts, as their knickers
Haunt my skin.

the droolstrings of misery run from my lip to my chin
and then from my lip to your lip
tart as vegemite your consolation kiss
oh owch, oh owch
i'm sick of feeling anything.

dearest ixxz,
not to worry at all about your busyness, UTTERLY understood - I think we both know the woes of deadlines! i am feeling rebellious, myself. i am starting to get under the weather with the feeling that i am not quite writing what i want to be writing. goodness knows, what i want to be writing would probably be some tawdry novel about the very close friendship of british naval officers, but i mean, academically. i am ready to beat my little fists against the wall of being unable to make myself understandable and persuasive. oh well! anyway. these dark days are annoying me, too - must the sun go down so early? i imagine you, come 3.30 in the afternoons, stressing over your writing and seeing that the darkness is coming and going "oh my gosh, is it already 3.30!!?!?!" but hopefully by now it is all done and dusted? if not, big hugs. remind me when or if you are going home this christmas. i am staying on here, but jaunting off on Jan 4, what ho!
anyway it was good to run into you the other day, and if the boots fit, flaunt them! plain and practical as they may be (but i bet they're not, for all your disclaimers of innocence!)
xoxoxox love
sashy

[to mh]
i think it's a kind of magic, seeing people out of context, they take on a fairy-like outline. Ariane and I have got to know each other a bit better over the intervening weeks - her house is a funny one, with access to the boiler room for five properties,with ample room for thousands of asylumseekers if she wanted to start an illicit business venture, and peatey and i and a bunch of australians who seemed like nice chummy people all gathered to watch the coverage from the morning hours on, on live feed via the abc website. anyway, im pretty good - full of worries and excitements. i hope that you're wonderfully well. let me know how, or if, thigns are proceeding with Mr P. White, and so on. I know that you had your party last week, and I hope there were plenty of delicious things to be heard and nibbled on. The squirrels here are still running around doing their last minute autumn business. It's beautiful. Little illegal immigrants though they are. Missing Australia a good deal of course, and clung to your flowers, I must confess, until they were really quite dead. My mother asked me if flowers were still alive over the phone, and I said "You mean, alive, or Sascha-alive?" for I have quite different standards to the rest of the world, I can't bear to admit things are lost. I'm sure Dame G is far more "proper" with hers. Anyway I have been getting plenty of work done, somehow. Hope you have too - or, if your preference goes the other way right now, plenty of fun or rest.
Hear from you soon : )

im all right. full of a thousand doubts of various kinds and full of excitements too, and enthusiasms, and worries, and all that! ive been busygetting things written, getting less things read after a whole year of reading, it seems, without producing anything from it all. so many trails of marginalia and underlining left behind in so many books. but things are all right. my health was yuk but now im great. and YESTERDAY!!! i was overjoyed by the howard defeat, and of course mildly pleased at the labour victory (i separate the two in my head), becaue i think i would have had to renounce my citizenship had howard been voted in again. i went to arianne's house just off the market square with peatey and some other australians and we watched the coverage live feeding over the abc website. breakfast items, and good news! it went down well, and was a breath of fun. i hope you are catching lots of smiles among your acquaintance. sighs of relief. now i am trying to resist the urge to track down every possible analysis of labour's platform and possible directions hereon. and part of me is hoping peter garrett WASNT joking when he said labour would just alter all their policies once they won : )
lots of love, missing australia

yellow sticky thing been sitting on desk weeks:

stars rush together and plait in silkworm strands, brushed so fast across the sky too too eyebright
my tongue evaporates and beads on the roof of my mouth; drops in a cold rain of condensation without words, just tiny beads.
like nerve cells stars connect in lucid strands and brightly writhe across the sky strands like the fractred tissues you see on the eye afloat in toobright light and swim, brushed thin, into the close-vision distance.

my favourite apocalypse. my perfect apocalypse.

noone can byst the scleroid coat
of my tough lust

i pity you for pitying me
thankyou for saying thankyou
i pity you for being pitied.

puke. rudd says he's no opposed to tax breaks for private school parents.
which howard has offered.
let's make sure the rich have more privileges.
peate_brian
well lets get one thing straight then I have the utmost faith in you, I trust you whole heartedly..............its just others i dont trust..............so if i seem jeleous sometimes, that is why.ok?
yahoo
vomit vomit. labouru is fucked.
ok : )
if parents want to send their kids to private chool because they think there's somethign wrong with government schools then THATs the problem that should be addressed
peate_brian
I know babe, I voted for labour but only as the lesser of two evils..........then that night I saw a greens advertisement and whish I had voted for them
yahoo
close down all the private schools and make the "good" teachers whove gone there for the higher pay work at government schools
then get a better pay plan
yeah im asking kit to vote greens for senate, house of reps im not sure but ti doesnt matter because labour always wins in grayndler anyway
if u start making the argument that "its not jsut rich parents who send their kids to private school" and that "some parents are workign two jobs" to get their kids into private school, then fix the fucking public school system
and better still, nationalise control of it.
it would make so much more sense.
stupid fucken govt.
anyway.
raving.
peate_brian
I agree, not for the sake of agreeing, I belive the smae thing baby, I really do
I should run for parliamnet somewhere and get to be primeminister
yahoo
lol
i am trying to comfort myself
that maybe rudd is only cynically saying that so as not to alienate the upper middle class voters in swinging electorates
and if he won,
hed start being a fraction more actually labbor-like
i doubt it though
hes so corproate.
but if i ran the world we'd all still be running round with the plague in peasant hovels getting eaten by panthers.

my safe tree.
out in the thundered field so rushed with rain i ran
to you; knowing you would let no branches drop
back to your bark, i huddled
until i was warm.

felt like i had sunlight in my mouth when i turned and laid my face
on your strong skin
and felt the safety of your strength protective
waking me

out of the cool, dead place where i had been
out of the dry, cool place where time had stored me,
stalled, expiry date approaching -
but now with my nest in your roots i could live hotly.

never before in my life have i smiled like this
or sighed. or has my sense of smell
seemed so alive. never before did people,
seeing me after a break, lean in and say
"it's good to see you looking so so HAPPY."

of course i get tired, still. of course
i fall into thought, too far, and get confused.
sometimes i bite. but i think
you will ever help pull me out of that dead well of wishing,
tipping me out to your arms where i sleep right and dream.

for you know, i was so afraid things would stay the same,
and now i need only pray that they never change.

i couldt sleep for ages i nearly got up to talk to you again
btu when i slept i dreamed about you
hyou and me were caught up in this scary international murder thing in this big old house with this scary old semi-retired butler who kept goign through his master's desk
but before we got there, we were in this crepy european seaside town, anyway, you were a jump-jet flyer, and there was a jumpjet, so you hot wired it, and went around doing loop the loops while i cowered, amazd yetterrified, in a lighthouse, and yuo cam e up almost right against the windows.
then it was time for us to go on to our next destination which was in spain or something, but somehow i ended up having to land the jumpjet myself - we sort of swapped places mystically one time when you came near the window, so i had to suddenly learn to fly it at top speed
and i only succeeded in landing it - not on the little runway provided but, because i had accidentally accellerated so much, on the runway sideways skewed then across the car[ppark almost down to the sea where i succeeded in grinding it to a haltwby putting my feet out the sides and waddling them in the dirt liek you do to stop a swing
i was pretty shaken, then we were ready to go on to spain but i remembered i didnt have my bag - id left it at a treehouse we visited
so i went back, and there were people sitting next to it - kids - and even though it was like 20 years since the day i'd last seen them and i was all grown up and they were still kids, they recognised me and said 'you're sascha! you mentored us when we were in year 1'
and now they were about to go to fort stret high school.
anyway they seemed to think i was an amazing mature woman especially when i told them about my boyfiend with his jumpjet.
they were eating lunch.
i found my bag and in it were some groceries i bought - a sandwich for my lunch and a chocwedge - you'd eaten yours before
you got in the plane, but id forgotten mine under the tree and now
it had turned into a soggy plastic sack of meltedness.
then you came up and smiled at the kids - they tried to follow us asking where we were off to, but suddenly neither us could remember the name of the palce
i felt sort of proud that, after boasting of you, you had urned up and really existed to their eyes
then wer were on our way basically next thing i knew in this manor house with this creepy butler
letter-opening and steam-opening his master's drawers and letter
looking for something in the desk that he needed to find before he culd kill him
and you and i were sort of trailing him sort of trying to stop him, but not wanting to risk or own lives too much
it was weird because he was kind of like the half-brother of his master, and yt his employee - hence the resentment
eventually we cornered him in the little bathroom below his master's garret, and his master came up the stairs behind us and said "what's going on" not expecting anyone to be up there in his private space
and the weirdest thing is
you looked at me, and i started covering fo rthe butler
the garret staircase split off two ways and one went to the master's turret study and the other went to this poky little room with magazines and an old couch and i said overloud to the butler
"Oh, [hisname], have you beewn hanging around in that dingy room again?"
at which the butler looked at me in wonder like 'why are you helping me?"
and i went and pushed the door and said charmingly back over my shoulder to where you the master and the butler were staring, "it's his guilty pleasure you know [Master's name], coming in here to read all the old 80s magazines"
... and then pretty well just after that i woke up.

when she began to contemplate her own textuality, she realised it was all a load of wank.

well u know i guess it is pretty cultural to scorn everything
yahoo
true
like to hump a tree, then scream "this tree SUCCCKKS!!!"
thinze
yes it's the proper way to do it
yahoo
you have to scream tho.
it's not good enough otherwise
thinaze
before or after?
yahoo
and then people come up to you and say "it's not good enough. not 'good enough'."
thinaze
what, the art?
yahoo
they do quotation marks in the air for the good enough - as indicated.
the treehumpng with lacklustre scream
thinaze
i love quotation marks
yahoo
as art.

**

thihaze
then u would be able to just patiently explain to them tha they were philistines.
yahoo
but you hyave to be patient
and u have to use the phrase "i think what everybody need to do first, is to calm down."
(preferably ensure they are already calm before saying that
then it is guaranteed to agitate)
thiaze
patience is the key to all interactions
yes, especially when it aggravates others
yahoo
yes. "yes."
thinkhaze
suckers
yahoo
lol.
oh, then you go and have a "Big Brekkie" at the most commercial looking independent cafe you cna find
one that looks so commercially successful and brand conscious that, though not yet a chain, it is definitely aboutu to become one.
Hassle them, once seated, aboutu whether their eggs are free trade.
thinaze
but it is still "independent"
yahoo
Their eggs will of course be local - but hassle them repeatedly.
And then ask for a quadruple shot espresso.
thinaze
i hate the artistic life, it is so much "effort"
yahoo
yes, it is "Effort" - with just a few days as an artist
you earn an "effort" stamp
you dream, on the fifth day's night,
that you are with your Grade 3 teacher
and she is asking you to put out your hand
and on it, she stamps the "Effort" stamp
with the grinning two-toothed hippo.
And you scream, making balled child-fists, "Effort? EFFORT?! What about RESULT!?!?!!?"

[re the cannes thing]
t-haze
8:53 PMi want to be that
i had a postmodern dream once, it was pretty cool, i thikn it is pretty cool to have a postmodern dream
yahoo
well, yes
but u should wake up and growl
like a culktureless dog

**

: ) actually ill probably break out in zits and die in sourceless stress on the caret, staring at the ceiling and drooling like a dying fish would drool, if they had any saliva
then as i lie there drooling, i'll get out my rush mat and my totem pole and shrunken heads and start chanting "who de debel you?" "who de debel you?" "you no speak-e, i kill-e!"
and if u still like me after that, well hey, we're sweet
: )
p-b
lol, I will love you with a purple face, bloated, head first in a toilet bowl
yahoo
what if i suddenly looked like billy zane, but with F-cups
every time there was a full moon?

hello pink apple
8:35 PMi dreamed i was ishmael
it was bizarre
jaon collins was there
and i had to hang on to a helecopter
t-aze
was she wearing furs?
like on the little feet of the helicopter? sounds scary
yahoo
lol
i wish the feet had been furry
it was hrorid, i had to cling on for deer life, all the while trying to choose between 80s movies that had been transferred to DVD
to watch if i ever made it onto the helicopter
or something like that.
t-aze
u are so totally postmodern
omg, the postmodern dream, it is totally a sign
yahoo
i know, i am becoming a FILMMAKER
whose films are remaindered
8:52 PMon the salt-swept floors of Cannes

**

then i was trying to show my sister a song on itunes
8:41 PMbut everything i clicked on, when i scanned track forward, turned out to be like an mp4 video of me singing opera (or trying)
and kit identified my voice as some particular opera singer, a not very good one, she thought i was miming to. but it was me! it was me! it was me doing karaoke along to phillipe jarrousky backing instruments.
and meanwhile
she and i were trying to watch Krabbé videos - but they were all taped in the wrong order, we were confused
I hjad to excuse myself, that the helicopter, and the potential impending visits from the whole Nevilles family, had thrown me.
Mumma was offended that I was going away to be with the Nevilles.

i love your skin
our faces close, your neck, our breathing
and like, for centuries, philosophers have been trying to take our souls out of our bodies
like, what the hell? i'm happy here:
i love you in my heart, that thumping muscle thing.

i went for a walk.
by the way.
around.
i could feel my fingers shrink.
it was cold and misty out.
really misty.
it's Guy Fawkes' night tomorrow night so
I walked past the ghostly kiddies rides and things they have out on Midsummer Common.
also i went down a stone stairwell i often pass in the way through from one stone court to another
peate_brian
what the hell is Guy Fawkes' night?
yahoo
and have never been down
it smelled of a sauna
and it turned out there were shower rooms down there
and 'bath' rooms
like for those weirdos who choose to go use a communal bath insteadof a communal shower
and they were in what looked like nun's cells, with white-painted vaulted ceilings
because that's how old the building is.
heavy doors too.

yahoo
yup but
rght now, i just woke u[p and look like
an oyster someone dropped in sawdust

down the street, the townies thud in their uggboots
and gloss stockings
the fat one sucking a slim little penis:
her glow-tipped dry white cigarette.


*

in the grey loam of his mind, the Thought begins its disinterment. Stirring, slow, through the soft grey soil it puts out its grey hands, slowly, patient, and begins to unbury itself, to crawl slowly up through the ash dust dark through to the conscious surface. he feels it stir in the grey loam, feels the loam shift, the ground shift, and has to sit down on the park bench. he knows he will see it soon - he will see its hands (if there are any fingers left) and it will put its face up too, drey dry-rotten and stretched, gravity-graven, with some of the features worn out by worms, some of the features gone now into lost dust, so he knows that when he sees the face, when it is there before him all fresh from the grave in his mind, he still will not quite see it; it will be like a person trying to remember a face, unable to fully recall - a general impression, gapped with grey. and it stirs and shifts, and he sits on the bench, and he wonders if the grey hands will still have fingers.

looking at the bridge of sighs, i saw a duck in the swim with six drakes. i counted the drakes. yes, six. six drakes and one duck. she was pretty. their heads gleamed green, the drakes. they quacked and lunged at each other's tails, fending each other off - two, in particular, seemed in conflict. one, in particular, seemed dominant. then, whoever was presently winning would sidle up to the duck and she seemed nervous of the attention, yet she didn't try to get away, she'd let whoever it was sidle up beside her; furtive, but somehow so gently serene, so fragile and at risk in the winter summer light.

i hear you pigeon.
your beautiful coo.

maybe it was gaining the hour; time suspended an hour, a free hour, as england put its clock's back.
the time changed overnight and for the free hour, for a few free hours, i guess i let myself too.
a halloween party. a pantyhose strangled tart.
six-seven.

every day about 6.15, maybe exactly 6.15, the bell starts tolling. it's a real bell, a huge church bell, i realised yesterday, but at this distance the sound is flat and electronic. it tolls for a long time. longer than any bell should toll. like time has stopped for a bit or, better, got stuck in a groove.

the wooden stairs... in st john's... i said they were worn... but not just that, sort of sagging, but beautifully sagging, aged and strong and pale and dry and bowed like bent bone... driftbone... big...

His voice - soft, strong, hygienic - swathed over her; wiped her clean.

there's supposedly a harpsichord kicking round somewhere....
i feel like a little snail.
thinkhaze
a harpsichord!!
yahoo
I KNOW!!
"several" in fact.
i have no idea where.
thinkhaze
why snail, isolation?
yahoo
or how u get tot hem.
thinkhaze
several!!
yahoo
i dont know
sleepy isolation.
yes.
thinkhaze
is it like a labyrinth?
yahoo
sleepy isolation.
its confusing. thats for sure.
noone helps you.
you're on your own.

Buy the Big Issue! Last one left!
The Big Issue! Only one left.

i should have called that mozart-azs-wagner story "portait of the artist with a stuck fart" or even "sonata for stuck fart"





**




liplicked, she sat back. her scandalled eyes scanned the mad scene, the blur of him running off, the slack backseat of his jeans.

"But why did they put you in jail?" the boy asked the man.
"Because I am a pederast," the man explained.
"What's a pederast?" asked the boy.
"Well, it's... It's a person who thinks very bad things. Who thinks the very worst things."
"Oh! OK so, I guess, it's a bit like a pessimist?" And here the boy paused in thought. "Gee," he said at length, thumbing his bagstrap, "I'm kind of a pessimist myself, sometimes. Gee. They shouldn't put people in jail just for that."

bkp@hotmail.com
anyway, what i was gonna say is, I remember thinking you were one of the most beautiful girls i'd ever seen
yahoo
!!!!!!
bkp@hotmail.com
yeah, true.
yahoo
wow.
bkp@hotmail.com
haha, that killed ur train of thought.
but yeah, it was nice.

tonight i can't stand it you're too far away
and love's like a tongue-twister so hard to say

i have to remember 'be here in this time'
don't just wait and wish it away.

but today today was a beautiful day
short as it was
the sun the squirrel the secret garden the water the rippling on the roof as i stood inside the bridge of sighs
with that feeling kind of like a disbelieving laugh looking up
being there

and in st john's college
finding my way up the stairs
several sets
with their wood worn, worn
over centuries, wood
like a riverbed, somehow
or something like driftwood,
but that doesn't get it either.

so i went back today, and the wine glass was still there. but it had been moved. now it was atop the other grave. and it looked less meaningful somehow, with the sunlight out.

but the glass was no longer empty.
it had filled up with rain.

Maybe this version is a bit more like a poem, but it's less like how i actually experienced it:


===

a little ancient church
sunk in its own green graven garden
in the rain
bright snatches of flowers edging the green and the stone
in the rain.

on a tombstone (or pediment)
an empty wineglass, rain-wetted
stands alone
in the rain.

beyond, or almost through it
i can see, grey, on the grinless stone
of the next little grave
the carved skull.

in the rain i stand alone
empty.


===


BTW, the stone is "grinless" because the skull was not smiling - nor frowning. it was the upper skull only, with no lower jawbone.

a little ancient church
sunk in its own green graven garden
in the rain
bright snatches of flowers edging the green and the stone
in the rain.

on a tombstone (or pediment)
an empty wineglass, rain-wetted
stands alone
in the rain.

beyond, or almost through it
i can see, grey, on the grinless stone
of the next little grave
the carved skull.

flux@thinkhaze.com
aw! hysterical sobbing! tell me more! i have ben thinking about u bunnypie!
yes it is sold!!! we are moving
my little cat is sitting on my bed miaowing at me
i went to the opera yesterday it was so supremely fabulous
sorry will start yahoo
yahoo
it's all good i just started thinking i was in the wrong place and it was all wrong and i had made a huge mistake and lonely and so on and so forth
flux@thinkhaze.com
oh it's you
i sorry i sent a message saying " yes it is sold we are moving" but it told me you didn't receive it.
how are things now?? hysyterical sobbing subsiding? why huge mistake, the culture shock?
if problems persist please COMEHOM!
yahoo
i feel much better yeah
flux@thinkhaze.com
my house is sold and we are moving, and i saw tales of hoffman at the opera it was fantastic. i wrote an essay about william morris and romanticism, now i'm trying to write an essay about the medieval morality play everyman and i hate it but it has to be in on friday.
yahoo
i dont know, walking past all the groups of ppl
did u mnow i played in a n orchestra for that opera?
the DOLL!!!!
flux@thinkhaze.com
are u finding yr niche??
yahoo
anyway : )
flux@thinkhaze.com
there is an opera called the doll?
that is so cool that you played in an orchestra for an opera
u re talented creature!!
i love opera
yahoo
no no, there's a doll in Hoffman
I playe din the orchestra for Hoffman
flux@thinkhaze.com
oh yes the dol
awesome
yahoo
but i liekd Antonia
flux@thinkhaze.com
the doll was my fav part
yahoo
i love this song she sings
flux@thinkhaze.com
i liked her too
yahoo
i only know the english words.
but i have it on m,y computer
its a fucken kickass opera
flux@thinkhaze.com
i thought it was great too
yahoo
i was going to go see it but was saving money
i fuckn love opera
cambrdige is so weird there's a "Handel Opera Society"
like all the society's ge tto a level of specificity that is just crazy
flux@thinkhaze.com
u should have seen the bit how they do the dolls in this one at the opera house, it is fantastic, we were laughing so hard
yahoo
wish i saw
flux@thinkhaze.com
are u going to start a "dollyhead dollfactory" society
are u going to start yr own society?
yahoo
lol yes
flux@thinkhaze.com
it sounds like fantastic campus life
yahoo
remember we discussed a doll company we cd start
i cant remember what it was gunna be called though
flux@thinkhaze.com
but u need to start a "dollstudies: dollpower" society.
yahoo
LOL
ok.
OK.
MORE THAN OK!!!!!!!
flux@thinkhaze.com
lol.
yahoo
i forgot it was called that
omg that was the wrongest htotest thing ever
i am gonna ebay for disembodied doll heads
and fill my room with them
like one of those 'ball rooms' at wonderland and fun parks
u put infants in
so when the cleaner comes she sees this rolling sea of powerheads.
flux@thinkhaze.com
would u be able to sleep?
yahoo
i would never be able to wake up again.
flux@thinkhaze.com
LOL.
yahoo
i would sleepwalk though the doll-land day.
lol.

flux@thinkhaze.com is currently using Windows Live (MSN)

Some features may not be available
yahoo
fluxxete!!!!
i mean, fluxette!
flux@thinkhaze.com
lol i feel so glam
yahoo
: )
flux@thinkhaze.com
like a laxative!
yahoo
bunny says hello she is sitting on my computer watching me type
flux@thinkhaze.com
how are you?
yahoo
i know, can i just say
flux@thinkhaze.com
ah sweet bunny!
yahoo
for some reason i thought of laxatives too!
flux@thinkhaze.com
i am such a laxative
yahoo
"She had that kind of lean, laxative glamour."
flux@thinkhaze.com
v descriptive
yahoo
abnormal number of anorexics in cambridge actually
flux@thinkhaze.com
really!! that is scary
perverted perfectionists or something?
do u have a theory of aetiology or whatever?
yahoo
ooh sorry dunklemouse
i racked off to read an email
yeah it is SO that they are perfectonistswhen i wasnt
getting my period i read all these articles that said
the problem (as with eatin disorders) was more common
among "professional or intellectual women"
i thought
"while i'd like to think that they are just trying to
make women thik they shd go back to being breeding housewives
there is probable some truth to that."
and here, in cambridge, i see the walking proof!
and, healthily, feel no sense of envy or aspiration.
: )
flux@thinkhaze.com
i'm not surrpised but reassurred nonetheless.
yahoo
yeah neither am i surprised, but it seems to me some ULTIMATE CONFIRMATION of mental health
flux@thinkhaze.com
yeah congratulations
yahoo
ok, this from a person who spent the last few days having odd fits of hysterical sobbing but anyway
how are you marcling??
did the house sell?!!?!
tell all!!!!!!!
flux@thinkhaze.com
aw! hysterical sobbing! tell me more! i have ben thinking about u bunnypie!
yes it is sold!!! we are moving
my little cat is sitting on my bed miaowing at me
i went to the opera yesterday it was so supremely fabulous
sorry will start yahoo
yahoo
it's all good i just started thinking i was in the wrong place and it was all wrong and i had made a huge mistake and lonely and so on and so forth
flux@thinkhaze.com
oh it's you
i sorry i sent a message saying " yes it is sold we are moving" but it told me you didn't receive it.
how are things now?? hysyterical sobbing subsiding? why huge mistake, the culture shock?
if problems persist please COMEHOM!
yahoo
i feel much better yeah
flux@thinkhaze.com
my house is sold and we are moving, and i saw tales of hoffman at the opera it was fantastic. i wrote an essay about william morris and romanticism, now i'm trying to write an essay about the medieval morality play everyman and i hate it but it has to be in on friday.
yahoo
i dont know, walking past all the groups of ppl
did u mnow i played in a n orchestra for that opera?
the DOLL!!!!
flux@thinkhaze.com
are u finding yr niche??
yahoo
anyway : )
flux@thinkhaze.com
there is an opera called the doll?
that is so cool that you played in an orchestra for an opera
u re talented creature!!
i love opera
yahoo
no no, there's a doll in Hoffman
I playe din the orchestra for Hoffman
flux@thinkhaze.com
oh yes the dol
awesome
yahoo
but i liekd Antonia
flux@thinkhaze.com
the doll was my fav part
yahoo
i love this song she sings
flux@thinkhaze.com
i liked her too
yahoo
i only know the english words.
but i have it on m,y computer
its a fucken kickass opera
flux@thinkhaze.com
i thought it was great too
yahoo
i was going to go see it but was saving money
i fuckn love opera
cambrdige is so weird there's a "Handel Opera Society"
like all the society's ge tto a level of specificity that is just crazy

He said, "You look like an angel with that light behind your head. You look celestial."

it's a temporary thing, the two supervisors - because
my main one doesnt know anything aboutthe topic lol
lol your vision of the future
lol
flze.com
have they commissioned yr bust yet
yahoo
tbhats not true btw that she doesnt know anything, but its not her research interest
um, i wish!
a 32B marble bust of my bust
flhaze.com
it's only a matter of time!!
wow, pioneering
yahoo
it's be pretty
it could be declared obsecene and covered up
with a bra
(of my choosing)
flkhaze.com
heheh
yahoo
and i will insist on "rasberry lace"
"sheer raspberry lace"
to see what they come up with

fluxxy!
fluxxy!
it
's 8 am here
fluxkhaze.com
hey how are you?
yahoo
i just woke up
ukkk
UKKKKH
last thing in my dream, i was cuddling a little pug dog
flux@thom
that is so cute
yahoo
except it was big, like it grew to its true size when i cuddled it
fluxcom
was it a good dream?
yahoo
YES!!!!
themost traumatic thing that happened in it was that apeatey and i couldn't find the creal toy we wanted in this big box of cereal lol
pretty grownup dream
: )
flux@thinom
it reminds me of this http://www.dnaco.net/~vogelke/pictures/how-to-hug-a-baby/
yahoo
opening it.
actually there was a creepier thing - i found a picture of me taken m george or adrik or someone at school where i was outside my old hoe, in marrickville, liek we'd walked there from school one day
and in the picture i was bald like my dad and had a long crooked nose
and i got really excited and said i had to show it to my dad and see if ithe thought it was him.
flux@thm
did u like it?
yahoo
lol the dog
flux@think
no, the creepy photo of you
yahoo
no, i'm lolling at the dog you sent
lol
but yeah, i liked it!
i thought "shit i was ugly back then" but i also thought "COOOL!!!!!"
i had this horshoe ring of bald-capped brown hair
----
flux@thinom
i hope you don't go bald, your hair looks good where it is
i know and i love the last pic where the baby and the dog are both smiling
yahoo
well
if i do
i can wear the BEST wig
dollywiog
flux@thinom
that's true
yahoo
i can glue that dollhair you get from spotlight to my head
flux@thiom
omg, that would be so awesome
u would have to glue it so it looked like a real wig
ther ewould be no other way to do it
yahoo
of course but
it would be like in the witches, where the witches keep scratching their heads
flux@thim
lol
yahoo
that is how ppl would know i was really a bald doll-woman
"a gaudy doll-woman"

i dreamed i was in this class led my an ancient history teacher and glynne greg and kit were ther ein the class to, anyway
part of the class, they were going to remove people's skulls from their heads
and becaue they judged i had a very fine example of a skullthey removed my skull form my head
but my consciousness stayed in my skul while they passed it round, and
tey made comparison between my skull and the queen's skull as fine examples then said like "unlike this marmoset skull" or "unlike this half rambutan" or seomething liek that
but all ic ould think about was how you were coming soon to meet us for dinner, and you were going to arrove before they had a chance to put my skull back into my head
actuall yithink my consciousness was put aside for sakekeeping
so i kept thinking how my head would be this squishy hairy floppy sack hanging off my neck wih no skull/structure
and in fact while i was busy talking to someone i kinda forgot that i was disembodied, and boddy was ina chair in next roomw aiting for skull to be put back coz i was yakking away to glynne or someone
and i heard your car but sort of didnt realise
and next thing i knew you came in and i realised you'd been there to see the proces of my skull being squished back into my head and set up again
which i myself hadnt seen
and which the teacher had asked me to do myself, and when i said i didnt know how, he said "neither do i, really" but went off to do it
anyway then i was talking to you and when i realised you had seen them squishing it back in to the floppy headsack i was imagigin i was so horified
but then i was distracted because your skin was all dry and you had a bushy red beard and red hair that stuck up on your head
and you were really pale.
and i told you i didnt mind.
it was so so horible.

EASIER THIS WAY - THROUGH LETTERS. ONE from and then one TO MY PADRE:


Helu!

Thanks for your email below and your poetic txt message on wordsworthaquidatleast, hedged bets, and deceased bovine patriots.


More please - of fluro and blue / green domiciles.

Kit told me about your crisis of identity - DON'T PANIC - identity is fluid. Esp if yr not travelling soon. Let me know if I can help.

Good that Skype is working - in theory you and I cld attempt this down stream, time differences permitting. I have the gear at work I think.

Some snippets from a continuing antipodean existence:

- heatwave at present - 32 degrees tomorrow. May need to bring the fat lil ones in from the sauna.

- just saw a 2006 film on Cable with Steve Coogan called The Alibi, American film, but quite witty.

- your sketch sits on my mini-desk and is a beacon shining light on all that lies just beyond our grasp.

- am reading Oscar Levant's autobiography [his real one, not one I made up] - "Memoirs of an Amnesiac". Great title. He begins with a long honest rave about his obsessive / compulsive behaviour. I shall do a film treatment.

- Listening to Robert Fripp's 1977 masterpiece, Exposure, and much else.

- Kit and I watched Soldier of Orange Sunday night. Part 2. A promising Krabbe on Rutger moment disturbed by the arrival of a man from Prufrock. [Coleridge moment.]

- The ABC Bookshow is doing Moby-Dick this week. Shan't watch it. THe Spectrum For / Against was also on M-D this or last week I think.

- Puppies are pretty happy, all in all. Pigs bawl for their slaves. [Brecht moment.]

- Kit and I watched a halfway cute Cary Grant / Ingrid Bergman romance last week. Very stagey, but articulate. "Character driven". Called Indiscreet. Great Title.

- Tom Cruise is set to play Borges in a bio of his early career, "Young Jorge". The Library sequences will be done at Fisher. A first-ever Argentinian - Australian co-production. [In an alternate version, for DVD release only, the exhumed Borges plays himself. Johhny Depp to play Borges's muse, Sue-Ann. Tim Burton to direct that one.]

Must go - puppy whaling time. Er, walking.

And enough of me. Et tu?

Dabdil
xxx


IN REPLY:
SASSlmo
to Rob
More options 07:55 (0 minutes ago)
I copped some serious wit there. Thanks for the email. You would be
lost in the bookshops in this one-horse-many-college town. The one
right next to trinity, Heffers, is immense. A sad lack of cows,
though. The Cambridge Uni Press bookshop is dauntingly content-full. I
saw at least 18 books I should read, each priced at £18. Time to
discover libraries. Speaking of Borges. Yeah he'd be right at home.
This evening in the bookshop, or perhaps the supermarket, i thought of
a one-off line, which went "I sing the humble _____" but what the ____
was i can't for my life remember. Wit's whittlings lost. What else? I
try to make a point of doing one idiotic thing each day. Today, I left
the bath running over. Yesterday, I misplaced my passport. Both
situations were salvaged - luckily. Why do they let me out? Anyway I'm
doing OK today. Yesterday I was slightly hysterical for a few minutes
and thinking I should never have come. Met a nice German girl (who I
could have sworn was American) in the kitchenette today. We got
chatting, such that I had to remicrowave my food twice. It was quite
amusing. We mutually contemplated, and rejected, the idea of joining
the welcoming Pub Crawl.
The sheer number of vomitting firstyear girls in crotch-length lycra
skirts on the streets is truly incredible. A blonde apocalypse.
I rattled off this poem in response to my feeling of lost-ness in the
midst of administrative mess and quadrangles with no names or signage
and where every tiny littl eproblem requires you to trek to a
different department:
===
the uni said 'let me mother, let me mother'
said 'suck my stone breasts'
but the hard paps are cold, and as unyielding
as male nipples. the steep taste
of life in the deep unadministrative womb
of the sprawling stone beast
starts to daunt. daunt, daunt,
i hover haunted by the sense
of obligationdeadlines creeping up on me
quick as ghosts behind the collonades,
as we keep off the grass.
==
Now as for actually doing anything academic or intelligent, I'm afraid
I have little to report. Dread little. Though you'll be excited to
know that I was speaking to a cab driver in Singapore, who was able to
tell me that UNSW Asia was back on the cards thanks to Singapore govt
funding. Is this true? Why hadn't I heard?
I can see myself working out how to get on this way, but I feel I am
going to put my foot in it a few times each week, and I definitely
need to practise this time management thing a bit more carefully. I
made myself a to-do list today, mapping out various commitments, it
made me feel a bit better. Endless forms and things to remember. I had
an experience of peculiar transport today as I entered the library off
Nevile's court and wound my way up the stairs to these unexpected
great doors past unexpected marble busts into an unexpected high huge
hall where I had to coldly step down the black and white tiles watched
by cool librarian eyes from between the ancient vellum-laden shelves
to the huge desk where I was to sign my name in the BOOK and so
matriculate. Then I trickled away.
Thinking of you each day and hoping you're getting on well. Hello to
all the critters. Pat Kit on the head for me and say "nice sheepy.
nice sheepy. ba-a-a-a." Eat more golf balls and bowling clubs. And
your Tom Cruise vision is one of your best yet.
Kit really appreciated your enjoyment of Soldjaat van Oranje.
I have no TV. I wish I felt this making me more productive.
It was rather wonderful, when my passport was returned to me, I was
expecting nothing of the sort, sitting at about 10 PM at this desk
with my computer blaring music, beneath which I thought I heard a
knocking. I thought maybe the music was bugging a neighbour. Turned it
down. Heard the knock again. Went to the door. Rotund Mr Plod-like
portly man in a bowler's hat. "Lost your passport miss?" "Oh, yeah-! I
did!" --hope bursting forth in my voice. He made no verbal reply, but
wordlessly presented the passport. "Oh thankyou so much---" I ran on,
thinking, Aaaaw, can I keep him?
Warrell my pet pigeon has not been around today, I'm worried he's left
me. They have strung fake hawks between the buildings here which blow
in the wind, designed to scare pigeons off, but they look like Art.
Lots and lots of love, and big hugs, and bzzz-ing of foreheads on upperarms!
xoxox Sappy

I try to make a point of doing one idiotic thing each day. Today, I left the bath running over. Yesterday, I misplaced my passport. Both situations were salvaged - luckily. I don't know why I let myself out on the streets. Discipline. Discipline. Discipline. All gone now.

on my walks home when everything's shutting down i have a tendency to stop in at any open door i can find.
in this instance heffer's bookshop, which stood open after 6 for a launch event.


==

in the bookshop, or perhaps the supermarket, i thought of a one-off line, which went "i sing the humble _____" but what the ____ was i can't for my life remember.

the uni said 'let me mother, let me mother'
said 'suck my stone breasts'
but the hard paps are cold, and as unyielding
as male nipples. the steep taste
of life in the deep unadministrative womb
of the sprawling stone beast
starts to daunt. daunt, daunt,
i hover haunted by the sense
of obligations deadlines creeping up on me
quick as ghosts behind the collonades,
as we keep off the grass.

hinkhaze
hi, how are you? i just emailed you!
yahoo
sweeet!
im hanging in there!
i bought knickers.
i just got daunted in a library walking down
to sign a book
thinkhaze
really is it a bit lonely!
you're doing booksignings already?
yahoo
over the tiles past the tall shelves and marble busts
yeah, yeah - matriculation book
to "matriculate"
thinkhaze
it sounds like a classical temple
yahoo
it is the first time the stone surrounds have transoprted me
yea it was!
thinkhaze
that is pretty cool
yahoo
i have only been peripherally appreciating things because ive been so wiped out with organising myself, even just communications setup were a nightmare
thinkhaze
really as in wireless internet?!
bummer that it's been tough settling in
yahoo
yeah liek they gave me a landline phone numbr and ai went and bought a phone, only to discover there's nowhere to lug it in
that sorta shit
lol
thinkhaze
lol
bad tv comedy
sascha's sitcom!
yahoo
lol
yep
lol itd rock
i read ur email : )
thinkhaze
painfully funny

from before got web set up:


These hallowed halls are plumbed. It’s funny to think about the upright columns of moving shit
That must run up and down through the buildings,
Part of their framework. Scholarly waste.
[BB Crt, Mon 1 Oct, 2 pm ish, shortly after losing passport]

==

My teeth break chunks out of a fresh pear
In merrie England.
Hourglasses running love
Spin in my chest and
Words that have to wait
Stay bricked up mortal in my mouth.

Alone I feel a little bit serene
A little listless. Vivaldi streaks the air
With violinsong. The speakers are new. One fat pigeon
Looks up at me when I check on it
There on the windowsill.

Privacy never bothered me much.
I can see myself reflected in the window – seeing
What others would see if they looked
But they wouldn’t look and, if they did,
Worst case scenario: they might laugh.

I speak and, here, it doesn’t sound like English.
I laugh at myself. I’m a child.
I play with tracks from different CDs
On my computer. Eat. Drink. Wash my face.
This is my first night alone here. I guess
I must just be confused enough not to feel sad.

[Cambridge, Blue Boar Court, Sunday 30th September 2007, approx 7.10 – 7.15]
[the poem took about as long to tap out as the pear took to eat]

if they run out of fossil fuels they can start mining coal from under my eyes.

the snow begins to wilt
and the growing scene of grass, exposed
shows brown beneath the greening spring of light
i could stop and kiss time
on her smooth and thoughtless brow
and with my pocketknife
i could lock blades with the rusty scythe
of death, with his shy smile
glancing coy from behind the fuzz on the apple bough.
i could dispose of archaic terms
i picked up from old books
like "vex" and "wane" and "ebb"
and simply stand and laugh, yes,
'stand' and 'laugh'
and quote myself out of existence
losing my self in the warm, wordless womb
of the springwake.

Into my lifeless life
You rushed in fast, like a stormwater flashflood
Stopping my mouth. Fast,
But seeming to stop time
So a month takes ages;
Seems a year, or more.
More. More. I have to gasp
At the bright meniscus of this fishflood world
Of you, and you, and you --
You blotting out all other words
But 'you', and a few clichés
I never trusted in before - but now I do.
I do. I do. I will. To say it. Say it.
I could not, I cannot say more.
I just don't know. All floods subside, I guess,
But ours, I think, will leave an ark
Filled, two by two, with our paired lives, our animals
Our life.

[written months ago - mush mush mush]

i dont want her to be unhappy
every day i will be feeling terrible
gulty guilty guilty
no nervous system anymore, just a guilt complex
thats how ittl be

adapted by me from a sappho fragment, and somehow relevant:


I truly wish to die.
She left me in tears, saying
“We’ve suffered so terribly, us two,
Sappho, I don’t, I really don’t want to go away.” And I said to her:
“Go and be happy, remembering me,
For you know how I cared about you,
And if you don’t, I want to remind you…”

come be my godfathermafiaboss
my badboybuddybloodcurdling boss
beat me with feelings and dirty my mind
twist the rinsewater out and then say:
ONLY BY SAYING IT OVER CAN YOU MAKE IT GO AWAY
ONLY BY SAYING IT OVER CAN YOU MAKE IT GO AWAY
and i'll say:
"your sweet and generous nature."
i'll say, "your sweet and generous nature."
your sweet and generous nature.
your sweet and generous nature.

if i just had more fire in my blood
i'd grin and go
it would make sense
it would make sense to run
like a flashflood of flame along the plane
of dry grass outta here.

if i just had less lava in my blood
it might set fast
so i could stay, and know
"i want to stay. i want to stay."
not always wonder "if?"
not always question "yes?"

if i could drown the drought.
if i could drown them out.
if i could throw myself off the big cliff of otherness
it might make sense to go
it might make sense to stay

but it wouldn't be right to go
and it wouldn't be right to stay.

yahoo
transferring files, stressing, shd be tidying, prob wont get there, stressing, wasting time, stressing LOL
quality
thinkhaze
sounds nice
yahoo
tops
TOPS!
thinkhaze
it's all a bit of a surprise and din't realise you were leaving so soon!
yahoo
lol sucky
SUCKY!
lol
sorry hysteria
mild, tho
no outward symptoms
THANK FUCK THEY HAVE PIANOS IN ENGLAND
something to vent on
THAT CAN BE MY NEXT SONG
Airvent
Soundvent
aznd rip off courtney loves doll veins
with DollVents
i cd have gills
porcelain gills
thinkhaze
that sounds nice
that could be fun
yahoo
thats it marc!!
thats the refrain
repeating bimbovoiced background:
"that sounds nice. that could be fun. that sound nice. that could be fun" with giggles
can i tell you something sick?
thinkhaze
please!
yahoo
I HAVE COME TO THE END OF MY HATRED FOR OPALS.
thinkhaze
lol
i uderstand
they're OK
blush
yahoo
LOL
shd i try to go back?
shd i try to backtrack?
thinkhaze
hmmm
nah
maladaptive
yahoo
ooh thats a good wor
d
what if i became an opal?
thinkhaze
i'm addicted to it
yahoo
would you watch me glint?
thinkhaze
yeah, that would be pretty cool
why, are youb ecoming an opal?
yahoo
i have no reason to believe so YET
and yet,
there's a sense
a sense of fractured coloured light, and depth
and glitter
and blue blueness
and a little sound the light makes like an "eek!"
thinkhaze
really? are u sure it's not a tinkling sound like a million lil bells?
yahoo
would that make me an opal?
OR A CUBIC ZIRCONIUM?!?!?!
thinkhaze
tinkling bells definitely more opal than cubic zirconium.
but cubic zirconium are pretty too.
but i think plastic and glass are pretty and valuable too.
yahoo
ME TOO!
and lucite. lucite.
thinkhaze
i'm naming my 2nd daughter "plastique"
yahoo
lol LOL
yes.
YES.
i agree.
i like rocks that come out of the earth
or both out of the earth and the sky (igneous)

me & bp:
bp:
we are apparently getting uniforms and I bet they will look shit, actually I know they will!
me:
one day u'll have a job where u have a bigger role in policy direction, etc
in the meantime, you're a lackey
and that's just the way things are
if ur boss doesnt know whats good for him
thats not ur prob - you're still getting paid
paid to feel frustrated and impotent - better than feeling
frustrated and impotent for free!


yahoo
glad u think so : )
yeah sleep good, u know what tho
my sleep, while uninterrupted, has been so dreampacked that
it seems more intense than waking
so im not sure if its wrking out restful : )
infinitely better than tossturning tensing tossturning tho!
thinkhaze
yeah, dreams can be fun.
yahoo
they so can
lol im sorry
i am still laughing
at telling u 2 u didnt have to move
lol
god i suck
and am blind
ill send u pics when i get my ass together
thinkhaze
it's all good!
yahoo
what up to today?
thinkhaze
not much really - just reading news and crap and then going to see the dr at 4.
u
?
yahoo
transferring files, stressing, shd be tidying, prob wont get there, stressing, wasting time, stressing LOL
quality
thinkhaze
sounds nice
yahoo
tops
TOPS!
thinkhaze
it's all a bit of a surprise and din't realise you were leaving so soon!
yahoo
lol sucky
SUCKY!
lol
sorry hysteria
mild, tho
no outward symptoms
THANK FUCK THEY HAVE PIANOS IN ENGLAND
something to vent on
THAT CAN BE MY NEXT SONG
Airvent
Soundvent
aznd rip off courtney loves doll veins
with DollVents
i cd have gills
porcelain gills
thinkhaze
that sounds nice
that could be fun
yahoo
thats it marc!!
thats the refrain
repeating bimbovoiced background:
"that sounds nice. that could be fun. that sound nice. that could be fun" with giggles

on my release
i'm scared
i'll tremble under the great hutch of the sky.

said to marc:


best not to burn even ur mistakes, maybe?
i don't know
im a hoarder
when i am old and dentured, i will never throw out my cat tins
i will nail them together and make bushband instruments.

im starting to think there cant be stream of consciousness narration anymore in these times because there can't be any stream it's chopped and changed by constant signals many people have said this already i am sure that's postmodernism innit?

i am bridged with sighs.



and when you hear music you don't want it to soothe you.
when you hear music you want it to search your soul
crossbeam your soul with searchlights

or at least, make you aware of the thing inside you
that seems to be a soul.

keep having nightmares:

one of the things, there was this green paint that kept going over everything, indiscriminately, drowning the mouths and the surfaces and the holes in the trees so nothing could breathe, just everything this green

and yesterday, pillows that keep going in front of heaters, getting heatedup and curtains we cdnt get away from the heat the electrified landscape tremors like from a big train under the green pasture earth around our house and we'd never be allowed to leave.

and the same one as the green going over, the twowomen upstairs, renovators, sharing, for the moment the one lower bunk, and i kept to have going up there partly paralysed feeling on the creak stairs in the dark to fix the lights the unsure wall and then i kept having to run down while they screamed about the mexicans the mexican screaming the mexican screaming but it was some kind of deadeatingelectric cartoon househip high how is that scary but it was it was andi had to keepo going back and i was slower than them running the wrong way i woke up all shaky i barely could wake up

you deserve the best tautologies
my lovely love who is loved
the greatest best tautologies
my lovely loving love, love, love.

live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse... it doesn't need to be your corpse.

We were having coffee, talking. Mostly about books. "I think I've got a novel in me," he threw in.
And he was right. I could see the novel, right there behind his eyes. It wasn't a very good one.

i didnt spring it on him in lunch - i kept chickening
waited til we'd just about walked back to car, he was talking
about ppl at work having kids, and i said
"are you looking forward to having grnadchildren?" in this jocular way and
he said something jokingly enthusiastic and i said
"well then you'll be glad to hear the news!"
and showed him my ring and he said
"what does this mean?" and i said
"we're engaged"
and h elooked at me for a sec then sort of smiled complicatedly and said kindly "oh sashy" and kissed me on the cheek then said
"congratulations"
and kinda wryly smile-laughing i said "i can't believe you believe me!"
and he said "why, weren't you serious?"
looking taken aback
and i said
"no, i'm serious, i just didn't think you'd believe me!"
he had his concerns and a furrow in his brow as we talked but also a smile on his face
he was worried about me breaking your heart LOL
he said he thought you'd be good for me
oh yeah and when i was dropping him back at his work he said (joking) "so hey, is peatey's brother married?" lol

imagining a story, the confusion caused to a boy by the sudden death (car accident) of his father, a prominent euthanasia advocate.

he dreamed he went back in time, the year before his birth, christmas day, and crawled beneath the tree and shook and squeezed and tossed the gifts that were placed there under the pine twigs for his sister. he opened one and recognised the bear that would later sit on the end of his sister's bed in their shared red-wallpapered room.

he sneaks into the indoor play pool where he is forbidden to go with its piss stench of chlorine, ammonia. the dirty forbidden steam smell stings his eyes and nostrils. do not immerse head. the sign says. his mother always said. but he plunges into the amniotic warmth, floats, balls his body up. opens his eyes under the water, letting them stare and sting, looking through the chalky glow at the surrounding walking kicking legs of mother's and children, bottoms, swimming costumes dulled through the blue-lit grey-blue. a bandaid, loosed, swims toward him. he can see the bloodmark on the backside of the bandaid's little meshpad. it moves like an eel, soft and slow, past his shoulder. he still stays balled beneath the water, not breathing, barely aware he is holding his breath. then someone bashes into his back. a child. too many children buffeted together in this indoor sink--a crowded womb.

to bobble, today:


geesh! they're prtty cool groovers at them there bowling club when they wanna be!
bugered if i know if i'll be free - have seminar til 7.00 i think, and may be nursing a surgically-altered Peatey after that, but if I can't trot to this one you at least have gotta! let's hope they repeat the idea because it's kinda outta let field in a wa that suits this area hey.
riht now i can hear one of the doggies chewing something up - id better investigate.
hows u anyway? i reckon you musta left early coz them coffee was STONE cold - those of us who dont usually wear a watch have to rely on such symtoms to guage the workings of the daily day.
xoxoxox chape

Another glimpse, the second set of stair-rails. Two neat yellow-green feet on the top step, and the bottom half of a fat child's body waiting there. Two thirds of the pool, he has made now. Two thirds. So, so, slow. He hears the currawongs. Any minute now, he might hear his mother's sharp birdcall pierce through the rushed rustle of water in his ears. Get out, Paul. Paul, get out. But he does not. And his sister, where is she now? She must have made it up her lane... Glancing aside once more for a wet breath he glimpses the plane tree, redly glaring even through the goggles' green, its splayed branches holding on tight to the wide green sky. Just as he is turning his face back into the water he glimpses the single tough-woven cloud still making its slow lap across the long horizon.

with effort he can do this in seventy seconds but he enjoys the resistance. rediscovering the impossible length of each lap. the water as impossible as it once seemed: unyielding; even moses couldn't part it. he slops and crashes and glances sidelong to his right to see the first set of stair-rails. He has only made it a third of the way up the pool. With clenched teeth he grins. When he turns his grinning face up for a breath, the cold water streams off his gums. A quick glimpse of the green-shaded sun trees and sky before his head is down again. His slack elbows plow over his head, pulling the water at cross purposes. One stroke, two. Three. Four. Five, six, seven quick slaps on the water's surface, then seven, eight (slow slops) before he takes a breath. He has been told: breath every fourth stroke. This next go, he will try nine, ten. He will hold the spent gas of this breath in his mouth til his cheeks darken and his struggling limbs begin to twinge...

Squaring the circle with each stroke.
He deliberately kicks his feet too hard, wasting energy, wastefully pumping his ankles, imagining the ungainly splashing he is making as he winds ahead, ignoring the long black line. Imagining his mother's eyes aimed on his back, darting back and forth up his thin swimming length, resenting. Her voice tugs at him like a hard rip through the water, ESP messages urging him: Chin down! Shoulders straight! Shoulders straight! Like I told you! Like I told you!

Hammer-hearted, he pushes his goggles up, skewing them across his forehead, and looks back along the bright blue chlorine surface. To his surprise, he sees that his sister has only made it a third of the way up the pool. Except. Oh yes. Of course. She has made it here and back and then another thrid of a lap in the time it has taken him... Her pink-capped head gleams like a bead, or a wet nipple.
Feels a gonk of snot slide from his streaming nostril to his lip.

Seen through green plastic goggles the scene gleams: envious, sly. He allows his arms to slacken, his elbows to splay. He slops through the water. His trunk zigzags a little, and he doesn't keep his chin down but looks ahead along the line through the green-tinted cold.

And the breastless woman who is here everyday, in her swimsuit of dead dusk blue, machining the water with her stiff battery-powered stroke, always already there before Paul arrives and still there swimming when he leaves, taking tumble turns, barely every pausing in the water. Once or twice, the sight of this woman has given Paul half a hard-on.

i planted a little microchip
under my skin
to track myself whereever i go
whereever i go
i shot it into my wrist to track myself
because i knew they wouldn't dare
policing my own limbs
cause they would want to.
eventually dislodged, the chip began to slide
bigbrothering about like a criminal mite
beneath the dermis, epidermis and
it go somehow into my head and then down
to my heart, where it made me nauseous
and i sat for a long time, chromatosely
INFESTED
by my own watchful spiderwebbing eyes;
sucking the blowfly blood from my own stuck heart.

that's what we need, a voir dire
where everyone goes out
and we all swear
i swear, i swear
i swear i shall not tell
i will not stop
i will see if my own reasons are
admissible
my ratio decidendi
hurts
it hurts
but it only hurts me by pain referred
from the way it hurts them.

thinkhaze
hi how are you?
yahoo
hello old boy
sorry baby bird
i was downstairs
frogt to change status
thinkhaze
welcome baack!
yahoo
howya
i was thinking of you roday
thinkhaze
*blush*
yahoo
yah it was dfirrrrrrrrrtu
dirrrrrrrty
sorry
actually it was dfirrrrrrrrrrrtu also
thinkhaze
*giggle*
what's going on?
yahoo
got guests over
famiylk friends from canberra
et toi?
thinkhaze
not much
i went and returned some vidoes
and fubbed around
yahoo
oooh fubbing
i done lotsa fubbing today
sooooo fubby
thinkhaze
i feel fubbyless
yahoo
im ready to gub
gub hard
all nite
thinkhaze
heather is a curse on english
a blight
yahoo
let's dirt her
thinkhaze
she can never be eradicated
yahoo
let's dirty her muddy good
let's cake her up with lamington
thinkhaze
cool
yahoo
let's crumb her bum
thinkhaze
no way
im not going near her bum
yahoo
we'll pay someone to do it for us
thinkhaze
like a hitman
yahoo
yah
but a fish and chip shop trained hitman
thinkhaze
http://www.facetsbymarcia.com/newdesigns05.htm
someone's had a bit too much power play
yahoo
omg
sexville
thinkhaze
lol
yahoo
this webpage makes me wanna do joan collins
lol how did u find this?
thinkhaze
lol
yahoo
powerplay jem!
thinkhaze
i found it by accident in a google image search for "euphoric"
yahoo
lol lol lol
LOL
thinkhaze
do u think the person who made this was born fucked up
or the world did this to them
yahoo
nah they were born good
like dorothy in the wizard of oz
then they took slimsecrets celebrityshake
and got unwell
thinkhaze
LOL
yahoo
UNWELL
i want the gemini
thinkhaze
i want it all
some of those dolls are nasty.. the person who made them had a nasty mind
not sexual, just evil
although i really like the green one
"web".
yahoo
lol i like the jpg
thinkhaze
it semeed to fit.
do u want to start a doll factory?
yahoo
USSS
YUSS
help me to begin
my dolly doll doll
can it be called "Dollface"
?
thinkhaze
is that the factory name? or the name of the first doll?
i mean the company name
yahoo
the company name
Dollface dollbuilders&vendors
thinkhaze
yeah that's a pretty good name
dollbuilders hahah
yahoo
made from 100% recycled doll
the first doll cd be called "juicy"
thinkhaze
lol
just as long as we don't go making any dolls for "normal" little girls
yahoo
nah fuckem
howabout "dirt doll"
thinkhaze
that sounds sexy
i want self-surgery nurse doll
yahoo
HOT
that's what the box has to say
thinkhaze
smoking doll!
yahoo
"Self-surgery nurse doll - HOT!"
there IS one!!!
thinkhaze
lol
boring
yahoo
i have an odl doll book my gran gave me of french procelain dolls
and one has hand to mouth smoking action
but she looks liek a pretty, old
porcelain doll
thinkhaze
that is so creepy
i want a fairy doll with detachable wings, and she screams when you pull them off
yahoo
lol
and a "pinup butterfly" doll
you pin her to the wall "again and again"
09:21"hours of fun"
thinkhaze
lol

i said "i'm sorry about all my baggage. all this shit."
he said "i've got baggage too."
i said "yeah we're like dungbeetles. each rolling round our emotional dungballs."
or something like that.

WRITTEN yesterday at the usyd arts office hastily on their terminal:



into the bloody soapdome
in the heart of the glove puppet
i steeled myself for a goldmine
i windswept myself i syringed me

last night i dreamed we were heading for new zealand my mother and i on a bus, along a narrow narrow main street not unlike parramatta road, but the bus had to stop, and for entertainment we were to be shown a stripshow of mannequins in the window of the lingerie store, but my mother and i were not so interested - with the kids briefly within we looked at the rows, the $660 sexboots, but then my mother and i withdrew to the entry alcoves where the mannequins were to have done their little tease, mechanically, and we played with the voice recording machine, which was made of terracotta, like a great big ocarina, and everytime she recorded her voice, my mother, it came back beautiful, alike, just a little distorted, but everytime i tried to record mine it played back like christy moore singing, and somehow i couldn't sing anyway.

and the other night i dreamed, the night before that, that i was in this all-female mafia mob, in fact except for one corpse it was an all-female dream, and the mob was headed up by my sister's phd supervisor, and apart from me all the posse members were these studious-looking overseas student first years, and we each had to hold a guinea pig - the only reason i got to be one of the head henchmen was because my guinea pigs had grown so sumofat that they filled their cage, the fat squeezing out in sausages between the rungs, but they were at home, not here - one girl had a tiny tiny pig that was unbelievably cute, but when i tried to show my mother, who turned up, the girl and pig had gone and i showed her the wrong one, a large one, muscular, orange lipped.
and then we were crossing the square out on a gob us mnafia gals to make a hit, and it was somesort of eddiemurphyactionmovie we were inside, and the subtitles/closed captions were on, so subtitles were running past across the square and then alongside our feet, so we were looking down top-down on the running words, but because what we were in was the freeform directors cut of the film, the subtitles were out of sync, they were from the wrong scene, so as i crossed the square in virtual silence it was strange that the captions at the bottom said [clip clop clip clop] for a horse, and so on.
and then in the seedy two star (if that) motel we were ready for the stakeout and one girl from our posse and me peeled off but she found the opposing girlpower mafia had slain her dad in the room opposite the one we were to occupy, and his corpse was somehow like a beached whale yuo could walk inside the big maw of the corpse, and she went into her father's dead cavern to mourn, it was within the rules, so i was on my own on the job. and i heard gunfire and death, and as i crouched behind the damp cheap bed i was scared, but when finally kylie minoque, the head of the opposite mob, burst through the door guns blazing, i rose and knew i must be killed, but then i thought 'this is a film this is a film' and i talked her down, i said this is supposed to be entertainment, it cant end this way, you and me alone with me unarmed in thisdingy hotel room, not much action, just you shootinbg me, and she came around because she looked (i was half unbuttoned) and she said "you have six nipples too!" and i looked down and i did and i said "eight, actually" and kylie said "me too... do yours secrete?" and i said "what do you mean secrete" and she said "like, this brownish red stuff?" and i said "no" and she said "well they're doing it now" and i looked down and they were it was like paint, and we bonded over that, our mutual sadness our weakness.

AND today i remembered to add:
oh and then the new zealand map coastline dust storm coming to get us - the
dream not linear, circular, looping back round its own perimeter.

sometimes i really wonder if things would have been different, better even, if i'd stayed away from all the screens and all the e-hooks and all the transactions that i use to take up time to get rid of it but then what would i have done with it all, if i hadn't let it waste then i would have had to use it, and what if i had proved inadequate?

maybe it is better not to know.


i want to make this day i've passed in walking, windowshopping, waste, to mean something one day, and at the same time it's like four years ago, fiv, six, i new already, there would never be any day when anything i did would seem immortal, or even to matter, where i would think that anything mattered, even though i always have to feel like it matters so much.

words crushed out between the blocks of nought
the juice of waste
thin-trickled, quick
across the surface of the cuboid, solid
bovine monoliths
of misspent time.

last night:

i mean, i tried to think about it all sensibly, and then i realised that i didn't really want to think about it sensibly, i just wanted to stupidly say yes

little hammers little hammers
little hammers in my head
ears my shells, my tiny shells
in your palm silvered with your breath.
i hear the sea i hear the sea
i hear the sea when our waves crest
and all the sounds are blurred and bled
all the sounds are blurred and bled
little hammers fill my head.

nether not never
nether, nether, nether
amongst my netherings
amongst your netherings
standing smiling
into the nether, ever, ever
who would have thought?

if you were close enough to someone, crazy enough, you could be solopsisters.

I gotta do me some hardcore lotus eating.

"SORROW, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow.

One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough
With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,
A rust-red share in an empty furrow.

Hearts that strain at her chain would sever
The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:
All things pass in the world, but never
Sorrow."
- Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Sorrow"

yes like mad like breathless honey like a billion bees stinging and stinging unending stinging again and again in their hot honey furrier's forest of noise my takeaway kisses all ending in kisslessness.

if i could fill the world with sound fill it in with sound so the world is the sound is all in the sound a throbbing webbing net of yells to fill and claim its spaces fill the distance with the voice so the voice fill distance and the distance belongs to the lungs the throat the hollerer

the million stupid birds in my heart were taking flight again, flocking in a V that pointed straight at him.

on my reading list, lips.
and to do: lose, give in.
the list is very brief.
it is such happiness to breathe.

The girl reached the bus stop just in time to see a breathless man banging on the closing doors of a departing bus. "Gah!" he cried at the bus as it pulled away without him, but his face itself was peacably serene. He seemed merely to affect irritation for her benefit. The girl stood blinking, and he saw her. He smiled. He appeared to be foreign. He wore a checked shirt. "Does this often happen?" he asked her, appealing to her in a voice of unperturbed wonder. The breeze blew his words.
"It happens to me all the time," the girl answered kindly.
"You are not from here," said the man now he had an opening, "You're Russian, aren't you." It was not a question but a statement, an unmasking of her secret. But it was not her secret.
"No," she said, then, "Why do you say that?" It was now night. But shops and streetlights lit the scene.
"You're not from around here," the man said, "People around here don't talk. You talk. You must be Russian." He was smiling.
The girl took pleasure in this image of herself as being both exotically foriegn and without prejudice. "Actually," the girl answered, and the distance had closed between them - they now stood together on the pavement like friends, "I'm not. I'm just Australian. But funnily enough, I have a Russian name."
"Oh yes, what's that?"
"Vera. My middle name's Veronika."
"But they're the same name in Russia," the foreign man laughed. His own accent was subcontinental - Sri Lankan, perhaps. Then, taking her words in, he added, "But I knew it, didn't I! I could sense that you were Russian, you know?" And he put up his pale-palmed hands gently for her view, as if they were sensory devices of the most delicate and state of the art make. The peacable smile still lit his lips.
The girl did not like his hands, but laughed at his words. "Well," she said, "People often think I'm Russian. I don't know why. I used to pretend to be Swedish, at school."
"You are not really Swedish?"
"No. My parents were like... third generation Australian, or something. And their backgrounds were all English, Irish, Scottish, you know. Maybe a bit of French in there on my dad's side. I don't really know. Not very interesting anyway." She looked up the road for her bus.
"Do you know if all the buses going down this street go to Circular Quay?" he asked.
"Um, no," she said, considering. She enjoyed feeling like a Helpful and Considerate Person. She said, "I'm going down there, though. Wait, this bus coming-" and she stepped forward to flag it.
He followed her up the steps, saying, "You're going to Circular Quay yourself?" and she smiled back over her shoulder at him vaguely as she queued for a ticket,
"Yes."
She sat. He assumed the seat next to her. Although slightly nervous, she maintained the pleasant impression of herself, refracted back at her from the foriegn man's gaze, as an unprejudiced and fearless streetwise young woman. The streets were busy and she had the sense not to think herself in danger. In any case, she professed to hate the coldness of the modern city, where bypassers could not exchange pleasantries on street corners without inwardly accusing each other of hateful and perverse criminal purposes. Nonetheless, she began to sense about the man a slightly unwashed smell - real or imagined. She also became aware of the piercing lightness of his eyes.
"What is that building?" he asked, as Centrepoint Tower came in view out the window.
"That?" she smiled, "Centrepoint. Are you not from Sydney?"
"I have lived everywhere," he said, without the air of a conman. "The Phillipines, New Guinea, India, Broome..."
"Are you from India?" the girl asked.
He said, "You know something, I sense a lot of tense energy in you."
"Sorry?"
"I have a sense for these things, and I have a sense, you know - your spirit is not in balance. You find yourself feeling very anxious, sometimes, don't you?"
"Doesn't everyone?" she laughed, not showing herself startled by this new subject. She derived a sense of amusement from the idea that, in thinking she would believe in his psychic sensations, he was presuming her to be less educated, less sceptical, than she truly was. It occured to her that he meant to engage her interest by talking to her of her inner self as if that self contained great mysteries. She knew this was a respect in which many young women were manipulable.
"But you see, I sense this in you," he went on. "Perhaps you are very busy?"
"Well, I am studying."
"What are you studying?"
"I'm doing two degrees at once. Science and Law. Exams are coming up."
"You see, I knew it. You are working very hard, doing very well, yes? You are very stressed about it, and so you are not happy, you are not feeling your life is in balance, you know? I feel a lot of this negative energy in you."
"Well yeah, I'm stressed," she laughed - she felt her eyes flick about as if this really were an uncomfortable admission. She decided to play, "I'm very anxious, you're right. I don't take the Law too seriously, but it's a grind."
He took her hand. Proud of her upstanding qualities as a modern young woman, she did not let this bother her, as he said, "Yes I can feel this. You know what I can feel? One day you are going to be in the wig, the grey wig, a judge, you know?"
She laughed, "I don't want to be a judge."
"No, a barrister, maybe... but you will surprise yourself, I think. You will have lots of success, the career." He continued to grasp her hand, "But you must do something about this tension in side you, you know?" As he spoke she stared at his eyes, his nose, nostrils, his dry lips.
She did not tell him that she was doing badly at law, and it did not interest her. That she had postgraduate study lined up in Science. That she was not going into a Law career. The dramatic irony of the distance between his presumptuous clairvoyant impressions of her, and her own better knowledge of herself and her intentions, entertained her. But at the same time, he had his talons in part of her brain. By his words about her tense spirit she felt herself dragged forward to face a picture of herself as a fated and miserable person. Lately, she had been haunted by this image.
He still had her hand. "You know," he said, "I sense something else, too. I can feel these things, you know, because I have lived a lot, and because my own soul is in balance. I can sense there is a woman. A best friend, yes? She has to do with this tension."
The girl had not had a female best friend in years. Her mind briefly threw up an image of the face of a female schoolfriend to whom she had once sworn undying devotion. But all had fallen apart into hate. That was years ago. She thought of her sister. "Well, not a best friend," she averred. She wished her hand was free.
He released her hand, and said, "Well, you love this person, you know? But you have to beware her, OK? I know this. I warn you. Don't trust her." It was with the utterance of his next sentence that she realised he thought she had a female lover. He said: "She will infect you, you know." And his words were literal, not metaphoric. "You catch something off her, you know? The STDs."
She expertly supressed a laugh. It was plain now that the man had no clairvoyant skill whatever. He was a quack. But of course, she had never thought anything else. "Is that right?" she asked, wearing her face like a mask of concern. Her quick, sharp mind took note that the experience she was having at this moment would be excellent material for future anecdotes. For amusing her friends when she arrived at the Quay.
He watched her, and she saw he believed that she was truly weighing his words. She saw that he believed he had hit on something. He said, "I had a female friend once, you know? In Broome. She was living with her lover, this woman, two women, you know? She thought she would never want a man. But you know what?"
"What?" the girl asked simply, resisting expressions of irony.
"She is married now, you know, with two children? So you should think about this. You might think, with this woman, you know who you are, but you cannot trust this always, understand?"
She blushed as naturally as if he really had pierced into her secret love life. She could not tell him that she was single, not even sexually active. "All right," she said, then, "Thank you. I mean, yeah, thank you." She wasn't sure what to say. She added, "I'll think about that."
They were approaching the quay. She was aware that other passengers on the bus had noted her association with the stranger, perhaps with concern for her safety.
He said, "You should."
She said, "I will." She gazed smugly inwards at this image of herself as a troubled lesbian, at risk of disease. After his generalisations, which by luck had hit on her inner state of constant anxiety, his words about this imaginary infectious woman had a hilarious specifity. He was incompetent. He thought he had her gulled, and she had gulled him. She reflected, with some pleasure, that she probably could have pretended she really was Russian. In his ignorance of her true life, he would have known no better. He was like a puny ant below her. She lost her habitual anxiety for a moment, and any fear for her safety, in a sense of herself as a playful, and slightly seditious, towering intellect.
"This is Circular Quay next stop," she said.
"You are getting off here?" he asked. And she knew that if she said yes, he too would alight behind her.
"Yes, I'm meeting some friends," she said deftly.
"Ah," he said. She saw in his eyes that his bus trip had been without purpose. That he was bound nowhere. She suspected that in asking her the name of Centrepoint Tower, he had asked her a question to which he already knew the answer. "Well, it is good that you understand now, these things to remember. You must try to relax yourself, you know, to find this peace inside you?"
The bus stopped, and she rose. He also rose. They stepped down into the cool night air. She was relieved of the imaginary smell of his checkered body as the breeze came.
"You know," he said, "I will be in Sydney for some time, if you would like to meet up for coffee, and I can tell you more about yourself. I can tell you many things, you know, because I am with myself spiritually. Perhaps Friday morning?"
She smiled perfectly, and said, "Oh you know, I'm very busy now, exams. But thank you. It's been lovely to meet you." This struck her as a perfect speech.
Unfussed, he said easily, "All right," and pressed her hand, like they had genuinely bonded. Again, she cast herself in his gaze as a Generous Person who had shown Unusual Tolerance and Engagement. In allowing him to press her hand without fear or revulsion, she had gone beyond the call of duty. She could see she had safely escaped him.
"I'm off to meet my friends," she said, reclaiming her hand and stepping back, "But thank you again, truly. And thank you for your advice."
"You remember," he said, and then, "Lovely to talk to you. You remember what I said. This will help you. For your safety."
"Of course," she laughed musically. Walking away, she looked back over her shoulder. She was grateful to see he had walked off in the opposite direction. He did not look back. She felt immense relief. He appeared to be heading nowhere. *Russian*, she mouthed in a laughing breath, strident. She imagined herself beautiful. She thought of Nastassja Kinski.

*

Five weeks later she sat in a food court in a different part of the city, in the afternoon, eating a nougat bar in tiny bites. She was thinking of work matters, and the gift she had just bought her mother. A voice intruded:
"Excuse me, could you tell me the way to Centrepoint?"
She looked up. She thought she knew the face. She was not sure she had heard right. "Sorry?" she mumbled in guarded distraction.
"Do you know the way to Centrepoint?"
She saw the piercing eyes. "Um..." she began. His question seemed to contain some deeper proposition. She was not quite sure it was him. "Um, no, uh, sorry..." she trailed off, alarmed. She of course knew the way, but for a moment it truly seemed to her as if she didn't.
In a hard voice, he marveled, "You don't know the way to Centrepoint?" A challenge.
He had asked her a question to which he knew she knew the answer. She had to stick to her story, "I'm sorry, I don't," she repeated, more surely.
He stared for a moment. "You're German," he cursed her, and strode off.

IN PROGRESS - DO NOT READ.

The girl reached the bus stop just in time to see a breathless man banging on the closing doors of a departing bus. "Gah!" he cried at the bus as it pulled away without him, but his face was peacable. He seemed to affect irritation. The girl stood blinking, and he saw her. He smiled. He appeared to be foreign. He wore a checked shirt. "Does this often happen?" he asked her, appealing to her in a voice of unperturbed wonder. The breeze blew his words.
"It happens to me all the time," the girl answered kindly.
"You are not from here," said the man, "You're Russian, aren't you." It was not a question - it was a statement, an unmasking of her secret. But it was not her secret.
"No," she said, then, "Why do you say that?"
"You're not from around here," the man said, "People around here don't talk. You talk. You must be Russian." He was smiling.
The girl took pleasure in this image of herself as being both exotically foriegn and without prejudice. "Actually," the girl answered, and the distance had closed between them - they now stood together on the pavement like friends, "I'm not. I'm just Australian. But funnily enough, I have a Russian name."
"Oh yes, what's that?"
"Vera. My middle name's Veronika."
"But they're the same name in Russia," the foreign man laughed. His own accent was subcontinental - Sri Lankan, perhaps. Then, taking her words in, he added, "But I knew it, didn't I! I could sense that you were Russian, you know?" And he put up his pale-palmed hands gently for her view, as if they were sensory devices of the most delicate and state of the art make. The peacable smile still lit his lips.
The girl did not like his hands, but laughed at his words. "Well," she said, "People often think I'm Russian. I don't know why. I used to pretend to be Swedish, at school."
"You are not really Swedish?"
"No. My parents were like... third generation Australian, or something. And their backgrounds were all English, Irish, Scottish, you know. Maybe a bit of French in there on my dad's side. I don't really know. Not very interesting anyway." She looked up the road for her bus.
"Do you know if all the buses going down this street go to Circular Quay?" he asked.
"Um, no," she said, considering. She enjoyed feeling like a Helpful and Considerate Person. She said, "I'm going down there, though. Wait, this bus coming-" and she stepped forward to flag it.
He followed her up the steps, saying, "You're going to Circular Quay yourself?" and she smiled back over her shoulder at him vaguely as she queued for a ticket,
"Yes."
She sat. He assumed the seat next to her. Although slightly nervous, she maintained the pleasant impression of herself, refracted back at her from the foriegn man's gaze, as an unprejudiced and fearless streetwise young woman. The streets were busy and she had the sense not to think herself in danger. In any case, she professed to hate the coldness of the modern city, where bypassers could not exchange pleasantries on street corners without inwardly accusing each other of hateful and perverse criminal purposes.

[what is this building... German... question the answer to which she could not fail to know]

had bizarre dream involving being in new york trying to get to times square, but dingy mall-mouths opening up eveywhere, full of seedy kebab smells and remaindered menswear, dark neons, like boschian hellmouths. and kit and i were jackhammering into the floor trying to escape from mummy who was possessed, and we jackhammered down through three floors into the underground, from which you could escape through into a shop with several miniature dioramas, including a very appealing plastic island, just sand, tree, water, no detail. Julie had found us putting on our sunglasses ready to go through in the tunnel. But she was in a good mood again. i stole a pair of jeans accidentally, but i didn't want to return them, even though they were slightly too big.

The name changed dream:

I couldn’t stop swearing. “Holy fucking god, this party isn’t half as fucking bad as I thought it’d be,” I told Guv. The music was all around us. Then I said, “Sorry, sorry…” laughing. He doesn’t like bad language. He already told me off earlier in the day when Merelly and Barb were stuffing down those donuts (“two fucking donuts a fucking piece”), when Guv and I were on the floor, sprawled, under the desk, poring over a difficult William Faulkner novel. I was trying to explain it, why I liked it. I couldn’t get my head, my tongue, ANYTHING, to work. “I’m sorry, you know, it just has this thing to it, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking out of it…” The end of semester, exams. How could he expect me to be able to talk sense? I was tongue-twisted. Exhausted.
That’s why I needed a little help to get into party mood. I realise I’m acting funny, and everytime someone picks fault with me, I tell them, “Sorry babe, must be the aspirin talking.” Micky laughed when I told him that. “Aspirin, hey?” he ribbed. “And is aspirin an upper or a downer? Or would I have to try one to find out?” “Got eighty fucking bucks?” I asked him.
But all night it’s been like I can’t ever be where I want to be or see who I want to see. Something keeps stopping me. Sudden obstacles rise up, on purpose, I guess, or maybe that’s the aspirin talking. Like how I want to stop swearing when I’m talking to Guv because he hates it, and I just can’t. Like how when I tried to see Neve, because she’s just got back from Canada, that bitch Barley got in the way, bagging her out, so instead of hearing about Canada I was trying to patch things up between them, trying to explain that I agreed with Neve and I didn’t agree with Barley and anyway... And then the implement. I wanted a good old talk with Neve, and somehow we get to a bottleneck in the room where the party buzz is at its loudest, like speaker feedback or mad cicadas, and what do you know but a fucking implement drives up behind us, a fucking forklift. “I’m not seeing things, am I, the aspirin?” I asked her. She laughed, but we were separated before I heard her answer. The thing nearly ran me over. I was sprawled back, almost up on my sister’s table, with her friends. I stood there, realised I was trembling, looked down as the caterpillar millipede heavyweight tyres rolled on ready to crush me, feeling the whole world tilted, angular, and I thought it might not really be there, because I was already perplexed, what with Neve wearing that purple velour musketeer suit. Normally she dresses like a slut. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. A cocked feather tricorn isn’t her thing. So “maybe it’s the aspirin”, I told myself, laughing around the scream I was emitting at the sight of the implement nearly killing me. Fuck.
But all night I haven’t been able to get what I want. His girlfriend was away in China, and somehow I failed to capitalise. Now she’s back, back. I only came to this party to see him at midnight. I knew I wasn’t going to make it with him, not after he’s been with her for four years, but fuck, fuck, I could at least have seen him at it, under the imaginary mistletoe. I could have belted out auld lang syne while I watched him kissing her, kissing her, kissing her. Instead, this place is packed, and you can’t see a thing. You can hardly move. There’s the dancefloor though. I tried my luck but they kept changing the beat. One minute it was bossa nova, the next second reggae. Then Barley was asking me if I’d ever learned to dance. I can’t dance, I was sure she was being sarcastic. “God, no, no, no way, are you kidding me, I mean why?” I was laughing spittle in her plastic amphetamine face. “Well,” she said, “I wanted to learn. I’m trying to find an instructor.” The reggae beat banged and bopped in my ears. I told her, “Try Neve. She learned for years. She’s great, she’ll know someone. She’s over there, in the purple velour suit. You know Neve, don’t you?” But Barley winced. That’s how I started the fight. Barley said, “I can’t stand Neve, I’m sorry to tell you. Every second word she says it’s, and I quote, ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking.’ She’s one of your old school friends, isn’t she?” And Neve, who’s a paranoid anorexic, turned out to be standing right there while she said it. Right behind Barley while Barley bagged her out as a creep. Neve shot hurt eyes at me. “Neve!” I said, “Don’t listen to her…” I pursued Neve through the crowd. But of course I lost her. And even when I found her, the implement came. The forklift. Fuck.
“I’ve got eighty bucks together,” Micky’s voice tells me.
“Oh OK, really?” I laugh. “Here’s your aspirin then…” And I dig through my bag. But of course I can’t find it. I can’t do anything I want, can’t get anything right, can’t get, get, get, this evening. “Crap, fuck,” I utter, mutter. Micky laughs. “Maybe I took both,” I tell him. “Is it a bad headache?” I add, then we both laugh, just as someone announces the race.
“Race?” says Micky. I think how it’ll be midnight soon. Then Micky is lost in the crowd. I look at the pink glitz crowd and I think how I hate these people. Occasional glimpses of my sister and her friends: they seem to be having fun. But why am I here? Why? I only came to see Guv at midnight, that’s all it is, isn’t it. That’s why I came, and I can’t find him. I can’t even… And now the race.
Of course Peter Forward wins. It’s to be expected, I mean, he’s blonde, he’s big, I think he used to be Swedish. He won despite his two-minute handicap. I don’t care: I’ve got to get outside. Someone said something about fireworks. I suppose it’s nearly midnight. What if it is, what if we’ve all missed it, in here with this madness of noise and aspirin?
Outside the air is swimming, it’s warm, or cold, or both. Cool, I think, but humid. I can breathe again. I didn’t realise I was hyperventilating in there. In small groups, people are leaving the venue. They’re firing a flair over there behind the skyscrapers. But this is strange. I can’t see the harbour bridge. I thought we’d be able to see the harbour bridge from here. “Jesus look at the bridge!” someone shouts, but I can’t see it. I crane and try to see but I can’t see it. And the opera house seems to be on the wrong side of the harbour. The opera house was never here before, it was the water front hotel, the party. I don’t understand. I never noticed this ramp, either, these stairs. People are going down to stake out seats before the water. “Is it really New Year’s Eve?” I ask a passer by, someone from my year that I don’t know. They look at me and smile and don’t answer. “Bitch racist,” I hear someone mutter to someone else. My head is clearer though, out here. The air smells clear, but things are hazy, sort of fuzzy. There’s a stillness: for a second I’m sure there’ll be a terrorist attack. Little fireworks after going up across the water. They seem so distant. Too distant. But Jeremy Wu can see the bridge. Everyone seems to be able to see the bridge, except me. “The lights on the bridge!” Jeremy laughs, “Wow!” They always put a lightshow on the bridge, making out some symbol or icon. I crane but I can’t see. “What is it?” I ask Jeremy. “Jeremy!” He turns and looks down on my through his thick steamy glasses. He has this laugh on his wet lips, he turns away again and says to his best friend Wurther, “That’s so honest. That’s so honest. A dollar sign, and the pound symbol. The dollar and the pound!” So honest. I chuckle. I remember hearing they were going to do the dollar sign. I didn’t know they were putting the British pound up in lights on the bridge. I chuckle alone.
Peter’s brother, blonde Brendan, has gone down the stairs, the ramp, into the shallow foggy water. It’s around his knees, he sloshes about. “Cold!” he shouts, “Cold!” An animal howl, but he’s grinning. I have to follow! I don’t know anyone here very well, I know faces but not names, but nonetheless I crash down after him, clumsily sploshing down. When I get to the water, he gets out. I splosh in. Girls behind me laugh. My clothes are wet. It’s not so cold. I swim out. The water feels humid, like the air. It doesn’t feel so much like water as dense, dense air. It’s very cloudy. Murky. Whitish.
“How is it?” someone calls out. Fireworks behind me, behind the moon.
“Beautiful!” I call out, “Like a milkbath!” I don’t want anyone else to get in. I want the whole revolting harbour to myself, all its strength and all its scum. But fuck, is it really New Year’s? It’s so quiet.
Nearly midnight. People are milling out now. They know it’s nearly time. The fireworks. Already I can hear people murmuring “Ooh” and “Aah” at the preliminary bangs and cracks. Terrorism scares jar my heart. Nearly midnight, I’ve got to find him. I can see my sister. She’s with Sarah and Rebecca. She’s wearing her customary pink, a frilly top. She looks so unlike me. She looks distant. I could try to go over but she’s down too many steps and she can’t see me. I wave my arms but she can’t see me. She doesn’t want me. She looks through me. Her eyes are like buttonholes. I feel hemmed.
Racist Bitch. Maybe that was directed at me. I was pretending to be racist earlier, in context. I forget the context. And then there was when we were dancing. When I said I could only dance to Asian music, and somehow someone took that the wrong way, and Rhonda was staring at me like a furious baboon.
It’s at this point that I realise it can’t have been Peter Forward. He never studied law. He isn’t in my year, he wasn’t at the ball. He can’t have won the race. What race? I can’t imagine what race. How could they have held a race in that room with that carpet and those lightfittings and no moat for the speedboats?
I know exactly where I’ll be at midnight, New Year. I’ll be in the middle of this crowd, nowhere, looking for him. Trying to be next to someone when the shout goes up, ‘Happy New Year!’ I’ll be right here, just here, on this tessellated pavement, in the shadow of the architectural crescent, unable to see the fireworks. Yes. That was midnight then, wasn’t it. People mill around me, shouting, smiling past me. I feel so alone. I’m alone even now, tonight, in this crowd where I know that I’m popular.
I see Beth, I know her well enough to shout, “Auld lang syne! Auld lang syne!” in her face, and we laugh, and I mush on through the mess of celebrating bodies. I keep thinking I glimpse him, keep thinking he missed it too, keep thinking I see him coming out of the glass doors of the function room but it isn’t him, it’s just the endless press of others, and I’m not going to see him, I know it, I’ve missed it, and I’m going to get away now. I can’t keep waiting round like this, treading water for years. I knew it today when I tried to make him feel for me, when we were reading that book and I kept touching him, trying to make him like the novel, which was full of scenes of dark sex. And it’s a shame. I wanted to kiss him tonight, so much. I know how it would feel. Marching down the path to my heart from my mouth, left right left. I know just how the sweat would taste on his upper lip. “I know you’re in love with me,” I’d tell him, pressed against him, “Why don’t you and Bianca take a break?” I’d press on, pressing, lost in the whirling aspirin memory of his kissmouth.
I stumble up the sidestreet. The party sounds dwindle behind me. I feel more confident, now, that there isn’t going to be a terrorist attack. It would have been nice to see the fireworks tonight, but I never see them, somehow. I keep not getting what I want, but I don’t mind so much about the fireworks, really.
I know this street. I know these leaves and darkness. That open doorframe. Tiffany’s grandmother’s house. I can see them in there: Maria, and the grandmother. Kneading dough. It’s a quaint warm scene, in the dim. The room a cosy aleph as I enter. They welcome me. I feel I was not expected, but I am welcome. The old Italian grandmother is cutting out stars from the last of her Christmas dough. Left over from the pies and cookies she made for Christmas. Waste not want not. There is flour spilt on the floor from her gnarled aged hands. She smiles. She speaks English, well enough, but insist on trying to speak to her in Italian. I make signs and ask where to find the broom. I can feel Maria disapproving of me. Maria knows that I’m drunk. The grandmother laughs and signs to me where I can find the broom. I have the broom and I start sweeping. up the flour. I understand when the grandmother tells me in Italian that I’m a good girl, or helpful, or something. I get the general idea.
Then a voice I know. My mother and father, in the doorway. They’ve come by to collect me. “Did you see the fireworks, Sash?” my mother’s asking. In the bright eyes they have the look of having been somewhere fun. Like some of the fun is still in their eyes, stardust. I say, “Oh yes, amazing weren’t they? Did you see the dollar sign?” I don’t tell them I saw neither. “Hello,” says my mother to the Italian grandmother, but I shoosh her, “Mummy! Shh!” and I mouth loud, “ESL!” “Oh I’m sorry,” says my mother, “Aah… prego.” My father, normally quiet but evidently tipsy from the new year, says, “We learned to make do in Italian, tourist Italian, when we were tourists. In Italy.” I ignore these exchanges and say over the top of the scene, “It was a good party. Neve was there, she’s back from Canada. Peter Forward won the race. I went in the water, it was filthy.” “What?” my dad bugs, “In the harbour?”
I’m not sure that I answer. It’s a new year and the old one’s gone and I’m not sure I’m not just alone somewhere, on my side, drooling and dreaming.

in the swimming horse dream - the owens had the holiday house, it was crowded, unpleasantly, bit grimy - you sort of had to leap and step over people, things, food everywhere, unclean and untidy.

beautiful dream last night. swimming white horse(s) in this forest river pool, with three foxes sitting together by the side, people i knew (extended family/owenses?) everywhere. the big white horse swimming through the cool clear water was like a unicorn or porpoise somehow. magnificent. the three foxes were devious. there were other animals, ducks and fish i think. perhaps the river came from amazon river doco i watched part of yesterday. was on a tractor with tim's [?] family, walked thorugh a spider web going to loo before leaving, going to some dusty zoo but ended up with tim and rhnoda trying to send a telegram but found i was completely incompetent to type or work it out, like i couldnt get myself to look up at the screen even, bizarre inability to perform simple task. just yesterday kit was telling me she had dream where she was in sleeping beauty's castle admin office at disneyland and couldn't write her own name legibly. so. we are both, in our subconscious, defeated by the mundane and everyday, in the midst of wonders?

written yesterday:

i gotta hammer this tired brain into some sort of shape.
can hardly keep eyes open. have been happier though.
yesterday was the 1st. bought a calendar for our room and one for the desk. fin de siecle [sp?] fairies.
wearing my NY subway token i used to always wear at school.
half asleep.
coogee today with marc. then caught odette for coffee but could hardly stay awake.
when we were in bundanoon for glynne and greg's mutual bday, i dreamed there was this flood in this place (into which i dreamed jacuzzis) a vast apocalyptic flood and then, from the centre of the flood, a whirlpool of sand, a desert spreading out in a vortex from this wormhole centre. and then out from the pupil, the centre of the desert, there rose my grandmother and grandfather (dad's mum, mum's dad) with linked arms. and they were geriatric and somehow, like ancient adam-and-eve, we were going to have to walk them across the whole desert, which would widen wider than the sahara. i went up and touched my nan on the shoulder and she said it was hot, "i've worn the wrong slacks."
the eve of new year's eve, i dreamed new year's eve in advance. i wrote it up with alterations, subtractions and additions, and will post it with altered names shortly.

ANCIENT email excerpts... some worryingly disingenuous...

not so good
with guessing if ppl have emailed me coz im usually so
simultaneously hopeful that they will have and
pessimistic that they wont have that i just HAVE to be
right everytime.

he is a reformed man. He is all man
for this reason. If someone is all man it means
they're comfrtable enough with their man-ness to deal
with other men being a man in whatever way that man
seems fit without having to partidcipate in that
method of embracing manhood, you see. a man told me
all this once. ok so it was my inner man and we were a
bit high on tequila and cold cobs of corn, but i think
he was essentially correct.
he can even draw! (sorta).
i think yo'll make him a very loving 3rd wife.

I do like the idea of wearing his raw male scent
around though.

for diary:
Did you know I was once mistaken for a trannie?
i was either 13 or 14 at the time and dressed up for a
screening of rocky horror, and, not possessing any of
those boobs you so hate and wearing way too much
vampish make up, this pack of homies comes up to me
and a (then) friend [believe i me i wouldnt do that
stuff now, ive had some strange phases] and said "dont
you feel weird about wearing a dress/" to me. and i
said, "not really mate, seeing as im a girl/."
actually he looked kinda embrassed after that so i
felt id won. even though it was a bit depressing,. i
mean if i was gonna be a man i wouldnt want to do it
by halves. if i was going to be a man id want to be
the all man type, chris cairns style, and do all sorts
of manful conquest shit in my youth before maturing in
style.



poor guy. i think i owe
him money.

Some man dot meets:
she went
through NZ immigration and obtained citizenship. they
have it done for u while-u-wait over there, its like
keys cut in 5 mins and all that jazz. Keys Cut, Colour
Photocopying and NZ Citizenship HERE, while u wait!
They are happy to be a stepping
stone for would be Australians. And i dont blame em.
3.5 million people, 60 million sheep. NOONE needs
that many jumpers or lamb chops. Except in siberia,
say.

you must tell me more about your seeeeeeeedy past
sometime. how many children do you have?

you didnt
really sleep with 5 footballers did you?
gosh. why'd yuo stop?
[kath in queensland]

more worried about the ones who did the whole team!!!

i jhad this one jock boyfriend, it was a mistake,
there was no real mental connection even though we
liked to pretend there was.

she breathed in his words
she felt the sharp little letters, like metal shavings,
stuck in her lungs.

hunched, online mouseclick
bright labyrinths of light

the dry breeze ages air

stressays

the moon like a lost spud, washed and peeled, rolling on bitumen.

cross off the moon, cross it out! the moon above:
a white irrelevance.

strike through the moon. strikethrough the moon.

the night before last i dreamed about these wrinklecockeyed creatures, half-human half-cockatoo, sickly bent and goosepimped, wearing clothes. human sized, bigger even. those round cocky eyes!

my dad wrote this yesterday in an email, it requires tense adjustments:

~ The Voluble Air ~
He was attentive to the voluble air
Cloyed monologue of sprites
It reined him in / sucked and pouted
Clouds floated / benign moisture
Until the black pennies drop

the dry breeze ages air

stressays

the moon like a lost spud, washed and peeled, rolling on bitumen.

cross off the moon, cross it out! the moon above:
a white irrelevance.

strike through the moon. strikethrough the moon.

the night before last i dreamed about these wrinklecockeyed creatures, half-human half-cockatoo, sickly bent and goosepimped, wearing clothes. human sized, bigger even. those round cocky eyes!

my dad wrote this yesterday in an email, it requires tense adjustments:

~ The Voluble Air ~
He was attentive to the voluble air
Cloyed monologue of sprites
It reined him in / sucked and pouted
Clouds floated / benign moisture
Until the black pennies drop

nourishing puke
opens up her beak
for the mother bird's nourishing puke.

noose treeeee.

my love is a city in ruins
all its buildings are condemned
unsound foundations

but ideology isn’t a cage, it’s an aviary

I can't remember yesterday! I don't remember yesterday!
i always find I can't remember what's just passed - the week, the yesterday - and yet my long term memory - the past - it's total recall, sometimes.

If only the deepest pool
Were just an inverse mountain top,
Or if my antennae tickled deep
Into the sleep I feel inside.
Sometimes I think
There is a world that interlocks with this
Where all else is,
Where all else is. And to shiver,
And to sigh with life, and die,
Is there to live, and gasp in breath,
And be still. Still,
If we could bottle god, and drink him
(or, of course, her) down in a dram
And drain all godless thought,
And forget Abraham...
All rhyming lines would then cease
To make sense. Meaning, I think,
Is often built like a fence that we
Must leap like sheep, counted
In another persons dream, to get to sleep and,
When we get there, breathe thin air.

last night, nude bar

We stood up. I don’t know—was I breathing or not breathing all that time? We had been speaking into each other’s eyes all those hours. I’d been in the leather chair couched in the loud dark bar; there we were sitting back touching hands in that dim loud bar, talking, until we stood up and he laid his hand on my upper arm and then we were falling toward each other, held, a hold that was both fleeting and lasting, touched, and when it came apart before we wanted, he said something quickly before I had a chance to say something quickly, and we both knew.

The Careers Section

I was in the paper
My face has lined birdcages
Breakfast crumbs have sprayed over me
Who am I, scattered about in different rooms?

I have been in elevators,
Folded under suited arms, warm
In the pits of business men and women
Peeling back the glad wrap from their lunch rolls.

Who am I, when, to pack the jugs
And vases tight so they don’t fragment
In the removalists van beside cupboards and lounges
I am torn and stuffed deep down into crockery mouths?

Guttered in the street I blow
A footprint stamps me, weeks
Go by and, brittled yellow, who am I
When the next gust blows up and busts me into ash?

I told a friend this mad weather suits me.

A kitsch draft:

There are tombs and isles in thy body:
The crypts of Lieberkuhn, the islets of Langherhans,
Thy spine a white obelisk, stabbed
Like a swordfish sabre, UP
Through the dense muscled red of thy flesh.

There are catacombs too, winding around
In the belly of thy private Gaia, and in
Your South mouth, there are whispers
Of movement and of fear
And nervous pleasure.

And here there are two long-stemmed royal orbs, from which
Hormones spread in halos, carrying crystalline hysterics through your webs
And half-cells, half-lives, huddle there.
Behind these, that long word ‘duodenum’ leads to
GUTS, in which mesh laws of supply and demand.

Then there are thy chains and spirals, protein acids that
Map thy life, and that decide
How the dark empire will spread, as it divides and subdivides -
The winding spiralled stairs of thy existence, and its repair.

A banyan tree of glands, and veins
And faceless butting guts in a warm batallion, oh
Do not ravage these lands with poisons.
Thy brain is a Lusitania it will take only one shell to sink.

Now remember, I want you to pretend to be my boyfriend. And remember, you've gotta say your name is Jade, OK? Wait, will you let me fix your hair? OK. No wait. There. OK, now can you remember all the things I wanted you to say? When we arrive, OK, when I introduce you to Josh, right, I want you to make sure you call me babe, 'k? And you've got to do this with your hand, OK? Like you own me. All right. Let's go.

the literary text as sanitary pad!

Dream 6/8
India. I can’t remember most of it. Towards the end: my satin ballet flats are getting ruined as I step on the mudsunken milk-crates that make up the boardwalk, as a local geisha passes me with her cameramen or admirers, on my way to the private hotel shopping centre with its spa smell. I’m in a ball gown – it’s not quite clear to me why I’m dressed like this. There I obtain sneakers so I can brave the polluted and diseased ground again, though I fear my hem is getting wet, and outside again I have lost Kit. I holler, holler then I fin her and she has come across Janine, they are coming across the wet-sewrage ground which is seeping and squelching, yet just over there utterly careless the rugby boys are playing football. Janine’s not-exactly-happy-to-see-you eyes make me extra self-conscious.

Vivian answers the door—a treelined ashfield-like suburb located where leichhardt is—and she looks overgrown, broad, tall, her head relatively small, long and curvy and heavy like someone drawn by dobell. and she holds a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. and when I see her I feel this filial rush and go forward to kiss her but she draws back subtly so I know it isn’t right. And there’s Philip standing by in the back right and I make to go to him to, but I realise, no, no.
Seated at the Nicholas Datner table, Adriana (I think, or is it Isabella, or another?) comes over all grown up. Yes, grown up: she is about seven foot tall and has a cool uni-savvy look. I am seated and she stands over me and as I ask the routine questions during the conversation she starts prodding at my underarm with a rubber billiard cue but we keep talking while this goes on. I feel nervous.
But out the back, they have a peninsula, a long thin outcrop of cliffy rock that juts out into the ocean, grassy green, and a surprising number of people have flocked here for the activity now that the annual winds have come: we are all going to get on the horses and ride them as fast as we possible can off the cliff so we take flight in the storm, and now I’m with Lucas and Odette, and Rhonda’s about somewhere, and others are taking off, buffeted, ahead, and I am on my brown horse and I ride fast as I can fast, into the hard grey waves of wind and I’m swept up and Odette is with me I think or is it Kit and for two seconds, for a moment, we are flying but flying sideways for the winds are unexpectedly strong, it’s dangerous, we’re plummeting crashed down into the churned sea, swirling. And I think, *Lucas is gone.* And Odette and I are ok, and Rhonda is straggling out of the sea, but we think Lucas has drowned, but then it washes in: a car washes up on the beach and Lucas is inside and he opens the door in the rough shallows and gets out and tells us calmly that when he was caught underwater he found an old wrecked car on the sea floor and had the sense to get in so he could breathe the air inside to keep him alive until the car washed up.
The car was silver and quite new.

I don’t know that it is the language that makes the complexity, I think much of the complexity is pre-existing and language has yet to map a lot of it out, if it ever could. I mean, complex chains of comprehrension-being-sensation-feeling precede expression – though of course expression, the code, generates new means, new formulae, of comprehrension-being-sensation-feeling. Symbiosis.

another crazy dream.

some sort of tourist destination. a low-down cliff walk: a concrete path winding around slowly down through some bush. an atmosphere like we holiday-makers are part of the nation that gained at others' expense: edgy, lucky, implicated. to the left, the building, also concrete. inside, the pig man. he is an example of the successfully genetically engineered crossbreeding of a man with a pig. he is going berserk. they keep him/it locked in that three sided concrete box with the walls painted a bright dark pink and inside he is going brutally berserk, and we stand at the rail and look in through the glass side.

but back near our accommodation, we were in what was either a clearing or a carpark, and we saw a tiny willow-the-wisp drifting along quite low down, or, better, hovering gently up and down in the air, low down, and julie said "that isn't a willow-the-wisp" it was one of those deadly insects that looks like one and it was dangerous to leave it floating there, she said, because some child might think it was pretty and touch it and that would kill them. so she said she had to get it out of the way - it seemed to feel us there and wait for us, floating in air gently up and down, crystalline delicate - she got a tissue out and tried to get it in the tissue and it hovered and as I saw her trying to get it I thought *she could be more careful* she didn't have the tissue over all her fingers and as she was trying to close the tissue around it i knew it would happen and then it touched her finger and i thought she would be dead. because what happens is, it corrodes all your blood. but because she only brushed it for a second she would probably live but they might have to make some amputations fast, we had to call the hospital - but we were around her in a circle in panic and i was thinking how lucky it was because if she had closed her hand around it she would have been dead she was only trying to help the other people, and now it had got her arm, her blood, corrosive - hurry, hurry! how stupid, how stupid, if only i'd...

though it's not that windy, this older woman's voice in my head:

the days seem far too long, and it's so windy I could scream.

Anyway, to note: I AM UNSTABLE. indeed, i'm losing it. I had to leave class today. The reasnos are too big, worldly, and personal too. I feel like i need help but that's also like saying there isn't a reason for this.

Why is all as it is?
There are things in the back of my exercise book - i'm using one from an old year with a torn off cover - that i mena to put online but i can't be bothered now.

every so often, i arrest myself on suspicion of fraud.

idea to write:

The Christmas Cards London/Sydney. Each breath condense on the window pane. It's cold, for Sydney - for Summer. "Which one?" "The round-shouldered one."/"The one with the strange starry eyes." She looks like she's blind. How are you. Every line of text says: I don't know you anymore. And I write back and every line says: Why do we keep this up? [Each perspective.]

"We mass together distant scenes and events in an unreal way"

[GE, Letter to David Kaufmann, 12 October 1877 in Haight vi 404]

Last night: stomach cancer dream. Friend and I making records of ourselves posed nude. 2 Friends advice - don't go out showing your legs like that (elephantine). We bigger lesbians never have the chance to be with skinny blonde girls - like you - "but i love bigger women." Mother's constant assurance that the prelim diagnosis will have been wrong, or it will be operable. Sister with a plastic bag of groceries - breakfast items - I am emotionally incapable of eating. Cancer cancer I'm thinking, I'll die. I climb the rickety garret, my family following behind, and in the dark wood belfy, broken by daylight, i hear the doctor telling my aunt it is malignant and very advanced: "oh my god" and "i'm so sorry." voices: the one apalled, the other calm. calming.
and my reaction? uncontrolled. i show no courage whatsoever. i think of the photos and my youth. i lose it completely.

the worst thing was, it was such a beautiful day.

and so it has been my task to summarise
the lively letters of the dead.


and this tired task continueth.

updated from old post:

Dreams, dreams, so many.

One: I was walking with Kit and friend in the bush. There were multicoloured cockatoos guarding one gateway of leaves, and every so often on the right, a restaurant or something, set back. I went through one of the doors on the right and I became a Muslim boy called Abdullah. I really was him. Having been moderate, my father had turned fundamentalist. He had grown a beard and so on. My mother and two sisters and I were standing by while he searched the place for anything infidelic. He was looking for jewellery and so on. Writing. Meanwhile, my younger sister, Dana or something, was desperate that I help her find these purple earrings of hers. They were deeply sentimental for some reason: something either to do with our grandmother or some boyfriend, a date. I hunted in wooden boxes and things, pretending to help my father. What’s that in your hand, he said, when I found them. I was helping my younger sister get away to meet someone, driving her quick in my open topped car. But back at the house, he was asking, What’s that in your hand? And yet, like a film, in the end, he forgave us. We foresaw the possibility of living together, in mutually accepting tolerance. But for the moment, though there was love, it was uneasy. My mother, I barely recall her saying a word. I had no consciousness that I was in any way me.
The dream looped back, so I repeated the walk in the bush, and the scene had changed slightly and I was explaining to my companions the subtle ways in which it had changed since the time before. my voice annoyed me.

I’ve had so many. I should have written them all down. One, I was DJing for James brown and my intellectual property teacher was having us right our exam on closeted women in Victorian novels instead, and then I announced I’d already done the exam and she sent me off, and up above, in these little garret nun’s cell rooms, she was helping keep the women in hiding.

The one in the jungle. Skinny dipping. Some sort of animal, I’ve now forgotten what kind, maybe an orangutan or something more unusual, that I was caring for. Felt it was in danger. My aunt and uncle were about.

The one where the whole world was paved and there were glass scientia buildings everywhere, evacuant, and people walking like open-day tourists between them and how, from the pavements, the Picasso fountains would spring up, like some architect with a minimalist glass vision had taken over the world with his verticals and his horizontals and his space and it wasn't so bad but it could have been better, it could have felt more alive. We passed between them and came to a place with stairs where you could see more of the distance and a vast sunken public square but it was vacant, we had space to ourselves for once but you didn't know someone wasn't watching and you didn't know a fountain wasn't about to spring up at your feet. Aesthetics had conquered.

The one far too complex to explain with the German or Austrian or Scandinavian bushwalk that seemed forever and the beach and the swimming the overhang with cave paintings and how were went out swimming, my father and i but it seemed within seconds it was already dangerous, time to come back, it was going to be dark and I was so afraid I hurried on ahead of them over the tussocks and hillocks the boardwalks racing on ascending and it all had the slightly fake look of a diorama and there were the wooden fruitboxes next to the signs i didn't have time to read with the cauliflowers and other soup vegetables stacked in them, proud of their produce those aryans, but i hurried on and it seemed so soon i was already back at the entry hut, the information centre. And maybe that was the dream where I was stuck in the onefloor yellow asian airport place with the little open mall-store grocers trying to buy a singlet looking through coathangers, and trying to find a snack before Kit came back.

I can’t remember any of the really lengthy amazing ones. Sadly: because I remembered them all perfectly on waking from them. Maybe I will on reflection.

Weeks and weeks ago now, months ago, the one with the posh megamall with the red cushioned wallpaper walls with the gilt counters and welldressed women milling about buying crystal jugs and so on, all so red velvet wallpapered and oppressive. yes, all the women were shopping, while upstairs up those last escalators there was the floor where the world leader with his dark eyes and his slicing charming smile had his boardroom and the model Lego forest set out with the little LEDs in it that lit up when he and his board of decisionmakers, all male, made their decisions about how to release hate into the world. That was it, the map made of lego, the model map, mapping the spread of different forms of hate with these little red lights, like the forest was the world.

Updated...


**

ONE

We’re going around the corner and there’s a storm like a mushroom cloud in the distance. There’s a feeling in the air lie the world has only recently discovered the corruption of its idols and apostles, and like many have died or may yet. Things are insecure, new, fractured, bleak, and yet a little optimistic like this might be a new beginning—and we’re a little optimistic because we’ve been lucky compared to some. Still, the powers that be have something just beyond the horizon and you can see it, and smell it, in the smogspread air.
Maybe that’s why the black cockatoos have gathered round the substation on this main road with dust and no traffic. We pull over to watch them, we open the car doors to watch.
The cockatoos are playing a game. They perch on the wires against a backdrop of stale brown bricks, with the static air, and each bird leans forward slowly on its perch, slowly, leaning further forward until they reach tipping point and tip forward, swing down around upside down then up again through 360 degrees back to their original position.
Anyway if we want to beat that acid rain and whatever else might be behind us we’ll have to get going. Back in the car, drive on, slow. There’s only one direction: forwards. Everything brownish—wait, there’s one of the government buildings. “I need to go to the toilet,” I say. They roll their eyes at me, affectionate. Although we’re all apprehensive we’re ahead of time so we pull up and I get out. Inside, it’s dim. A university feel, cramped. The loos to the left—I head in. There are cobwebs. A yellow dim hint to the light. A stolid stocky thirty-something female lawyer with a short wave of blonde hair emerges from the nearest cubicle and doesn’t look at me and I go in after her. I sit down on the loo, and the woman lawyer has left her thoughts behind her in the cubicle for others to find and they become mine, I have her thoughts as I wee. I reflect on the meeting and the conduct of one of my associates in the firm. I’m amused to be having her thoughts. She didn’t seem friendly, and I suspect it would annoy her. Still—and I flush—she’s the one who left them hanging round behind her. I wonder how that’s possible. If she knows she’s doing it. I exit.

TWO

China. The lands are owned by the political philosopher John Rawls. Late daytime. Dark cliffs, rough-cut, a quarry, almost a chasm, dropping down. The family and I, or some of us, are at this stage walking the edge of it. Waiting for someone to catch up. The ocean is not far off. We sit down to lace shoes or chat or drink or something on a rock. A sense of excitement, fear, something wrong perhaps. The grey, periculous view.

Then it's the grey gameshow arena. Conrete. Desks tiered, ranged round in a semi-circle. Perhaps there are hidden cameras. Very Mao, but modern. Dark grey. It's a gameshow. Here's how the game works: when it's your turn and you're ready you press your buzzer from your audience desk and the two opera singers, Chinese and painted in ancient Oriental style, run out warbling out into the centre of the space warbling the high-pitched opera and you have to translate as they go. NB: the militia come in if you're not up to scratch, with machine guns, to arrest you.

Then you're in the holiday shack. A shack up on stilts, or raised in some way, perhaps. There's a verandah. The place could use a sweep, I think. You're camped out there with your uni friends. You weren't expecting the house to look so domestic. But there's no furniture. It's cold. Your thinking feels very internal. It's funny how the ocean comes almost right up to the front steps, the verandah, the door. That's Julie's handbag getting washed away down there! She left it on the sand, who'd have known the tide would come in like that? Was that a little dog just now in a blur?

Something's wrong. There were war crimes in the quarry, or something. And what's with Rawls being a big landholder here? That seems dark.

But then, you're a singer yourself. The engagement is not til this evening. You're in the mall, you're walking with Rhonda. You're wearing a ball gown - I think it's royal blue. You head towards the dingy supermarket. You pass the busking singers. There are two soloists, and then behind them, three girls who provide the chorus. Because there are only thee of them they turn around and sing down the empty lift shaft so the reverb will fill out the sound of their voices and multiply them, making them sound more like a real choir. George Torbay is conducting. You reel, you don’t want him to see you but feel that he has - you jump the metal bar fence that fronts the supermarket then you're inside, in the eighties kmart glow. You head for what I suppose is the foriegn foods section. There they are - the mushrooms. Cut in quarters. Each quarter has the span of a vinyl record. They must have been seriously huge mushrooms when they were fresh and before they were quartered. They're dried, of course. In their compartment.

Up on the nearby shelf: the canned weetbix with milk.

Yes, it does seem as if, with this dream, you are mocking yourself. If only you'd get it!

THREE

Maybe the building was drowning. A hotel I think, the four of us, the family, staying in one room and we saw a dad and daughter from a neighbouring room going out now and then on the balcony looking over the sea. I don't know, anyway we had to keep going down the grey brick chute and the black meerkat cartoons were hitting each other over the head with their paddles with cartoon whacks, flattening the flat tops of each others cartoon heads. We went up the dark chut the other side, came out, went down again, Kit and I. At the bottom, the next time, there was the cartoon warthog. It chased us like a minotaur, reddish, bullying, and we were terrified and somehow we got up the chute slammed a cubicle door on it, I don't know, I felt heartbeat terrified, and then, up top, guilty sad - maybe we drowned it.

There was something also to do with a hospital bed and a very high ceiling in a huge gallery-white room with some hint of green, and all of us girls in our nighties.

A SOME-WEEKS-AGO DREAM:

China. The lands are owned by the political philosopher John Rawls. Cliffs, a quarry, almost a chasm, dropping down, me and family members at this stage walking the edge of it. The ocean not far off. We sit down to lace a shoe or chat or something on a rock. A sense of excitement, fear, something wrong perhaps. Then it's the grey gameshow arena. Conrete. Desks tiered, ranged round in a semi-circle. Perhaps there are hidden cameras. It's a gameshow. Very Mao, but modern. Dark grey. Here's how the game works: when it's your turn and you're ready you press your buzzer from your audience desk and the two opera singers, both Chinese and painted in ancient Oriental style, go careening warbling out into the centre of the space, turning about gesturing and warbling the high-pitched opera. When you've guessed what it is they're warbling, you press the buzzer. NB: the militia come in if you're not up to scratch, with machine guns.

Then you're in the holiday place. Up on stilts, perhaps. There's a verandah. The place could use a sweep or something. You're camped out there with your uni friends. You weren't expecting somethign so domestic. But there's no furniture. It's cold. It's funny how the ocean comes almost right up to the front steps, the verandah, the door. That's Julie's handbag getting washed away down there! She left it on the sand, who'd have known the tide would come in like that? Was that a little dog just now in a blur?

Something's wrong. There were war crimes in the quarry, or something. And what's with Rawls being a big landholder here? That seems dark.

But then, you're the singer. You're in the mall, you're with Rhonda. You're wearing a ball gown - I think it's royal blue. You head towards the dingy supermarket. You pass the opera singers. Their are two soloists, and then behind them, two or three people provide the choir, the chorus, only there's so few of them, and they turn around and sing down the empty lift shaft because the reverb fills out the sound so they sound more like a real choir. George Torbay is conducting. You reel - you jump the fence that fronts the supermarket - it's metal - then you're inside. You head for the foriegn foods, I think, section. There they are - the mushrooms. Cut in quarters. Each quarter is the size of an LP. Fucking huge mushrooms they must have been, fresh and whole. They're dried, of course. In their compartment.

Up on the nearby shelf: the canned weetbix. With milk.

Yes, it does seem as if, with this dream, you are mocking yourself. If only you'd get it!

LAST NIGHT:

Maybe the building was drowning. A hotel I think, the four of us, the family, staying in one room and we saw a dad and daughter from a neighbouring room going out now and then on the balcony looking over the sea. I don't know, anyway we had to keep going down the grey brick chute and the black meerkat cartoons were hitting each other over the head with their paddles with cartoon whacks, flattening the flat tops of each others cartoon heads. We went up the dark chut the other side, came out, went down again, Kit and I. At the bottom, the next time, there was the cartoon warthog. It chased us like a minotaur, reddish, bullying, and we were terrified and somehow we got up the chute slammed a cubicle door on it, I don't know, I felt hearbeat terrified, and then, up top, guilty sad - maybe we drowned it.

There was something also to do with a hospital bed and a very high ceiling in a huge gallery-white room with some hint of green, and all of us girls in our nighties.

found in old scrawlings during cleanup:

"in a way, it was rape. i mean, i consented to sex. but i didn't consent to it being so BAD!"

&

there's no such thing as fiction. only history in disguise.

&

i should go home and dig into the mulch mound of homework and so on instead of leaving it to compost.

The Ascetic:
Starts thus -
Next, at about 4 AM, he takes the covers off the bed.
He goes to the pantry and sorts what is stale and infested from what's all right. The stale and infested he keeps. The rest he throws away.

fictive:

he is tenty three, the ferry captain
... he smiles at her, she sees only cow brown eyes and shyness.
in the sunset, looking like modas had touched him.
she closes her eyes and sees paddocks that thunder with laughter, feels the gold brush of wheat under her palms, Elysian.
tickle. brush tickle.

he lay around on his bed anorexiating, wishing the day would pass over him, but the day only seemed to get longer. he couldn't believe how slowly the time was passing - like it was stalling in front of him just to shit him, so he trod up on the back of its slow ankles, and in the meantime he could only lie there thinking how does anyone do anything? how does anyone get anything done with all this time around, swamping?

i know some of the meanings of some things
but i do not know the meaning of everything
and in any case, some things change their meaning.

i have changed in this respect.
there were stories in my eyes once that are no longer there,
and other stories have replaced them.
sounds, too.

and sometimes i have wondered if there is a deeper meaning
to beaks, and claws and talons.

in summer, even in these suburbs full of thieves, people leave their front doors open wide.

swelter. the humid medium. microbial community we breathe each other in aour hated neighbours even. part of us wants this community.
the shared disease of being human and suburban.

however, my parents do not leave their doors open.

they put on what they called the christmas video. the videotape of a logfire. their tv set was set in an alcove where a fireplace used to be.

it turned out they were not really american.

rhys and i were so afraid of that ghost book that we had to give it to sebastian. we promised we would have a ritual to destroy it, but we were too chicken even to do that.

is the reason for creepycrawly books working - is that something to do with symptomatic reading? they give you the meaning of environmental signs and so you give those signs the same exegesis when you move through your own surroundings? so that the windows become the haunted eyes that looked at you from the page?

once we were inside - the door closed behind us
one of us started to say something or we both did - the smell of the holiday house
but it was no use, we knew we were going to kiss, within seconds we were kissing, thinking 'this is crazy', i knew i was in love my head-body-heart swept in the warm lovewash rushing, it was sunlight.

to live in archival light
in the low dark
to last forever - black soul stamped
on the bound leaf of acid free paper.

~Because we grow old~

isn’t it funny how human beings grow two sets of teeth?
as juvenile beings we have only tiny beads to gnash.
getting down the daily meal:
a Phyrric victory.

A woman had an abortion in her youth and, later on, worried continually about whether she’d done the right thing.
“Of course you have,” her friend told her, “You have to have done the right thing. Otherwise you’d go mad.”
This seemed to be her allegory for the way history is written.

the road to success is narrow and dark, and leads forever down.

crawling back up the other way on the warm loam to the yellow mouth of sunlight you emerge through the nettles and squint, a little breathless, happy, warm.

a couple of weeks ago, or so:

After reading the pages concerning the WTO protest and the kitten someone burned alive at a train station, she assumes the emergency brace position with long soughing indrawn breaths, heaving gasps.

The PM as Performance Art
As with most great works of art, unrecognised in their time—
Paintings, sculptures, installations, even buildings—
The full power and affect of the PM was not recognised
By many in its moment. One man
Was moved to remark that the work was "not an oil painting."
Others failed to detect the latent satire in the way
The performer spewed jobs and words and bodies right and left and
With his cartoon mouth, span spin. Art appreciation
Did not yet extend much into politics in the noughties, and the people
Who saw, and listened, and were not moved to remark
Upon life become art (or death) should be forgiven.
The House of Reps was not then recognised as a gallery and
In Paddington and Melbourne and other artsy hotspots
Few showed interest in displaying the gibbering automaton
In its little jogging suit.
. . . . . . Observing all this
With fatalistic patience, the immortal artist sat back
In his red den, pared his clawed nails,
And filed down the aesthetically pleasing spike on the end of his long, fiery tail.

i sharpened my heart like a stone-age blade on a dead tree's petrified trunk
my axe-head heart, obsidian, shone
like the hate in the eyes of a late eighties punk
or the neon gleam of patent leather in the late-night.

this is politics. all is politics.
grey breath. the sentence, death, begets the thought:
why did i come here? why don't i go away?

these are our hopes and feelings:
takeaways.

my passionate infinity:
the harpoon's eye
the threads of rope, run parrallel, untwining
like the spires of sight i find
in the height of the sky, in the knot
of an iris, sphinctral, contracted,
then dilated, swallowing mine.

and through the strobing of fluttering lashes
lashes shuttering like a camera on motor drive
you saw the sun and thought how history is
this little aperture we get onto the universe:
a little span, the wink of a little eye
that is gone - its duration diminished
in the eyeless sea of time.

and your amoeba heart will swallow mine.

The ship tolls, leaning from one side to the other, pointing to the North-East sky then the cloudy South-West then pointing North-East again, and so on. Eyes shut tight, on her back, on the deck, she feels her life toll. She is the ringer in a bell that is rung for no reason. She feels the sun’s warmth resonate on her skin. Breathing in the resounding smell of the sea—the smell of travel, history, endless horizons and blood. In her belly, a rolling like the swell and coil of cramps: her stomach turns, and turns, sickening, and she lets the warm seasick sensation spread through her like pleasure, lets it take possession of her limbs, breathes deeply, offers no resistance. She is seasick in the swaying bell of life, inside the toll of the knell, the rock and roll of her invisible existence. To be lost, to find oneself all at sea: that is modernity.

i raised i opened my wings and a flock of birds through out from underneath them with sound like galloping clouds.

Dreams, dreams, so many.
One: I was walking with Kit and friend in the bush. There were multicoloured cockatoos guarding one gateway of leaves, and every so often on the right, a restaurant or something, set back. I went through one of the doors on the right and I became a Muslim boy called Abdullah. I really was him. Having been moderate, my father had turned fundamentalist. He had grown a beard and so on. My mother and two sisters and I were standing by while he searched the place for anything infidelic. He was looking for jewellery and so on. Writing. Meanwhile, my younger sister, Dana or something, was desperate that I help her find these purple earrings of hers. They were deeply sentimental for some reason: something either to do with our grandmother or some boyfriend, a date. I hunted in wooden boxes and things, pretending to help my father. What’s that in your hand, he said, when I found them. I was helping my younger sister get away to meet someone, driving her quick in my open topped car. But back at the house, he was asking, What’s that in your hand? And yet, like a film, in the end, he forgave us. We foresaw the possibility of living together, in mutually accepting tolerance. But for the moment, though there was love, it was uneasy. My mother, I barely recall her saying a word. I had no consciousness that I was in any way me.

I’ve had so many. That was a week or two ago. I should have written them all down. One, I was DJing for James brown and my intellectual property teacher was having us right our exam on closeted women in Victorian novels instead, and then I announced I’d already done the exam and she sent me off, and up above, in these little garret nun’s cell rooms, she was helping keep the women in hiding.

Last night, jungle. Skinny dipping. Some sort of animal, I’ve now forgotten what kind, maybe an orangutan or something more unusual, that I was caring for. Felt it was in danger. Supervisor and aunt and uncle about.

I can’t remember any of the really lengthy amazing ones. Sadly: because I remembered them all perfectly on waking from them. Maybe I will on reflection.

Weeks ago now, the one with the mall with the red cushiony walls with women buying crystal jugs and so on, all so red velvet wallpapered and oppressive, all the women were shopping, while upstairs the world leader with his dark eyes and his slicing charming smile had his lego forest set out with the little LEDs in it that lit up when he and his board of decisionmakers, all male, made their decisions about how to release hate into the world. That was it, the map, mapping the spread of different forms of hate with these little red lights.

God possessed an eternity - ETERNITY! - that thrilling infinite instant, that limitless space without borders or measure or clockbeats.

And yet, he decided to make Time.

I think this has to be an argument for the importance of film studies. God was a moviegoer at heart. In the glorious hallowing domus of eternity, he really found himself wishing there were something really good on to watch.

And so, he made Earth. And little people to! And heroes and villains and saviours and mismatched brothers stealing from each other's mouths and eating each other's arms.

And Mary. She got some screen time too.
She was ohso overwhelmed when the angel came and told her the news, its sweet tones immaculate.
Mary's eyes were starlit. And Mary said to the angel, "I am filled with the light from your mouth." And Mary said to the angel, further, "You annunciate so clearly."
And the angel answered, "Really? Well you drop your consonants. Earthling scum."
But by this point, God had tuned out. He'd skipped over to the Noah channel, where a camel had fallen overboard.
He missed out on the sex scene as well.

This Mozart story I wrote.

Because I love this idea of Wagner (or X genius) born at the wrong time and having to write the music of his historical moment and unable to write what is inside him driving him mad because the foundations haven't been laid for him to build on.

heathcliff's hooker [9:14 PM]:
is that you sleepyhead?
heathcliff's hooker [9:14 PM]:
out of bed sleepyhead
heathcliff's hooker [9:14 PM]:
i love "whimsy." wonder word. i tried to write a story based around that word once and i just corrupted it.
heathcliff's hooker [9:14 PM]:
goin invisible.
sleepyhead [9:29 PM]:
i am here! are you still here?

heathcliff's hooker [9:29 PM]:
yip

heathcliff's hooker [9:30 PM]:
love sindy

sleepyhead [9:30 PM]:
hey how's lifes
sleepyhead [9:30 PM]:
cool i think it's okay
sleepyhead [9:30 PM]:
it's limited tho
sleepyhead [9:30 PM]:
o/c
sleepyhead [9:30 PM]:
i'ts good for what it is? dunno
sleepyhead [9:30 PM]:
you corrupted it in the story?
sleepyhead [9:31 PM]:
it is a bit you know meringue castles or something i suppose
heathcliff's hooker [9:31 PM]:
what, what?

sleepyhead [9:31 PM]:
whimsy

heathcliff's hooker [9:31 PM]:
yeah exactly... this girl sunmits and assignment, and
heathcliff's hooker [9:32 PM]:
its a creative writign assignment, and her teacher writes "a delightful whimsy to this story Niccola" on it, and she's horrified.
sleepyhead [9:32 PM]:
haha

sleepyhead [9:33 PM]:
blue novelty pencil sharpeners heheh
sleepyhead [9:34 PM]:
i'm dreaming about experiemnntal techniques in brain surgery
heathcliff's hooker [9:34 PM]:
did you read?
heathcliff's hooker [9:34 PM]:
joy.
heathcliff's hooker [9:34 PM]:
do you think maybe
sleepyhead [9:34 PM]:
just now
heathcliff's hooker [9:34 PM]:
i was was inwardly punning ont he irrelevance of shit employment to you?
sleepyhead [9:35 PM]:
but eveerything is relevant! everything! shiver.

sleepyhead [9:35 PM]:
:-)
sleepyhead [9:35 PM]:
o shit that is a freaky emoticon
sleepyhead [9:36 PM]:
i hate emoticons
heathcliff's hooker [9:36 PM]:
evrything is relevant, isnt it.
i despise them. i hate it when
heathcliff's hooker [9:36 PM]:
computer converts colon bracket to face
sleepyhead [9:36 PM]:
i know, it hijacks meaning
sleepyhead [9:37 PM]:
i went to the archibald and the photography portrait whatever it is
sleepyhead [9:37 PM]:
the photography portrait is the typical nasty with, artists by artists
sleepyhead [9:37 PM]:
very upsetting
sleepyhead [9:37 PM]:
heheh
heathcliff's hooker [9:37 PM]:
it takes away nuance of your smile and replaces it with someone elses smile.
the coolon braacket is so expression-neutral.
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
winner of archibald very good
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
i agree
heathcliff's hooker [9:38 PM]:
you can populate its meaning acording to your knwoledge of the person.
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
yes that is very trues
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
*true
heathcliff's hooker [9:38 PM]:
i liek it from glances ive had. i tried to go see with george, but corwd thwarted us (first weekend it was open)
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
my smiley faces always have dahses for noses.
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
i KNOW
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
i know, it was impenetrable today
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
i decided i will go back
sleepyhead [9:38 PM]:
when the seething mass departs
i heard the most awful comments.
sleepyhead [9:39 PM]:
one woman told her male companion irritably "i scratched my pimple" and he pulled down the back o fher dress and looked at her bare back
sleepyhead [9:39 PM]:
a fat man on weaver jack "like THAT'S a portrait"
sleepyhead [9:40 PM]:
but small child i heard in parental tow
"great show i say! i say, great show!"
sleepyhead [9:40 PM]:
:- )
heathcliff's hooker [9:40 PM]:
LOL LOL
you made a poem
heathcliff's hooker [9:40 PM]:
LOL LOL LOL
heathcliff's hooker [9:41 PM]:
i wish i'd been there.
sleepyhead [9:41 PM]:
it was ogod
sleepyhead [9:42 PM]:
been rereading byatt
sleepyhead [9:42 PM]:
what u reading
heathcliff's hooker [9:42 PM]:
which?
heathcliff's hooker [9:43 PM]:
as in, which byatt?
sleepyhead [9:43 PM]:
little black book of stories
heathcliff's hooker [9:43 PM]:
me, reading nothing!
heathcliff's hooker [9:43 PM]:
was reading "the idiot" - gave itover.
sleepyhead [9:43 PM]:
unlikely scenario!
heathcliff's hooker [9:43 PM]:
read "disgrace" - so fucked.
sleepyhead [9:43 PM]:
yeah fuck that
heathcliff's hooker [9:43 PM]:
since then... just some beatrix potter!
heathcliff's hooker [9:43 PM]:
you have to read "the tale of timmy tiptoes." it changes from childhood.
sleepyhead [9:43 PM]:
i actually wrote you a paragraph describing "the life and times of michael k" or whatever it was i read i will find it for you
sleepyhead [9:43 PM]:
really how?
sleepyhead [9:43 PM]:
does adult mind molest it
heathcliff's hooker [9:44 PM]:
totally - no, no, no actually
sleepyhead [9:44 PM]:
is he a grey squirrel or somesuch
heathcliff's hooker [9:44 PM]:
no it is pre-molested. even the drawings are wrong. b-grade. and this chippy hackee guy! it's wonderufl.
heathcliff's hooker [9:44 PM]:
do u own?
yes it is, well done.
sleepyhead [9:44 PM]:
ok cool that'sa ll i remember
sleepyhead [9:45 PM]:
diod you see the one with the photograph portraits
heathcliff's hooker [9:46 PM]:
ay?
heathcliff's hooker [9:47 PM]:
no i didnt see any... only one th enews...
sleepyhead [9:47 PM]:
ok

heathcliff's hooker [9:48 PM]:
any good?
heathcliff's hooker [9:48 PM]:
i hate tv. but i need it.
sleepyhead [9:49 PM]:
can't find that fucking thing i wrote
sleepyhead [9:50 PM]:
no it was v crap. the subject of this photograph studied fine arts blah blah blah a close friend of the photographer for many years blah blah collaborated on many projects in the past blah blah blah
sleepyhead [9:50 PM]:
what do u use it for honing your critical faculties
sleepyhead [9:50 PM]:
?
heathcliff's hooker [9:50 PM]:
when you do, sne dit - id liek to hear. someone else praised that book to me.
heathcliff's hooker [9:51 PM]:
photograpyh can be qannoying - so little effort.
heathcliff's hooker [9:51 PM]:
you could do a betert portrait of you than anyone else.
heathcliff's hooker [9:51 PM]:
the following written.. you like?

moth

lost lifelorn wall moth
at rest on the plaster, large, like a wallmounted
souvenir, or a badge of courage
dark, soft, a soft barnacle
of sleeping wings, laced with eyes
and lines like spires, a gothic filagree
and tiny threads like the dipped lashes
of a child's embarrassed eyes
your dulcet chocolate dusk brown
musk-silvered iridescence, there
on the tarnished plaster. the air hangs
with cooking smells, you, perhaps
sense differently to the human beings
that occupy the sofa with their saucers
and ignore you.

he moves through mothlight
mothdark eyes meet mine, aspiring
to alight upon my kiss. in this white bed
we keep no secrets, we spread limbs
like wings, and let the television
blur away our nerves and silence with its fizz
of static (bad reception) and its noise
of American voices, dialogue, snappy, idiot,
quick-and we're undressed
and I think this is how I like you best
and the woman in heels says
this could be the end of western democracy
and vanishes into an a
sleepyhead [9:51 PM]:
i read some novel by him about this really poverty-stricken guy, who i think has a harelip, who is like a raker of leaves in a park or something. then his mother is dying and he wheels his mother in a wheelbarrow to try to get to the place where she insists she might have been born but she dies on the way so he like tips her into a ditch or something. then he goes on a strange journey of desperation and meets many psychos or sociopaths or idiots or whatever, some of whom may have been hippies. i think he ends up at the beach with some freaky woman trying to fuck him or teasing him and he bursts out laughing or wets himself? cant remember. but the whole time he hans't really eaten and then he like, profoundly transcends some sort of physical limitations or achieves enlightenment through his mental illness. it was very deep and philosophical, that is all i can remember of it. i did not understand it at all, because i am either far too borderline gifted or simply lacking in education. but i think it was widely respected and won the booker prize?
heathcliff's hooker [9:51 PM]:
and vanishes into an ad break.

moths whirl up, drop, outside
when I'm cooling myself on the street in my bathrobe and
distantly, I hear the beat, beat, beat
of someone's subwoofer, belting out the bass loop
of a hoon's confusion, beautiful
to hear the gorgeous boredom of this sound
drown in the wide grey maze of soulless houses.
sometimes I wonder if the purpose of double glazing
is to keep the sounds out or to keep them in (for privacy). many things
are like that, double adapted.
like humans moths serve no purpose. they crowd
in a flutter of flat eyelets, blinking
on the window, bellies peering through
at the light inside. they shake and shiver on the glass, and,
within, perhaps you have recovered
from the shivering that shook you
when we kissed.

heathcliff's hooker [9:52 PM]:
LOL harelip poverty...
heathcliff's hooker [9:52 PM]:
he wins the booekr for everything
heathcliff's hooker [9:52 PM]:
fuclk him. and now hes got australian citship, he'll win allt he prizes here too.
sleepyhead [9:52 PM]:
he is a strategist
sleepyhead [9:53 PM]:
will read poem now
heathcliff's hooker [9:53 PM]:
better than peter carey winnign even more though. i have never read PC btw so i cant judge, i think ppl enjoy bagging him out a lot
heathcliff's hooker [9:53 PM]:
and i liekd a para i read of ned kelly
heathcliff's hooker [9:53 PM]:
kelyl gang
sleepyhead [9:53 PM]:
oh yes god i read that
heathcliff's hooker [9:53 PM]:
yes, stragist. using language liek a job.
sleepyhead [9:53 PM]:
heheh
heathcliff's hooker [9:53 PM]:
i thought maybe u did. any good?
sleepyhead [9:54 PM]:
no it's ridiculous you can hear him all the way through
sleepyhead [9:54 PM]:
and he goes on all that stuff in the beginning pages about great editors still existing blah blah
sleepyhead [9:54 PM]:
only byatt is allowed to do that re national library or whatever haha
sleepyhead [9:55 PM]:
it's ok ned kelly character is endearing and some decent magic realist bites in it but just u can see how far short it falls or something. peter carey is there all the time that's all, it's unsuccessful
sleepyhead [9:55 PM]:
imho
heathcliff's hooker [9:56 PM]:
LOl great editors stilll existing. fucl him. fuck em all. i keep typing fuck fucl. fuck that!
heathcliff's hooker [9:57 PM]:
i would screw ned.
heathcliff's hooker [9:57 PM]:
in a brickyard only, though.
sleepyhead [9:57 PM]:
me too but he would have to shave his beard
sleepyhead [9:57 PM]:
heheh brickyard
heathcliff's hooker [9:58 PM]:
yeah! well they shaved it to hang him. sorry, foul. i would not sleep withj deathrow.
heathcliff's hooker [9:59 PM]:
i HATE capital punishment i dont care the crime. better to let victim's parents shoot you for revenge than cold institutionalised "termination."
sleepyhead [9:59 PM]:
cool poem

sleepyhead [9:59 PM]:
moths are beautiufl i think
heathcliff's hooker [9:59 PM]:
kinda old hat, the poem. but i like moth.
sleepyhead [9:59 PM]:
well i like both
heathcliff's hooker [10:00 PM]:
i didnt describe the moth though. it had yellow bee stripes on the back of its neck and red globe eyes. it could have been threatening, but it wasnt.
actually thjey werenet red eyes. it was a red bauble on its back. never seen same. quite big.
heathcliff's hooker [10:00 PM]:
glad u like.
sleepyhead [10:00 PM]:
tehy are colourful

sleepyhead [10:00 PM]:
i don't like capital punishment either
sleepyhead [10:00 PM]:
oh and i don't agree with prisons either
sleepyhead [10:01 PM]:
i don't know if i have any real rational justification of these opinions perhaps i picked them up from someone with more knowledge thani.s
sleepyhead [10:01 PM]:
i agree with flowers and rainbows
sleepyhead [10:02 PM]:
i think i told you one of my previous death fantasies getting sentenced to life imprisonment where i would be brutalised to death
heathcliff's hooker [10:03 PM]:
thats...
heathcliff's hooker [10:03 PM]:
so worrying, actually.
heathcliff's hooker [10:03 PM]:
when i was seven i had a with torture fantasy.
sleepyhead [10:03 PM]:
yes well depression selfhatred etc
sleepyhead [10:03 PM]:
really?
heathcliff's hooker [10:03 PM]:
witch, that should say.
heathcliff's hooker [10:03 PM]:
yes, i get put on this rack with a compression function. wrong for a kid, i think.
sleepyhead [10:04 PM]:
u have gt to start early if you want to achieve any thing in this life
sleepyhead [10:04 PM]:
bwahahahaha
heathcliff's hooker [10:04 PM]:
a machine to flatten my abdomen, bizarrely. SQWUAAASSH.
sleepyhead [10:04 PM]:
bad jok sorry
sleepyhead [10:04 PM]:
ow
heathcliff's hooker [10:04 PM]:
LOL. well, i've achieved flat abs!
BAD JKE SORRY.
sleepyhead [10:04 PM]:
:-)
heathcliff's hooker [10:10 PM]:
what is
sleepyhead [10:10 PM]:
??
heathcliff's hooker [10:10 PM]:
only justificaton for prison
heathcliff's hooker [10:10 PM]:
is if someone is seriously likely to dangerously reoffend.
heathcliff's hooker [10:11 PM]:
it just jams poor ppl into a loop when it/s e.g. drugs, stealing.
sleepyhead [10:11 PM]:
agree
heathcliff's hooker [10:11 PM]:
the whoel drugs thing propels itself - should decriminalise, get more control. even heroin.
sleepyhead [10:11 PM]:
but u got to keep the fuckrs down
heathcliff's hooker [10:11 PM]:
"regulate", dont criminalise.
heathcliff's hooker [10:11 PM]:
kick the shit outta them.
sleepyhead [10:11 PM]:
the boot in the face
sleepyhead [10:12 PM]:
i was overcome by flourescent lights on the bus tonight, they are cruel
sleepyhead [10:12 PM]:
and when u close your eyes and put your face down you still see them
sleepyhead [10:13 PM]:
im better tonight tho
heathcliff's hooker [10:16 PM]:
on bus? so dull though? or bright onmes?
heathcliff's hooker [10:16 PM]:
i am pretty good. a few tearful fits but brief. nearly emailed you in angst yesterday
heathcliff's hooker [10:16 PM]:
restrained self.
sleepyhead [10:16 PM]:
bright and cruel
sleepyhead [10:16 PM]:
u shouldn't worry about that!!
heathcliff's hooker [10:16 PM]:
those arent the fluros you still see. it's your own hell mouth. or your doomseye.
sleepyhead [10:16 PM]:
lol.
sleepyhead [10:17 PM]:
yeah i know
sleepyhead [10:18 PM]:
the hellmouth is v creative

sleepyhead [10:18 PM]:
cause life is v messy
heathcliff's hooker [10:18 PM]:
if your skin pores were hellmouths for bacteria. if the bacteria were afraid of them.
sleepyhead [10:19 PM]:
or something
sleepyhead [10:19 PM]:
heheh
sleepyhead [10:19 PM]:
my eyes are hellmouths for my brain
heathcliff's hooker [10:19 PM]:
yes bright and cruel.
at lawschool, in the lifts, i look so old. i hang my head but the afterimage of my reflection is in my head. grey and cruelsick.
heathcliff's hooker [10:19 PM]:
that's bad. for your brain. for your eyes.
sleepyhead [10:19 PM]:
did u know max martin wrote 4ever by the veronicas
sleepyhead [10:20 PM]:
i think there is an evil mirror on the back surface of my skul
sleepyhead [10:20 PM]:
*inside
sleepyhead [10:20 PM]:
what that poem u wrote about ur skull
sleepyhead [10:21 PM]:
omg i bought a siouxie and the banshees cd it was terrible i tried to sleep to it but it kept waking me up it was so bad
heathcliff's hooker [10:21 PM]:
my dad has one of them, im no fan. i love the word "banshees" though.
heathcliff's hooker [10:21 PM]:
what was the poem re my skull... scraping soul down off sides?
sleepyhead [10:21 PM]:
i thought i would make a good banshee
sleepyhead [10:21 PM]:
yep
sleepyhead [10:22 PM]:
i can't summon the necessary tears tho and i hate to look careworn
sleepyhead [10:22 PM]:
it is dreadful!
sleepyhead [10:22 PM]:
i have a cover of mother mother by the veronicas hahahaha
sleepyhead [10:23 PM]:
i never realise how much shit music i download
heathcliff's hooker [10:25 PM]:
really, a lot. i try not to.... i pay for it.
sleepyhead [10:25 PM]:
i am convinced that things wil lget better
heathcliff's hooker [10:25 PM]:
liek some paranoid law school weirdo.
heathcliff's hooker [10:25 PM]:
any recommendations, that will have emotional pull?
sleepyhead [10:26 PM]:
it's so difficult to find music that actually makes me emotional
sleepyhead [10:26 PM]:
i'll burn u something i hop e
heathcliff's hooker [10:26 PM]:
they help purge, forme.
sleepyhead [10:26 PM]:
i mean music that actually recognises my emotions
sleepyhead [10:26 PM]:
yep
heathcliff's hooker [10:26 PM]:
which tori amos songs are good? i have never "listened" to her.
sleepyhead [10:27 PM]:
dresden dolls album is pretty good
sleepyhead [10:27 PM]:
ok i'll burn u some tori amos
heathcliff's hooker [10:27 PM]:
yeah that sort. maybe your emotions magnet to the song and get pulled out like a beesting.
heathcliff's hooker [10:27 PM]:
hey, iamgine if the thorn actually hurt the rose. digging into its side. into the stem.

last night, my dream.
the last part before waking: zoe and i, and then my father (my mother in the changeroom) swam in the 'lucy in the sky with diamonds' diorama resin waterfall at the australian museum. zoe's idea (in a blue bikini, with such joy).
i) there is no waterfall in that diorama, and it was much larger than what would fit behind that glass
ii) in the dream it was not resin, it was water, clear and smooth. like the waterfall i swam in queensland. but i love the idea if it had been resin. us bugs, cloyed, trapped, pulling forward, wings stuck. sabre toothed tigers galling us as we floundered.

other things:
-just before then, marc having taken a job in the museum shop, having organised all the loose trinkets into circles like british druid or faerie rings. blue novelty pencil sharpeners or something.
-an old home video, my toddler self, and kit and seb, lying on our beds, seb on the floor, in a bare room, chatting. an age between each stupid sentence. a sense of irreverence. cute faces (mine, kit's) but not deserving.
-an historic house we hadn't heard of before - a mural all over the outside, 1840s? an eccentric colonial? extensive inside and, outside, wonderful gardens, though the caretaker, who found us below, didn't think they were thriving. we got into it via the QVB underground mall and the woman came and saw us with a basket and thought we idiots thought it was a shop and were trying to shop. she wanted to shoo us away. we'd been heading for l'occitane to get verbena spray. and instead found this! THIS!
-same place, outdoors. low grassy ramparts/stairs leading down to a roughtumble bush a dry billabong the other side. my cousins aunt and uncle there, my camera, me taking pictures wishing i was in them. this was when the home video appeared my sister called one of the pictures file names "everyone." i had taken it.

i wonder how many people watching The History Boys could identify with both Posner and Daikin (sp?). I think I may have.

*

was in men's section of myer underwear with marc yesterday (regrettably). found strange pair of boxer-briefs that cost about $200 dollars, said all over them "Dolce Gabbana you know you want it" [actually it was another brand but i've forgotten] "Dolce Gabbana you know you want it" "Dolce Gabbana you know you want it" "Dolce Gabbana you know you want it" "Dolce Gabbana you know you want it" "Dolce Gabbana you know you want it" in crossing over type, and hidden in amongst it all, where the unsuspecting sucked in brand-hyped buyer would not notice it, was the line:

"Crotch - you know you want it."

The Gowings store has closed and become a giant Supre. It kills me.

I feel better suddenly, but just before I wrote in an email that I was not happy right now even though I number amongst those who have absolutely no right to feel down considering their overprivileges, however that underlying guilt is of course the floor of woe & social malaise, underneath, perhaps, in it? i mean, when you rip up the carpet of neurosis...

*

Meeting a writer would, i suspect, be trying, and deflating, and daunting, and ultimately harmful to the soul. i may be wrong. I've read accounts of people meeting auden and, apart from those who actually ended up human on his faithless arm, they seemed to find the experience intimidating, and fall-shorting, in terms of wanting something to cross between that coudn't, despite their sence of his greatness in person.

Perhaps it was just an interview with one person. One person's account. There were certainly no accounts from lovers. Who knows, maybe the account was Alan Bennet's own? My mind seive-like, sometimes - surprisingly.

i scraped the soul down off the sides of my skull
where it was stuck like peeled paint or bathtub plaque
around the warm, unhaunted, darkened NUMB.
i tried to pack the flakes down into a wad
but the crumbs would not cohere
it was damp, and dry, and disparate.
like a teenager with the house to himself for the week,
the water smiled.

[what is wrong with me? what was wrong with me yesterday? crying, crying. i have no right to be like this, none. i'm provided for. maybe that's it. guilt, on top of the rest. i have no right to ask the question what is wrong with me. there are real things wrong. sickup emotional sickup. why self-focussing? because it's frightening to focus on anything else right now. i should be shot. my hair is falling out]

what stones are green? emerald. peridot.
She, she, she
the air like a wetsuit: airless, tight. airtight.



Prose Fragment Poem
hidden.
everything's northbound
everything northbound glares,
winks, glares,
huge prints
on the sky, fibres
waving. world.
sell anything, sell anything
the castle
mast of hopelessness. hopelessly
affulent. the billboard
glistens, she glistens
towards her, stunning
comes
the thunder of westbound traffic

just had moving vision that i'd like to become a microscopic creature seeing only close up seeing only close detail, a scuttler in the grass, underneath and in between the sweeping blades, going forward, forward, pursuing unthinking seeing big and never thinking farsighted

scuttling over under in the detailed green barely disturbing the close damp earth

my soul is a water feature.
my soul is gone.
it went down the funnel
my body is the funnel for my soul
my funnel web.

no spout? no spout?

1 fish 2 fish red fish blue fish. those Seuss words just came in my head.

oh my god i see it so clearly now the soul is a poisonous green potato green potato

the soul is like one of those signs that says 'potatoe' instead of 'potato'

wy did i never see before that the soul is a poisoned green potato goodforzilch green green shitty spud bucket history face death balloon woody green dung wad.

the soul is completely useles. my soul is completely useless. it is like a shoebox with underripe potatoes in it. chewing gum on a shoe. it is like a shoesole a dog has chewed. it is like a helium balloon. it is stupid and senseless and who the hell who the hell who the hell is stupid enough not to be miserable in this horrible world what an incredible feat of self control will what apowerful mind or else just moron status it must take not to be screaming.

i found myself thinking "the time machine" not as in a machine for time travel but as the mechanism/conceptual apparatus with its differing historical rhythms that humans have made for themselves to live in & how it takes over pounding us out like biscuits or cheap alarm clocks or some shit who gives a fuck.

last ngiht walking home from newtown. all the way, but the length of brighton street in particular, it struck me, came over me. by the time i reached the corner of brighton and west, those isolated gums, dim pale slender poles with the moon effulging behind them. i didn't think it, i felt it.
that primitive moon and those trees standing and throbbing millions of years ago. the same that shone on far-apart campfires and lands before humans and even, i thought later, diprotodon. i felt so strongly the manmade nature of clock time i felt the same moon was there and it was the same though things were ckeared there was still the warm humid heat in the air, the same medium, the same high sky and sense of being in this almost primeval landscape. i might have been another scuttling instance of marsupial life in some sparse and quiet path of undergrowth nearing a clearing long, long, long ago with the insects and the humid quiet medium warm and high around and the long gums and the white bark and the moon behind, behind, above, above and me and all alive, alive.
not anthropocentric in the least, this world i felt, i saw, was there around us all the time, perhaps behind but there - the leaves, the gums, the half moon high, behind. a snake far more fitting to document it in art, in signs, than any human hand. i didnt feel that. not anthropocentric, or anthropomorphic, not even my human eyes, that's how it felt.
the feeling rising and me into the feeling rising losing self in sense - me gone just present humming in that insectsong alive, alive, the warmth of air, height distance hug, the moon.
not reading hardy, i don't think, just the atmosphere, the time, the night.
but i did think of tess looking at the moon and transporting out of herself over that distance concentrating herself in the gaze on the far distant moon and i felt rather the moon brought down here, the moon burns in my atrium heart, one chamber, but then i reversed it and did what she did for just the glimmer of an instant and i was there, yes, a moment, and that was a human act, a focus of the eyes with a thought - transport.
i could have renamed that west/brighton corner there and then, with the trees and their undergrowth gone, standing pale tall long. the words came to me so unfittng to the place for the daily gaze: the moon at bone's gap.

from emails i sent today:

on the 1979 moon treaty --
did you know the moon is leaving? i'd like to call a book that. "The Moon is Leaving." Leaving orbit that is. Then again, once u start thinking in astronomical time, you damn yourself to the concussive horror of human insignificance. Best to stick with nice antrhopological concepts, like Law and Love.

so glad you feel better. i feel different. i feel oddly revamped in some quintessential sense. maybe
it's getting to sleep ok last night, but i think it's more than that. i feel like my body contains some
new hormone called Vividerone.

====

yesterday there was this insane wind.
i told marc i couldn't do a 6 oclock start, "i absolutely fullstop couldn't." i don't know how he was doing it.
marc boyne plumber yesterday, somehow he always has this rustic hardyesque light in his face and makes some regional country compliment, its so strange. its like a film.

wrote on saturday, late:
I had a hell of an evening. Went out for dinner with a friend - Commonwealth ATM ate my money &
then I lost my glasses inexplicably which i needed to drive home and spent seemingly hours looking for
them, failed miserably. Harassing pollution of Saturday night hoons. Came home to axe-weilding mother. Made friends with her & confiscated axe. Am now feeling relatively cheery since I'm peacefully at home & next stop is bed.
too many projects going at the moment. i feel less than lighthearted about [attempted novel's] fragmented & unmaneagble state. it is insane how many thousands of words i have written in the past 5 yrs. what i wouldnt give for a clean
slate. it's distressing.

where is my time lapse hidey-hole? to be on a stopstill freezeframe plane of time for a little, for just enough to get it done, something done, one thing amongst all the many many many things done.
intensity of experience is returning i think. for a long time i was feeling wooden, closed off, in a sensory sense. too many screens - too much "looking at" not feeling within. now i'm being a pisshead romantic. i should seek chemical help. drink and dance.

also a saturday email:
went to animal park today!! so good. there was this wallaby with such a soft little nuzzle, and it had
such a hot body temperature, the poor wary little thing. so pretty with its eyelashes. there were so
many beautiful things there. i love the different way they all move.

==
i have so many old emails. i suppose they serve to sort of auto-diarise my life, to some extend. i hope i dont lose them all somehow.

also wrote:
I just (tearfully) read the Mayor of Casterbridge over the last couple of days
and so have a hankering to see some Hardyesque regional characters. Hardy har har.
You sound relatively brighteyed & bushytailed gov. Hope everything, workwise & otherwise, is going
fab. Had wonderful afternoon at Symbio wildlife park. Morning hell though: trying to wade through
messes of own writing.

Yeah, look "Middle Eastern Appearance" up in the revised Oxford and you get three definitions:
i) Evil
ii) Satanical, threatening or diabolical in aspect
iii) Opressed minority

Tim cheerfully broached the topic with me once telling me how much flak he gets at airports due to
his "middle eastern appearance." Imagine: terrorist Tim.

I was wearing someone's ear off for 1/2 hr yesterday about how I want to go somewhere
with a creek! A pebble creek! This may require me to move to NZ though.

during last week:
(i have been shortening schoarlship titles to 90 and 45 characters)
other great scholarships include a one-off grant for research into
"The Cyto and Chemoarchitecture of the Echidna's Cerebral Cortex"
and an enticing sounding one entitled
"The Drug and Alcohol Scholarship"
---a year's supply, perhaps?
There was also one for "Preventing Throat Lozenges Sticking Together."

speaking of lockups, the other brilliant thing i used to do was leave my
violin behind in classrooms on days when i had a lesson later & have to go
back well after hours when everything was locked up & find the cleaner
lurking under the stairs. i'll never forget that ghostly smell.

when i zipped home after meeting you the other day alas i had locked myself out... nothing daunted, i had a nap on the doorstep.
ive done laps at night@leichhardt pool a coupla times & it's sort
of amusing - people glow all blue-white like pale frogs.

it's a bit of a flat pancake today (the brain) but not in a bad way. in fact i'm not at work, i'm clocking
in at work from home, one of the (over)privileges of nepotism.

when you get a moment in front of a monitor, tell me what
you're doing. coming back to the fatal shores at all this year?
it's almost february. so in a month or so it'll be back to law school [...] meanwhile, these few days, i've been
trying to organise old unfinished stories, collated chunks of prose, 1000s of
word files, and i'm lost in a hell of words which is also a hell of myself, a
monster begat out of my own nowhere efforts, efforts that led nowhere, seeing
what i can salvage. that's one thing i'm up to just now. the others - working
2 jobs (usyd[for magsy!], unsw) and music and loving the sun and not being away all summer as it so often
feels i am, and looking after family & canine & dental problems. sleep has
been scarce, not for want of putting my head down on the pillow & wishing it
would hit me.
met up with an ex yesterday and found the experience
somewhat deflating.
in general, though, there's been a lot of (the right kind of) intensity, and a
sunny yellow feeling, and i feel alternately childish and grownup.

[edited/altered]
took me days
to recover from the brilliance of brokeback mountain in which not all concur, in fact im not sure i recovered. i could feel
salt in a slick running off my hands in the when i got home and was washing my
hands, thats how many tears had been running down them/my face/everything.
actual public sobbing took place as i was walking home. bittersweet
wrench. it was quite life-moving.

kit away 6 nights for a conference in tasmania.

How was the rest of Saturday? [at glebe markets] Sorry for my sudden exit. Was on the verge of
collapse. Walked into a car/side mirror. Am finding walking in a straight line
increasingly difficult. Could this be love, or just a terminal illness?
Anyway was home with hours to spare to go to Observatory Hill with my mum. I
think she enjoyed her massage but then, you can never be too sure. ... it seemed to me very hot.
I hate
my face.

I fear on the inside I may be a brickie's labourer - I
just lack the manpower. And i completely agree about the frightend child
feeling inside (incidentally: your singlet suits that geist exactly!) I am
increasingly thinking of myself as overgrown child. I need to get out of this
somehow or I will turn into one of those old women who wears pigtails with
daisy clips and mumbles to her thumbs as she strides along King St. Not based
on any actual person, but you know the general idea. Sometimes I think
innocence & real childhood and the memory of it is the saddest thing in the
world. Truth be told though, I was never particularly innocent - i think i had
quite a naughty streak as a kiddywink. Not in the worst way.

Yes, looking at my computer and the sheer indeed insane volume of
unfinished and unfinishable and i suspect essentially shitty creative writing
projects it contains is deflating. The neurotic rant
ends now. BANG! Boink, boink, boink. The cheerful and onamatopaeic descent
into nonsense.

i think you kissed me just in time
it felt like a diving catch
we made it by a hairsplit breath
i don't know what i would have done if you hadn't done that.

the scene was bursting in on me
my heart was gulping hard
i was terrified that there could be
so much vision, so much time.

in italy my eyes trained me
to see with a happy broken heart
the distance between them and me
and here and there and then

the past - i trained my gaze
on sights that peeled my eyes
and sharpened stars in my dumfounding view
of heady waste. the stars! the stars!

i'm hopelessly confused. i'm in a hell of words.

it was like someone was holding down the E key in my head. bipbipbipbipbipbipbipbipbip. interference.

there was once a sea captain who fell in love with the wooden woman carved on the prow of his own ship. he never spoke of it, but every day grew more pale - keel-hauled by his own passions. after being caught three months in the rip of this secret love, he was starting to look like a drowned man. he became superstitious. he would only face furrard, he would never face aft. he wanted to look where she looked: out, out. the straits in his heart and mind narrowed. his navigation suffered as he lost himself in the blind map of his own emotions. still his salty galatea held her pose, carved and impassive, a totem-girl.

at school we used to have something called a 'cake stall.'

in primary school there were 'fetes.' mexican/spanish theme to one. student waitressing. kit's black tea.

in centennial park we used to ride our trike/scooter around the children's bike ring. it felt like a lot of traffic & many different speeds & different ages children were around me. but yesterday when we drove by there was only one kid going round & round alone in the drizzle, the humidity.

she wished she could click on the minimise button in his face and shrink him down & move him across to the bottom lefthand corner of her life where she wouldn't have to look at him & always be thinking come here come here i love you.

also:
dinner at cl's (back from vietnam, lost her father) great night - spent time at the piano (what? in public, me? never!) and what delicious berries tessa brought. the night felt steamy. i wanted.
helped edit essay.
also huw's 21st lunch yesterday. interminable. the dog had bad skin and growths. nothing seemed well cared for. i played the piano there too. fats waller - smelly old piano stool books. there were 2 accordions. no one could play.
and vanessa's - a dinner evening family thing last week. the pool. goosebumps. the "big" sister. time.
time, time, time. i've been too busy. i can't think but i do. i can't think but i do think. i love you. time, time.
coogee with my mother, too. coogee, coogee. the water's warm.
& audley with merle. it doesn't matter how the weather is there. birds, many species all in a view.
close your eyes. don't forget sometimes to do that. and look right above your head. look right up at the sky. three dimensionality. there are three dimensions. wait - more. but forget the fourth. time, time.

after new zealand (mating dolphins, meeting people on the milford boat, the hedgehogs, the dry wine country)
opera house: the cherry orchard.
film: good night and good luck, broken flowers (so, so slow)
music: antony & the johnsons (at the state theatre - my first time beyond the foyer there) & andy irvine in tempe, what a great concert, 3 sets and went late, even threw in 1000s are sailing, i never thought i'd hear that live, can't believe i wasn't in tears.
i've been at work much. many days that seem full and my life still inspired but it's hard. i don't want to have to feel like i'm putting my nose to the mill to get things done. i want it to be loose and free and fun.
imagine if someone looked at you and smiled and summed you up kindly - "she's a lose woman."
or, "she's a star."

no one

on the bus there were people reading papers. taking mobile phone photos of each other. no one was looking out the window.

that was yesterday.

today i was in the house, the kitchen. the paper before me. the remains of brakfast. it's funny how we only feel haunted when we're alone. we don't realise that the times we're haunted are the times when we're in company. we're haunted by the other people in our lives. they're what really haunts us.

i turned to page three and had that feeling like i was the last man on earth alive.

i went to the window. outside, there was no one. no sign of life across the street. the haunting empty feeling on my back grew stronger. i opened the window and stuck out my head and looked up and down the street. it was still - if there was a breeze, i couldn't feel it. there was noone, not to the left or to the right. an empty street. no sounds that suggested a living thing doing the business of living out of sight in a hidden backyard. zero. my loneliness had opacity: i couldn't see through or beyond it. that was a lonely moment. i couldn't climb out of it. i was alone. i haunted my own house. there was no one besides me. not even a dog barking.

i got my wallet and my denim jacket and i went out onto the street. i started walking. i didn't know which way to start at first, then i started for the main street. i couldn't hear the traffic. i was heading for the bus stop. there's a bus stop, i thought, up on the main road. but i was having haunting thoughts. i imagined that when i got to the bus stop there'd be no one else waiting. sure enough, when i got to the main road, i didn't see any traffic. i didn't see anyone. it was sunday, so the shops were shut. but the bus was due soon. i sat down. the bench was warm. i still couldn't feel a breeze. i waited. the haunting thoughts went on. i imagined that when the bus came there'd be no one inside, no one driving - but i was wrong. the bus never came.

r a v a g e d e x p a n s e s

fiction written at unsw:

===

the old man had blood on his face. he was trying to
feed himself to his chickens.

**

she was a broken high-heeled shoe. High quality
damaged goods, her value depreciated 90% by the rent
Jay had made in her silk.

seeking counselling, sitting in this waiting room full
of the seconds and rejects of human life.

**

she learned four languages. she was interested in all disciplines. she made quick progress across most fields of knowledge she approached. she loved to read, but more than that, to think of things, connect thoughts across spaces, slip threads through the illusory boundaries between areas of learning and link them.

after the abuse, she couldn't do anything with her mind's ravaged expanses.

I dreamed the Revelation of St Mathew.
I dreamed it as literally as it is possible to dream something so non-literal. It was visionary. It was a vision.
It was sublime, visually and atmospherically sublime, in a way that no dream of mine has ever been sublime. It is also the first time I have ever had a second hand dream. It was Mathew who dreamed the Revelation of St Mathew, he was there first. I don’t know how I gained the right to be there.
In the dream, at least, I gained that right because I was on a tour. Like a rainbow that has its foot somewhere and can be climbed, the Revelation was a site, somehow, a kind of meta-real Ephemera that you could visit, and its entry had been located in an area of provincial France. There were tours there. We were on a tour that was visiting the Revelation – you could enter and climb the Revelation. And so the Revelation was less a dream-narrative (time) than a dream-space (eternal) – a space/place you could move through, move up through, though only on a particular course, like a track, I suppose the course was the order in which the thing was originally narrated.
The air was sun, sublime, mist-light, God-light, it was like being inside some immensity God had exhaled, and it was somehow unlike anything I could have imagined – it was something an amazing painter had imagined, vast beyond all vanishing points – vast, bright, haze, outside the limits of vision.
The Revelation of St Mathew – a tour. You went on, you went on the path with your tour group and I was with my family of four and we went on in the group – and it just kept on thrusting up, you would be on one level and feel its altitude more heavenly more Alpine more exalted than any air you ever breathed and yet then you would thrust up to the next, and somehow it looked the same only perhaps brighter, vaster somehow, that view down from the bridge of stone over limitless distance without fringes, out to clouds, distant cliff-bridges partly made only of sun or I don’t know, I can’t describe it, and you could hardly believe it when you walked on a little and were shot up into the next tier, and felt an even more incredible altitude, sublime, like breathing so that you yourself were being breathed, you were air, and you could see better, further, than ever before, you couldn’t help looking, and it was like for once gazing was enough, gazing was consummation itself, there was none of that hunger you get with a beautiful view to consume it. It was enough – and you went on, up, thrusting up to the next height, the next incredible expanse, with a space beyond expanses.
And light, light, light silt-sifted through clouds, expansive light, immense, yet not bright, heavenly in a sense of that word I can never communicate, like being breathed, like everything – enough, enough, enough.
Somehow a sense of sunlit stone structures not quite real – whatever you were working on (and on the way up, underneath, a vague sense of dark beings, a kraken, a spider-thing, hovering – shadowed – beneath the suspended stone path we were climbing, dali-esque somehow, material/immaterial, suspension itself – these creatures that were seen only when we had to go down the last part, through the bottom few levels, on the way back (of which, see ahead). You saw nothing of them on the way up, there was only a dark hint of them at your back, like eyes on your back.
And then the summit level, the top level, where you could see the golden gates, the something beyond that you saw and somehow didn’t see at once, and yet it was there, it was not vanished in any sense. And strangely, here you felt the altitude was clarified somehow, clarissimus, somehow more ‘real’ and although now at some insane height beyond all human knowledge (for you did not have to walk all the steps up, you were somehow vastly shot higher up through levels though always on a path, never aware of this shooting or how it happened over such distance) – anyway, although you were now at this height, strangely, there was water now, a human distance below, perhaps only ‘virtual’ water and, in the disance, a light-faded glistening image of a bridge somehow reminiscent of that lucid yet misted early morning view of the golden gate bridge only you knew it must somehow be much vaster, infinitely vaster, and so distant you weren’t quite looking at it, yet you were. Bridge mist god light.
The mass queue appears of all the worlds dead ever in a mass going up the ramp to the gates and we, the tour, couldn’t get to that last part of the promontory (some real metal fence holding us back perhaps). We were invisible or irrelevant to the masses – the order of their queue was determined by god, not first come first served (for there is no time in heaven).
Had I gone beyond the golden gates, I would have seen the numbers described in the revelation, in their strange manifestation, I would have seen holy numbers, I would have seen the sheep-eyed thing, etc.
Real speedboats were going under us on that water. Speedboats under us, real, with that clarified hard loud feel to them, hyper-ordinary somehow, like being back on earth with men shouting, young men, French men I think, shouting with the speed of it! And then we were on a train going down – we were on a sort of rollercoaster train only it was not a ride it was infrastructure – we were on it going down from the level of heaven and it started fast and it went faster, faster, accelerating madly to pick up an incredible speed that seemed terminal, I can’t describe it I thought my face would fly off but it didn’t hurt but I thought we would all die – extreme speed. The driver of this train was like a taxi driver – a man of few words, not friendly, bored of his job, not comforting, and we sped sped sped down not quite til we were back at the level of France but til we were perhaps within airspace that the French government administered, and we were alive, my family, and getting out of the train, and my mum tried to say something friendly to the driver but he was just sick of his job, not friendly, and we were going along on our shaky legs waolking back with our amazed faces turned to each other amazed smiling like we’d really got full value, and there was this mundane exhausted Euphoria as we went down the last part, through the bottom levels that now looked dark and enclosed like stone, stone caves and we went down on ladders through holes in the floor, waking the kraken-creature and other insect-monsters and spectre-things that guarded the doors from the shadows, moving once then keeping still, keeping their every sense trained on us. I felt a little fear, excited Euphoric fear, so that my bowels were weak on the last ladder and I felt like a baby crapping in its pants.
I realised only later that I somehow had crapped in the piece of cardboard I would have to use for the next three weeks to wrap the kebabs we were having for dinner. FUCK, YUK. We were back in the tour accommodation now – with a panelled, muffled, low-ceilinged carpeted fake teak cruiseliner feel to it, and a hum underneath us - and I went to the loo and wandered into the wrong room and went back out (I think a guide made a pass at me) and then I was eating my dinner at a high table and these admiring kids, cricket-fan type boys, were gathering around me because they’d heard of me via my sister’s websites. It was hard to get rid of them. Then there was a talent night.
At this talent night I only saw one act, prematurely performed – it was a pair of precocious American children, boy and girl – whose act was to try to get chocolates out from under a huge heav rusty iron birdcage – but when I looked I could see the chocolates were really little parcels of cremation ashes, compacted. The children spoke in horrible childish/unchildish trained-actor voices.
Then I was at the bottom of the cliffs of coogee, a mad wild version, and it was gone...

i can hear, through the office wall, a currawong.

(the wall behind me. there are other things to post here, but they must wait)

New Year's Eve (or morning, now: it's 12.41)
2006 is here.
I made the not particularly well thought out decision to stay home. 12.42 now. But not particularly regrettable.
"Not another year in this world," I said. The TV was on. I was laughing into my hands.
Happy birth-- I said as I kissed my dad on the cheek. I was about to say "Happy birthday."
Happy new year, I meant. Happy new year.

Another poem, hey?

God, I should so have a boyfriend. I'd write him the most beautiful love letters.

[He could make the pukie pukie motion but keep them anyway... preserved in a bowl of saccharine]

Two leaky people

I drew you with a toe in the salt foam
+ noticed how our suckers meet to form a single tube
and everything I’ve loved in life began to bleed and move
dissolving into massive seas and white salt breeze
and all the waves along the shore froze still to point at me
and I saw the face I’d drawn was somehow drawn upon them all
Everything I’ve ever loved dissolves in you
Held together by some beautiful glue
Everything I love melts into you, blue, blue
But it’s too hard to describe so I won’t attempt to.

salvation army christmas dinner. man served his turkey. he a) tries to redeem it for cash value, b) tries to sell it to other hardluck cases in exchange for money for port/"smokes"

revisiting some memories.
like living in the hot uncomfortable space beneath a loose tooth.
nauseously intimate.


the line "like... tooth" above is one i tried to formulate in a story long ago and i just put it in context for fun. the original expression of the simile was far less elegant, but i've forgotten.

nigel kennedy kafka CD is playing haven't listened to it in years, thought it was gone. "look at me... i'm feminine..." johnny apollo a man no more... cracks me up, in twain. the album is so bad

a capsule novel?...

In their lives the two sisters were not unlike the two fish they had as children. The two fish lived in the one tank. One fish, the one that was Kaitlin's, was always eating. She even tried to eat the plastic weed. The other, the one that belonged to Sylvia, was always staring at her own reflection in the glass. In the side of the tank. She appeared to be staring out but was always, in fact, staring in at herself. One morning, Kaitlin's fish ate Sylvia's. For the next week, Kaitlin ate nothing. Then one morning she sank to the bottom front right corner of the tank, and ebbed there until the next morning when she floated up, dead.

It’s raining. I saw the cobweb in little rainthreads from the step when I came in.

found this amongst handwritten notes, evidently intended to post:

1/8/05
I’d been starting to feel like I’m just a caretaker for all this old writing; things I had written; loose dead scraps like offal, shrapnel.

also i wrote:
i want everything to occur by happy accident.

written in the back of the semester's 3rd note book:

hearts becoming stars
heart heat.
star light
heart light
love love love.


it wasn't a poem, it was how i felt.

she's got foxblood.
she has foxblood.

here's my attempt to decipher (and alter to a poem) something written on a pink index card that got wet in my shoulder bag:

you've always been a help to me
hanging out over the broad flat
night on a friday: the sagging moon
competing, up there, with the suburb's underlight
spilling tears, clear milk.

the card (which certainly did not read what i have typed above much at all) also said:

"drawling hum"
and has a note from my dad to buy a kilo of coffee, to my sister.

ave verum corpus/corporal
a chapter called "humble pig."

he not only sold his soul. he incorporated, and made a share issue to each of the employers, corporations and discourses that had a hold on his life. as well as an issue of preference shares to God, the holding company in the sky, including a right of pre-emption.

i suppose you could also call this "the history story."
death is the house that we built. some called it progress.
it left traces in excel spreadsheets. someone in a suit said, "i think we should reschedule the apocalypse. do you think we could make that next month, instead of next century? would that be do-able? how much notice will the bigwigs need? what does the statute say?"
i said, "i love you." that's what women have been saying for years, like they're supposed to. i'm very good at it. it's blinkers: keeps your from looking side-to-side, or underneath yourself, down at the foundation stones, the flagstones:
they're banknotes.

so strange and so human that people want to watch the same story again and again -
the boy meets girl story.
meanwhile, underneath all this, another masterstory is going on. the death story.
[a secret underwater rip that underscores millenia]

so these past weeks. dysfunctional lines of romance (imagine that last word spoken with a thick drawling honey of irony):
-violin ben/beth @ wellconnected
-the too earnest scotsman
-the friend (oops)
-the x

and writing, short fiction. have felt inexplicably restored to energy of my "Sweet Precocious Youth" and have developed uncanny ability to edit my own work savagely and feel drastically happy about doing it. but have also discovered that since the teenagerhood i have written so much that i will never be able to deal with the copious mound, only sit on top of it guarding & lording the mass frustrated&kicking like a brush turkey.

it rains, sprinkles, brings my skin and face alive, the world in my face wild and clear the streets striking me like i'm 14 again. this mornign on the train getting on towards central, looking down at the tracks below the elevated tracks where the train was - puddles forming alone, a battered dead gothic shed, a waste, depth, and as the platforms came nearer, the men in their fluros walking along, walking along, and it migth as well have been a mountainside i felt so soaring.

My present motto: if in doubt, regulate. public enterprise, social services & tax reform on an equitable basis

Had amazing day with Adz at Chinese Friendship Garden the other day. We'd been before. Beautiful & full of leaping lizards and jumping carp, visceral. Scones in teahouse.

Moot on Wednesday evening and Workplace law talk last night, then dinner in GPO sushi on (martin place?)

Meanwhile everything is happening and not happening, leaving me feeling swept away.

obey dying wishes,
hush.
i made an angel of my ignorance
an original approach to sin
god comes freely, feelingly
and some shakespeare player says "thought is free."

for 3 years straight the singers forgot how to sing. they would only scream.

audiences left clubs and theatres and auditoriums with heavy metal headaches. when they went into their ensuites at home and opened their mouths to brush their teeth, screams came out of their mouths.

sticking out of their raw gums they saw alien teeth.

I always thought if I stared at the window long enough, when the moon came
Unaware for that moment of my name, or any one elses, at my back
I’d face tomorrow, replete with happenings and sparrows of light and gazing
Days to come, like eyes, to meet my
Terror-speckled head, still unrequited. My whole heart

Would heave with light, receptive
Open, like an iris, full-dilated, full
Of him or of whoever was to come, with teenaged graceless
Hope, I’d face the window, like the sun, to squint
Into the darkness of unpromised black, divining
Moonlight from the half-caste mix of streetlamps, moon
And black, over the streets that—wrung with rooves in rungs
By day so red, by night so grey
Would speak to me of lifeless love, to live
In me at a coming future day

But always future. Always yet to come
My readiness was all of me, I had become
The drum of my own beating heart and head and want
With virgin simmering waiting on my heavy knees to see
A face cut out in stars or sketched like a figure-skating god
Between the dots that join the night to galaxies
Beyond galaxies, beyond systems of love and hate. I would skate
Out on the thin limb of my wondering ache, the thin-ice dream
Of expectation, sleepy-headed wonderings and roamings
In the shadows of a bedroom, no better really
Than any dreary midgets in the suburbs.

Those four panes, about which
I meant all these words to be spoken, I would gaze
And gaze into life as if my electric greasy gaze
Had worked primeval muck into those plates of glass
Enlivened them with eyes and tongues of clear, cold life
To take the image of my prayer and cast it back, in black and white-of-moon
For me to catch, a dimming boomerang of shadow-stacks
Into the room, so carpet-dense and solid, whole
Where I would beg
Those window panes, hung vertical, framed as a goddess
By my teenaged eyes, to answer me,
And hope that when I next checked (the moment pending)
His email would have arrived. And so reply.

come here girls and boys
come here girls and boys
you know all the right lyrics and you're making the right noise
come here girls and boys

it's a broken music, sliding
in the box - a shattered plate
it's a tesselated victim
it's a deluxe form of hate

slake my thirst to go to sleep
put an end to all this noise
you know the chords and rhythm
so come here girls and boys

had a good talk with merle. books and tomatoes.

you said, "clearly we should take a giant crowbar and fuck the world, when we are god. clearly, god beat us to it"

i said "this, that you wrote, is exactly how i feel, NOW, NOW, NOW. indeed just moments ago i wrote a poem on dolly to similar effect, except not about the world but about myslef. i call it "submit."

i said "fuck im angry. im just so fucking angry and low. i look outside and it's anger. i look inside and it's anger. i hate what i am doing, i hate what i am being, i hate what else is, and anything i dont hate seems to mock me, or reduces me to tears. i'm in the country of last things, to quote a paul auster title."

yeah. last night i cried because i was holding a little seamonster toy and i had that thing like memory, fragile sunlight, and i cried because there aren't any seamonsters.

there are what- landmines full of bank notes?

and giant squid. my sister pointed this out to me, but i'd already thought of it myself: i comforted myself with giant squid. we'll have to settle for squid. leviathan squid.

submit to the sledgehammer
you made from your own clay
why not admit, it's familiar
you always do things this way.
submit submit to the pummelling heart
that punches its way through your chest
all the downbeat concrete rerun repeating
foolish post-teenaged mess.
submit, you git, to the usual bullshit
submit, if you won't act your age
you're drunk and you're low and you're full of it, hypocrite
free as a bird in a cage.

The Thylacines

Our skins were marbled by the sun.
We wore our own hides
Proudly – like the trophy skins of prey
Or Prada fur

I had nothing else on, and you
You also wore your beard, I think, but then
It might have been no more than a half day’s growth.

It’s hard to remember. Smells
Bring memories up better and
Sometimes when I’m plunging out the drain I think
“I wish that we could do this with the past.”

The day’s going to stop, right now
The sun is about to vanish and the lights
That line the streets are soon to glow.

Our skins were smooth and young and
Underneath them we had hearts
With tusks as hard as moonrock or
The lopped horns of a lost rhinoceros.

this afternoon walking home through the warm yellow air i saw a welfare couple arguing. screaming hoarse throats. she kept asking "what's the time." he'd answer, "i'm not in a hurry. are you?" and she'd ask, "what's the time. i just want to know what's the time." he'd growl and bark and not answer. and then say, "are you in a hurry?" and she'd scream, "what's the time. i just want to know what time it is?" and he'd growl and bark. i went into the corner shop on parramatta road, the corner before palace, and they came in too. she asked the serving girl for the time. twentyfive to five. no reaction from the woman. i turned off down the lane to palace street and behind me i could hear them yelling, hating still. i couldn't hear the words anymore, except that she kept yelling, "don't, don't, dont. please, don't."

esoterre.
the place where the esoterics live.

esoterror.
fear or the esoterics.
or fear of being esoteric.

in the yard the torches burn and burn
torches from mitre ten. the cheap beige tubes were turned
out of bamboo. rare tortures hide
behind the eyes of meeting friends
chatting with urgent smiles that cry:
let's never do this again.

you opened your arms like a wide net for a wild bird
and boldly i got lost in the maze of wiring.
i want to forget all i've seen and heard
i don't want to remember anything I've learned.

the same dark scaffold. i was shocked to find it there: my restless limbs and, deep inside, the same dark scaffold.
this week, this week. so low.

the jasmine's out.

last night: york street bar. men on the street: a wanker, a brawl. came and found me in the 7 eleven and I shoulder-sobbed. talked about family. the cold street, noticing cold. handhold taking me back inside.

i say it's not the same but i have to confess there's the same rush in my skin and i almost stop breathing. but it's not the same. is it the same? and will it ever be the same?
it's better to leave you without a name.

the only doubt remaining
is to doubt our own earthly remains
the breathing broken lips open
and the bodies in the rain
there are draining faces racing
to the open gulphing gash
that is the burden of decision
when there's water on the brain
and you laugh at laughter, leaving
all the shit you knew behind
and your canarybird says "fuck the future"
and you say, "no thanks, i'll be fine."

we were strangely immature
it was the only way to be free
immaturely, we were immured
in the things we used to be.

immaturity, immaturity
is the only way to breathe
it's the only way to keep breathing
when your body has ceased to believe.

so shut your mouth and SCREAM
scream THIS IS YOU AND THIS IS ME
shut your mouth and be demure
it's the only way to be free.

tongues from the morgue
mortuary tongues

i came forward, claiming
"it was i, i do confess
who made this mess,
and i who cleaned the wound we made
in reason, with our bodies.
fucking, fucking lifeless
"cunts" and other stupid words we learn to swallow
like a seance for a scream we uttered once
and had forgotten.

we are women, women, yes
and men too, men
who were not afraid to sever - without flummox or distress
that little thing that made them man and, yes,
i have pulled with oxen, heaved
with queens in labour, birthed the beasts
that one day will undo the doings
of my tongue. our destiny
is banished from this land and we
are trapped here. separate
in our barren lands, we famish
and disguise ourselves
with lies about our living
and our dead celebrities.

touch me. i love being touched.

they say try it, try it. it's nothing less than a revolution of the senses.

back from far north qld.
back at law school for second semester. parties. old friends. timetable trouble.

these, i meant to post long ago:

19.5.05
went today to DJs toys. Sylvanian families, my little pony, mr men, smurfs
I was a child a child

Also, last day after exams, talking to odette about dark castle, old computer. Strange technology mythologies childhood.


Borges:

I am he who knows himself no less vain
than the vain looker-on who in the mirror
of glass and silence follows the reflection
or body (it’s the same thing) of his brother.
I am, my silent friends, the one who knows
there is no other pardon or revenge
than sheer oblivion. A god has granted
this odd solution to all human hates.
Despite my many wondrous wanderings,
I am the one who never has unraveled
the labyrinth of time, singular, plural,
grueling, strange, one’s own and everyone’s.
I am no one. I did not wield a sword
in battle. I am echo, emptiness, nothing.


Me:

i don’t know why i hold this shred of anonymity
like a scrap of fabric across my naked breasts

The text says what it does not say, yes
But the text also says what it says

IM GOING TO BE BRILLIANT AT EVERYTHING BRILLIANT AT EVERYTHING BRILLIANT AT EVERYTHING

IM GOING TO WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN

and then i saw the imaginary man and the imaginary man said "keep it real."

my father said to our older dog while wrestling her ears, playfully whacking her snout, etc:


"Dabdil understands what Muffin wants. Dabdil understands the dark psychology. Yes he does."

ive had this little piece of paper floating around in pockets and beside my bed, as i always have pieces of paper floating around, with a note scrawled on it to the effect that i was supposed to mention Siobhan and her little sister being here showing off their skills on the piano, and I can't really think what I wanted to say. Did they belittle/get belittled by each other?

xxx

at the dreadful cabaret of this heart
i'm not on drugs and i'm only sitting in

the bad songs keep on choking on the smoke
the singers are all flat and the dancers have bad skin

and someone elses heart is on the table
someone elses heart is on the floor
some cruel cool chick is pointing and she's laughing
and she's smiling at the bouncer at the door

different effects:

she put on the music and began to dance

she put on the record and began to dance

he put on the music and began to dance

he put on the music and she began to dance

he put on the music; they began to dance

he put on the music and they began to dance

he put on the record and they began to quickly dance

he put on the record and they began to slowly dance

slowly, they began to dance

written during real property, 19/5/05
the sunrays slant
across your land
onto my panels
the sunrays slant
onto my panels
across your land

written (typed) while studying real property, 16/6/05
-must benefit land in some way so a mere right to recreation is insufficient (*Ellenborough) [but right to use adjacent park held to benefit land itself]

the artificial evening
your halo of halogen light
we down our artificial ecstasy
we are righteous, we are right

25 verses go here
25 verses to come
25 versus follow
Making 27 in sum

For every up, every up, every up
Has it's down it's down it's down
Every up and every up,
Has a down-a, down-a, down
[And you... call him... a down-a-down-a-down...]

[I watched you repeat and fade. I found the action unconvincing]