Gag on a pneumatic drill The pavement regurgitates Squares of digested concrete The sound of illness all day Makes me want to puke My string cheese brainstem Unplug the way an elbow Of scaffolding might drop as I look up And kill each migrain As it kills me A sudden windfall gifted From a six storey fruit tree
I Found Myself In The Garden
In the garden I found myself. It’s been above the sink all along as I washed the hundreds of dishes in a year. And this one quiet evening I stopped the taps and felt it the same, passive and cold behind glass. And yet it called for me now, in a voice I’d never heard. This first solitary dusk was a calm breath after drowning. There was no coughing or gasping, just a long slow draw from the new air back to life. And as I broke the surface tension, the water drained from my saturated senses. The liquid blur blinked out and the pressurised muffle poured from my ears, rupturing pulsing occlusion from a skull that had numbed to its squeeze. I heard above the gargling bubbles, the echoes of promises I’d made to myself in different times. The call was my own, distant now, from before. And with nothing hanging in the fresh twilight air, I followed it out into the night.
Drop In From A High Ramp
They always come together, the opposite sides of the same thing. Maybe not in the same week, but soon enough you’ll feel one side and then the other comes later. Drinking coffee for the rush or the lull. I want it no less, but I have become sick of the word FREEDOM. I want what it means, but its shape becomes caught in my mouth and needs a few tries to fully spit up, like toothpaste froth in the morning. The word COMFORT fragments as it spins away from me, no longer cast as a cohesive structure that glows warm, blunt, dull, numb. A ready-made life stretched out across a lounger chair. The shards of shattered comfort suddenly become sharply defined. The harsh edges and gaps and stops shoot me afraid as the particles behind them shiver and swim. The static was not as blank as it seemed from within. The edge shows you that you were somewhere. And you have just embarked on a journey through nowhere. The fear is crucial, but it’s worse than it seemed through the windows. Waking up alone. Waking up panicked by the gamble. But as the sleep falls from your eyes, wide and yet still shut, you see this world and this life for real. There is no balance and there is no tonic. What’s out there is scary, but staying here with no future is chilling too. To face one is to miss the other, and my god is it exhausting to miss everything all at once. You miss the control every road-mapped day of your life, but the highway is underneath your treads and the underlying parts of life are supported, so progression is easy but its direction is rigid. It isn’t your direction, but an approximation you accepted from a distance. And with every mile approaching, the acute angle between its course and yours widens and opens like a jaw off into the unknown. The decision to stray was a hard-won battle, and now as you idle at the mouth of a rough, bumpy lane off into the obscure and unseen, the word CONTROL isn’t in the front seat of your mind anymore. Now instead it’s this word COMFORT again. And you look back over your shoulder towards the highway junction exit and begin to flood the engine with nostalgia for the lanes you could see clear where you were… But not where you were going. And as it becomes too much to bear, breathe, and stare back down the entrance of this new coarse trail, where there’s nothing to help you across the loose surface and no detailed maps to show you the turns or the way. This is your direction, and you’ll feel where you’re going, but you won’t know where you are. And you know it’s right. You know that even as you look back and long for the easy route, the moment you rejoined it you’d be looking straight back off into the wilderness directions. You know it’s right, but your heart will not land, and so you are frozen at the mouth of a new life. The breeze on your face is the only reminder that time has not stopped still as you perch back foot on the lip of a high ramp. It will feel impossible to drop in until you’re already halfway down.
Back Fence Burned Down
Mexel eats a rice cracker. Tony gestures for one with squiggly fingers across the decking. Mexel throws one like a frisbee. It is instantly picked up by the wind and carried over the neighbours fence. Tony doesn’t look up from his four-piece hammer drill set. The garden’s lawn is patching yellow vanilla in the weeks since rain. Mexel has mixed the plain, caramel, and salt ‘n’ vinegar rice crackers in the same tube. Tony stays out of them this way. He doesn’t have the psyche for that kind of Russian roulette. The backyard hangs open at the bottom, spilling out into the local park behind the house. Mexel watches the baby swings alternate like pistons in the distance. Tony basks in the clicky precision as he assembles his drill like a sniper rifle. The back fence had mysteriously burned down in the night. They blame each other. Mexel blames the cheap flammable paint Tony bought at the carboot by the train tracks. Tony blames the swarms of butts Mexel flicks as catherine wheels from his top window past 11. They both know that only one of them cares enough to fix it.
Frozen Ricochet
It’s always felt sad to lose The stuff that touched your life The headlights silent scan your room In the middle of the night Shadows swell and carousel Sweeping the dormant air The stillness bends but doesn’t break The furniture doesn’t care This is every place you’ve ever held Keys to lock up for the night And never once imagined how It rests outside your sight And driven home defeated Followed hands and not your head Making slow turns lost in thought Empty streets pulled past by reflex With a lifetime’s worth of practice You’ve grown too tired to sleep Eyelid scissors have scraped too blunt To cut off from the conscious stream Didn’t even realise they weren’t closed Until the frozen ricochet Of soft lamps passing unaware Showed you your home in a new way And literally lit up your life As laid across this space That you rent and that you cherish And you wake in and you hate As a stranger you will never know For a washing degree Gifts you a feeling rare and precious Warm and sad and temporary
Rattlesnake
The cell phone goes off like a rattlesnake at the foot of my bed. Torn from the supporting machinery of a complicated dream, I am certain that I am about to die. I scramble like pale egg white in a smoking pan. The lingering stench of sleep makes me dizzy. Usually, the diabolical fumes remain unnoticeable as they seep from your reasoning and cling to your clothes, at least until the mid-afternoon when they suddenly mature with a tang of disappointment and they make you feel violently sick. The mean words of a kind idea shimmer in my head. They’re too bright to bear, and they sting my mind’s eye, punching vision holes when I look right at them. But I know what they say. Wash this all away.
Heavy Duvet
How much more talking can we do In the face of disagreement In the face of something new A face so ugly to you The patterns in our curtains hang Strained and pale against the dawn In my chest I feel the bells clang Without a thought my shoes slip on And it’ll force me through the forcefield My brain objects but knows it’s true It’s fed on my magnetic blood That’s polarised to repel you You’re a heavy duvet You’ve always kept me warm Let my muscles atrophy And soft edges sore And I’m so well rested That I sweat and spin Waking up is an ending If you might never sleep again
Listen To Your Legs
Humid like afternoon on a tropical island, toasted and sealed to sweat in the darkness of an exiled sun. The rotten stairs bow like blades of grass under beads of damp, held together by surface tension as we scuttle down into the wrecked obscure. How many bug eyes rest on us from every angle and vertex, every cavity and void of blasted night? It’s better to slightly cross your eyes and blur the horror, the less visually detailed the tight angles we’re forced to brush up against remain, the better for our nerves this whole ugly descent will be. The ceiling squats low enough to caress the tips of my hair. Cream-painted ancient sawdust boards. Gnarled bricks look on with cauliflower faces like former boxing champs. Decades of dry red particle rain spill into sifting puddles of rust flour, kneaded by the thumbs of time into the clammy floor. Showers of brick dust caught suspended like miniature captured galaxies in a universe of spiderwebs. Wet in your lungs, dry in your mouth. Unease in your heart, decay in every direction. Your legs say you should leave. You should always listen to your legs.
They Call It Clarity
They call it clarity. It’s not like a crystal, it’s more like you’ve turned around with your eyes closed. Something was ploughing towards you from behind and you didn’t know. You would have let it impact you, but you turned around and the inside of your eyelids flash-curdled from endless dark to bright light membrane. You felt the headlights shooting at you and your joints bent in reflex and leapt you on their own out of the way. You never saw what it was though, that was coming for you. Just felt an imprint glide raised against your instinctual fabric, and that was enough.
It felt bad in every direction, but one means something and the others do not. I’m truly glad I didn’t go. I was about to, despite the desire leaving me. Despite the vigour and the lust evaporating. Suddenly the ancient parts of me ceased to grind and devour. They let go of their colossal overpowering grip and let slip thousands of years from my modern nerves. I wanted to be, but there was nowhere to be. Practically nothing made sense, and yet I was still full of dread and excitement ready to ride. There was no meaning for me, just opportunity. There was no sense, only a frail spark. I would have frozen, unable to ignite and they would have had nothing. And what about the sheer fear of the unknown and the possibilities that wander into the messy and horrific? In isolation, these are risks I would have taken in exchange for chances, but even when the discomfort was only mild, I had made myself numb to the really heavy reasoning. The parts not out there, but the ones sitting at home. The ones that know where I live and will sit with me long after the recklessness sours. To do it has no meaning, but to have done it? Well, that is vital to how things go forward. What we are facing right now is so hard and so difficult and so full of meaning spanning a decade. Comparatively, what was skipped on today is worth nothing, it’s already cumbersome and the joy would be short-lived and likely unsatisfactory. And yet it would cost so much.
I’m glad I didn’t go today, even if I let someone down. I didn’t feel like it anymore and it was going to be hard, but I was going to push myself. I would have been a fool to myself, but I checked in with real life for a second and it sucked the anaesthetic out of my bones and I felt the incision I was about to rip in myself. I stopped and things will not be easy, but as my life may fall apart, the last thing I need is more wounds. The last thing I need is more guilt to keep me awake. The last thing I need is more shame to keep me distant. I am better for this.
Torn Fantasies
There’s so much to do. And it seems so terrifying. I’m always sweeping Tiny beads off the edge Pottering and waning Avoiding eye contact With the standing stones I live most of my life in the shadow of This isn’t home On a north facing lawn On the cover of a magazine Dancing on the pavement in a storm Spilling torn fantasies
Quit Vision 