Oh yes, it's mother's day. I spent forever drawing things for the purpose yesterday. It went well. I felt wonderful yesterday, in some tired displaced way. Felt like I'd swum a long way. Anyway mother's day went well, given it's usually tears and misery. We gave her a quality+++ wool shawl and you couldn't complain, it was grey, and could double as rug. And 'Diary of a Wombat'. It's like talking to my dog, that book.

Is there a reasopn my sister is so good at craft stuff (from origami to making complicated giftwraps to making pop ups and stuff) and I am an appalling ... well, everything that involves handiwork?

And finally, here's one I posted on marc's and my 'dialect' blog (sorry to plagiarise us), that i actually like:
I ordered the code red
The gushing night
The gushing black light
o swoon you muted stars
Go wink and dim, this din din din
Put out the fucking light
feel it swollen caving in
the woolthick swarm, the cosmos
Moss of mozzies rising, from your feet
and CRACK I fall, the ground beneath you
Ground beneath you rising, din din din
The dell death knell, I search for you
I search for you on infra red
Put out the rapid blacknight light
I search for you on INFRA RED
All history swims, where are you now
Where are you CRACK where are you
(muzzled)

**
I actually went mad at some point and stopped writing "poems". Or dense base rhythms of shit, as they are alternately known. Because who gives a shit if they're shit. It's just a way. It's just a WAY.

I guess I mean, it helps.

This is what we're all getting at, with these... writing it down. Because then it becomes. It isn't just the racked naked swarm. Because you could end up thinking you were lost in the womb of the corpse ringing the bell tread-kicking the nothing air. But then it comes out. And then it's normalised. Or at least, it's funny.

Compression Brakes
I feel the compression brakes expand
Contract
Compress, compress the modish mood of hate that treads
Like a drunk farmhand into a slough ditch.
Rain’s falling, gilt rain
I watch it down the pane, sliding drops that meet
Blur into a wobbly clear sheet.
Guilt’s like a sheet, like plastic
Wound around the head.

(and once I saw a waterbird
her neck in a ringpull
thick-furred, with the black blunt wavewind
making her dead wings kick).
Compression Brakes
I feel the compression brakes expand
Contract
Compress, compress the modish mood of hate that treads
Like a drunk farmhand into a slough ditch.
Rain’s falling, gilt rain
I watch it down the pane, sliding drops that meet
Blur into a wobbly clear sheet.
Guilt’s like a sheet, like plastic
Wound around the head.

(and once I saw a waterbird
her neck in a ringpull
thick-furred, with the black blunt wavewind
making her dead wings kick).

Gretel
The delicate husk of a bird
Its leaf-light
Fragile flight
oh, my bird
I follow your // trail of crumbs
Droppings and crumbs
See? The world is made of leavings.

Frag. 1
and during the reign of
… but what were her reign dates?
/a song that broke…
…he turned…
[the rest is lost].

Underlined but Untitled
who named this line of coast?
Avoidance Beach, Denial Bay…
They looked away
Set up camp to face their ghosts again.
oh my ships, my people

*
mudflap madflap.
*

Cross
I will plunge into your centre
My centrifuge
My sanctus, my red refuge
That black colsac—
I will nail like a cunning dart
Through the centre of
Your crucific
Blind, blind like the back of the hand
That meets the cheek.
Because you are so cold
Because you’re so so cold
I will hammer out a life
From my own weak rib.

Anthem
—grabbed her little fatty arm
Slammed on the brakes
And we watched the black cat crossing
Like a spot on the vision.

And I realised, Life’s a tightrope
We tread in stilettos
Gargling boiling water,
While we hum a few bars of the anthem
And fake it.

My cure, My curate
What if I were a saint
By the world’s appointment?
You would come to me for a blessing
Down on your knees.
I would reach out and touch your brow
To cure me.

[[or:
What if I were a saint
By the world’s appointment?
You would come to me for a blessing
Down on your knees.
You would reach out and touch my skin
To cure me.]]

Audition for Attendant Fool (the one who won’t do)
Am I a fool?
Then club me to death.
I’ve been speaking in tongues
(I like the sound of them)
I’ve been ladeedada
I’ve been falalalie
And I covered your lines:
Trees in deathvines.
Oh stay, oh stay
And if I’m a fool?
And if I’m a fool,
Why’s your blood on my wall?
And if I’m a fool?

I was me once
Give it to me
Give it back
I’m so happy, happily. O I’m
So so happy.
Try it again, but slower:
Dolcissimo.
Am I fool?
But I’m in your arms.
Am I fool?
Then why are you running my bath?

It will all work out, somehow
Let’s have SEX
It’ll be FUN
I’ll buy the bullets
You bring the gun.

These poems were also written about a week and a half ago, but I didn't really know if they were of the calibre to be shoved on here, but for want of anything else to say. i just got my law assignment in one fri with one minute to spare, then realsied all the footnotes were roman numerals, and other eorrying proofing (i.e. lack of) problems. Must remember to actually feel alive this week. Otherwise I am booking a holiday to the morgue.

Picked up my trampcoat yesterday. Need to go to a trampfest.

***

This was intended for dollyshot, Sat 19/4/03. I can't remember if I posted or not.

Do you know one of my favourite memories is looking at the plastic toy dinosaurs for sale at the Australian museum when I was a kid. It was so enchanted. We used to play with out plastic dinosaurs like they were… I don’t know. Like they were really something. I’m really happy in that bittersweet way, thinking about that.

K is at M’s wedding today. Boohoohoo. Boohoohoo! Now who is she supposed to marry I’d like to know? And she looked so beautiful today in her dress and all, too.

We’re going to Coffs Harbour tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it, though it’s supposed to be wet and cold. I don’t think that really matters when you’re at the Nautilus, with the pounding sea. Yes I know I called it the pounding sea. How trite. But it is. Its been crushing the beach for years, demolition and construction. Pebbles or sand or crushed shells. It all depends. The rocks higher or lower. More or less buried.

Just what I needed to shock the enamoured out of my system – though he was at the Easter Party on Thursday night: I met someone lovely, and who knows how we might follow it up. He’s from the country. I mean that explains it. I always knew I was right buying that Women’s Weekly country blokes issue. It was a sign right? Oh but he’s blonde. That’s so not me?

Oh another thing. The most massive rainbow today, and you could see the whole arc of it. Huge and so intense, bright. There was a little girl in a pink parker marvelling at it near the bowling club, when I was walking home from Norton St, and her mother showing it to her. It was lovely, seeing the little girl stunned by it. But honestly, I don’t think I felt much different. Any less stunned. I mean I’d already called home to get my dad to look at it. When I got home he was vacuuming. But you could see the rainbow from the back balcony.

God I’m a dag sometimes.

So I had to find someone at the last minute to mind Minka, my rabbit. I dreaded, as she refused on a previous occaision, but rang G. She is an angel and has saved my life. Plus I got to take her out to lunch (order something more expensive next time!) and etc. And the weather’s been washed and clear, or grey, or wet. And my notes for English are going OK.

It didn’t rain last night, so the ringing kept me awake. I wish it would stop. It seemed worse. Then my back all knotted up, probably because I was tense, but it went really stiff. Not really like that before. My mother dealt with it for me, and it was like 3.50. She’s up so late! Saved my life. So puffy-eyed I eventually got to sleep. Over-heated the room.

Agony is,
Waking up from that dream where you have what you want.
And it's just a dream.

And that was just a dream.

I sounded a bit depressed yesterday, but I wasn't anything like as depressed as I sound in that post.

i got up when it was still dark after pressing sleep on my mobile phone clock twice. then i started working. i basically forgot to breath. i didnt eat lunch or anything. you could get sick of breathing, and eating. and then i got my assignment in at 1 minute to four. It was due at four. And I only changed out of my pyjamas at about 20 to four. In a madflap.

My life has vanished in a snow of angst and panic.

I walked the way of all flesh to the chapel of dead lives.

Funny when you see people and they are just empty vessels. I used to feel body and mind were integrated. Now I feel like one is just rolling the other along, shepherding.

The thought of someone you love dying is much worse than the thught of dying yourself. And the latter is pretty bad.

Noone's dying btw, that I know all that well. I just... it was topical.

Incidentally, R. of Omar Khayyam was given to me by my grandmother before/when she died, having belonged to her sister, my great aunt M. I didn't understand it when I was about 8, but within a few years, it became so dear. It's brilliant. I've always sympathised with more Epicurean schools of belief for one thing, in the old sense of the word (as opposed to Epicurean=drinks gourmet wine and "pampers" self). In terms of their epistemological reasoning. And the carpe diem concept comes from that too, I think. I always fail to carpe diem. God, if god was a carp. Actually, by the state of the world, god probably is a carp. But anyway, yeah. Fuck the stoics.

I was reading my english notes for an essay on a DH Lawrence draft, and in it I found that I'd written this marginalia:

"Sleep, sleep, though the world is full of noise".

Interesting footnote to it all - the ringing in my ears. It came to the left ear, but it's dying off, I hope, I swear. It had better be. It sounds a bit like singing wires.

I used to say I hated silence. I thought it was like death. I've never been dead. What was I thinking? Silence is beautiful, smooth as silk.

Here are two quotes, famous ones I guess, well Macbeth is anyway, that when i stumbled across them and had a good read for the first real time, were like looking into an aleph into truth and the dark rump of my own cosmology. Phew. That was melodramatic. This occured in mid highschool (for the R. of Omar Khayyam quote), and either in year 10 or 12 for Macbeth, I forget which. As follows (obvious in their way. obvious and so well expressed. isn't that philosophy? or should that be badly expressed?):

life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

for in and out, around, about, below
tis nothing but a magic shadow show
played in a box whose candle is the sun
round which we phantom puppets come and go.

Have I mentioned this before?