Hard Sell

sure, there are flaws

in the market system.

but in a pastoral utopia,

could you cure famine

just by moisturising?

Oh Buoy

moments of civilisation
peek out of the sand

and mental maps amend
for makeshift paths of
flattened grass

take note of
patterned shell arrangements,
weathered glass,

the coals of teenage experience
and picnic relics:

paper plates and
olive pips
schnitzeled
in mammal ancestors

six hundred million

generations past.

a wave peeks back
and curls into the shore
like a century,
pushing on the corners
of everything -

oh buoy,
it’s effortless.

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lethargy


i need to work more, of course
and make it to at least outside the head.
but it’s hard to ignore thoughts about

what it’s all for, especially when

what’s par for the course
is pretty fast for the horse
and the praise always only comes after the scores.

one things is for sure,
looking at a scale of things deduced to be important;
if you’re going to

write a poem about this
you should at least be remembering to
take your supplements.

(this is how i was feeling a while ago, i am doing lots of things now actually)

Here is a poem about magic.

We do a lotta cool shit.

Did you know that most of my friends could tell you what “mana” is?

It is because they are amazing.

wow i just tried to write a normal blog post and i am not capable of it anymore. the moral of the story is that things are really great right now, today was outstanding.

Grove expectations was last night, i read this.

Gums.

In this dream I pull out my own gums only to realise that they’ve already absorbed the drugs and are now infecting everything in contact. I squeeze my mouth tightly in my hand, and I feel my fingers throb with the pressure.

In this dream I squeeze harder, trying to crush it, until I hear a feedback screeching and it occurrs to me that this fist of compressed touch centres was never meant to be. Things were meant to be more difficult, probably. For example, this, my gum-crushing grip was once for tree-climbing while running from lions.

But then again, Dawkins taught me that the basic impulse of life as we know it is to seek and maintain stability. So i don’t know how I ever expected to not be on the couch watching 30 Rock.

In this dream it is only when I discover that my gradual gumless vegetation will result in some grave indecency that action occurs. Something like where my idle brain is hijacked and used to power smartphones or mastermind terrorist attacks, provokes me to buy one of those old nokias on ebay for a dollar, and use it to exercise justice, for instance taking down the government, and the head of the government is Angelina Jolie.

In this dream I compress my gums into the ebayed nokia coffin, which contains the screeching, and i use it to interrupt the signal for the wireless stunt equipment being used by the government agents. Angelina Jolie can’t get these fucking robotic action arms to settle down, and eventually they tear the fabric of the dream apart.

In the end of this dream my nokia explodes and my drug gums absorb everything, before finally filming over. Overdue feelings of winter tremble a little on the crust, but everything inside is stable.

for the record.

your head lowered, eyes looking up.
it feels like they see everything and
sometimes I am
suspicious that you are otherworldly.
just in case:
i would love for you to have cool powers,
we would not have to break up.

getting old

old like feature walls will be
old like wallpaper,
brown houses
and caves.
old like Boney M will be
old like Cary Grant,
jesters
and Saul of Tarsus.
old like before Bond defeated terrorism
with an Ericson K800 will be
old like the excitement of home printing
and gyroscopes.
old like Pokemon Red will be
old like Pacman,
Mouse Trap
and Tutankhamen parcheesi.
old like H1N1 will be
old like H5N1,
asbestosis
and locusts.
old like my parents will be
old like my grandparents,
their grandparents,
and theirs
when the family rocket comes out
when China takes over,
super volcanoes erupt
and people live forever.

Condensation

There are people who know about meaning.
Their optimism breathes with belief,
revealing all the pictures I drew as a kid
on the glass in the back seat;
those marks that framed the
static-y, speed-fractured outside scene.
I knew back then how to deal with blankness.
Before it thickened and
my eyes blurred out the foreground.
Before I gave in to gazing at miles

of wasteland, dried rivers and rusted machines.
Before I felt the pressing down of a white sky

as it slowly hammocks with rain.

But there are people who know better

than to be absorbed by this

heavy nothing.

A primary school aged child could tell you,

this is condensation.

You have to draw something into it.

.... i think this is the most obtuse my writing has ever been. maybe it makes some sense? i hope so.

news:

i went to grove tonight. it was wonderful.

i am drawing all sorts of things right now.

Signal

I felt the morse code
of a
jittering love
on my fingertip;
messages urgent,
with spikes in the reading.
When my hands are still,
moored warships
pulse a distant
paroxysmal sad,

but

this feint needle can bear no weight
on the scales
of fibre-optic
you.

Postmodern Romance

I was wasted for
the month we met.
Due to minor
brain damage,
my memory of you
is like a cloze passage.
You could have said
almost anything.
In my postmodern romance,
I prefer to believe
it was sexy.

so i have an update. this is shambly and ridiculous, but comes close to my thoughts recently somehow. perhaps because of the shambliness.

The single context model

All too often, I find myself distracted by minor existential traumas from things that can be broadly referred to as “what matters”. For instance,

revolutions,

shale gas drilling,

photosynthesis.

These concerns fight mundane daily stresses for my priority of thought, messily like in a reality TV elimination, and often they win the consolation X-box. It’s difficult to even begin justifying my evaluations of worth for these various things, so my solution is now to think about dinosaurs instead of any of that other stuff. To think about dinosaurs, for instance,

giving each other library fines,

trading tempeh recipes

and blowing each other up with long-range missiles.

I remember as a child going to a nature reserve where you could see fossilized dinosaur footprints still in the earth. I was convinced it was a hoax. How could the soil we kick up be so old when old people already seem so old? How could the earth have belonged to these creatures that a) basically sound like dragons (which are not real), and b) are the stuff of Spielberg franchise?

The idea of all of this however, nostalgic child-naivety aside, is to produce a context. It seems to me that there are far too many contexts, which is where problems with evaluating importance occur. So, to make things easy, I propose only one context: that all things are of more OR less significance than the impossible fact that dinosaurs walked around for millions of years, in a The-Time-Machine-remake (2002) kind of way, in your house. That is, where your house is now. Generally, in the context of dinosaurs, whether you marinate your tempeh before cooking it, for instance, hardly matters at all. I find that imagining dinosaurs enacting these valuations is an easy method for realising that basically nothing especially matters.

Test the model yourself. Imagine:

Dinosaurs putting things into context.

Dinosaurs being meta about putting things into context.

Dinosaurs trying to be humorous about their meta-ness, because they feel that the self-reflexive thing is old hat.

Dinosaurs wearing old hats.

You might now have some questions, which can fortunately be addressed through a further demonstration of the model:

Dinosaurs debating specific flaws in the model.

Dinosaurs debating circular reasoning.

You are welcome to be more elaborate in your imagination of these scenarios. You can imagine a small group of stiff-collared creatures at a conference, banging their claws on the hard desks and screeching “reductio!”. You can imagine that, meanwhile, those dinosaurs that have embraced the logic of the single context sit variously in positions of comfort in places of beauty, texting their sweethearts about what a lovely day it is and perhaps they could drive to the beach together in the evening. These creatures drive for hours to get to the very nicest beach, because in the context of themselves the travel-time is negligible. They set up a picnic blanket and gaze up into the night sky, because in the context of themselves the moon and the stars are marvelously important. They relax, make out, watch the stars become brighter, and are relieved that the single context has provided a meaning for them that is far beyond their control.

Things only then become problematic for this placid couple when you begin to imagine

dinosaurs seeing an asteroid come hurtling toward them, but luckily

dinosaurs having control over the earth’s physical processes! or, something like arcade game style dodgem tactics! but somehow

dinosaurs being unable to conceive of the world outliving them by hundreds of millions of years, and

dinosaurs preferring to do nothing.

And perhaps now you can see the real value in the single context model, for all of a sudden none of these things that you imagine matter at all.

... huh.

astronomical to web show details 1 May (2 days ago) you hacked my email to spam my entire contact list about your products. don't do it again. sincerely, bronwyn watkins (astronomical@gmail.com) 3g-ipad2.com to me

show details 20:21 (5 hours ago)

Dear friend,

It was wrong for us to use your email to advertise our products,but in order to make our buyers to understand our products better,and buy products at more reasonable prices,I think that it's well worth.We do not think it's correct if you evaluate us as your mean!

Hope you can understand.

It’s Clover between us: Imaginary interactions with Clover Moore

Or: L’espirit de l’escalier

Based on a true story.

Clover Moore came to my door. She gave me a pamphlet about her vision for the future of Sydney, wore a badge with her own name on it and was shorter in person than I expected. My fingers were covered in olive oil because I was cooking a nonspecific pasta sauce, or I would have certainly shaken her hand. She was with an entourage of (if I remember correctly) at least four other Clover-badged campaign assistants; one to knock on doors and three to presumably stop people like me from making out with Clover herself, who also stood at the safe distance of a metre from the front step. People remind me that she is married. I remind them that I have no shame when it comes to gay-seeming local politicians who prioritise environmentally sound transport options; that is a moral exception (sexception) that even my girlfriend understands. If the campaign entourage were absent, like if Clover had sent them to have an ice cream break while she doorknocked just a couple of houses herself, you know, because we can all imagine her pulling something pretty neat like that, she would have been a lot closer to my face (a metre closer) as I wished her good luck and told her that my housemates would be very jealous of the visit.

“Oh, so you’re the only one home?” she might have responded.

“Yes actually, but what about you? I would have expected for you to have a few people along, in respect of your considerable local celebrity.” In real life, managing to come out with this phrasing off the cuff and in despite of sincere nervousness would cause me to feel very impressive.

“You flatter me. Although, actually, I do have some people with me. They’re eating ice cream at the moment, but I am vegan,” she would add, if she were, “and I don’t so much care for sorbet, so I am alone for the next twenty minutes.”

“No way, I am also vegan!”

“Wow, does that mean you also ride a bicycle?”

“We call them bikes, but yes I do – this is my bike right here,” I would say, gesturing to the slick looking yellow road bike in the hallway, or perhaps it would be a chrome 80s BMX.

“Oh, that looks like a smooth ride,” or “is that vintage?” she would say, depending.

“I just finished fixing it up. You’re welcome to come in and have a closer look – wait, what am I saying. I’m sure you’ve still got a lot of doors to knock on, I should let you get going...”

“Well yes,” she would say, with some hesitation, “yes, I suppose.”

“Unless I could offer you a cup of tea?”

“Well, why not? Thankyou, I do like to stay in touch with the residents, after all.”

“Great! Please, come in. I’ll put on the kettle.”

Clover and I would listen to Jethro Tull on vinyl. She would comment on the surprisingly delicate flavour of the chamomile tea we were sipping, I would inform her that I had added a few extra ingredients, grown in styrofoam containers out the back, and we would talk about creative strategies for sustainable living in small-scale domestic urban environments. We might discuss the critical need to ensure that such concerns are dealt with responsibly in the political sphere, and find ourselves lightheartedly saying the words “think locally” at the same time. We would laugh, our eyes would meet, and, for a brief moment, the two of us would gaze into each other, communicating a silent longing. Clover would place her teacup down on the coffee table and look away.

“Clover. If you don’t mind my saying so, I’ve thought about all of this happening before. The circumstantial meeting, the tea, the Jethro Tull, even. I think of you often, in fact, and not only because pictures of your face currently flank all major roads in Ultimo. There could be something here – I know you see it,” I would entreat.

“You sweet thing,” she would begin slowly, her eyes still fixed on the coffee table. “Of course I see it – but I know you’ve only got a crush on me because I’m gay-seeming and I have prioritised environmental transport options. You only love me for my policies, not for the woman behind them. Besides, I’m married. And I have to think of the city. It’s coming up to an election, and if rumour got out that I was somehow involved with a digital native…”

“Oh, Clover, you’re right. That is precisely what I love about you; your dedication to this fine town. You must know that I understand. Although, we do have a few more minutes before your associates will start to wonder where you are – perhaps we could just sit here on the couch together and watch the video clip for Telephone?”

“I think I would like that. I think I would like that very much.”

A cockroach in your corduroys is horrifying. There is an obvious initial feeling of revulsion, coupled with and augmented by the distressing tactile grossness of insect spasm vs. leg flesh. After you have raced into your bedroom and stripped, you decide that from now on it has to be skin tight pants forever - which is sad, particularly if you like to have pockets that are big enough to fit an entire bottle of wine. More problematically, you begin to think about yourself as a terrain, and about your nutritional value relative to the backyard compost, and finally about how this is all wrong; neither the compost nor your corduroys were ever meant for this. The compost heap is meant to convert food waste into plant food which is eventually more food for humans. For humans only! Corduroy is meant to be a durable denim alternative of fluctuating trendiness. Cockroaches were nowhere in the pamphlet.

This distressing contemplation of your body as a potential adventure zone for something that shits in the sink plagues you for hours, and makes it hard to go to sleep. You decide to play guitar for a while to unwind, but in the backyard where you normally enjoy the night-time rock-outs are the compost and the cockroaches. You are driven to the front stoop so you can smoke at the same time as you stroke the strings and try to find mournful chords but for some stupid fucking reason your neighbor has a life of his own and that life has intersected with yours at the point at which he wants to go to sleep because it’s actually 1:30am. You finish your cigarette and try reading a Wikipedia article to get some perspective. You discover that cockroaches have been on earth since the Carboniferous period, up to around 300 million years ago. This basically blows your mind. You feel no more or less important than everything in the history of life ever, which has all been a terrain of sorts, and has all been crawled all over. You forgive the cockroach, and, when you do finally sleep, you dream a nice dream about being a corduroy mountain that can walk around.

This Heat

It’s tragic, that moment when you realise that a frozen tomato is not the rush of nutritious refreshment you were hoping for, but, rather, pretty fucking weird. Sasha is undergoing such a realisation, the hardened cells of its constitution fracturing around his gums, the skin sticking to the sides of his mouth like a terrible kiss. The freezer is still open, revealing the other options he could have chosen. This was the new thing this summer; frozen everything, relying on chilled pabulum to moderate the thermostat in a house with no air-conditioning. “We’re saving the planet,” was the optimistic catch-cry; an attempt to mitigate the sweltering misery of forty degree days and also of certain depressing environmental realities. Sasha swallows, grimaces, feels disappointed but then suddenly very aware of his own entitlement, and forces himself to remember that it took millions of years of evolution and the honing of agrarian practice to produce this consistently under-appreciated sustainer of life, not to mention $4.99/kg at Woolworths. He then thinks about the entire experience as though it were an unobserved art installation – he has decided that basically everything is, if you think about it in the right way – and both the sensation of the tomato and the inflated market price seem quite reasonable.

“This heat,” his housemate announces gravely, descending the stairs in a singlet and underwear, pulling the kitchen window all the way open. Sasha shuts the freezer. He has had his head half inside it for a few minutes, justifying it as part of the installation, with mental reference to a recent internet meme. “Are you trying to air condition your face, Sash?”

“No, we are saving the planet. Hey, I don’t think there’s a breeze, that window does nothing.”

“We could try watching Titanic,” she says, only half ironically.

“1912, what a world. No internet, no gay rights. You should try a franana, Bell, they’re like ice cream, it’s fucked.”

“No goatsee, no global warming. I already had a frectarine this morning.”

“Maybe. We could download it.”

They sit on the couch for twenty minutes discussing further temperature mediating options such as going to a museum or a swimming pool, but decide each time that the initial effort of conforming to a socially acceptable level of non-nakedness and catching a bus somewhere would defeat any foreseeable future comfort-gain. They also decide that Titanic is a pretty lame movie and way too long. Sasha googles other iceberg related films while Bell begins to ponder their inaction with respect to a more general lethargy. Within the next few weeks my brain will have vegetated to the point where little circular slices of it can be used for tightening my tired eyes, she thinks to herself, and decides this is something she can probably write on her blog. She wonders what it would actually take for her to do anything right now, and what that thing is anyway that makes her do anything, ever. The thing that somehow manages to carry her to University, 21^st parties and the café on the corner rather than the café down the street. Because of the job prospects, because of the necessity of others, because of the siphon, of course. She comes to the familiar conclusion that things happen when they happen because they do, and that if you think about it in the right way then it’s not actually as tautological as it sounds.

Sasha decides they should watch The Day After Tomorrow because it’s escapist and neither of them have seen it, and Bell agrees because Jake Gyllenhaal is “a babe”. As they watch, Sasha tries to think about global environmental disaster as though it is an unobserved art installation, to moderate success. Bell rationalises that total ecological collapse must also happen, because it does, in the same way as everything else. She sighs like you sigh at the news; exhausted. They both hold frozen bananas against their heads.

photos

on my camera that i've only just sorted through.

late resolution: take more photos.

night and day

(frivolous alternative: Gay Divorce)

in the day
i take the place of the shadows
i became.
in the day
i take the place of the things
we couldn't name,
in the day
my body takes the space we kept
last night, when

it was unclear there were forms -
when it was unclear there were shapes
or norms, states or laws
at any time,

ever.
in that darkness

like before anything, we didn't have decisions. only

impulses,

that something must exist

to make my heart

feel

like

this, like it’s there

(you know,

there),

to make me apprehend this distance between

where eyes and the outside swap,
in which you appeared and
were barely real and
my heart wouldn’t stop –
maybe a bodily excuse for why
i could not.
but
in the day i can discern
the outline of

your arm on

my arm like
chaos to horizon,
as our eyes open on the bodies that we
pressed into orison.
in the day
you take the place of the things
i couldn't name,
in the day
you take the place of the puzzle and
the skein,
in the day
you take the place of what i
struggled to explain,
and
our figures take the place of the shadow
we became

but no really.



things are great.

imaging an ex/girl/friend.

so now that we've ended the experiment
of our trial unseparation,
we could go to a gallery?
sure sure sure sure sure...
but, will you come as yourself,
or the personified domestic prop i dream about now.
i'm making out with a cd rack
at our old house party, all our friends
are there and are thinking, what the fuck?
but, they don't realise the cd rack
is you.
so you're clear, the party was pretty hoppin' (we had snakelights);
i could've made out with a lot of other, actual people.
i guess this is love.
but in my waking clarity, you were kind of brittle,
and, while perspicacity is afforded,
maybe this new break is for the best.
now i can finally get a tan,
without your tall concert-comfort limbs
fucking up the UV.
now my lungs can regenerate, while you
smoke yours dry enough that i can
see right through and know that
in there it's still 2009 for us.
and that's how it should stay,
i guess.
so, sure sure sure, we can go look at artefacts -
rouse the past passions of others,
contemplate a still-born avant-garde
and forget that this was a lot like
our first date.
we can look at the works and not our feet this time.
we can circle the podiums
in some kind of symbolic denial
of our own buried chests,
and toast to your art-world success.