reading proust and borges

your family has a frailty
about it that endears
it to all the girls who've thrown
their heads under the celestial
doona cover when your mother sobs
or your brother's anger rears up
like a cornered Huntsman -

the comparisons your father makes
between he and a young Sylvester Stallone
puts smiles on faces that subcultures coat
with taciturn dust - waxy apple skin
legs stuck to your thigh by sweat
at the knee pit start to pulse to the rhythm
of your mother's songs about your overweight
cat, Bee-Gees songs with 'Petey Petey Petey'
in lieu of the regular lyrics -

perfect dysfunction would, at least, have made
Borges bow his stately head for periodic
infinity - for you though, you for whom the pinwheels
of chance spun hardest between May 1988
and February 1989, they are simply your family,
they are of you - and when a multitude of souls
embodies a single being it is nothing
if not deified - you are a God and I worship accordingly.


...


she is crying fitfully, a baby who has yet to learn 
how to cry and breathe conterminously
but old enough to suffer incurable anxiety - why can't 
those maladies be resolved in reverse order?


why can't babies, as from the tit, 
be weaned from their manic depression and social phobias,
and the fear that life is lived
always on the cusp of tragedy?
then Lyotard wouldn't ache to be a child again - 


to know how to celebrate is to have
mastered mourning, and in the faces and objects
and areas which monster us with their beauty
there also dwells the monstrous - 


but  look at her, Panda-eyed,
tears blotting each eyelash 
like the bulb of the root in each pore, weeping
over nothing when everywhere
there are causes for joy!


I watch her and, as never before,
think that we are designed to suffer,
that the Epicurean opposites are
chemical inducements, that our inscrutable
purpose is really none too clear -
only problem is, if suffering is inborn,
why aren't there more babies on Prosac?

...


the fervour some need to write
is closer to a frezy - but Fyodor
Dostoyevski is more buck wild than the girl
I like who blusters her notepad around
the room, as though to consecrate
the emotional eddies on the page,
whose scornful hisses ward
off my feeble attempts to speak to her -
I am dating a prettier,
less talented, female Underground Man.


...


everything I have ever wanted to express
already resides in two places:
the Library of Babel and a book
called In Search of Lost Time -

subsequently my will to express it
has been nullified, effaced by the urge
to read it in a totality that I
would probably never have realised  -

what effect does that have on my worth
as an artist?
well, the Library's books never were furnished
with authors, but if we hold to the logic it seems
that they too should be infinite in number
and variance -

therefore, not only have I written all
that I'll ever write already,
I also wrote In Search of Lost Time
and every other book there was, or will be.
so did you.

beginning of another story about spiders

It’s just that I already feel like I need to start making sense of the decisions I made, put them into a logical sequence instead of the impulses, pell mell and violent as orgasms, they were when I made them. Because in all my short life I’ve never felt regret like this. I’ve never tried to breathe but couldn’t, because of how sick I feel at the idea of sustaining my own life. I’ve never heard the voice of the storyteller in my head speaking in so many discordant accents, tones, volumes. I’m half-cracked and I know I am and it’s all because last month I set a spider on fire.

A Huntsman. It was bigger than average, the size you can make into a monster with an outstretched hand and not feel like a liar. It scuttled across my bed. I was reading A Discovery of Strangers at the time and a John Serrie album, one of his exquisite collaborations with Gary Stroudos, was murmuring in the background. I liked to listen to Serrie while I read; the sparseness of his arrangements seemed incommensurate with the speed at which I absorbed each page and had the subsequent effect of both slowing down and supercharging time, as if I were surfing a great wave as well as watching it from the beach, building miles and miles offshore. My white blinds were drawn, but backlit brightly enough to know it was still the afternoon. Now and then I could hear Kiera, my housemate, and her boyfriend Daniel making food, which usually made me hungry and lonely because Daniel was a chef and I was in love with Kiera but the window of opportunity had been steamed over by our living arrangements and the fact that she didn’t love me back. Something interesting is that our house was a double-storey but the kitchen was the only room upstairs.

 The sight of the spider almost gave me a heart attack. In that moment I was suddenly reminded of the time when I was a kid that I had gone for a swim and taken a bunched up towel off our table tennis table to dry myself and then felt something in my hair, felt the tickle of it coming down my front, saw it on my chest in the reflection of the backdoor, woke in the night at the slightest odd sensation for weeks afterwards. It was a memory I had forgotten and at the shock of it I sprang up. I managed eventually to track the spider to behind the bed-head, which I had covered in cutout pages of Hesse’s Siddhartha. The spider was sitting as motionless as if it had never moved in its life. Its legs were curled up, like those of a dead crab. Its body – or sac, or whatever you call it – looked like a bulb of nutmeg and the thought of putting it in a nutcracker made me grit my teeth. As calmly as possible I pulled the rest of the bed away from the bed-head, revealing a sliver of dusty floorboards, a pen and a couple of odd socks. Now the spider had nowhere to go.

One of the dusty socks was thick, an Explorer I think they call them, and I put it over my hand like a puppet of death. The dust made me want to cough but I held it down. My dad had always used a jam jar and a paper towel to trap spiders, or cockroaches for that matter, putting them out in the yard or, to make my sister and I laugh, over our neighbour’s fence, but I was panicked didn’t have any empty jars or paper towels. All I had – or thought I had – was a sock. For a split second though I took my eyes off the spider and looked around, maybe to see if anyone was watching. It was then that I noticed the cigarette lighter on my windowsill, sitting in the bonsai pot.  I used it to light candles for my incense burner. There was also a can of shoe waterproofer I had happened to be using that morning in preparation for the trip I was making to Mount Bogong.

loaded smells: mulch

garden mulch is a smell on

which I drank myself

into adulthood –

and when I’m old and the

only ellipsis left

is that of the great perhaps it

will blow towards me in

a squall of memory, the scent

of the saturday trips

to the warrandyte nursery,

the fig tarts we ate there,

the christmas trees we

had chopped down and loaded,

the mulch hillocks

I could have ran up and down forever –

whole decades will have vanished

by then – fettered as I am by this

nembutal imperative – fettered

but fearless – I can watch

the umbrella of a  water fountain crown

and land like the sound of babies

treading water, float tranquilly down to

the cavernous pits of my remembrance –

I can like it there. So when the dump truck

bucks a mulch mound into the centre

of royal park, I imbibe it as if I’m about

to be submerged, knowing

I’ve a few more gulps of that woody elixir

left before my long hair turns white.