apology for tina

yes – she is the sort of woman

who’d be given bunches of flowers

on inglorious occasions –

from the way the droplets slide

I can see that her brown suede boots

which come to the crown of her shins

have been carefully water-proofed –

I can see the underwear

beneath her jeans as her arse lifts

and falls and it is small, probably

expensive and bow-tied –

                                            what a falsehood to live up to,

                                            when your genitals

                                            are wrapped up like presents – 

yes – the slipstream of Chanel perfume

that spirits me on is neither

too weak nor too strong to dislike –

and like a nineties anachronism

her pony-tail begins very high on the head,

held loosely by a huge blue scrunchie

identical to the one I’d play with

in the beautiful hair of Tina at crèche –

then I lose her for she is not

bound for the Melbourne Central station

but a lingerie store nearby –
given the memory occupying me

at the moment she walks in

nausea quickly supplants desire

and then heartbreak – she is ruined!

poor little Tina will never be the same!

women and I, the old hospital

women and I –

                                !!!

all the hollow gorilla’s-

-chest beats I contrive to write of

so prophetic and full-

-souled but fail so singly to

textualise that odd pairing

or maul the whole body

of significance with cowardly

epigraphs and tangents

about gorillas!

even now I’m turning the pol-

-yester tag of a pair of trousers

over in the hand without a pen

in it – I love the tag to distraction

because I don’t want to see the real picture

drawn except surreally, behind curtains

with crazy patterns and faultless

fire-retardance – because women

repeal all the laws I’ve imposed,

drive me to mental banditry –

women are pointillists and em dashes

keyed across the rare earth elements

of my cold plot of composure –

the contorted seams of the cheap

pillow case their heads rest on

and perfume for weeks and months

seem to show what it looks like inside

when I try to describe what I feel for them –

now the trouser tag is a couple of balls

fallen down an unreachable crevice

behind my bed, I think that my ailment

stems from the soil of their being

better than me, and that, to tell the truth,

I’m yet to really know any.

...

then slowly I walk a little

               slower past the delta

crane boring ward by ward  

                through the old

Royal Children’s – sunset

                bleeding out

over halved helipads and barbed

                 wrecking hooks

walls fleeced open like skin and

                  tin fences

fringed like Bible tassels –  

                  glassless windows

holding latent night all day

                  until the holes

are so agape they’re no longer

                  holes – dogs

burying bits of debris with the

                  greed of a junk

artist exhuming them– the U.S

                  army built this

and also the Royal Melbourne –

                   now I can think

of nothing more lullingly still –

                   after the cranes

fall silent and it’s only a jagged

                   silhouette

against the glow of tireless

                   Flemington

road traffic, and the walkers and

                    joggers of twi-

-light have retired to shower

                    I slowly seek out

a little window of dry grass and

                    watch until I too

am crumbling, and black, and quiet.

               

a girl's beautiful arm

I watch her gaunt arm flapping as she comes

down the spiral staircase to the basement

of the library I’ve  been sitting on tenterhooks

in all day, in all-day delirium, in danger of  writing

a thesis about wrecking balls instead of Proust –

I like how slack and wantonly it moves, the way

thoughts do when you’re running – I like that I am

more cognisant of her arm than she is as

it strums the flower tracery on the side of her

muslin black top, and her boot-heels clip-clop in couplets –

an arm, I think, has never been more beautiful

than this arm, more pacific and modest and good!

borderline writing

the IQ test reads MENTAL DEFICIENCY – they bring mum in and she exhibits

apoplexy, as if the twenty years of indexical ‘I’ aren’t brought to bear on the number thirty-seven edged under her blood-red nose – the tissues they give her are the cheapest kind and I reckon that’s obscene.

as if on the page the last N puts me out of school I’m not halfway to in search of lost time’s end, I have’t written

I BELONG TO A DIFFERENT PLANET

on my celing, or before I throw that lady into her mantelshelf, into the pictures of her pussy sons I don’t sketch a seascape in bed which is framed and put on a sideboard in the corridor perforated with my first holes –

or after my mates have gone I don’t bleed from my wrists because I need to

for how the world is and for why I was born – but if they’re going to reduce intellect to a bunch of percentile scores I’m going to reduce their scores

to mud, I’m going to piss on the canteen walls, grab the arse of the nurse who looks like Lily and wake, wrapped like a precious gift, in padding.

the doctor comes in and says BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER but I know the truth: I’m undiagnosable. 

vale spider

While the spider was burning I had compared the smell to garbage in my mind and thought how terrible the smell was, but not for a second had I considered what the smell was or, for that matter, why there was even a smell at all. I had killed an innocent creature in the most sadistic fashion and not batted an eyelid. The thought that maybe I was possessed at the time by the memory of that spider in my towel, in the thrall of a sort of temporary madness which knee-jerked the murder of this spider into occurrence without my being able to stop it, was cold comfort because it was downright absurd. All I knew for sure was that I was a cold-blooded killer and my actions were as incomprehensible to me as they were despicable, truly as fucked up as it got. 

But the worst of it all was that Kiera’s dad had been wrong that day: I wasn’t vegetarian – I was vegan. I refused to wear leather and attended veganism seminars. I had every back issue of the Friends of the Earth cookbooks. I scoured ingredients lists and knew what was in every numbered food additive. I signed all the AVAAZ animal rights petitions that entered my inbox. The only cosmetic I ever used was organic vegetable soap, on my face, on my body, instead of shampoo, everywhere. I took iron and B group supplements. I was proudly, even militantly, vegan. The room started to do dizzying shit and so I popped two Temtabs which put me out until midday.

 *

From then on, eating vegetables left me with an acrid taste in my mouth, as though I was eating poisonous stuff or weeds. I almost felt guiltier eating them than meat because more than anything I hated posers, and I’d become one. Pretty soon all I could stomach were sweet potatoes, bananas and the odd bowl of porridge made with water. I no longer believed that deep down I really believed in all the sacrifice and the scrutiny or the politics. I didn’t even know if I cared about animals anymore. How could I have?  Vegan, as I think now, had been my epithet for five years, a parenthesis placed next to every utterance of my name. And now it was bunk.

The sight of paintbrushes made my fingers tremble. When I held one I would break into rabid shivers. It meant that anything I did looked amateurish and the act of doing it the opposite of catharsis. I began to doubt whether I actually liked to paint or whether the fact that I was talented and cool people respected me for it wasn’t the real motivating factor in my desire to be an artist.

what is meant by 'self-reflection'

only when the wind stops and I feel
no forces at work upon my nerve endings -
when I forget my body's positioning
in space, the pressure on this limb
or that limb - when, like Plotinus,

I feel that my body is no longer mine
can I love it,
can I imagine and intellectualise
'body' at the same time - like
watching a woman as she sleeps
or thinking of a woman on the other side

of the world - but with our manifold
minds we need not go fishing
for New Age techniques or cubes
of sugary LSD - for we can put to bed
one voice or another at will -

we can put will to bed at any time
of the night or day - analyse
our behaviour as though it were
transposed onto film and that film
mailed to the farthest, darkest place on earth -

while unused the foibles of our character
are sleeping beauties
the skin of whom we caress, the pulse of
whom we coyly check, not impolitely,
to make sure they are still alive

because their stillness, like their silence,
is total.

Spider Story Draft (working title: The Time I had a Beer with Kiera's Dad)

I had to work at Art After Dark that night and so I didn’t think much about murdering the spider until later. I was a ‘ticket scanner’ at the National Gallery. When I had first gotten the job – the outgoing ticket scanner was a friend of mine whose glasses were especially thick and whose R.M Williams boots were at least third or fourth-hand, who painted large pictures of pool tables and sold them to regional hospitals and nursing homes – I had imagined a utopian combination of work and pleasure. But a month or so in, after watching a documentary about construction workers in a spectacular area of the Bolivian Andes I realised that, like theirs, my job was just a job and that I could just as well have been scanning tickets for illegal cockfights or dinner theatre shows. I also realised I didn’t like my coworkers very much because they didn’t see it like that, or pretended they didn’t.

On the other hand, I guess there was a certain valour in working a mundane job at a place everybody else considered an escape from the mundane. Most people worked jobs that weren’t supposed to be anything but a means of paying the bills, which were therefore diametrically opposed to whatever they did for fun. Everything was made ‘funner’ by comparison. For my part, I could easily have come to resent my passion for painting because I disliked the crappy job that that passion had afforded me. But I didn’t.  I didn’t because I had accepted that art was a pauper’s enterprise and I was more prepared to scan a million tickets to the Napoleon Exhibition than to start painting pictures of pool tables or men standing around on a golfing green, waiting for the last man to putt in. It was that artistic integrity that I felt had been queried by Kiera’s dad and his stupid Pirate of Penzance comment.

When I came home I was tired and a little bummed out. So that I could go straight to bed, I immediately brushed my teeth, washed my face, and pissed. I also sprayed the antibacterial spray onto the eyebrow ring I had gotten a few days earlier. Then I entered my bedroom and saw that Kiera had left a chocolate muffin on the little antique sideboard  next to my bed. She’d moved some books to one side and put the muffin on the other side. The muffin was huge and had orange rind on top and it was in my favourite bowl, an old Rice Bubbles one with pictures of Snap, Crackle and Pop in their American clothes, which my grandma had given me when I was little.

I ate the muffin with a heavy heart. Kiera and I had lived together for six months by then and the best way of measuring how comfortable she was with someone seemed to be through the kindness, devoid of ulterior motives, that coloured the stuff she said and did. That was how I knew she liked me, maybe even loved me. I had never known a better or more beautiful person, let alone imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would be on the receiving end of their goodness. It was also how I knew that she could never be mine and why I almost wished she would suddenly become indifferent to me. I took the bowl upstairs and washed it; the microwave clock read 02:17. The apartment was quiet except for the fridge and for me. The first thing I noticed upon reentering my bedroom was the can of water-proofer on the windowsill, as if it hadn’t been there before. At the sight of it I froze. I turned to the mirror on my wardrobe and saw that I looked wrung out and terrified. I sat down on my bed feebly and started to think about what I had done.

spider story, moving, changing

My housemate Kiera was the daughter of a prominent politician in Melbourne. A federal member and a Liberal, Kiera’s dad was tall and very broad, an Irishman who still spoke with an accent and who was a devout catholic. When he wasn’t in Canberra or in his office on Orrong Road, Kiera’s dad was doing ambassadorial stuff for the biggest anti-abortion organisation in Australia. He wore suits with thin ties on the weekends – at least on the weekends I saw him – and his aftershave was too young for him, probably something with ‘ocean’ or ‘mist’ in its name.

I didn’t like Kiera’s dad very much at first. For starters, there was a lupine aspect to his face – the big toothy mouth and pale, beautiful eyes – that, in combination with the sheer mass of the man, made me uneasy. His hair was so thick and anchored to his forehead in such an immoveable, angular line that it almost looked woven, or like the pelt of a huge Irish Wolfhound. It was all black too, but not in a coloured kind of way. Is it possible for a fifty year-old man to be without a single grey hair? Even on the sides? It was weird and it scared me.

Secondly, Kiera’s dad’s eyes were the same as hers. I mean exactly the same. That unbelievable likeness niggled at me every time I looked at her sexiest feature and I resented her dad for it, despite the fact that they were his eyes first. Not that it mattered much either: I had never been – and would never be – able to stare into Kiera’s the way I wanted. 

But when you got right down to it, Kiera’s dad was difficult to like because he couldn’t stand me. When she had first moved into the apartment we share and was hauling her bed through the corridor, he, holding onto the other side, muttered something I heard distinctly and which is still kind of on reverb in my mind whenever I see him, even now that he and I have had a beer together.

-He’s a painter, dad, I heard Kiera say. A really good one.

-So he paints houses then?

-Dad, he’s an artist

-I’m just taking the mickey, Kiera, I knew he was an artist just by looking at him. If a young, middle class Melbournian man looks like he’s a Pirate of Penzance, then he’s probably an artist. And a vegetarian. Is he a vegetarian?

I couldn’t hear what Kiera said next – maybe she nodded. Because her dad said hmm and then something about which way the bed was going to face.

Even though it was amusing to hear an Irishman actually say taking the mickey, I became self-conscious and thought later that two people who were different ages and whose political and religious views sharply diverged, and who hated what the other wore and who thought what the other said was funny when it wasn’t supposed to be, that two people like that could never get along. So how did this beer eventuate then? And why would I bother writing about it? Well, the answer to the second question is that it now seems as if the beer was representative of the breakdown I had and am kind of still having. The breakdown that started last month when I set a spider on fire. The answer to the first is this story.

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 and a John Serrie album, one of his collaborations with Gary Stroutos, was murmuring in the background. I liked to listen to Serrie while I read; his arrangements were sparse, seemed incommensurate with the speed at which I absorbed each page, and had the effect of both slowing down and supercharging time, as if I were surfing a 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 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 eventually managed 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 a dead crab’s. 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.

*

When I doused it for the first time, the shocked spider darted halfway up the wall in a flash before staggering back to the floor, poisoned, already half-dead.

Never before had I done anything like what I’d just done, but by now, except for the nervous start I gave when it reacted to the water-proofer, a kind of trance had come over me. I was looking at the spider the way I looked at the last page of a book just prior to sleep. If the book was no longer a book but a lullaby, something which coaxed me into another mental imperative, then so was the spider hardly a spider. My weird urge to burn had smoked ethics and the naming of things and there was only one way to ease it. 

Certain that it had no more escape attempts left in it, I sprayed the spider a second time. While it was glistening wet I swooped the lighter in close and sparked. There was a crackle, and a very high-pitched, beetle-like squeal, and the smell of burning rubbish, all of which I took in with the focus of a scientist conducting an experiment. I was deathly quiet and could feel that my eyes were open wider than normal. I sprayed the spider some more and the flames turned greenish and almost sucked back up into the can, terrifying me. So I raised the can higher and pressed the trigger as softly as I could; the occasional droplet of combustant would fall and stoke the flaming spider on its pyre of smoking dust.

There was a lot of fire and smoke. There was a lot of waterproofer on my fingers. And even after the spider had devolved to a shapeless piece of charcoal I continued to dapple it with waterproofer, relight the flames if they went out, unthinking and so unmoved, transfixed and so not really watching. Then when there was nothing at all left to fuel the fire I swept the remnants into a dustpan and threw them out my window. I pushed my mattress back into place. I realised I was still wearing the sock on my hand and took it off, dazedly put it in the bin.

I opened my bedroom door and the smell of whatever it was that Kiera and Daniel were cooking rushed at me, attacked me. It smelt good.