a pedantic haruspex
an admirer of accurate entrails

From Psalm 102:

My bones cleave to my skin.

I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.

The water isn't everywhere but there are drops to drink.

yes there it was, speared on the soul's bright tines


to polish the soul's bright tines

That's the funny thing about the birds and the bees, or the bees anyway. I thought they could only sting once.
Love swung into him as a wrecking ball and knocked him flat, knocked him back in time or knocked time flat so he didnt know what hour it was or what year, and tomorrow's presidents had already been born and gilgamesh still walked and it was as if cicero had never really died, with her there on the floor with a face as real as apples and tears and spilt milk.
And even though he could not speak, he went through life the living prophet of past disaster to come.
And those two children of his, with eyes a colour that no matter where they looked it looked like they were looking at the sea. [or at a cyclone/something]

asking whether the moon were half empty or half full.
and he said that depends if it's waxing or waning.

and he said all smiles are empty.
empty crescents like the dark part of the moon you don't see.
she said that isn't emptiness
it's the full moon.

their breasts were firm like buttocks, their buttocks soft like breasts

With the shock of the cut, he emitted a deep, strained sound that - had it come from a goose might have sounded like joy.

the pearl is my oyster though this day is jason's fleece.

Surely the most consummate form of metempsychosis would be the entity that passes through this and that form of life to reach its final embodiment as a carrion bird, scavenging on the flesh of all the other creatures it has been.

o winter skylight
vivid refrigeration of the lamb

She said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"
And the mirror said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"

the light dappled through leaves... and later, the light mapplethorped through evening palms.

Icarus lives!
Wax floats.

Pas un mot

a brief house

by a fossil-coloured dove



the olive oil bread

The absence of "paltry and base" arts keeps "God's true princes... from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors... to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass."

After the opera they walked home, Hettie humming and singing the main themes in her ordinary little voice, which sounded pretty.

High Estragon levels can lead to a loss of libido.



===



"That girl needs to lighten up. Even on a deckchair in the Bahamas, she'd look like she was waiting for Godot."

we need at once to recognise the inessential, unreal character of
racial categories - and the real, material impact of those categories
on actual human lives.

unbodied

their conjugal decline

Once you have exhausted the improbable, whatever is left, however intolerable, thrusts in as the truth.

“ambiguity, self-doubt, andestrangementasfundamental
psychologicalcircumstancesorabidingsocialorpoliticalvalues”

Nice little line from Gramsci on the need for a self-reflexive criticism, aware of its own contingency: any valid social criticism must have as its "starting point" an attempt at "'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory."

Flawed, but neat.

sap:
Advice from the poets. "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the [PhD student] now." – Samuel Beckett.

kit:
I respond to your 'advice' with this line of Oscar Wilde, which sums something up for me: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." Except that it isn't even proofs but rawest drafts upon which I perform this fruitless surgery!

sap:
Nice riposte! But good sir, follow not his advice. Yeats used to say he'd had a "good day" with his poetry when he managed to eke out one line. One
instead needs to follow the example of the "moving finger" of Time itself as described in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,
"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line..."

More dandelions for bees.



More suns for planets.

By Weeper’s LakeWhere sleepers wakeWeepers slake

Eve doesn’t bite the apple herself she shares it with two creatures - - or “she broke it in pieces and put the pieces out on the log and sat watching for the birds and the little mammals to come”

Starling Larkwhisk Maybe the solution is not so much throwing in the towel as tearing the towel into strips and tying them together to fashion a makeshift rope.
about an hour ago · Like · Comment

Starling Larkwhisk This too shall fail.

productive discomfort with dominantn modes of apprehension
/ways of seeing
modes of historical apprehension
modes of apprehending experience//


including individualism itself (seeking vocabs for expressing cllective being, subjectivity, etc)

[not ALL canonical writers of course - but note even bloom on shakespeare! Spre suggess something of this]]

I'm trying to dream up an article (solely to soothe my own sense of my worthlessness to the world) "Loose Canon" to argue about Faulk and Melv - in a semi-paradox, that these are authors deserve to keep their canonicity today precisely because their texts, methods raise the very questions about cultural centre and margin that literary studies is now asking. And that the "canon" of so-called "classic" writers, for all its faults, has actually tended to include those who
8:15 AM

break down prejudices/settled ways of thinking - create 'constructive discomfort' with
8:15 AM

established discourses [[partly because of their inner dialectical tensions, off-setting of different forms of discourse, etc]]
8:15 AM

and that it is therefore actually conservative to DEFY the canon
8:15 AM

and progressive to embrace it

"Loose Canon"
F and M - in a semi-paradox: these authors deserve to keep their canonicity today precisely because their texts, methods raise the very questions about cultural centre and margin that literary studies is now asking.

Poofreading is very important.

Tristram false dichotomy between two alternative modes of thinking history. Remarkable given Engels focus.

"Knitting with bellybutton fluff." Deremaindered.

She was screaming at the leather paneled walls of grief.

you feel amazing. you feel so amazing. you feel so good. so good. so good.


you could do anything you wanted to do. you could be anything you wanted to be.

Genesister:

Defiant Eve ate snake with apple sauce.




== == ==

We wore our own skins like trophy hides, or Prada fur. We were wild with pride that day.

as the east disgorged its contents, the west gorged on its discontents.

engaged, vacunt.

“what, to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase, each author succeeded in “maing of what he [had] been made.” [JP Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, NY, Vintage, 1968, p.91]

there are little dead men floating in my pen.

Did you know that you can have your wedding cake cremated and turned into a synthetic diamond? That's before you have your first-born infant and have the placenta turned into a teddybear for him/her... And yet, ironically, these fossilisations and embalmings only go to prove that "All that is solid melts into air."

she's
galatea, the stalagmite formed at the mouth of a drainpipe

she's

galatea, forming like a stalagmite at the mouth of nightmare.


nightmare lime,
the mouth of a dripping nightmare.

all night with the gothic tappings of a moth in a bucket.
damn spirit rappings.

weeding the widow of her wounds

wet-spots of time.

sick of sleeping on

asleep on the

asleep between

time's wet spot.

I was catching my plane - there was not long now, and for whatever reason I was leaving though she would be dying.
I had been off almost buying a postcard amongst the fast food stores.
It was all so public.
I wanted to hold her, now that she was going, but the wheelchair was empty now, and peripheral, and just a bundle of clothes, and all there was to hold was the bottle of bleach.
It was a big bottle, the size of a small child in my arms and it was semi-opaque, semi-clear, and inside the bleach was green and I held it and it did not feel so terrible, and it even grew a little warm from my warmth, and loss was something I felt around me, and my sister standing by - and she'd had her own rapprochment.
I was holding the bottle crying thinking I didn't want it to be like this, my cheek pressing on the big lid, when
And the nearby horse paddock, the polo players and the runaway rabbit and the hatchling chick and the airflight check-in.
I had to hold the bottle because somehow she was no longer there in person, or if she was there she was very small.
And then she was there again suddenly - like springing me there with the bottle- but she was very small, or not present in her presence, or perhaps just a quarter size, or she was mostly just a voice.
And she said in that cruel hurt hurting tone, "when you've finished doing whatever important thing you're doing you might want to say good bye or something because I'm going to be dead soon and you'll have plenty of time to do whatever it is then. Be the happiest day of your life." So so sarcastic.
And I wanted to scream, I was crying out "It won't be the happiest day of my life, it won't--!" and I heard my voice all stupid whining choked and ineffectual in rebuttal, and she just said something else, something so hard sarcastic hiding hurt and grim conviction. Something about having a big smile on my face then?
Maybe she was dead after that.
But why the riding school in the fountain dale in the airport? All those kids from Yale university, on their Druid quest.
And I think also she missed her own plane that she would have boarded as a corpse, and that was what it looked like seeing someone die: standing with my aunt and family, and to see someone die they were already gone, you were just standing on the tarmac watching between the faraway pylons the wheeling away by the doctor and nurse or the air hostess of that empty wheelchair.

you cannot ask the desert
why it keeps existing

overheard - some cliched histrionics?

"this is what i wanted from the moment i first met you."
"i should have given you that wake up call."
"you are so sexy. it's incredible. you are so sexy. so good. so good."

"i thought i had lost my chance. i kept wanting to talk to you. i kept thinking, i've lost my chance to some old bald man..."
"thank god i gave you that lift."

sticks of light

kiss me, tenderize the night.

zelda fitzgerald:


Awriterwasallheeverwantedtobe...Butshedrifted
inandoutofthearts.Herpaintingreflectedherexaggeratederraticpersonality,
decorativethoughitwas.Andherobsessionwiththeballetultimatelydefeated
her. Yes, shewassearchingdesperatelyforsomegratificationofherveryown
anditwasavalidsearch,butitwasherillness,notScott,thatinterferedwith
achievement.8

E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

she was orphaned, omphalost.

His penis flaccid, a froglet's vestigial limb.

pretty helix, pretty helix

"[mutual] disillusionment with the world is... the only real basis for love between man and woman"...

adapted
from an essay on melville and arnold.

Extra-celestial.

Melville in Clarel: "the negatives of flesh" ... "the penetralia of retreat"...

"It is not so much paucity as superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern authors".

Tyrone Longchamps - plain vanilla criminal.

"so inconsistent is human nature... that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short" - Stowe of all people!

the little henchwoman. she was at the top of the stairs, where she was not supposed to be.

Eve ringbarked the tree
Even stripped off and boiled the bark!

'throwing his life ironically away'

that is me

throwing my life ironically away.

"Let life come asunder, they say. Let water conceive no more with fire. Let mating finish. Let the elements leave off kissing, and turn their backs on one another. Let the merman turn away from his human wife and children, let the seal-woman forget the world of men, remembering only the waters."

"They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains/ the hottest blood of all..." Whales Weep Not.

From time to time, then, Lawrence could write.

They say the sea the sea they say they say they say the sea is the sea they say

her warm sob
that slow plume of sound slow upblooming
like blood blushed in water.

leaves have eaten from my hand
stones gleam in the snowdrink.

he sat in the indefinite interim
with that stuck sand that did not dislodge.

She was an hourglass full of wet sand. Clumped wet sand, too impacted to fall.
She was an hourglass overfilled with sand, grains packed in close with no room to move.

in the reeking light


on the white breeze, blood. debris, dropped bark on the hot grass, the shed scabs of trees.

She didn't seem designed to sit in chairs. She kept getting up, leaning thinly about the room, tossing off remarks.

she had a fridge full of half-eaten things, things that looked to have been bitten and discarded.

these hard hearts /

a world too wide and violent

When they weren't racing, she would switch to breaststroke sometimes, and he would fall back to watch her slow frog-legging in front of him, and it was as if in that wide, wide dance was the birth of the world.

Sebastian stood: an unembarassed target, and no saint.

I like Deleuze’s remark on novelists who: “characterise the individual as a flow of events and not as a person: ‘…the unique chance that this or that combination has been drawn. Individuation without subject.’”

solar plexus supernova

the broth of God
the spice triad

the broth of God
the spice triad

The day outside the bedclothes only seemed to get colder as the light grew. She sensed it colder. She lay in the stagnance her had made under the covers, curled tight, so the cold was only on her face and her hair as they lay exposed on the pillow. By cold beheaded.

She dewed into a thaw.

she spoke the density of sadness
in a voice fleet as stone
there was a trill in her throat - like
a mechanical nightingale
and her words came like the words of cut-up prose poetry
drawn from a hat.

she repeats unrepeatably.

i am the angel whose mouth is deep

the angel whose rubber mouth
is winged

i was the valve inflatable of the that hell
of novelty toys, and butchers taut and trim.

All that was left of her was agony.

She was like the snow before it melts.

the blood is too much like dense air - or is the air dense with blood?
i could ask the flies, and they'd say,
"it's blood and shit." they know it.

dozens come to feed on it
the bellied legs,
the flat air conched with death.

in the airlock of regret
the airlock of sadness
the trapped breathing
the airlock of yes

how will i ever cope with what has happened?
how will i ever cope with the way things went?

there is this hole called Why
that is no grave.

He was a well-paid thirty-four year old managaement consultant, but he still lived with his parents, and tacitly acquiesced in letting them buy the household groceries, and do the domestic chores. But he donated a hefty wedge of his earnings to charities, and he did not trouble to tax deduct these donations.

In the garden he found her dentures, clamped onto the tree, on a low branch, where she had seemingly bitten into it and lodged them. It was like eve had not been satisfied with the apple but had wanted more, more, and had been punished with this extraction, as the hand is cut off a thief.

he felt his mother watching him with that expression morbid and intent.
he turned and she was there looking out of him, her stained mouth eager, pouched tight. she had finished her mulberries and soon she would be trying to get out at the back door to get at the tree again.
she had removed her dentures.

Ten there was the one about the prostitute, which ended with the punchline "and one for luck."

He rested, the first day. Just sitting on the back verandah, surveying the stumps, with the saw across his lap, and his palms resting lightly on the heavy blade. He rested most of the second day as well, inside with old newspapers, and crumbling paperback novels, locking the heat out as best he could, but in the afternoon he descended the three steps from the verandah and wandered around among the stumps where they were strewn, trying to guess which one he would decide on, having no idea, showing no preference yet. He tried to imagine them cast on a flood - the way they would float (if they floated) - the way they would turn on the tides (if they did not sink).
It was so dry. The ghost-gum lay like crazed bone. The gully gum pachydermal, brittly ruched, brickled. The ironbark slumped dark, sullen - blackarmoured.
None looked seaworthy.
He stood, arkless and without ocean, surveying the dry miles unrelieved by rain...

I was fascinated by a poem on the radio where an extended metaphor was unsettled by a simile in which the thing metaphorised was likened to its original self (extended description of horses coming up beach, likened in one line to waves).

... and god just a calm blood-donor.

the dimwitted bark, the childlike fly
he watched
the toothmarks of his shoe
everything summer-loose.

behind her brow, a pearl of pain

when she shut her eyes she saw it, white

as snowwhite swine.

the gun was her blood on her


her gun was the blood on me


the gunned blood



on her chests the drip of little breasts, and mine staring at hers, the gaze of the nipples head on. My breasts are waltzed pears, they have the look of having danced, they are capered nips.

But no they are not looking at each other, these albino eyes, these soft bulbed pink buttoned eyes - no, the pupils are divergent, wall-eyed, exotropic. And more and less than blind. But some flesh has sight they say - Medusa's locks, of course, and even Merlin's tongue, or so I remember dreaming.

I had this waking dream that Salome gifted the head of John the
Baptist to Gunther von Hagens, who plastinated it and sent it off to
Mattell™ as a prototype for their next-generation Little Miss Make-up
Doll.

Since the world was about to end anyway, Donny thought he might as well push that big red button.

i love Germ Greer's old suggestion that all little girls should be given the option to recognise Barbie as disabled and provide her with a wheelchair, but wonders where that leaves the Bratz dolls. In a top secret NASA extra-terrestrial holding pen? A neck-brace seems inadequate.

the sightless sky
the surfless sea

the lurid permafrosting of the grisly ancient cakes in the bridal window.

When Degenerella slashed her wrist, lollies poured out instead of blood. She realised that, like a piñata, she was nothing but a shell full of hard candies. That was when she bashed her head hard into the mirror.

The psychic sat rigid, a cold astrologial dentist, pulling her stars like teeth.

she was sorting the skulls of dolls.

In her bedroom the litigious light accused every object it touched, growing brightest in the mirror where it sued for breach of copyright.

out of dusk i felt our stone lands falling me apart

to a true vegetarian, sardine cans are only coffins made of tin.

sardine sarcophagi.

mummifying brine.

in the mirror she saw her face despairing at its own uneven features

like something cheaply machine-embroidered.

it was only when they were away in the next room when he realised that he had never before noticed the identical twins' identical voices.

arbor me, harbour me/ exempt me from the night
you were my aurora borealis /
come and be my fading neon light

deboned the scaly scythe.

at woman's body's pearly gates
voluptuous electric shock
(loop to end all loops
noose to end lassooing)
luckily deep in love
and deeply luck
in the pearly age, the pearly, pearly evening.

But if grief were rose and turquoise

tranquillity-gas-mask.

he disappeared into complete silence

bourgeois

canned angels.

when opened, the tins smelled of fish.

finding ways to double the shelf life of tinned angels.

I worship the wispy mnemonic triggers that free memory from its material detritus.

shuffling through her memories - a pack of cards entirely full of clubs.

it grew luminously, loomed ominously
the dutiful and the banned
sever nettles
never settled
the pungent spooning of the spoonerist.

reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.

He made himself a straw son. He bundled the stiff, mildew-spotted hay into fat hanks and tied them with string. He sectioned out crude limbs, tightening string bows at the knees, the elbows, of arms and legs that bulged and were haired with split ends. Each hand had two dozen bent straw fingers. He held the little knotted body in his heavy arms and wept.

She found her lips bleached by the kiss of capital
And yet they gleamed redder than ever

The little girl left her night lamp on, little knowing that, like moths, ghosts are attracted to light.

guinea pig - badger tree climb, scurry up telelgraph poles, next suburb then come back.
2 story hutch taken to barbaecue - girl had taken dolls - went check guinea pigs all this cigarette smoke came out - turned out the two dolls had hid in there to have a smoke.
Kokoda cave grandpa simpson drowned drag waterlog wrinklehead.
No engagement party food had to slice v thin single tomato.
kit ballroom dance.

He hadn’t expected that his child would be a fat girl. Perhaps he had unconsciously been assuming that the child would look like the boy on the diaper box at his mother’s house—the one she used to store washcloths.

Nor had he expected that this fat girl would be popular. She made friends easily at school, friends both fat and thin, both boys and girls, fitting in easily as a pliable peg in a flexible hole, happily enmeshed and always full of enthusiastic stories of the schoolday, the week.

He hadn’t expected to have a daughter who was good at squash, and at shot-put. He never expected that he would be at a District Sports Carnival watching his daughter take out the silver medal in shot-put, and taking bronze in discus. He had never expected to see a daughter of his grinning plumply in a photograph, with a ribbon around her neck, entirely unconscious of her fatness.

He did not expect, when she turned sixteen, that his daughter would sit with him at a calm kitchen table, telling him of her plans for university: law or social work or both, and her plans to do whatever good she could do in the world.

He had not expected to have a fairly fat seventeen year old daughter in the top three of her class in every subject, with her charity commitments every fortnight, and with the friendly, slightly overweight boyfriend coming around for dinners on Friday, always cheerful and respectable.

He was never quite sure whether he or his wife could claim any of the credit for how well Lucille had turned out, and how well-adjusted she seemed. He himself had always been a thin man. He didn’t even like cake.

The gargled argh,
The pain antboiling out of her eyes,
Ballistic.

The girl he introduced to her had a hard laugh, liked bricks baked very hard and brittle in a brick oven. But Esther was happy for her father. She imagined how it would feel to be him, to be a man his age and have this pretty young glistening bit of sex attach itself to you so smilingly.

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.