Wednesday, August 18, 2010
i thought of this at the bustop today and found myself pressing my finger into the bitumen.
i then lifted each foot and re-placed it softly steadily on the ground to make sure nothing was sliding.
then this car of scary men decides to stop in front of me and attempt communication. i snapped out of my fine bone reverie but immediatally wished it was of reality, that they could dissapear with a point of my bony finger.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
the roadworks tonight!
I just see him for about five minutes, he gets on my bus and gets right off. a brisk trip on the last bus of the last night.
I thought I could predict his moves. Throughout the two blocks and a roundabout
Until once that is his usual bus stop was changed. Roadworks ahead. he ran with his stiff sideways scissor waltz to the displaced bus.
I love him from a distance. My eyes so greedy that they could push the world flat on its face.
It's insatiable im desperate for every part of every moment because it’s fleeting. I wish for that which I love to not stop but
Then I wouldn’t have to cling so hard would i?
Id never Take it back.
I just hope he’s ok, had a great life and that here at its end it is all alright. What else can I do? A lost else, I don’t know.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
“You see the books, they are your best friend.”
Nothing here reeks of its previous life, as the shoppers are mostly far too dull to think beyond their own. These once freshly pressed products purchased by people wanting to create themselves, as free agents (albeit unknowingly enslaved to the whims of their pathological consumption).
They cannot stop that their saturday soccor trophies will tarnish and that their poly-blend polar-fleece sloppy-joes will ball up.
They cannot stop to realize if ever there was value, the where and the why and the how of it.
But, if it’s no longer wanted (because it never was needed) then they can feel good about themselves by giving it to charity.
It’s different when I approach the bookshelves though. Yes, we have Foetal Attraction, the bibbles that Gideon keeps leaving in random places (hospital rooms, school rooms, waiting rooms, changing rooms) Bridget Jones’s own personal diary, celebrity gossip rags from the late nineties, microwave cooking guides, the Atkins diet revolution.
“You see the books, they are your best friend.”
But we have this boy.
The boy was chubby and his barely joined hare lip glistened with mucous. His father was dressed well, not sharply, but wisely, in browns of varying textures. His accent, as he said it, was thick, but his tone, so gentle.
The boy’s eyes, behind he coke bottle thick glasses, one was of the darkest brown, the other, not seeing, of grey pearlescence.
I saw him later in the store whimpering between the racks of clothes; the Kramer shirts and the Lad shirts, the women’s jumpers and the women’s skirts.
“Daddy, where are you?”
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
-Vanessa Berry
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Baudrillard goes to Vegas
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert surrounding the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as opposed to the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it also has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert - a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.
"
Monday, June 28, 2010
You are unable to sleep, so you sit up and write, the next morning, you awaken to realise you had being asleep the whole time.
Outside my window, you look so beautiful standing stoic in the rain. Left unsheltered by the leafless trees, the drips that drape you that quiver and glimmer. You are incandescent against the all else grey. To this cataclysmic splatter, I reach out to touch and as my warm tingled fingers press the glass it appears to melt liquotic, it ebbs and flows within itself for a split eternity. Only to pause as finale, it drizzles into oblivion with a shrill.
I step out. I stand to join you under the deluge. You resist my offer of the moth eaten umbrella. And so we stand. Kindred in our cold. Frozen hands clasped.
It’s miserable, so unnecessary, we laugh.
By candles in bed with sheets crumpled and empty, banality is charm , cancer and qualm. You are the moon, you are its fire. Your breath burns the nape of my neck.
The constant streetlamp, slats through the blinds. I try to sleep but your inconstancy prises apart my eyes.
There are streets and moss I tread carefully. And steeples and fences I climb relentlessly. There are glimpses I catch fleetingly then forget. The drone of the traffic will hum about my ears.
It is all, all this, at my fingers, but escapes their malleability
My chest will expand and then rest, I will grab your arm and press your pulse.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
the cold was biting, even in the place where you had lined up, under the sun. the younger ones, naive still, clenched their faces as their eyes flooded with tears.
the older ones joked and jibed as they held their relations tight, the devils smirk of gallows humour drifting like spirits from their lips.
the world carried on, beyond the walls, it could be heard, a frenzied runaway attempting to escape itself. to no place in particular.
as smog fell upon the mourners you stood, frozen in your grief, a vision in black, ensnared by the sadness of your love. i am so sorry.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
a qualm in the lyf
All there was, was the disinfected squalor of mothballed routine and the clicking of keyboards, y, n, enter, enter.
It played a merry little, musty little tune, fuelled by caffeinated pseudo-zest. While the homeless veiled theres in hessian, _ _ decided to don his discomfort. He wore it smartly, detachedly, non-chalontly, in the form of a suit and tie.
The chargreyed pigeons he had to pass through during his smog rise journey to the smokestack where he worked, pecked all the way merrily through, his half hearted attempts to thwack them with his rolled up financial review.
And, if the crossing was red he wouldn’t budge. Respectful to the light ordering him to stay safe. He stood stoic, a beacon of conservatism in the gutter while the others jaywalked.
And the sweet and lo that gave him heart palpitations.
In the loveless prison he had learnt to call a home.
There goes my bayybeeee.........
:b
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
smack my bitch up, sleep dont weep.
socked and smouldering in ruins of dust and shadow.
(yiz palms are sweaty, absence of moms spasghetti).
Would like to put a jar over it all, of it, covered.
'Til the last breath is no more, spent.
So you’ll put a scarf around my neck
and call it a day.
And I’ll be here as usual sweeping up the ashes.
So I guess I’m gonna have to call it a day.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
smells like hsc english. smells like you. smells like the metallic dust of a war medal.
I buy a travel ten, enough for ten bus trips. Though that is my entry fee from which I can board the bus I wonder, where does the worth reside? Is the ticket of value because of the bus trip, or, is the bus trip of value because of the ticket?
If meaning is always deferred then to where does it all trickle down? Is there somewhere a field of an ultimate meaning waiting to be ploughed? A bog muddied by letters and digits, within which diamonds are interspersed, the glimmers to be excavated out of the rough?
I hardly think so. The ideal of an ultimate to which we aspire is a concept elusive, and pursued only in a bout of self delusion and vanity, an ultimate incomprehensibility which is therefore meaningless.
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless
-Douglas Adams
Does every particle of a minute, every minute sliver of gold dust and beetle juice, every crimson drop of every passionate pang of a heart stain, every feeling torn from the ducts of a creased eyelid (your salty water that stained the pillowcase as you lay there)
Does it all pool somewhere? Is this effervescent source seemingly dormant only because of its veneer of invisibility?
No, it is all just absorbed and entrapped into the coarse and amnesic fabric of time.
Every word uttered, and sighed, from you to eternity. The papers shuffled, the papers scrunched. Bodies moving together with sanguine vivacity. Only to be torn apart as fodder for the endless procession of worms.
As the tides ebb, and the crescent moon smiles, then swells, then reverses.
-All these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain
Everything passes, everything perishes, everything palls
I will do my best to love you, and to make everyone’s flight as comfortable as possible. An iota at a time the second hand has landed.
“Full fathom five thy father lies.”
And although every breath expires I can repose trust on my intentions that another will follow. To your destination in particular.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
WHHHATTTSSS THISSSS???
Your contorted nervousness.
It is your flesh that I wear
Your expendable eyes. I will kiss them closed.
Your skinless body,
I chiselled my name into your marbled skin on top of your silly little ticker.
I peeled away all of your skin from the edges of my name and left you grotesque.
I had rendered you vulnerable, I tore away at your solidity and ground you to dust.
My vicious breath yielded you to the gust that dispersed you away, to be lost amongst the meaningless everything.
With eyes kissed closed and ears doomed to an endless rhapdory of whispers.
Your skinless self writhed and contorted at the thought of my every touch.
Your conquered totality exposed to the perceptions I had forced upon you.
Your every thought was of the beauty of your capture and the hatred that you were the one ensnared
rapture.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Archaic Araneae
But to crumble their homes,
To kick at the foundation pillars,
And to have it all collapse into itself,
The walls to close in upon the cobwebs,
And to make their laces crumple up.
Each finger fans in and
If I leave my hand still just for long enough
A spider might come.
And each will compress and refract,
An undulating tremble,
Together then apart,
The sticky lace,
Woven around,
As it matrix scrambles for comfort,
Up my arm and to hide in the crease of my elbow.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
inspired by moo, dedicated to all
i am an honoured one when i see where they fall.
my thoughts of you clamp the corners of my mouth.
gold ribbons of paper, the floating ink that carries them,
lift my perpetually downward-curled obliques to make me a smile.
and as my mouth opens wide and my heavy lidded eyes begin to liquify,
a twinkled tear glitters down my face.
my love for you, all of you, so strong, i dont think i can handle it.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
post prickly-backed anxiety
Friday, April 23, 2010
tears stupefied.
but your sermon, that sermon, did nothing to comfort me. this you speak, about an afterlife? a god? it seems that you forgot to mention the desceased, for favour of focusing on the non-existent.
nothing compares to chhuuu, oh nasty head hair
Those days hunched over my desk, or on the edge of the bathtub, scissors in hand, hands clammy from the concentration of attention, eyes crossed, as I sought the schisms of each hair end.
I kept a specimen. I shut it in a jar. To the untrained observer, that is, everyone, bar you and I, dear reader, it seems to be a hollow jar. Lid screwed on tight in a bout of delusion. But you and I, now know, in this jar, therein lies perhaps the mothership of all ends split. The weakest, the most brittle, the stunning, the far more impressive than the ends that separate threefold. This starved filament of keratin bore a fringe of its own.
I remember when I first singled it out. It is the ends I judiciously snip off, but here, no end to be had. My eyes couldn’t cross enough, by neck wouldn’t twist enough, to see this hair in its entirety. In a radical act, my fingers gently traced it to its root, and form that beginning, I cut it off. To find with wide eyed amazement, the fringing ran all through its length.
High time to get a haircut, yes. I could have gone to just cuts, saved myself a much needed $30. I recalled ‘just cuts’ been the high school nickname of a brooding dark boy with an odd flop of hair.
I’ve wanted to change a part of my body dramatically for a long time. Perhaps a lip piercing, a few extra dress sizes? My friend suggested a tattoo; ‘qualms’ across my chest in a gothic script. A haircut was the most conservative option.
My guilt at choosing an expensive hairdresser was allayed, as I told him to cut my hair very short. My reasoning was that this would mean a greater length of time before my hairs grew into old age, I save money.
He asked me how I was. I replied that I had been hypnotised today. He replied, his conservative mode of conversation diametrically opposed to my radical whim to get all my hair chopped off, “that’s good”. His task at hand must have been all consuming. So I buried my thoughts into the Ok magazine.
A wet curl plopped upon Jennifer Aniston’s body. I looked up to the mirror and was startled to see I had no hair.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
left behind
I am disgusted with the world, with how people just die.
And so I thought of him as a young boy, writing down his name. I just kept writing his name down. That old man, not unlike my own grand father.
I had received a text message from my friend, my phone had buzzed with sanguine vivacity, just as the door had been closed, just as my mother had left the room, she had told me.
That reconciliation of life and death.
The chirpy message from a friend wanting to go out. Myself at my desk, surrounded by papers, all day wishing the day would pass; the study to end.
The thought of the demise of all around me. Of my own. Sitting here, the knowledge of the fun to had, of the immediate gratification of a night out with friends. Then of slow tedium, that lugubrious plodding through the aisles of study, towards a boring albeit more sustainable gratification.
The knowledge that what ever was chosen, what ever was done, what ever said, whatever sought, would end.
There was Guiseppe. A quiet man. A kind man. I had only known him in his old age, from my birth till my twentieth year. He was always old. I remember him as old. But not as dying. I hadn’t that misfortune of seeing him in his final stages of decreptitude. I had heard he had been placed in palliative care. That vulgar apparatus of death.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
go shop.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Air Pressure
Monday, March 29, 2010
All's well, end game.
sealed with a moist expectant tongue.
She had scabbed her knee,
Fallen while running to get to the post box
before the 5pm closing mail run.
And by her final application of a band aid,
There was I,
At which the sight,
The weeping wounded.
I, her shrapnel strewn valentine.
The moaning crows.
The blind worms, poking about.
Out mine eyes.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Out, out, brief candle.
My euphoria was ill founded.
As the smell of bitter black coffee
Permeated the city air,
I passed the concrete bed….
So I sit on this train,
Alone with the strangers to share my experience
The drivers voice resounds
Across the carriage
windows with such a verbose intensity,
That it renders me
Thoughtless, all I can do is laugh
As he heralds central station as the
glorious next stop.
He thanks me with such smart arse gusto for
choosing city rail.
When recomposed
From my convulsions of laughter
I look to the others
for recognition
that the pleasure of the moment was mutual.
Their dour faces collapse my helium balloon,
And as I come crashing down
I remember earlier passing the concrete
bed of the dead man.
Clyde Livingstone.
Those that shared the same endless bed as him,
(In the place where the pigeons strop and the workers fret,
in their shoulder padded suits, heeled boots
where their ties loosen by night
as they superficially strengthen their bonds)
had placed a little flame in the inner most corner of
his resting spot
on red cardboard they wrote of how he touched their lives
and how they would remember him.
These forgotten people
not forgetting the dead man.
All the while the workers pass,
As they unnoticed,
tended to the brief candle.
Which flickered constantly to the ignorant hum of the
whoosh of the suited briefcase.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Acuity
Black and white photographs upset me.
When I see one I think, that most likely,
the person depicted in light and shadow is now dissolved and diffused under ground.
Where no luminosity can penetrate to make something obscure.
Where the omnipresent darkness isn’t created by shadows cast, rather, it just is.
The photos now, mass produced and easily dispensable
encapsulate a hyper realistic construction of
our coloured forgings of an otherwise mellowed world.
Pictures seem to signify permanence.
In a certain frame nothing bar our garments worn plots our place in time.
The lurid hues saturate us with immortality.
Outdated now is that orange digital date in the corner.
It seems the photos have captured an eternal present.
Though this is far from the truth.
The pixels of time can exist only on a perpetually aging paper.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
daydream in sepia
even as the sky doused him with a morass of sleet so malignant it made his young bones groan, charles would ascend to another place. he'd imagine his sweetheart, below that very same sky. he thought of her thinking of him, writing him the many letters that he knew she had written.
(they had just gotten lost in this glorious war machine. charlie knew undoubtedly she always wrote to him. he wrote to her every day. maybe she didnt get his letters. charlie couldnt handle this thought. and so charlie write to her, in the toilet, as he was supposed to be firing his gun with aim, at every second he could spare. his bundle for the postman was always the biggest, and the most hilariously unnessecary).
he didn't know that she had taken up house with his big brother.
he didn't know that she couldnt bring herself to open his letters (not out of guilt, she just couldn't bear reading a simpletons declarations of abandonment to love).
he didn't know that his job filling shelves at the corner store would not be reserved for him upon his triumphant return home.
all he knew was his love. his silly, grand, big, endless, wasted love.
one morning the sky was blue. as the signal resounded for a call to arms, charlie realised that the sky was never blue. perhaps this meant the war had moved elsewhere. and so charlies thoughts shifted back barely a millimetre onto his sweetheart. there she was under that same sky, being ravished by a metallic downpour.
his sweet simple heart, feeble to everything bar love, couldn't bear thinking of its custodians debasement. and so with the thought to annihilate all thoughts charlie ran out into no mans land. clearing the barbed wire with such virtuousity that he had galloped almost clear across the waste.
the snow had long buried young charlie by that third year. and that uniformed photograph had fallen long before between the cracks. luckily for charlie he hadn't the faculty to realise it had disappeard the very moment it had been taken.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
kmart lunchroom circa mid 09
Seriously why am I so obsessed? If I had you I’d be able to write the most beautiful things. I’d pluck words from your actions, those actions performed in your beauty. They’d trickle over the most charred of pages. And seep into the most iron of hearts. What are you doing now?
If only you were wondering what I am doing now. Well here it is. The Kmart fecking lunch room.
The queer roly poly Indian man in the Hawaiian shirt and the pigs nose earrings. This pretty girl just walked in and the man I was about to write of, he looked at her. I won’t write of this man now. He seemed defined by her presence. The graceful asian lady and the fat westie, listening to cliff richard on her iPod, oldies have iPods now. There’s a paperback of the goblet of fire unread by her side. Oh my arch nemesis gina maccarone walked in, patro – no, matronising nonna.
So the electricity may be poring out the walls. The honeycombed lights buzzing their dull glow. The toaster could spring with joy. The taps could run with a smoky opaque cylinder of water. Fungus thriving upon the ceiling.
This lunch room is vulgar. And I’ll attribute this perception to not having you. I’d like a new job.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
guilt
And as i repulsively shuffle off this mortal coil,
(how did Shakespeare know about dna?)
The vile torments i bestowed upon my small world,
Cling to me like ravenous parasites.
II
And as the gentle breath,
of all who i have loved,
(so beautiful when quick
with life) suspends me gently over
the writhing pit of my crimes,
i take out my pearly scissors,
and i cut their benevolent web
hospital
A caustic glance,
It drizzles,
Fails to singe.
An unplugged pond,
And gritty smoke,
Permeates until the interior.
Severed cores,
Actual bones,
Marrowed geese,
Silly sneeze.
There were:
Bound papers,
Violent staplers,
Clockwork time.
Sifts through my lashes:
Living aids,
Plastic props,
Concrete slabs,
(Beds for bones).
In weakened flesh.
It is all a frozen expectation,
Helpless and snarred by
Malignant tides.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Wake
Standing at that doorway,
Several fleeting impressions gather at her feet:
The first was of a tooth and a piece of string
The second a beige boudoir shrouded in hairspray
She trampled over the first as its childish notions were shameful
She recalled hiding behind the doorframe and peering fearfully into the second.
But, not today and yesterday, and never again.
In the suit of black she and the rest were wearing.
That perpetual veil of hairspray had been lifted long before.
(once Roses husband had gone Rose had let herself go too)
And now she could enter those lurid pallid private quarters as often she liked.
She bounded out into the sun and ran to her third,
the grapes draped on the trellis in the damp darkened courtyard.
Pausing still for a childs minute, eager to be as interested in it as the two old men were.
(they were so old then, but now in their old age, she realises their youth then)
With intrigue unattainable she skipped to the next;
The whirring of the laundry, the engorged stillness of the outhouse,
Far too domestic.
And so, to the next,
back inside to that darkened room,
the one placed aside for the alien children as herself
with the dusty toys kept kindly
the toys she had tampered with many times to many
it was the locked room in the doorways view that beckoned.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
at the patrick watson concert
The tears dripped.
slowly. so. slowly.
That the icy breaths,
of those assembled
froze them in time.
They ludicrously bounced,
before hitting the floor.
Hardly due for a sweet reprise
they were scattered about
the concert hall,
and were pressed unknowingly
by those of all ears.
Her crystalline infection
was tantalising.
I could not help but yield.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
wait i'll get back to this, seinfeld is on.
... and the world awaits with bated breath for her next blog...
back to this i come, the seinfeld episode that is on is one i watched earlier today.
i luke-warmedly hold the opinion that dabblings in self expression are somewhat self indulgent, that they are an especially western notion, where the individual seeks to assert themselves, to self actualize and stake claim to their own uniqueness.
i have considered art that doesn't veer towards social critique as somewhat selfish; a reflection of the surplus of time ones easy lifestyle affords them.
to be placed in the realm of the other:
but, while reading the blog of a friend of mine, i couldn't help but feel a sort of warmth. one of those weird existential sort of feelings when you re-realise (just as though it is the first time) you're not the only individual. and so, my notion of blogs as self indulgent was trampled. her blog served to de-centre me, and remind me, as i constantly seem to forget, of the infinity encapsulated within and around my finite existence.
the world in a grain of sand, the world in a full stop.
when reading my friends blog i had the wonderful experience of viewing someone i knew primarly through oral communication through a different lens. and to check this feeling didn't exist because the writer was a close friend of mine, i read other blogs, and still there was the same weird warm feeling i mentioned earlier, though i concede, not as strong.
so, as for you, dear reader, do i assume a conversational tone with you? hide behind my anonymity and bask in the brilliantly illusory power it grants me? what service is it i offer here? in the light of a previous statment, shall i get on my shabby moral high horse and dish out tasty tales of injustice?
perhaps the blog is a place of self indulgence. and perhaps, that is not as bad a thing as i thought.
hopefully the silly little vignettes into my silly little mind will place a smile upon your face.
and here i shall place a quote from some intimidating intellectual to lend some prestige to this place
"a life unexamined is not worth living" -Socrates/Plato