living the reality

this place stinks of loneliness...
i suction onto anything that moves
with such uncertainty my voice begins to squeak.
most actions are time fillers
and words are my distractor.
the humidity of days gone by have left me open and full...
I cling to this feeling
and carry it through the streets
like a badge of honour.
i fear the loss of control,
a place not so far behind me
as empty days become empty minutes
i make map out strategies
and plan my attack...

i wont be left forgetting...
if nothing else I'll keep my words safe in my handbag
and an umbrella handy for sudden rain or whacking thieves

Two thousand and Ren

These streets are mapped out by my freckles,
each blemish a moment in which I existed in this place.
I retrace them and join the dots
to find the image of me amongst the markings of time…

I’ve been inside most the houses here.
Doorways hold my history,
rotting or renovated there is still remnants of my growth in the wood grain…
Many pools have kissed my skin
Many trees assisted my pallor
My laughter lived around every bend.
I cycle it backwards, blindfolded…
using my nose to sniff out my ghost.

These memories that weave my nest
will remain the net to catch me…
But a bird never learns how to fly til she is thrown into the wind…
The southerly caught me and blew me away with urgency
Free falling I gasped for air
I learnt to drown and learnt to revive

A learning that sketches a world I could only once conceive of
With charcoal on a brown paper bag
Torn open for vision boarding
But to scrape out those lines into existence takes more then burnt wood

As I connect the dots
the lines become the figure
and the figures traverse the lines.
Following them across other figures until all dots are joined
and together we form a master-piece…
Across distance to desert we etch out this world simultaneously…
While webs await our return
offering us the safety we will one day seek again...

From inbetween

Dizzy from the inbetweens
in between this and now
in between the ages
in between the sunshine and the clouds…

Heat exhausted and heavy with digestion
I hypnotise my limbs into action…
Moments away things will start blowing beneath my skirt
the lips of batik designs will falter my step
as I gain momentum in new found territories…

Time closes in on me like a comforting capsule.
As my grandmothers mind drifts into the depths of her history
Mine soars ahead.
Hurtling at speeds that make my heart falter
and my hands wary…
Floundering in front of me like lost jellyfish
in pre-storm waves.
Hoping to break the fall that feels inevitable at this speed.

I imagine the scent of crushed metal
as I eject the seatbelt
and allow a false confidence to determine my fate
I take calcium daily in hope it will strengthen my bones
and brace me for the descending future
that blinds my logic and lightens my heart…

I have stepped off
but not blind folded
My periphery vision is on full alert
as I await the moment I take flight
and accept the consequence of being wrapped around a tree…

because I like the curve

We’re in it…
or it surrounds us
High in our temple of words we let the ferocity gain velocity between us!
Legs tucked beneath me in denial
I laugh away the obvious
that your eyebrow provokes between sips of cider and beer.

I always imagined these unstable cement steeples would crumble in the storm
but here we sit
in the thick of it
and perched on our altar our foundations barely sway beneath us
This time we share keeps us separated from it.
I could reach my arm into it, break the wall
enter just a particle of me into the gushing tyrant that turns our view grey
Would one hand swallowed be enough to carry me away?
So I tuck all limbs in and remain safe
safety is where I’ll keep it
…because I like the curve of our bodies around the night
without the words to destroy this

Not all edges need to be tilted to gain perspective.

Mothers Oracle

In my mothers lounge room there is a grey box that feeds her information. Her oracle informs through its coloured images that can be altered and dismissed with the press of a button. Its insistent speech etches its way through my nervous system until it finds the endings to be pressed. Tampered by a subconscious mosquito bite I start to take out my agitated attitude on the nearest bystander, my deaf, lonely mother. I can hear her habitual comfort at all exit points of her house. This eve I move out into the caravan. Solace in my own screened companion, my mac speaks to me of calming mantra’s sung by the various voices of my favourite artists, how convenient these kings are to me now as I disconnect through ‘word process’ outside, while she disconnects through Ray inside.

We bickered over the positioning of the fan in the caravan, I walk away disgruntled but grateful for her help, then reposition the fan once she’s in bed. She has aged suddenly and it shows not only in her body but the habitual way she operates her day. She tells me about the fast deterioration of her mother and swears to end her own life before she reaches that point. Her words don’t sadden me as I will never allow it to get to that point, what frightens me is that one day it may be me telling my disconnected child about her miserable decline. I ode quietly to prevent this also.

I am learning to meet her nightly rituals for if I flee she comes looking for me in search of an irregular companion. I manage to persuade mutual interests from the box at times and deal in a semi-compassionate cringe with the way it shouts it’s nightly regurgitation at us. I appreciate her chocolate diet to cope in situations like these. Since flying solo she avoids cooking regulary but I can always rely on her to have a packet of mint slice, a box of havahearts and sarsaparilla on stand by. These days she is never without soya milk upon my arrival, a gesture that bemuses and gratifies me. Each time I open her fridge to a carton of Australia’s Own Organic Malt Free Soy Milk I picture the intensive care nurses raised eyebrow as my mother 3000km’s away lecturers him on how not only do I only drink soy but I only drink organic soy. A piece of fact she filed away about me during my Om Shanti dreadlock days and has never been able to shake.

Tonight her informer is giving an insightful lecturer about elephants psyche. Her favourite animal and a documentary, seemed like a sensible compromise, mother moved daughter stimulated. Turns out elephants suffer post-traumatic stress just like humans. In areas of Africa where large numbers have been violently slain by humans due to war, poaching or early seventies conservation practices the young males and disturbed adult females take their violent revenge out on rhino’s, humans and masai’s cattle. Their actions are purposeful yet they show signs of regret. Orphaned elephants awake from nightmares screaming like the youthful victims of human war. I have a profound relisation and hope about the way this film could educate adults forced to work with traumatized youth. Having shared this field of work with my mother for years, a subject we constantly clash on I again test my philosophies. In pretentious causality (wary of the dangerous territory I enter) I mention how this theory could be easily transferred to refugee’s and Aboriginal youth in Education and juvenile justice and perhaps used as a means of understanding the behaviour of traumtised generations. Her dog interrupts me by insisting there is some unknown source she must urgently bark at outside, in letting her out my mother pretends to listen to me whilst talking to her dog, a conversation easier for her to engage in. I say “your not even listening to me” to which she doesn’t reply and I know she has probably heard none of what I said. Disgruntled I internally oath to bring this topic up in my art one day, if she hasn’t the ears someone will have the eyes for what I know. I scold myself for being such a “know-it-all-smarty-pants” and remove my self to my safety cabinet. Here with my oracle I remind myself of the patience that will make this trip more pleasurable for the both of us. After all can I expect the woman who planted the righteous, liberation seeker and passionate activist seed in me to continue on that path? Isn’t that why she laboured with me for over thirty hours, retirement through the hands of an unwanted, distant child, seems like a legible trade off.

More guided by the hands that seemed to let me wander solo, more touched by this disagreeable friendship then my pig headed heart would like to admit.
The kings sing to me “Love comes like surprised eyes in the water” she did not save me from drowning but she has listened to the story repetitively and in my double fanned incubator of peace I forgive a little more and grow a little taller.

Gearin up for 2010

Give me a pair of rubber wheels and a set of spokes to make music with
Skirting the coast of this town
where my heart lies still and my mind awakens to the smiles
the storms bring in

Give me mango soaked horizons
and evenly spaced days
Open spirited alcoholics
and the down and dirty discussions of a Friday Beer at sunrise

Here my aging bones could rest
until they rot
Buried beneath the crowded flame trees
Disintegrating amongst the plump worms and mating frogs

There I will lie in contented sweat
and swollen veins
Heart bursting til still
Eyes smiling til closed
Limbs sighing with relief

But til then I’ll be busy
Bustin down the doors of the city streets
Marking my stride into the pavement
I’ll find the edges of the sky
stretch up on my tip toes
and pull them grey clouds down
Trample them to a smoky haze
that nicely highlights my swinging hips
as I take that bitch of a town by the teeth
and walk her straight back to her place at the bar
Where I’ll down me a whiskey
and salute a job well down
Before I saddle up and head on back to that mango-swollen land.

What happens on the island stays on the island

We all took that sip
the cups were raised, the cheer loud
Amidst the roar were the fresh promises to ourselves
We resolve to change our wayward ways
But they fall beneath the wayside for the night
as we dance our cheer into coral sharpened dawn

I pinned your startled skin to hotel sheets
You were not the only one who had never met her before
The girl astride your resisting/insisting hips
was merely a new acquaintance of mine

But the thrill of your rabbit fear electrified my spine
and I took your reins in for a steering
Your tongue was for teasing
My breast my armor shining white lily beneath the blue moon

Here my new year begins,
taking what’s mine
I taste the lingering scent of strength
As you determine your pleasure by my power

Sugar never tasted so sweet
when drowned in the cool
of a Balinese lime juice…