✰i✰blog✰

even in sleep 

a part of me is

soaring 

along a midnight street 

running, 

drunk on 

distant promises of 

din and 

dimmed lights,

darkness an invitation for 

dissonance, dizziness, 

and dogging skins 

hired for 

tightly prudent days 

paid for 

with sunlight hours 

defined by

the distance 

of 

held in 

breath 

when did I turn 

it inwards

the buzzing zip bang 

fuzz deep 

hedonistic drive for 

leg throwing

arm swinging 

teeth sinking into

movement 

craved and always at 

effortless disposal 

no need for thinking only 

soaring 

limbs illuminated with 

track runner stamina 

cartoon boundless bounce back 

was it 

little by little a

gradual feedback loop 

loop 

be good 

loop 

behave 

loop 

play families nicely 

loop 

until 

floor starer 

tin soldier 

I could cry 

I could cry 

please 

sell it back to me

how to leap 

perhaps 

in a jar

racing where

blood ought 

technicolour pixels fizz

blunt like 

pencil crayon stars 

pulsing veins 

from air that dips 

off rushing

backs meeting 

with collision

light years

removed from 

disembodied 

ears eyes chest fingers head 

unspecific 

voltage  

throbbing 

each 

it's a physical sensation

when I’m turning over

the idea of actually doing it

(out of necessity: 

I can't stay here

and courage: 

fuck em)

and my boss says

conversationally

I’m getting in touch with my feminine side

I identify as 

tiger 

RAH

he growls and pads in demonstration

a bodily response

(noted out of body)

jolt in chest 

my old friend the hidden fist 

ever clenched ever ready 

a lumpy traveler

up the throat 

making me swallow

(back to body)

leaked sourness

careful to keep my mouth 

unmoving

but he registers an escaped flicker

(must)

because as he scoffs and claws

he justifies

end of year antics

I tell him

all the saw dust 

and laugh a sound 

I prepared earlier 

then complete the gradual project 

of seeping backwards from the doorway 

into a busy working day 

of sucker punches 

just for me

hum to me, darling.

tell me that everything will be alright 

in this crevice which we live;

comfort me with how little 

they matter. 

What will I extract to make wishes upon, 

when I have at last run out of 

eye lashes?

A friend told me that last summer she saw a homeless man using his toes to collect coins from the NGV moat. What do wishers dream of when they toss their change into those slate-lined ponds? What does one ask for when leaving something of themselves behind in the guarding waters of an affluent institution? I think, for the most part, they are driven to poetic irrationality by the inexpressibly human pull of art. A surge that sets fires in stomachs and reminds us that we can participate in aliveness: that we have a place from which to see and hear and speak in this expansive world. Is each splash a reclamation of being? Call it by another name: a reassertion of dignity. What is dignity but dry sleeves, when that is the greatest kindness you are allowed to offer yourself? 

How can we allow dignity to take such different shapes? 

Izzy at Felix Coffee Co (when discussing the below): cruel and well read

tearing

again

never enough time. 

turning pages to say yes, I have read that one, I too, thought it was a sell-out compared to their early work (please don’t ask me about their early work).

submitting applications

writing manifestos

but

I am finding more and more 

that the efforts expected to

sharpen meaning, conquer purpose, 

are instead

animating

zoetrope horses.

i cannot outrun the feeling that

the galloping of flickering pages

falters faster

than double wicked 

candlelight 

(and reaches not 

half 

as far).

Last night you lay within these sheets. As you blinked upwards, your knowing smile, so immediately ready earlier that evening, became something gently questioning. I caught your slippery gaze: a cautious union of hesitancy and closeness; the emergent of new vulnerability shared (did you see in my eyes the same glints reflected back?). Our poorly feigned surenesses cast off with each layer: fortresses of laughter and wit brushed easily aside. Shed to make room for the welcome softness of skin against skin. Tattoos traced slowly with lips, and fingers brushed carefully through hair. Then the bashful uncertainty of abrupt goodbyes. 

Humming you under my breath. A tune I liked even without familiarity to endear it upon me. 

At first, we thought,

the moon will fill  

the things we’ve let

run dry.

But widening gaps

soon emptied what

that orb

could naught supply.

So, when we mined

our moon’s lasts dregs,

we made a burning fuel.

It took us to

a shinier home,

still rich in

unpicked jewel.

How often do I let what is in front of me melt away (shortsightedness that extends beyond my growing prescription)? Do you, too, begin to shut down every time you see someone who looks a little like me? Could your hair have grown out to that length by now? Is that lazy, up at the end lilt the one belonging to your ringing voice? Do you find yourself with inexplicably weakened limbs that are void of the strength needed to get you out of here, fast? A tightening chest you notice a little late because it’s eclipsed by the force of your pounding heart? Fog obscuring the mediating clarity you thought that you possessed, intensifying your unkind focus to pinpoint precision? A merciless laser beam. I am my own shrill villain. Am I yours, too? 

From where did the blight begin?

Moral high ground requires disparity; to be righteous is to damn. 

I see at last that an understanding is not what you seek. You probably believe you already told me, but how could I recognise the chasm between our intentions, when your responses harbored a clouded logic it was beyond my guesswork to discern? 

I figured - when my attempts to bridge were met with ice - it was because I had taken the wrong approach (too early? too rigid?). But whatever I might have tried would have landed just the same. If only I had known sooner - I would prefer that fewer of my words were emptied of their sentiment and twisted into spirits I cannot recognise, let alone hope to tame. I pray they are not the type to haunt. 

It is not unfair to avoid resolution, to turn away. But a different matter is the malice that peppered your returns like pointed shards of broken crystal. They cut me the deeper because I did not expect to meet them.

Though they now glitter at my feet, it is you reflected back. 

I’ve never been a real person. Yet, when my human costume is unzipped, there will be no labyrinth of chips and wires to support the artificially intelligent humanoid it turns out no one could distinguish. Nor a colonsing martian instilling too-late empathy into the purposefully ignorant. I am an imposter of a different kind. When my disguise at last catches on an unruly branch or snags under a fast walker’s impatient toe, bubbles of light pink vapour - too faint to be correctly identified as red - will pause for a second, shocked at the sudden arrival of an exposé they had always anticipated. But they won’t remain in formation for long. Their feeble membrane was just enough to ground them between the ranks of actual people. Without it they will quickly diffuse, carried off into the world like dandelion wishes; destined only to burst upon contact with the lightest breeze. Perhaps dewy pastel rings will linger on the ground below, marking, for a moment, each former fragment. I'd like that. A memorial as substantial as my hollow claims to personhood. 

Please,

dig your French tips into my waiting wrist.

Take a little streak of scarlet 

beneath each perfect crescent. 

Then you, too, 

will carry me with you.

If I was ever going to sacrifice someone, I would surround them with the strawberries-and-cream-scented candles I bought at St Luke’s op shop for a dinner party last year. I never lit them because the smell was too strong. Even one would have put us off our food. But it is wasteful not to use them up. So, I would have my victim lying on his back, palms up. And I’d light each of the twenty-four pomegranate-hued candles one by one with a single match each to draw it out. A crescendo of crushing crimson (maybe I’d arrange them in a heart shape in an ode to each little wax form). Then I’d leave the room and plug the door with him lying in the middle, unmoving as the candles burned out, immobilised by fear - or some other substance, I haven’t yet figured out the logistics - bathed in inescapable, toxic sweetness. Succumbing at last to the red he’ll forget about everything else; past, future, outside world, all slipping away into a seemingly eternal purgatory between after school lollies and punishment mouthfuls of red medicine on poorly feigned sick days. Maybe that would be sacrificial enough, just to remind him he is not so far from that unsure but excitable little boy (and maybe rob him of his sense of smell, too). Perhaps I could summon something like two years of free parking with that. Better to start small anyway.

Hala Shanableh (at the P.S. Art Space panel discussion, Sumud, Sabr and Sanity – Stories of Palestine): "Community is not about identity. Community are those who hold space for you."

On me in me consume me eclipse me,

Oh do let me become you !

Become

absorbed by you

until I am your

perfect match,

Such a lovely couple! seamless - I am your silhouette’s shadow.  

I’ll stitch myself to you by my toes as Wendy did for Peter.

Oh how Wendy envied that shadow! If only her toes did not snap needles! 

But I do the real thing;

I mould, watch, wait, yearn to yearn your guiding touch  

so much;

that yearning is shapeless, confused, homeless;

an unlocatable fact of life as mundane as mundane.

So instead I look to you

to inflate me with the knowledge that I am inflating you.

Yes ! This must be it.

I am your obedient reflection,

look upon me freely, 

I, Narcissus, will nourish you always.

Look

against my hip, my thigh, my downcast eyes,

your gaze lights me up;

casts me in flashes of vivid purple static.

I shine yourself back at you, a steady assurance that the space you never feared to occupy 

has ever been awaiting you,

it and me both.

We greet you with relief,

glad at last to know which ways to twist, bend, contort.

You may, once or twice, notice our bruised hips and dented shins 

(badges of our urgency to receive the space left over by your squared shoulders and pointed chin) 

but it is no trouble !

This is just what we wanted

always dreamed of!

I look forward with patience

to the release of breath that will mark tenderness crystallised. 

A scab needs no further attention.

Pickers only have themselves to blame

(everyone knows that)!

His and hers 

embroidered towels galore !

(oh dear, is that blood, did I forgot to change the needle?)

Marvin Wallin (during an Art History honours seminar): "fire engine blue."