little pieces of something

2010-10-19T22:11:00.002+11:00

in the woods i can hear the trickle of your fingers on the guitar string, murmuring little things that you might have never said had it not been for the wind. and it rises but you don't speak any louder and all of the things you might have never said are carried up and outwards, over hills and into the damp spaces under things. the little children see them and give chase, following the upward lift and light of all the things you might have never said. maybe they want to never say them too, or maybe they just want to know, as i do, the things that you might have never said, had it not been for the wind.

2010-06-23T22:26:00.002+10:00

sometimes i forget this thick layer covering me and can't see it for the holes, the pulls and the dropped stitches. sometimes it gives no warmth at all, though it did yesterday and the day before, thought it is heavy and woollen, though it should give warmth. sometimes i can't help but see lack where there is a laden table, heat where there is hearth, smoke where all there is is fire. sometimes i can't remember to hold hands that aren't holding mine, to touch faces that need to be touched. sometimes, i am a vanished shadow, set before the sun even lets the shape of me fade. and then from the thickening cloud of all of this i have made, i remember all i have to do is step outwards and upwards from under it, that you will catch me when it starts to fall. that i will catch myself.

2010-04-20T21:07:00.002+10:00

tonight is thick with heavy drops of rain and the weight of lightning, just above the line of the clouds. i walk out to the porch and say come and watch the lightning and you say coming as you open the window. out there all i am watching is the shape of your face in the shadow of the night, the knoll of your shoulder making way for my arm. this is the place i live, i think, the place where i am wearing your pajamas and it is six pm and we are cooking.

2009-10-26T22:48:00.002+11:00

tonight i am breathing into the shape of the bed around me, into the hollows and crooks of my own skin. tonight i am looking through the frame of the world that i give it, the black lines i have drawn around things. sometimes i think i forget what is important and then wake steadier because i have never known. these are the last few days of this waiting, the last few days of this two monthed, nine weeked space i have made, and i wonder if i am satisifed. i wonder if the wholeness i feel will be found again later, in the nook at the front of the stairs where i found that coin once, where i curled in against the shape of my childhood and slept. i wonder if these are all skins i can shed and sew, i can fashion into the shapes i might want now and later. i wonder what it will feel like when this absence is made real with its ending, in the awkward moments of some final waiting, the rattle of breathing as it fills and leaves my lungs, the shape that eyes make, found on the floor. i wonder if wanting things could ever be wrong. if in wanting, we make absence.

2009-10-14T22:09:00.002+11:00

in the picture of my life i hold in my head, the greying one that is browned at the edges, the one i might hold in papered hands and pass to people younger than me, there, i realise, i am always alone. bent down at an awkward place in my back, a place not meant for bending, with the broadest of chests and the longest of shoulders, i rest my gentle fingertips on the things that i have loved. i wonder if there might ever be a thing to share it with, a shape to sidle up next to in the wee hours of the eighty yeared nights. with feet fitted under blankets into one another, the right on the left, warming in handshake.

2009-10-05T17:40:00.004+11:00

today i tuck you into my hip, the curve of bodies and the way they fit together. today, i hold your back up with the cup of my hand, as if you couldn't on your own and maybe you can't. this is what it might have been like, i think. the rising bubble of your breathing makes a space in the room and i can hear it as i press my face against the door, then slowly back away, creakless, down the stairs. are all lives this precious or just ones smaller than ours? jump up, pull them down! lemons!

2009-10-04T23:20:00.002+11:00

what is in that one note risen straight up from the page, the shape of it wholly filed and gentle to the edges, dancing on the upward curve of your lips. do you know how long it is since i saw your face?

i think of how the hard thing will be to choose, how this is all indescribable. the feeling of this morning, waking to the back of my friend, grey against yellow - what was that to my heart? how the sun every day streaks itself in a ramble on the sky, how it is all colours and no colour, all at once. to breathe in and to breathe out - what is that? how can we begin, and once we have, is there any ending it? is this why we say things like love? because we like to think we are saying something, we like to name it, even if the name is not attached to anything, even if it is floating, up there above the clocks and the church spire, up there on the pitch of the wind.

2009-08-27T23:27:00.003+10:00

outside is that the squawk of the seagull and the sound of the sea? is it the soft descent of night into the longer distance out at the edges, the way that we lean ourselves against things, all the time. the way that there are things there to catch us. against the heavy weight of blankets and the condensing of breath as it breathes across the night, i am filled with things i am forgetting all the time, filled with memories i can't remember until i am here, in this room, my head against your chest and listening to this song. i am learning to fall again, and i fall into everything.

2009-08-24T11:00:00.000+10:00

this blustery city is worming its way into my skin, in through all the nooks and crannies, in through the pores. it is written as a dry narrative, one that floats in the air and is caught by the wind, one that lands on that woman's face as she is running, round the park. one that i can taste in the back of my throat as i wake in the closed off room, free of the emcumbrance of air. it is a homecoming that feels like coming home, that seems to be gentle, that seems filled with adventure. next to that and woven in it is an absence, a mindfulness and a blossoming, and a promise i have made to myself, that i whispered to the rock. maybe you can hear it, over there, in your proximity to the things i've left behind. maybe you already know what i said.

2009-08-19T23:25:00.000+10:00

so in the nine point five minutes that the computer allows and in the time of the tuk tuk and the coffee thereafter, i will try and summarise all of this. i will try to tell you how my eyes are larger than they were, how my heart is bigger, how my spine is stronger and straighter, my mind sharper, i am more marked than is visible. i will try to tell you how i am filled up, i have been filled up, how i have been living, we have, together. i will try and say that i am changed for it, for the creases of eyes, for the stretching of skies, for the length of time and for conversation. i will try and say that i have been split and opened and i will try and tell you what i have seen. i will try and say that my lungs are larger lungs, my kidneys bigger kidneys, my feet broader feet for all the things they have stepped in on the way. i will try and say that i love you. i will turn in an instant, up and into the sky, and i will try not to be made sad by endings, but to revel in beginnings. i will try harder than i ever have before to make all of this possible. because it is, and i know it.

2009-04-26T00:47:00.002+10:00

how is it that we find these people, whose hands fit so neatly into our hands, whose arms reach over our shoulders and pull us into them, whose faces rest flat on our faces? how is it we find them and then let them go, if not for the no longer fit perhaps but the search for newer shapes to hold? i will always stroke your arm, you say, and i hold it for you, balanced on the balastrade, and you do. i knew that you would say that.

2009-03-03T20:13:00.004+11:00

wind! you cry as it comes to you, wraps you up, lifts you off. wind! you cry as the world comes right up close to your face, pokes its tongue out, scampers round the corner. you wonder if it is yours, if any of this is, if it is as permanent or impermanent as it feels. your heart has swelled these last few days, so close to popping that you can feel it at the edge of your chest. so close to popping that when you breath sometimes you can feel the cockles of it catch, stretch, release. did you know your heart could do that? tonight, the car alarms explode, worried by the inclement weather and the threat of tornadoes. vic pol have sent out ten million text messages, telling us to batten down the hatches, telling us to stop, to huddle, to run to the basement. me, i am going out walking, my arms out, the wind all around me, laughing.

2009-01-25T09:30:00.002+11:00

this morning i am woken and you are not and outside, the day is waiting. it is hot and risen but it is patient for us and we are patient to. in the knowledge that this is one of many sundays. you rise and fall again into sleep, into the crevices of it, into the corners. later on i will find you there, hiding under the stairs, peering through the keyhole in the tiny little door, curiousier and curiouser.

2009-01-23T00:08:00.002+11:00

tonight there is the dash dash dash of the empty space in the bed and the upward sound of the end of this day, filled with dreaming and collision. tonight there is the occasion for hope and the occasion for laughing, the part of me that wants to stand still and the part of me that wants to run, wants to fly, wants to eat up all of this, so i am satisfied. tonight arms crash into arms and heads crash into heads and i feel close and so far away, so far far away. tonight i am stuck, here, in the in between loves, in the suspended space between this space meets that space, in the waiting, in the living, in the coming back from. i am not quite here yet, or as here as i could be, and i want so many things. i am not quite me, nor you either, nor the person that i used to be or the one i am learning. i am not quite the space between the space between us, the breath of breath, or the space of breathing. i am not quite the shape that the wind takes as it lifts itself all nightly, as it blows a dust storm, as it subsides. i am not quite ready, but i am wanting. i am here, tonight, in the contemplation of skin, and i wonder if the sum of all parts could ever add up to its whole. i wonder if i could ever make the right choices for my heart, if this is one, if the next one will be. i wonder if it is here, or over there, that i will end up. i wonder if it is with you.

2009-01-17T22:43:00.003+11:00

tonight i am tired and blurrier than the reflection in the window would have you believe. softer, too, than she thought that i was, or parts of me at least, the gentle parts. harder at the neckline, rougher at the edges, smoothed out and silking in a tendency towards distance. heavier and lighter, darker and steeped in pink, smoothing myself into simple lines that extend across the page, that float downwards, that draw to the end. i am not forgotten nor resting either. i am just about ready to jump up. i am just about ready. i am jumping.

2009-01-15T23:11:00.003+11:00

it is later now and it is silent. silent but for the roar of the train as it carols through the night time and for the rumble of the washing machine as it spins lauren's clothes. silent but for the lift and drop of fingers on keys, the creak of the chair under me and the way i thumb the floor with my toes. for the humming of the woman who is walking down the street, for the rush of the car too fast to the intersection, to the breath in and the breath out sound of ignition. for the little rattle of leaves against branches, the scratching sound of fingers on elbows, on ears and on scalps and the far away distant whining of sirens, barking of dogs, talking. if i listen hard enough, maybe, i can hear the sound of sleeping and the descent into it, the click click click of jawbones popping, the lifting of a knee and another knee just after it, to follow the shape of the pillow. i can hear the sound of heart pumping blood and minds just thinking, of them dreaming too, though that is softer. i can hear the way the eyelids close, then open almost, to close again, untightened, against the colour of the day.

2009-01-15T18:06:00.002+11:00

today i remember that i am whole and filled with buttons, filled with the sounds of passage and transition. i am a spy at my window, resting my eyes there to take in their movements, resting my thoughts a little further away, so as not to get corrupted. it is a moment of purity, as the car pulls up, as the woman steps out, as she turns, as she walks away. it is a moment i am watching from just over here, from in my window. she sees me. we see each other.

today on the floating floor above my bed, the window dangerously open, i wait. you had better not try climbing in, i say, and i repeat it to myself. you had better not try climbing in. gritted teeth and three months later i wonder if i would be that angry, if i would snap limb from limb with a shotgun in my hand, if that is something we could turn to. and as dinner time discussion turns to us, us three women, we ponder what we would do to protect one another. it is love and it is anger together. it is the both of those things.

today, in a tiny moment the opposite of everything i had seen and known before, the sun broke inverted against the sea. spreading itself backwards and behind us, a tapestry of detail and smudgings, dots and smears. and there, atop the water tank, just next to the place filled with storms and with lightning, i breathed in, shallow and deep, and i waited.

2009-01-06T18:52:00.002+11:00

today is the bounce from the speakers and the coming home to a full full letterbox and a messy room, the acceleration of my voice after three gin and tonics and the way almost every single thing in the world at the moment is filled with potential, is filled with silence and joy, is filled with discussion. here i am momentarily waiting, momentarily lost in sound, momentarily full. here, i am on the edge of something, dreaming in unison, and waking the same. here, i understand the upward drift of the air that lifts you standing from the mountain, and moments later drops you back there, almost as you had been, almost as you were, but changed. it is the suspended moments that we wait for, the ones that last for longer than we thought, or not as long. it is the way that i am waiting for you to walk in the door, for the moment, right now, when i see you.

2008-12-30T01:09:00.002+11:00

tonight i am back in this room in this house, in the familiar smells and winds of north melbourne. i am back in the transcient skies and the carrying of umbrellas, in the arms of my friends and the sun in the garden. i am back in the wide wide median and the way it is occupied, the hair across faces and the reflection of mine in the window. most of all i am back in the upward lift of my heart as i ride so so fast down the hill to my house, back down, head against the earth. i am there and someplace else as well, someplace next to me, someplace flying.

2008-12-28T01:50:00.000+11:00

tonight there are stars and i am under them, by the ocean. out the front of the house of my friend i look up, we both do, and there they are. earlier, in the ocean, anna and i spoke under waves of the simultaneity of joy and sorrow, the way endings and beginnings carry both, the way that neither overrides the other. the way that is what makes them so beautiful.

2008-12-25T03:30:00.002+11:00

and then later, tonight, i am returned and wanting, waiting in the middle of the night for the drip drip drip of the drops from the airconditioner. i think of you, in the morning, rising with the sun like children do and searching them out, and i think of me, running to the beach. i am returned from singing, from filling up rooms with the sound of the joy that is lacking from them, with laughter as eli puts money in the collection. we are the three outsiders, that much is clear. but, against that, i shake the hand of the man behind me, touch his missing finger with my finger, and say 'peace be with you'. anna and i carol in chorus, higher and louder than we have sung for a long time and i think of new york and years ago, and the different things my voice carries now. i think of the way that we are all making noise and silence, that we are all leaning into walls and floors, that we are all trying our best to stand straight. i think of how we break and mend ourselves all the time, how we find all these little things to hold our hands, to make them wholer, to make them clap. but in the curl at the edge of anna's eyelid and the reflection of not even half of stan in the piano, in the sound of lidia's voice in the kitchen and my father, hunched over, drinking whiskey, in all of these things there is an understanding. it is a conclusion i have come to over the last few days. let me tell you about it.

2008-12-25T00:21:00.002+11:00

tonight i am in a room by myself, listening to music and the sound of the silence made by the sleeping of my family. it is almost the very end of all of this, all of these things that i have made and am proud of, of the process of the passage of these last six weeks. it is almost the beginning too, of this beginning we have made, of this beginning we are walking in to. tonight i wonder if i am so very different, if i am cast from this cloth, if you and i and all of us are, underneath, all the same. are we? is that what you think? is that what you have always been thinking? i am not so sure against the raising of lips and tongues, against the shape that words take, in the awkwardness of feet and the size of them. in the way that i run from the house at 8.13 and don't stop running until my feet are drowned by the sand as i jump from the wall, landing, gentle, at the edge of the world. things are so big from here, bigger than i remembered.

2008-12-24T20:16:00.002+11:00

tonight the world spirals upwards to a shadow of itself. here there is the drawl of the crows and the herald of the magpies; together they mould the space of the night between clouds. it takes the shape that they allow it, the shape that their fingertips and the gaps between them give it, so that now, at the end of this process, it is lumps and fragments, it is ephemeral. floating all the way up there we wonder how it got to be this way, how we forgot the meaning of form, how all we remembered was the light. we forgot all of it, i think, except for this tiny moment, as the sound of your piano rose up against the waves and you carried it forward, a wardrobe, at your back.

2008-12-21T09:27:00.003+11:00

we fell asleep once, holding hands, and in the time that we slept almost all the world changed. waking, softly, there were footprints on the beach and we wondered whose they were, who had come here before us. a storm came in from the horizon. most of the time, we were up and dancing. most of the time in flight. most of the time we spent in silence, dwelling on the immediacy of limbs and their distance. most of the time, most of the time, we were just sitting, with a telescope, recording the craters on the moon.

2008-11-30T18:22:00.002+11:00

these are days of joy and mourning, mixing in the beginning and the end of life. today i have my arm on the backs of men i have loved, fitting the shape of shoulders into the shape of hands. we are walking the streets of moments we have lived ten million times over, breathing air we have breathed before, laughing as we did last summer, the summer before it. we have been living this whole time.

2008-11-26T20:41:00.003+11:00

this morning eli makes a swing, strung from the rooftop of the gallery, and we run, and we hold it, and we are suspended in space. this morning i am flying through the vaulted hollow of the echoing gallery, which is filled with the rising sounds of us, yelping with excitement. eli climbs to the mezzanine, and stands there a minute, before letting go and drifting, silent, a pendulum hung off time and off centre. we fill twenty minutes with this flight, until it is time to pack the thing away, pull it back into the ceiling space and leave it there. have the last go he says to me, and i do.

i am going to have the image of you on the swing in my mind for a long time, because it was a beautiful thing.

2008-11-24T09:49:00.003+11:00

the grey spreads itself out on the day, relaxing into the pose and breathing. he is comfortable there, blanketing us, standing between us and the sun. someone is chainsawing in the distance and it winds up and climbing, through all of the doors and all of the windows from there to here. this morning i am part joy and part sorrow, the fine line between the two. i am heavy chest and stretched out arms, i am bike riding and just laying down, monday and sunday. i am the prospect of passing time, i am the way that it passes. i am so close and so far away. and, like everything else, this is finite. soon, this time will be over too. soon, i will be living that other life, the one over there that i am away from. soon, i will be back there and none of this will mean any more that the meaning i choose to give it. before the soonness, i am concentrating on the way the smell of the sea is everywhere here, especially in the rain.

2008-11-23T10:31:00.004+11:00

this morning i wake to the sound of my father turning the pages of the paper in the other room. the lift of his coffee cup, its rattle on the way down. these are the things that shake me from sleep. not the blended cry of all the birds in the trees outside this window, nor the drip drip drip of the leaking pipe on the far wall. it is the familiar sounds, the ones that i am hearing now and will likely not hear again, the ones that fill this house in this last time, probably, i will live here. i wonder if i might wish to preserve them, somehow, before they are lost to me? if i would know them, when i heard them? i wonder which ones might be precious and which ones better left, to vanish, in the hallways of this house.

2008-11-21T11:25:00.002+11:00

this morning there is the beach, there is salt mixed with salt as it swirls in my mouth. i am knee deep in the churn of the water and the long stretched out sky, and it is almost flying as i top the crest of the hill, pass over the high point, to all of the world that is before me. the sand is cold from the night and the water is too and my toes find a home there, nestled, deep and comfortable. the man waves to me, running, as he passes and then i have the whole of the shore, from city beach to scarborough, to myself. all of it is mine, and i remember why i love this place, and how i love it. in the moment when the water fills your ears and the cliff of fear as the wave crashes over you. in the upward pull of the surf, how it catches in the small of your back. in the tiny moment of light as you open your eyes before the water ends, and how you can see it, refracted, in the sunlight. here i was born, and there i died. it was just a moment to you; you took no notice.

on patience

2008-11-20T21:43:00.002+11:00

impatient, i dance across the hard wood floor, wanting the panel to be filled. i am restless, my mind is moving faster than my hands, and there is no keeping up with it. it is up and out the door, skipping down the stairs and up the other ones before my hands have even noticed. i am not good at the sitting still, at the keeping calm at the making do. i am not good at not wanting more, though not all of it would fit in this time and this place if i pushed it. the carriage over crowded, something would give.

2008-11-20T01:21:00.001+11:00

tonight the world is crackling, racked against itself, filled with electric. i stand outside in the thin fabric of this dress and watch it all moving, watch it all coming at me, watch it happening.

2008-11-18T22:59:00.003+11:00

how do these things travel so many miles, to land, unfettered, at your feet? they are blown with the wind maybe, eastwards and up the hill, up high street, up the avenue. have we always taken distance for granted? Has it always been this close between spaces? i wonder how they lived before, when my grandfather tied his horse on the terrace, when my mother drove a car the first time, without the fingertip touches we offer ourselves. how did love find love? were there more empty hearts, mismatched and broken, looking instead for penpals or library books, an outlet for their lonely? maybe, with the internet, they might have been happier, might have not lived for fifty five years in that loveless marriage, found someone to hold hands with, at eighty, down the street.

2008-11-16T14:51:00.002+11:00

i think i remember what it is like to feel like a child, or like gene kelly, and i walk sidestep down the street, strut up on walls, dancing. the italians love it, as i pass them. i greet each line in their worn down faces, smooth out the kinks in their backs, make sure that we are walking straight together. i take their hands over my hands, like my grandmother used to, and lead them where they need to go. or let them lead me. where does all the sound go, when you are older? do you forget about crescendo? but then they spin me out, and i keep spinning, the little mothers tucking their hearts in. we all have our hands in our pockets sometimes.

2008-11-15T21:49:00.002+11:00

i am slow today as i find my old pace in this city. slow up the hills and in the alleyways, slow down the slope to the park and through the fountain. i am slow finding a pace that fits my feet. slow creeping into things, slow leaving. i would have thought i might be faster than this, kept running at the pace i have been, momentum shifting momentum, always forward. i would have thought that i was not weighted from the heels anymore. thought that the sound of breath as it is breathed in was enough, enough to carry me forward. eyes always look so differnt from proximity, and i forgot that, i think, in the passage. i forgot the way things taste and things smell here, the way that things might have been, and i remember you and how we are different. these are the narratives we write in our home town; ones of loss and forgetting, ones of memory. these are the things that we do not want to shape us, but do. these are the things that we are made of. and it is the way that we interact with the past that makes us new again, not the way we remember it. it is the way that we let it take us, the way that we wear it with daring, the way that it is us and all of us and nothing. it is the way that i feel in this house, against the white walls and the history, the sounds of all the stories we have made here. stories of silence and fried bread thick with salt, of roast beef and crispy potatoes, of sewing dresses and tiny shoes, hats, and bags and fighting.

2008-11-15T01:27:00.003+11:00

under the jacaranda there are circles of light, circles of lavender and cupped up hands, circles that drift under the wheels of the cars. this is a familiar city, that i have forgotten or am forgetting. one that i am choosing to forget. like the oldest things i rememeber, they are not so real to me anymore, they are things i have imagined and remembered imagining, things that are not memory but the dream of it. it is all of these things and the shape that they take, the way they are no more or less real now than they have ever been. and it is the same; the eucalyptus at the window, the breath of the wind. the rusty hinge of the back shed door, my fathers' dragging feet. the small little grunting noises my mother makes as she cleans, and the other ones she makes in indecision after drinking.

2008-11-02T19:17:00.002+11:00

you of the lady grey burn a hole in my lip, a mark that is staying there, no matter how much i lick it. it matches with the rest of me, a series of marks that add up to a whole and we can count them, seventeen, seventeen wishes. the smell of the bitumen rises up with the rain and through this window, rises up with the carolling birds as they augment the end of day. it is dark already and looks no different, darker than it might have been, had we forgiven it. tomorrow all of this begins again and i wonder how it might be to forgive oneself, how that might feel and taste against the skin.

2008-10-27T23:39:00.002+11:00

we are incorrigible, you and i. lacking restraint or patience, wisdom or fortitude, morality or strength. lacking all of these things but loving the hillside, the open mouth of the ocean, the escalating shriek of birds. understanding little but the sheer of the cliff, the rise of the wind and the way that leaning out, we can see the silhouette our feet make, down against the blue.

2008-09-30T06:19:00.002+10:00

how old would you be if you lived to one hundred and four? inside, did it feel like you had grown larger than everything, filled all of your organs with all of the things you had born witness to? childless, we have nothing to carry on from you and the rest of us are looser than we were before, a swallow at the top of a barn, not attached to anything. you have been alive for all of my life, and longer, you have parted your hair to the side and tied a bow in it. we have marked the passage of time, played out the visual games of aging, watched the process as it wormed itself across your skin. and it is many things, this passing. it is a release, i am sure, from the crevice of your bed. it is an isolation from the past and the understanding that you were the last of my mothers family, and you are gone now. and so we begin again.

2008-09-11T21:55:00.006+10:00

your letters are always on weighted paper, thick with the things you have paddled into. your s's, like your r's, are turned in on themselves and reflective, shoulders down and grieving. i see you're on the water again, that you are claiming it. all of the space between rustled waves as they shape themselves in the wind. it is not like the peaches or the squares of yellow light, not like the cobblestones of krakow and the small cracks between them. how much has changed between then and now, how many times have we been broken? how many times will we be fetching ourselves from the mountains, climbing up then down again, a bag filled to the brim with our hearts?

2008-09-08T23:22:00.002+10:00

tonight i remember to wait. to let phrases stew in my mouth before i say them, to plan, to be slow. to breathe between words, as if that might calm the clamour of my mind, the exhultant tumble of noise that runs out of me, as it always does. i wonder if i would lose dimension lacking volume and pace. i wonder if i could find it again, in some different form.

2008-09-03T14:40:00.003+10:00

on the way down the slope the sun is rising, casts light on the red of the belly of the pink and grey galahs. i catch the thought as it enters my head, as it enters my mouth, i catch it in my lips. i hold it here, in the little mossy hollow of my mouth, between its roof and my tongue and i feel it bounce as i am running. i will hold it with me for the whole of the day, i decide, and only let it out when i feel the heave of the door close behind me, when my foot hits the pavement and when all the rest of the light i can see calls out from in front, running, for me to chase it.

2008-08-23T15:13:00.003+10:00

the silence of this morning carries with me through the day, a hand on the small of my back, coming with me the places i am going. we have done this before, you and i, me and silence. last night, walking home through the distance between the earth and the top of things, between all the space and fracturing sound, i found a tractor, parked on the street. it was more silent than anything else, large in its overloaded way, hollow at the front. sitting there it reminded me of the man on the tram, rounded and heavy on his chair, soft for the hardness of lines on his face. sometimes it feels as if i cannot breathe, that there is too much of the world for me to take in, that it is impossible. i wonder how to carry things three handed, i wonder if this would help, through the volume of experience. sometimes breathing is not enough. sometimes we forget our own deference. but sometimes, other times, we remember that we cannot fly like the birds do, or jump up high, and we remember to be humble.

2008-08-16T21:15:00.002+10:00

the window has frosted over with the shape of my breath and i think of the way we are writing stories all the time, with the way that we have tripped and stumbled, with the lifting of our skin. added up, we are all the tiny little pieces of ourselves that have fallen, that are floating through the room, that are mixing with all the other pieces of living, the layer they leave on surfaces. we can see everything that has come to this, that has led us to this place and the way it piles up on itself. draw in the past with our fingers, make a picture of what we think it might look like. how, then, can we think we are alone in this? how then are we separate? because everything is blended with everything else, in the end.

2008-07-07T19:35:00.002+10:00

i carried a mirror with me all day today, in the palm of my hand, pointed upwards, so i could see the way that i was a part of the sky. it is not hard to imagine you are flying, if you try.

2008-06-23T15:21:00.002+10:00

the smell of grease from the macdonalds at singapore aiport is clammy, a sweat mark on the back of a t-shirt that you may have forgotten to wash. i am here, in the thick of it, my noise climbing the staircase to salvation. there is a child with a balloon and his grandma, grease on her fingers, open-mouthed and ripping up small circles of "beef". this is a drawn out compromise, the sitting down patient clamour of this place, the cresendo of mutterings and bumbags i can see. one year two months later i am still here, sitting and waiting. one year and two months hasn't really changed any of the things that i thought it would, except the hollow sound i hear now in my chest, the rising tempo of my heart. the uniforms are all the same and the glasses. there was a cool drop of water on a flat veined leaf yesterday, and i saw it, and thought of you. that is the thing that hasn't changed. that is where we are.

2008-05-28T21:20:00.003+10:00

tonight is quiet but for the piano, but for the possums as they play with their babies in the ceiling. i am in the domed light of this room, under its auspicious glow, reading of darker places than these. somehow there are only two of these weeks left, somehow all of this days have passed into passage. i have a pattern now, hexagonal shapes that fit together unfaded, the way my days are navigated. the upwards thrust of the morning and the chill in my fingers, the crook of my elbow straight down sydney road and the hill the hill, the bit before the bike path and the trucks. i have my desk, the two of them, and the coffee and its grounds. the date and almond balls and cemetary road as the vital line that links me to places. i have been mapping things out, piecing them together, in an awkward joining of shapes that aren't quite conjoined. here is north, here is west. here is the line that joins them. i know the shape of the sky though, and the tiles on the wall. i know the way i can find things, the way i can remember them. i know that there are things i miss. i think about the red light behind the shape of your door, the sounds that might be filling that space, and i think of all the absence there, that you are building. i think of the bittering of tea at the end of the tall glass and cupcakes and simplicity and i am glad i am home. i am glad i have found it. i am glad it is at the tips of my fingers.

2008-05-25T23:58:00.002+10:00

lately, i have found myself sitting at tables with amazing women. amazing women. i haven't done this before in a conscious way, at least not brought them all together. i have found myself disappointed with the men that i love, but not the women, not all of us, around a table, eating and drinking. there is something about that hearth that we have been made into, about the comfort of these spaces, that is so good. i feel grown and full, decent and living, belonging in my chair.

with you, however, i am eternally dissatisfied.

2008-05-19T12:37:00.002+10:00

what secrets do you have for me today, little building, in the crevices you have made for me between things? this is a daily exercise, this one of self restraint, the way i am held by the chair, the way i cannot let it go. we know what is happening, don't you think? the man with the pregnant belly, the woman in a veil and heels, me, in the corner, looking at the wall. sometimes i think there are too many noises, that they are too bodily. they rise up, from mouths and ears and bottoms, running for my ears, so i can hold them. they are faster than i am. the irrational is visceral, is so akin to pleasure and to pain, is not even bothering to make a passage. and here i am, in the chamber made by sounds, wondering why it is that i am left here.

2008-05-03T07:37:00.003+10:00

heralded by the birds, i am moving up the hill to the broadness of the sky, in the anticipation of the flat. there are six of them today, little orbs, but this time with lights, that blinker on off, on off, as they communicate with me. two ladies wait as i play with their puppy, so many feet, and i wonder if their feeling merges with that of having made something, having given birth. are they proud? two chinese women gamble with language, like it is a game they are playing, and i can't fathom how someone might be able to make sense of all those things they are saying. my ankle hurts and so i slow down to a walk, wonder if i will ever be as small as my mum is. i used to think that when people died, there would be some cry the world made, so that everyone could know. i don't imagine that happened as you sat there, and that is the worst thing, the way it could have been days.

2008-04-27T21:09:00.005+10:00

the drive

2008-04-20T19:17:00.002+10:00

you know you told me that. somewhere between here and the hospital, as we sat, entwined, on the tram. your tall body making a hollow for the back of my head, your long hand a nest for my hand. somewhere between here and the uplift of the guitar, between the music i was humming, using all of my throat. we have never been too good at this have we, too good at taking the shape we want to take, at negotiating pathways in the maps of ourselves. there were three men sitting there, reflected in the reflection of my face, and the three of them blurred together in the furrow of my brow. i have convinced myself of something and it is at the edge of my brow, a line that continues along my face. i have convinced myself of all of this so that now, here, this sunday, i have found my hand at my backbone, my shoulder by my knee. head down on the table, head back on the ledge. we wonder what it means and i think i say nothing. i think that thats what i said.

2008-04-17T14:45:00.002+10:00

i wonder how we can do anything at all, against the black circle of sky that carves out the day, against the weight that is the cold in our fingers. you are autumnal, i say, and you look at me like, what, like, what was that sound? i have carved out the space you recommended in the cavities within me, made them the shape that you said - four by four by four, and they are almost perfect now, almost square. in the morning, i check them and draw a map of the space in the middle of this blank page, leaving all of the beautiful parts out, just keeping the line. i wonder if the line is beautiful. and then, after eggs and vinegar and green beans and toast, after all of that and at the end, i decide that maybe there is something to the line, something under it i didn't see before, some space beside it maybe. positionality is what matters against the white space, and i think that maybe it is just that we have to look behind the line, behind the hollow of the places that our hands aren't, to see. to see everything that was already there and the things that we have made through absence. and then, later on again. lying in bed, at night, after things have diminished, i wonder what my breathing looks like from that far away. i wonder where it might travel to, between here and the window, and then, after that, if it is free.

2008-03-26T18:57:00.007+11:00

today i am thinking of a book i found once, in a bookstore right near the house i live now, just down the road. it was 'the lost buildings of baltimore', a detailed pictorial and historical narrative of the demolished places in one place, the significance and insignificance of them. i began to imagine the narratives of the places i was visiting, invented a story of an elevator driver who inhabited one of the lost buildings, who ran people to their floor in the non-existence shaft. where do places go when they cease to exist? and, moreover, do they ever exist except in our perception of them? i am thinking about beauty, and the way it rests in the imagination, and i am thinking of memory, and the way it is invented. today i read about architecture as a means of measuring oneself, of revisiting places in order to gauge transitions in oneself. places, it seems, can only ever carry the weight we assign to them, their narratives exist only within the existence we choose to allocate. the notion of the importance of places, then, is both lost and amplified, and suggests, perhaps, that the lost buildings of baltimore were lost all along. or no less lost once they had been demolished. i like the idea of architecture as a gauge for self, the notion of travelling backwards to your own perception of yourself as embodied through something physical. i think about the time we were playing hide and seek in my parents yard, and i found that dull coin, buried in the dirt, under the church leaves of the fern. i wonder what it would be like, for me, to go back there, if it still existed. to bundle myself into the earth, press up against the verandah, a worm on the ground. what i mean, i guess, is that the process of guaging oneself against a place suggests that that place may itself hold some neutrality, some removal from the subjectivity of experience. places have their own narratives, and are as manifest in the process of memory as we ourselves are. we are both complicit in the construction of narratives, in the imagining of buildings as the embodiment of what we have experienced there.

2008-03-24T23:29:00.002+11:00

i think i have been here before, the place where the storm is at, but i am waiting it out, i will sit and wait it out. the crickets start up, just outside my window, and i wonder what it might be like for things to be more simple than this, for the rain to just fall, like it is falling now. back to the place where we were all suitcases and i was sitting on the floor. back to a certain weight to my shoulders, a downward pitch to the afternoon as it rumbles into night. the window lights up, every now and then, with the heat the clouds are throwing down, and next to it, i wonder if you can see my face. i wonder about how different things could have been, if both of us were different, and braver, if both of us had said all of these things in the beginning and not the end. we built things, didn't we? with our hands and other parts, with the way that there was something in the crook of your elbow. there was a time, i remember, when you held a cigarette in your hand at the back of my neck, when, on the street, you hugged that woman, called her a name. and then, later on, when the light crept over the edge of the wall, through the gap in the ceiling and into the room. and then under the lip of the cliff, feet jutted out on the rocks, and the way the ocean was just making noise, not speaking or anything, not even whispering. these are all of the things i remember of you. it is my head that knows different, not my heart. my head is the one i am listening to.

2008-03-18T03:23:00.003+11:00

when i wake, it is 3am and the world outside is rumbling. there is a freeway near here, and a leaf on the pavement, and the two are dancing with the wind. it is too hot to sleep, like it was last night and the night before, too hot for anything but the mosquitoes and the wind. outside, it is cooler than in here and i contemplate moving the cushions from the couches, out there, to the backlit stage of our backyard. somehow, though, i will be too visible, and remember the man who yesterday, from his balcony saw me without my shirt on. i remember nights like this from my childhood, the rustle of the dead wind and the way it brought no comfort, and from lake street, in that vortex of a house that wanted neither light nor breeze. here, though, my life is different, and more of my own then, and the wind is like a beacon in the night. i wonder how to fit more of it through my windows, if i could open the curtains more without betraying my dignity. i wonder how it takes a shape in the spaces we provide for it, how we like to think that we have control. i wonder how it is that we live in these places we have made for ourselves and how we cannot stand them, cannot stand the heat.

2007-12-14T19:32:00.000+11:00

bored with new hair

2007-12-10T19:13:00.000+11:00

was it you who wrote these things on me? was it?

today is an imagining and a wearing of time and together we waltz through the kitchen, me in my apron and time just tapping, keeping up with my awkward step. we stumble on the third step, the downward step, every time, though neither me nor time can figure it. there is the smell of onions frying and the sound of water as it reaches the tip of its boil and we had thought that that would be music enough but it isn't. the power is out and the lights are off so we are just feeling our way through this, just with bodies, the edges of them touching like a misjudged bird's wing, skimming the surface. we are learning a lot from one another, like how to breath and how to keep on breathing. in, then out. in, then out. with the third step there is a lot for us to concentrate on, and so i step back, stir the onions, and sit. i imagine the way i could just float out the window, taking time out with me, and the way that we would see many things. i imagine the way the cat would take it in her stride, seeing me and time leaving together, as if she had always known it would happen, that we were in love. we would take each others' hands, with thumbs wrapped in thumbs, and under us there will be the whole of the world. there is no way we could touch it, but just seeing is enough, just feeling the wind as it moves through bodies, hearing the rushing sound it makes, the whistle. later, years later, we might remember how we did that, or wanted to, and we might tell all our children of the way things were or might have been. the way time and i flew across everything and didn't change a thing. the way we were carried.

2007-11-29T14:03:00.000+11:00

i woke up and you were breathing. we both were, and the sound of it filled the whole room and all of my mouth. i woke up and there was so much noise and silence, and there was a line between forms. there was a line and the shape of it was the shape of my breath and the way it is moulded in my throat, the way it is a thread between lungs and heart and tongue. the way that it tastes as i let it out and then curl it back in again, the way that i can see it moving. my skin smells like seven different things and in the night they are everything and i am the way they mix together.

2007-11-21T11:20:00.000+11:00

this morning is all wakeful weariness and the ring around my eyes as i pinch them in the mirror. i have overdrawn my account and so i do without coffee and come here instead, to lurk in the open hallways of the library, to wonder when it might be that i am not tired, that i am excited and filled with a burgeoning need to run outside and see the day. this place is filled with silence and people, the gap between their voices and their mouths. i am going to miss the beach, and i am going to miss the ease of this, the way that things have made a home for me, despite my best intentions. but that is not enough and i know it.

2007-10-25T13:22:00.000+10:00

i wonder if you know that you are one of those people, one of those, like those you are with. i wonder if you can see that, that beyond your arms and legs and eyes, there are things and there are people. and i wonder if you see that i am one of them. i wonder if you know that it is not about you, any of it, it has never been about you except that you are writing it, or trying to. i wonder if you can smell the way the day smells, smell the distance between places and the way that we keep breathing, if it tastes like anything to your tongue. i wonder if your body remembers, anything new or old. if it has learnt anything, new lessons, or old ones. i wonder how you can look people in the eye and then reach out, still looking, and pinch at them. because it looks like you are seeing things. and that is what i don't understand.

2007-09-04T20:25:00.000+10:00

from this side of the world i remember how to live, like you do, in the mountains and the air. each day is a little parcel that you give yourself, wrapped in the ghettoed bark of a willow tree, wrapped in all the breathing we have done. it sits in the nook of your cupped hand, like a bird did once, like you have always remembered it, and, sitting there, we occupy it with thoughts and questions, the things that we think might happen. from this side of the world, i remember green, and the light in eyes when the sun hits the water, and the way that waves just catch you, just let you fly, and then drop you, a tumult, in the sand. from this side of the world, i hear the catch in your voice, the rising sound of your father singing, the way that there are hands from here that stretch out, all of that way, to circumvent this distance and have me stroke your hair. from here, this desk, this dropping night and the blue light it brings, from the way that i can't hear myself breathing, the catching up footprints of the cat on the floor, the voices of birds and mice and roaches, from the way that i am alone and together, the sound of all of this day as it explodes and melts itself into memory, from the cars and the bikes and the people passed this way, the places i have been and you have been together, from the barbed wire fence you once walked in front of, from the way my heart beats and yours does too, from the puddles on the floor and the drip drip drip of the ceiling, the light in the window and the crows at your old rooftop, from the stark white sheets filled with endings and beginnings, from the movement of life, out of this room, down the passageway and the way the old man kept on trying to escape, from here, from all of this, and the way it makes up part of me, from there and us together, there is nothing to say. i have a song in my head and i murmur it to myself. there is nothing to understand but this tiny little hand and the way that you held it, the way it held you.

for jenny and michael and christina.

2007-08-28T19:57:00.000+10:00

it is a small betrayal, this one, this one of disrespect. it is rough, like the edges of things, and they way they make my teeth crawl, the way they weigh my fingers. it is an awkward sitting, unsat with well and carried, silent, to the other room. i am a small child in the domain, in the parlour, in the place where i am told what to do, where i am quiet, and from here, from under the table, i realise that none of this is right and none of it is mine except the mouth of me and the unspoken words in it. they might still be there at the end of this, and where will we be then, my friend? where will we be then?

2007-08-26T14:13:00.000+10:00

2007-08-26T13:01:00.000+10:00

there are tambourines and samma climbing on my lap, the smell and sound of onions in the other room. i lift my voice to meet those around me, i lift it up to that point in the sky, to see if it can fit, to see if i can match it. time moves, around corners and over things, and there is so much living going on, so much sorrow, so much grief. i open the door and think of how if it is that i fall back, if it is that i vanish, there are all these gentle hands there to catch me. resting on the small of my back, to give me grace. i wonder if they feel that? resting there, magnets to my spine.

2007-08-11T19:29:00.000+10:00

bigger than my stomach, she says, and pushes the cake up and away, and i take it with me, back to the kitchen. she hunches a little, eyes dropping into her coffee, into the wide shoulders of her purple jumper. when i brought it to her, she was resting her old hands on the table, like a prize that she had won. she opened them, and took the things i gave her, in a way that catches my breath. the overlap of age and youth. she gets up to leave a little later, and comes over to me. i touch her arm and she touches mine, and there is something there, a communion of skins, the added up weight of time and breath, the years we have lived together. she comes and leaves alone, in the way that she is living.

two couples at a table toast with water glasses, and then, later, the hand of one of the men is in the hair of one of the women. it is the smallest and most intimate of things, a gesture and an embrace. i wonder if that will be something that i have, when i am smaller than i am, when i am wrinkled.

this place is filled with families today, small legs braced inwards to tables, heads on shoulders, hands curled around things. there are feet on chairs and a solid space that is filled up with the sounds of living, the argumentative confluence of life. i know you, they say. i know you. the little girl cries real tears and she is hoisted to the hip of her papa, and, carrying his face, they go outside, to the place where the air is. there are moments, like this, everyday. she spreads all of her food all over the table, the floor, the chair, almost none of it in her mouth at all, and i laugh at the stories of picking lentils, slurping soup. this is something i haven't chosen for myself, the magnification of noise, the weariness of eating, the joy of your own eyes in someone elses. it is a magnificent thing, living.

2007-08-05T14:34:00.000+10:00

samma: a timid ball of neuroses

2007-08-01T15:46:00.000+10:00

somewhere, not here, someone who might have been me, and someone who might have been you, are celebrating. someone is sitting on a chair and someone feels happy and overwhelmed, everyone there does. there is activity in the room, and motion and ripping, and all of those people, those people who might have been us, are so filled up with things, with the way they are filled with joy. and maybe it wouldn't have been like that at all, maybe it would have been different, and maybe the life of things would have drained away by now. but in my head and in the fissure of my life, i imagine it like that. and this is for you.

2007-07-31T22:00:00.000+10:00

i have been hit by a freight train that, during the night, snuck into my room and had its way with me. i didn't know it til this morning, but it is written on my body.

2007-07-28T22:08:00.000+10:00

i've been waiting for longer, for more years than you, to be at this place. we've been reformatting memory, down the streets of the city i no longer live in, and through its alleyways, and it is the end of a night of that, up against the bins. i've waiting for longer, to be able to do that, to breathe into the nightime dreary settings, to turn around and walk backwards through evening. and even through that, even against it, i have to sit down sometimes, and hold my head in my hands like the weeper does. i have to sit down and remember, remember all of the things that make their own circles on my hands, all of the jars of life i am holding. i have to sit down, and taste things, remember to taste them, in the way that i used to, so that they play with my tongue, so we can dance. sometimes time is a map or a reason. and sometimes, like tonight, it is just the way the curtain pulls in and outwards, moves with the air and the way that it doesn't seem to be moving.

2007-07-27T11:23:00.000+10:00

someone told me i was easy once, in a way that referenced looseness, the heaviness of flopping limbs. someone said it and it hung in the air in a way that made me think of talcum, that made me think of paint. there are new spaces to find here every day, under the heavy covers of coldness the winter lays on us, under all the things we have been thinking. light is segmented by space, and i am segmented just by myself. it seems like a better way to be, underneath things, in the place where the warmth is.

2007-07-17T23:03:00.000+10:00

sometimes we are light, lighter than the air and all of the motes in it, lighter than all of the shadows that fill this space, than the reflection of the sliver of the moon on the unlit side of it, than venus. sometimes we are weighted less than anyone else, than a fingertip or a moment, than a thought or a sound or an explosion. sometimes we are resting on cats' feet, jumping over things and down streets that we might have seen before or never, that are new nonetheless, that are frantic. sometimes we are so excited, breathing in and breathing out, faces close to faces. and sometimes, lying down, looking back and upwards, sometimes i think that i am falling and flying, all at the same time.

2007-07-16T20:05:00.000+10:00

tonight things are more fragile than i remember them, and i feel softer in the scenery as it moves out my window. i have picked up things i've been putting down, i have forgotten the names i forgot to give them. i am moving too quickly, too drastic and slow, through all of these days and i cannot find a free space to place my feet, not amongst the jumble down there. we are thick, all of us, with each other, a thick mass of breathing. and sometimes, in the overlap, we breath out together. but sometimes, like today, i feel like there isn't any oxygen left, like i am left with just a bone to gnaw on, and i don't like the taste.

2007-07-02T01:38:00.000+10:00

tonight there is wind and it whips through me, through the air and all of the sky and i float like the leaves that travel up the path and down it and it feels for a moment as if every little thing is just suspended in air and we are flying, all of us, holding hands.

2007-06-30T01:48:00.000+10:00

tonight i occupy this small space, the space of my hands and my feet, the space they create for themselves. i wonder, how do we negotiate the newity of this? i am molding something small in my fingers, kneading it like tarek does the bread, and it is soft, like the dough, it is soft. maybe it is a new heart that i can pop inside me, fit into all those absent holes that you have left, or maybe, just maybe, it is the heart of something else, a small thing, that i knew once and lost. i cannot lay claim to all of this sorrow for some of it is not birthed yet.

2007-06-21T15:21:00.000+10:00

today i am consuming time, i am eating it off a plate to small to see, too much of it to hold in my hands. i talk to you, on the other side of the earth, and it is like my heart is exposed, ribs are ripped open. there it is. we have no room for negotiation, or for resting, in the time between here and now. there is no time for anything, except moving forward, moving into the little designated mark on the horizon that i have placed there. it is when i will be fine and you will be too, but perhaps they are not the same place. mine is here and yours is there and they are not leading in the same direction, they will never be. i wonder what it means to disentangle lives. to take all the limbs that are yours and the eyes that are yours, to pick them up and put them where they need to go. because then, at the end of it, your eyes and your limbs aren't just yours anymore, and they feel awkward and strange, they feel new. it is that newness that is the hardest part, the process of re-learning yourself in the absence of another, the process of envisaging a passageway narrow enough. where is the place that we put all our un-shared memories? i have packed mine, in a suitcase, but i carry it with me always. it is the thing that is weighing me down, it is the thing that i cannot let go of.

fence posts and chicken wire

2007-06-12T23:46:00.000+10:00

at little creatures
from last night until a month from now

for you fe
and you mike

2007-06-08T23:38:00.000+10:00

it is not as late as i would like and the night is jarred, filled and empty with the black soot of night. i am here, in this lit space, against the light of these white walls. something is amiss here, something won't sit quite right. i have made no new resolutions, i have no space to stack them, up on the shelves. i have made no inroads into solution, no marks on this white board, no passage into the open doorway. i don't know what i'm doing. soon, i will get up, and go out, walk through the silent shouting hearts of northbridge, the loud cry out noises of town. soon, i will get up and get moving. soon i will leave and it will not be soon enough for my legs, too late for my heart and just the right time for my little little head.

where we went

2007-04-29T13:31:00.000+10:00

drawing attention, taylor studios, 15th april

2007-04-29T13:17:00.000+10:00

just one

2007-04-22T04:00:00.000+10:00

2007-04-14T01:49:00.000+10:00

right now i have this little circle of pink light to play with and it is mine. yesterday it was the manta rays and the reef sharks, the things i thought i might be afraid of, but wasn't, not really. i found out that there is a whole nother world, down there, at the bottom of things, where i have been frightened to go. it is colourful too, more so than i thought, and you can hear the sounds your head makes, inside of your head. there is nothing there that's bad at all really, and i wonder what the thing was that was stopping me, holding my ankles in the shallows. all i found, under the blue line in the distance, were the things that i wanted to be there.

2007-03-23T21:21:00.000+11:00

we are fumbling with the last steps of life, each trying to make the best of things. outside, the bay bridge stands with a wider step across the water, aged with dirt and muck and grime and the remnants of a goldrush. we found gold in the river, at the bottom, amongst the stones, one afternoon, and collected its fragments in the yellow beach bucket that someone else had abandonned. i lost a flipflop in the heaving white water, bent with my attempts to better things that were not mine to better. i baked you a cake and felt like that was the thing i could do, my piece of the puzzle in the road towards eternity. it didn't mean anything. there were five of us, at a table, all of us dealing with the things that we had done. none of us proud, but some prouder than others. we didn't know what to do, and so we did nothing, and held back the light bits of your hair. these are all the pieces of the things i will lose, all the bits of life that have meant something. i am in the process of packing them away, putting them in brown boxes and closing the lids on them, putting them on the high shelves, in the high corners of this room. memories stop to mean anything without context, and their context is going home. what for to do with them then? because they are only half mine, and it doesn't seem fair to demand then to keep them.

2007-03-06T00:15:00.000+11:00

i am driving as the moon travels up the sky, a floating thing that disappears behind trees and into the distance as i move toward home. the lights flick on at the moment they have chosen, and i am there, to witness it, this mark to the beginning of night. it has a deadline. there are no pelicans on the lamp-posts, and all of the world is a series of lines and lights that augment each other against the passage of time, against the way in which each thing is an individual thing, not a blurred one, not a smear but a point.

2007-02-24T02:25:00.000+11:00

i imagine myself, out there, long sleeping under a darker sky than this one, long dreaming of snakes and bushfires and the things that i might lose myself to. i imagine the way in which my legs would make a shape of themselves, against the earth and for it, the way that steps would become steps. i imagine the things i would encounter, on the long path over things, around the little blockages i had put in the way. i wonder if i would find a piece of myself, a heart perhaps, or a little severed finger, laying there, as if waiting. i wonder if i would think that i had planted it there for myself, as if this, all of this, was the path to a place i knew i was going. i would wonder then, if there were any accidents at all, and if sorrow was ever a conclusion to come to. i would wonder if there was anything i didn't know or couldn't change and then i would answer in a whisper to the held out hand of the world.

2006-12-26T15:19:00.000+11:00

there is salt as a new skin on me, a skin that i can taste and smell a little, that scratches on me. there is music in the other room. there is a whole almost day outside, rubbing up again my legs, wanting me to play with it. i am waiting for homecomings and for the end eventual time when i might remember to be happy.

2006-12-23T21:41:00.000+11:00

sometimes bodies become so entwined that there are too many ankles and too many limbs and too much artifice and breathing and hands reaching down into pockets for something. sometimes bodies wake in the middle of the night and their extremities are numb, and they lie there, just like death, but breathing. sometimes it is easier to deal with grief from the other side of the world, away from all the armpats and caring, people wanting to make sure that you are going to BE OKAY. maybe this is the end of everything though, maybe there is no okay and our numb limbs are permanent. sometimes it is easy to sit down and wait but there is nowhere to go inside of that, no hidden room at the back or under the stairs. my heart feels dead to all of this, so that i am responsible for it, so that i am trying to fit it all inside my skin, write all the histories responsibility onto the backs of my palms and then press them to my face. i want to swallow all of it. let them be the things that drive me. swallow all of it unchewed and wait until my belly is full.

2006-12-08T09:21:00.001+11:00

Today I sit with hal and joan and watch the short masts on the river, feel the day on our faces. Hot. I ask them questions that they answer with lies and tell me of their broken backs and hips and hearts instead. It is better. They are old, and their skin has lifted like paper in the sun, their hands have grown roots like trees that tangle and warp. They are bent over at the waist and wear suspenders broad over their bellies, rounded like the earth. Hal is testing his sisters memory and eyes, showing her photos from their youth, faces that she cannot make out or remember. One is of nel, and she is wearing a white hat and a white dress with flowers on. On the back is written the dates of her birth and death and ‘my first love’ in the way an old man would write them. He is old now, and his wife is dead, and he holds the photograph as if it was the most precious thing on earth.

Afterwards, I drive with the window down to rush air through the car, over the bridge and by the river, to this white space with drawings on the wall. Many people will walk past here today. i will remember not to forget the way that everything touches everything else.

2006-12-06T21:06:00.000+11:00

your long legs make a cradle for you as you lie on the bed and i think of the bottles full of grief we have drunk since then. there are hands wrapped on bottle sleeves and the feeling of food and waste as it slides down throats to bellies and the deeper sleep we are always slipping in to. this is a love song, the way i put you to sleep.

2006-11-06T23:56:00.001+11:00

is that better fe?

2006-11-02T09:55:00.000+11:00

on the occasion of the death of my grandma i was helping my dad change the oil in my car. at the funeral i realise how hard it is for him to hold someones hand as he takes my mothers and wraps it up with fingers. my aunt's blunt hair speaks for the family as if half of the family does not exist and i wonder how it is that things get so complicated when they are so simple. we eat sandwiches and nobody talks about grandma, as if she too, doesn't exist. she is the reason we are all here and i think of how hard it must be for my mum now that both her parents are gone.

2006-10-21T01:10:00.000+10:00

when is the end point of a sun set? when the prickling stars peak like urchins through their own night-time blanket? when the long stretched out arms of light, reaching back to themselves, loosen their grip a little, and start to fade? when light is just a line on the horizon, long and red, reflected out above itself, into clouds, into water, into faces? i turn when time tells me i have to, and from the long and narrow curves of west coast highway i give it to the corner of my eye, trying to gauge that which i am missing out on. i have the wind and the warmth of it through my fingers, the feeling of skin mixed with salt, mixed with sweat. i feel my face move and i am smiling.

2006-10-15T23:58:00.000+10:00

we are miles away now, and each eating separately. me, here, in the red light of a lonely kitchen, and them all over there, just as lonely. this is what belonging means i think. or some kind of obligation - the impulse that brings me back here, that flings me from a catapult through the rough and tumbling sky, over oceans and the curvature of land to some other little corner. outside the park is still the thing it was. there is a stack of bills on the bench. things are scattered still, where i left them and i wonder what the neighbours thought, when i one day just wasn't here. nor the next, or the next. i think of the way things continue to crumble and the way i am away from them now. the way i wish i wasn't and the way it is so good to be back here. it is strange the way things change, the way they vanish. it is strange the way hearts are divided and fulfilled. the way voices carry over such long distances to become just a whisper, just a breath, breathed in an ear and held there, for an instant. and i wonder what it feels like, to know that, in your heart. i wonder what it means to have lived a life. i wonder if it is precious. because it seems to be. to me, it seems to be.

2006-10-08T17:35:00.000+10:00

i don't know. but there are beds made and changed and the way this face is pale and the arms i curl up in. i am made uncomfortable by many things, least of all life. i made a two layer carrot cake. i cried a little in the kitchen. i thought about how i am leaving on thursday and how everyone needs some one to take care of them. why is it that we never make time for that? there are jobs and school and living things to do and deal with, no time left for loving in the plain and simple way that grief allows. i want to be the person who makes time for that. mike is the person making time for that. because, it seems, there is nothing more important.

2006-10-07T02:52:00.000+10:00

yesterday, i braid nancy's hair and ask her questions. there is a bank of her life that needs to be stored some place, the small details of days as they pass. she wore a yellow taffeta dress to the prom, her date was jim mcconnell. she didn't like to study. michael was a quiet baby. she remembers the names of movie stars from the nineteen fifties as we play trivial pursuit and smiles a small smile when she wins. and then, later on, mike tells stories from a different part of her life and we cry at the dinner table. me on one side, diane on the other. and she must be so filled with regret.

2006-10-04T09:46:00.000+10:00

i have becomes a baker, steeped days in the kitchen, filled up with the pride of floating chocolate pudding, the lines of garlic and chilli flakes, the way one small lifted mouthful is everything. this is the way i seem to deal with things. to mix and blend and stir and make sure that everyone is well-fed. here we live in the space of suffering, where days pass endless, remote controlled and distant. where lives are quantified by a movement on the bed. upwards or downwards, and the grinding sound that that makes. nancy's neighbour is a blind woman, who cannot see how her husband is mean to her, who takes each sigh of his unprovoked frustration as an invisible noise, a noise without home or destination. how can she ignore them, when sound is all she has? on monday she was outside, with him and her son and their dogs, them licking her face, the movements of her head with them so close to her.

it smells of melting as we open the door, wander through the open eyes of age. they wear bracelets on their ankles and an alarm sounds when one escapes. this is a place people want to escape from. nancy is suspended, between everything, between herself and all the little pieces of her that scatter the room. she is soft and quiet and her toes rub each other all the time, a constant comfort or battle - i am not sure which. there is nothing we can do to help her, but bake. so that is what we do, every day. pudding and pasta. and that is what it has come down to. that is the end of life. the comfortable space that we can make it, the forward motion of vanishing.

2006-09-05T08:59:00.000+10:00

this morning the day is a stripe of light then shadow that breaks up the sold space of green and houses across the road. it is the fruit bats singing to me, and the way they fill the new silence of this room. it is my confusion about everything channelled into a little moment of joy.

2006-08-09T22:06:00.000+10:00

there is a certain weight to things through eyes that are weary, that are blotched and reddened, that are sore. there is certain way to talk without saying anything, there are certain words my tongue has trouble with. there is a certain regularity to things and a repitition and a way of finding a way through things, through weakness. there is the green canvas of lawn that is the park across the road that i cross to sit high on the chair every morning, watching the way the light plays games with the colour. there is the certain band of yellow that forms a stripe between houses, italianate, italianate, united. there is this neighbourhood, its progress and progression and the way that choosing the hard path is so much harder than the easy one. and the single solitary thing i will never understand is why would someone do that? why would they?

2006-07-14T02:27:00.000+10:00

it is late, and i have left all of these things too long, so they have dropped, and i have forgotten them. now there is never enough time for anything, except for feeling the transition of things, the used to be against itself, the way i am fighting and lost in that. i know that this will not be forever, like i thought it might, once. that nothing is, like i thought it might be. i know that, in the way things scatter like they do, i will be picked up and floated and dropped again, washed up someplace. this is such a small and funny place, a curious puzzle, a fingertip on a fingertip. simple. not simple. tonight i read things and think about all the things i am not doing, the way i am the overlapped version of myself and my potential. but right now, people are doing so much, and some of them are breathing. i stop, and remember to do that. some of them are breathing.

2006-05-11T11:04:00.000+10:00

2006-05-09T21:40:00.000+10:00

there will be more of this, but for now...