smells like hsc english. smells like you. smells like the metallic dust of a war medal.

I don’t know how it can be achieved. A permanent residency here. Where is the value located?

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.

WHHHATTTSSS THISSSS???

I disregard your desired smile, you want it to lay upon your lips with a liquid heaviness.

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.

Archaic Araneae

They were under the brittle stone tabs by now.
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.

inspired by moo, dedicated to all

your silky steps in beauty, the words as they drip from your minds mouth.
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.

post prickly-backed anxiety

it's so scary walking home post-midnight. but when i reach the homestead i have this smug smirk on my face. sucked in murderer, my contorted lips seem to say, youve been waiting in the wrong shadow of the wrong alleyway.

tears stupefied.

father, youre cute and all, what with your greying hair and sunspots, the stockmans hat you wore as the coffin lurched into the void.
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

With ends split for here to eternity, and with a time consuming inability to trimming the perpetually splintering ends, it was about time I got a haircut.

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.