morning writing exercise - domestic (plus magic)

drip trays full of rosewood oil

are poisoning the peace lilies

as the sunlight also poisons them

chained as they are to the outside

and to that deathly perfume –

temporary fences raised

patio battle lines drawn

papers pulped under hot water

balled between unclean fingers

borne by ill-conceived winds

urging one way urging her

on her knees down the glistening stairs

down the sparsely-grassed embankment

down the sunken river banks

down the roots of thirsting trees

to the turbid, lovelorn depths

of the rosewood oil waters –

floating on the surface, four

pairs of Lucite insect wings

one pair of breathtaking legs

- pushed and pulled like tractor gears

poisoned red by the sunlight - 

that someone better ought to care for.

scene in which the narrator falls out of love

Her agreement was brusque – “you really can” or the like – but she sounded different, more invested somehow.

 “I used to write poetry”, I said back with surprise, almost in a whisper.

At this she put her book in a small brown leather backpack and got up, perceptibly nodding and smiling but making no eye contact except with some notion or other in her head, by way of the ground I guess, and started to zigzag towards the parking lot where the boy was still running in front of his white-haired admirers. There seemed to be a greenish aspect, toxic rather than natural, to the colours of everything.

I thought it was wrong follow her. But when she turned to ask me “why used to?” I thought the opposite, or felt that she did, and so I started closing in. She showed me her back again and kept zigzagging. I raised my voice and told her I’d changed a lot since the poetry. I picked up a flat, bald car tyre that was lying on the asphalt; both the brand name and tread indicator had worn away completely. It rolled in a floppy circle before falling with a thud, which she either ignored or didn’t notice. Then from the corner of my eye I saw the boy shoot off. I sounded out the lilt of youth in his breaths and smelled young men’s deodorant, Lynx Graphite or Accelerate, or even Polo Sport – his shoes were top of the line Nike Air Zoom Vapours, made in China from synthetic leather – as he ran up and back, up and back. Paying him a closer look I noticed there was no hair, none whatsoever, on the boy’s legs, and concluded from that that he must’ve shaved or used calcium thioglycolate cream the night before.

I started thinking about the time I was his age. My parents featured in almost all the memories, but not as people who were alive then but weren’t alive anymore. They featured instead, at least in the feelings they aroused, as people who were never alive, alive to me, like beautiful animals I’d seen only as road kill, re-killed over and over for sixteen years before decomposing completely. Like a kitten pawing at a catnip toy I waved this turn of thoughts off with a somewhat mad hand gesture, not because it was painful but because I knew, the way a man with Asperger’s might have known it, that that type of thinking was the pits. Then one of the ladies gave up her post at the fence to bowl; she walked slower than anyone I’d ever seen.

“What, you mean in terms of being poetic? You’re not as poetic as you used to be, is that it?”

She was wearing a long cargo jacket with the German flag sewn halfway up each arm, very tight black jeans – the kind made with 10% spandex – and black faux-suede riding boots, cheap and breakable looking, maybe from Sportsgirl. Her black hair had a caramel tint in parts, mainly the ends, which reached the small of her back. She had narrow shoulders and big thighs and she wasn’t sexually attractive. At least in a physical sense she wasn’t. I put my hands in my pockets.

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t write poetry anymore”.

We traced the bowls club fence, delighting the ladies – to whom we must’ve have looked like a couple – by saying good morning, and then came to a weed-filled alley between the bowling greens and the back fences of the houses beside them. Finishing a few centimetres before the ground, undergrown by Stypandra glauca just past bloom, the fences were warped and covered in spray paint piss stains and also a brown outdoor paint that had faded to purplish, like dying flowers. The alley wasn’t very long and was full of trash and quiet. It smelt like a near-empty creek. At the end I could see a small playground and a sliver of the baseball diamond too, mostly grass but also some of the ochre sand of home base. She was still a few metres – maybe five metres – in front of me.

“Well why don’t you? If you did once, why don’t you now?”

“I do other things”

“Like what?”

“Landscaping, for one”

“So you’re a landscape gardener; architect; painter?”

“Gardener. Yeah, I am. I mean I think I am”

“Strange thing to be unsure about – are you one or aren’t you?”

“It’s not a question of being sure,” I said, Steve flashing through my mind, “it’s just that, yeah, I do landscaping and all, but I don’t necessarily see myself as a landscaper”.

“Sure, sure”.

“I’m not tunnel-visioned,” I said, a bit angry, a bit confused, “and to suggest that I’m less poetic than I once was, that age has soured me or I’m drug-fucked or something, is a hell of lot more offensive than talking shit about the suburb I live in, which isn’t even Bundoora anyway”. Then I paused. Then I said: “Why would you suggest that I was tunnel-visioned? I’m twenty-five, for fuck’s sakes. The time for not knowing who I am ended years and fucking years ago”. I said sorry after that. My chest was throbbing and I smelled and tasted metal, tasted the smell of metal, which alerted me to the fact that she wasn’t wearing perfume. I couldn’t remember being near a girl who didn’t wear perfume, or speaking that way to anyone.

She made to turn back but stopped. I thought I could see her looking down and nodding again, and her hands were clasped in front of her pussy, which came to me a second as a pure, imageless idea that sent blood spurting to my dick.

It was almost as if my behaviour, I thought after putting her pussy respectfully out of mind, the behaviour of which I myself couldn’t make a modicum of sense, was ticking all the boxes in a kind of mental checklist she’d been consulting.

She dropped back to my side and as we continued to walk said, “don’t be sorry, I’d call those very good answers to very bad questions.”

I let out a curt laugh.

“The problem is I’m not a good asker but I love asking, which I think is pretty normal, and you’re just the sort of person someone like me wants to ask about because they know they’ll get answers like the ones you just gave, because secretly people like you want to give them. See what I mean? You’re itching to give them. People like you and people like me are going to be having these sorts of repartees until we’re old and, like, blue in the face. Blue from being dead”

“I don’t know if I agree with that at all,” I said after a time.

Her only response was to nod and look down.

As we reached the playground she burst out laughing and broke into canter and turfed her backpack onto the tanbark next to a tall but rusted slide, the sort that undulated, which she then clambered up on all fours. For a stride or two her jacket folded over itself and exposed her arse. I looked at nothing else until the jacket fell to the back of her knees again. Out of breath, she turned and looked right at me, knowingly, not for my perving on her but as if we’d just robbed a house together.

“There’s a ladder, you know,” I said.

“Well I don’t care because this is a weird fucking encounter, man,” she replied, still laughing. “My name’s Kirsty Gregory by the way”

“I’m Phil Shanahan”

“Shanahan – I know a Shanahan back in Canada”

I didn’t answer when she asked me to come up, but walked around to the ladder. While climbing I could hear her talking, itemising; I imagined she was counting on her fingers too.

 “I’m on the way to my dad’s reading poetry in the Aussie ‘burbs, at the crack of dawn; I’m leading some strange guy down a weird alleyway, a guy who happens not only to be awake at this hour but who’s also a poet, or a former poet, or a landscaper, or all or none of the above; I’m asking insanely inappropriate questions; he’s yelling, and I believe him, and he hasn’t asked me anything back, and I’ve never led a guy anywhere in my life”.

Three Myna birds, perched on the warped bar from which the swing chains hung in jaggedly welded grooves, had broken into song when it struck me that maybe things would have gotten physical if not for that pathetic soliloquy I’d just listened in on, just been made to listen in on. I thought that at the least I would’ve kissed her, or she would’ve kissed me. The sense of dread I felt almost buckled me over but there was also a sense of accomplishment in my newfound aversion, like we’d already fucked and I was lying beside her, and buoyed by this second sense I managed to climb high enough so that I could rest my hands on the wooden platform and rest my head on my hands, and look up her. I could smell the wood. She beckoned me forward but I stayed where I was.

morning writing exercise: poem about a tourist in a rut

nauseous from those outpourings of joy
and near-carnality
they the living living upon the dead
look elderly atop raking crow's nests
on yachts built at the dawn of Australia
elderly in the ancient sunlight -

*

               at a table - medium density fibreboard -
               you imagine you're an actor thinking of
               the saddest thing in the world so you can cry

               shortlisted:
               an old blind man standing numbly in
               as his guidedog is euthanized -
               his flinching touch as the pelt turns rigid
               operational senses numbed offline -
               problem is, the man is neither blind
               nor old, nor a man, and tears don't fall
               for archetypes stuck between pathos' forceps -

               shortlisted:
               a boy at a throaway table
               sitting on a molded polymer chair
               that'll still be around - but not as a chair -
               when people offer up their supplicant selves
               to insects - a chair made, essentially,
               by insects - forced to act
               like an actor trying to act
               like someone sad -

*

the mynas on the monstrous cooling vents
are graceful, are graceless, and shit and piss
with that unified sense of dialectics
that you get on night five, wasted in a playground -

surface of the slippery-dip too coarse
to move you in your double acid wash
you lie on that diagonal deep-ribbed bed
consider the here-s and there-s of going nowhere -

twizzle your antiperspirant-crusted
finger-length underarm hair -
why tonight are certain stars so there
when others are obscured, not by the clouds
but by what looks like bushfire haze?

*

all of a uniform shape! all of a uniform shape!
the chef is yelling behind mustard-specked French doors -
you weren't meant to hear him, you weren't meant
to know the food except as it's perfectly arrayed
on an oven-warmed bone China
                 made in Vietnam plate

resplendent with the smells of fresh-chopped dill
and the perfume on your ravishing waitress' wrists -
you weren't meant to go behind the curtain -
so unpalatable is it back there
that she takes your marzipan crescents away untouched -

*

someone's drawn a dick on the mensroom man
at a rest stop, where to piss you have to pay
fifty cents to an old bloke by the door
International Roast tin jangling, zip lock
bag full of urinal soap in his seabed hands -
dicks on men: now that's contemptible -

after the line dance class - where you make out
with a skinny girl from France who perspires sex
the bus departs for the final stop -
a Twelve Mile Beach that's only  four miles long
according to the pony-tailed tour guide -

shuttled onto Barton era yachts
you watch as one by one the group is cinched
at their waists to harnesses and J-ropes
climb the crow's nest, tilt their pale heads back
stretch out their arms - think, perhaps, of Kate Winslet

and then abseil clumsily down to the deck -
the whole ordeal upsets your stomach somehow -
when your turn comes, you tell them I'm all right.

waking poetry

morning, and the stepped-on cigarettes

spill open - tobacco hair from ear canals –

the school group crowding round 

smells of lime zest and strawberry bubble tape – the man

whose white beard streams from upright chin to lap

pays me no mind and I can’t understand –

asphalt, scuffed like an ice rink at day’s end

is hailed with small rocks loosed by the Eltham train –

flung up higher than I thought they would be

making indents as they land that I cant see

but which exist as sure as the crags 

in hilly terrain exist, and the concaves at her temples

she rubs as though trying in vain to tell

her own future, that pencil-skirted girl

younger than my little brother, but

weighted already to catch the biggest fish

weightless enough to be easily reeled in –

the old man walks more beautifully than her

but both are scarred beyond all recognition –

then a bell: the boom gates are coming down.

scene in which the narrator falls in love

I had walked down most of Coolidge, past three crumbling roundabouts and the house with the Scottish Castle letterbox, which had a bunch of junk mail sticking out its drawbridge, past a couple of fresh sets of burnouts, when the foreplay started. She was sitting on a bench facing the road, giant Red Bull can and fragments of cola Chupa Chup wrapper that looked dog-chewed at her feet, in clear view of the tram stop I was walking towards. Behind her, Kurrajong Park: a footy oval and baseball diamond and lawn bowls green. Morning still muffled the atmosphere like a pillow held gently over a swollen face.

A boy wearing an Australian Open T-shirt was doing suicide sprints using the lines in the bowls club parking lot and some of the old female bowlers had gathered at the rear fence and to watch him. Their faces were pressed up zoo-exhibit-style against the green wind-breaking mesh. They would’ve been prepubescent at the time the poet she was reading, as if his book were the thick manual to a machine that was going to save her life, wrote his most memorable lines. But it wasn’t the poet that stopped me. In fact, I walked straight past without recognising his jacket or form and without regarding the girl holding him as anything more than an incident I hadn’t been waiting for. The truth is that I happened to stop dead on the footpath a few metres in front of her for unclear reasons, but most probably to catch myself up to what my body seemed to be doing of its own accord, to figure out what the fuck I was going to do until I met Lucinda. All I could bring myself to look at was the high fence at the back of the baseball diamond and even that abstractedly, like it wasn’t there. I must’ve stopped a long while, though, because at some point I was turning to respond to a question, delivered in a girlish New Zealand accent tinged partly with curiosity, partly fear: what are you doing?

“Looking at the baseball diamond,” I told her. “You don’t see many in Melbourne”.

She put her book face-up on the bench. I glanced at the name: I knew it well. I thought then that maybe she’d been up all night. She stretched her arms out but not as far as they could’ve gone. “You call this Melbourne?”

I paused. “I guess I do. Greater Melbourne. I hadn’t thought about it. What do you call it?”

“Slumdoora,” she said, and laughed. “I’ve actually never called it that before. But God, you probably live here, I mean…do you live here?”

“Close to here, yeah”. There wasn’t a trace of condescension in her voice, which I found odd.

“That was offensive, sorry. No, I don’t know. The suburbs, the ‘burbs. It doesn’t matter”.

“I wasn’t offended. There’s more out here to hate than there is to love, if there’s anything to love at all. What are you doing?”

By the time she’d finished explaining to me that she was on her way to see her dad, who lived in a street just off Coolidge, but after getting off the tram from Northcote, where she lived – I smiled and told her that Northcote was where I was about to go, which made her say something else and briefly lose her train of thought – she’d been so wrapped up in the poet that she’d sat down on the bench to read the rest of The North Ship before walking through “that door” and into “that house”, I think I was in love with her.

“I’ve needed him,” she said, “I’ve been sick with need for words like his and I didn’t even know it until this morning”. A curtain seemed to go up in her then, and she took the book and flicked through it. When it came to rest she read:

Only hurrying and troubled faces,

The walking of girls’ vulnerable feet,

The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.

Then she apologised profusely for reading it so bad. I told her I would have done worse, then added that she’d done well. Then she read:

Then the moon would go raving,

The moon, the anchorless

Moon go swerving

Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss.

Without knowing why, the first thing I said to her in response to the second reading was: you can only imagine what kind of a man he must’ve been. Even more strangely, I think that she fell in love with me because I said it. 

passing an old woman

There was an old woman with shoulder-length black hair, white at the roots, on her hands and knees on the footpath. As I approached I considered stepping over her, but ended up politely veering onto the road and around instead. The woman was, at first glance, using a dustpan and brush to get rid of the rotten pine needles stuck in the cracks between the pavers, presumably because those particular pavers were in front of her house and she’d assumed some sort of ownership over them. She was very old – at least eighty-five – and had the leathery and slightly sour Mediterranean face of an Italian nonna. Maybe she was Lebanese. Her eyes met mine for a second; I smiled but it wasn’t reciprocated. Her bottom, in those inexplicably lurid see-through white pants that modest old women wore, was high in the damp air.

The woman returned to the pine needles, and I kept walking, and as I neared the distance at which it would have been rude to look back, I paid her one last glance, I didn’t know why. She was too preoccupied to notice me. It was then that I realised her dustpan was empty. She was brushing the pine needles, there was no question about her brushing them, but none of those needles ever made it to the dustpan. None of them made it anywhere, actually. All the woman was doing, I realised in that rushed assessment, was caressing the pine needles with her brush as if each were the strand of a different baby’s hair. I had no choice but to notch her down as crazy, as one of the many obviously out-of-their-mind people I’d passed or who had passed me without incident in life. What other explanation was there? Before turning back I shot a glance at the woman’s house: her front fence was higher than the ones either side of it and was made of green corrugated iron, like a seabed, and was overhung by a fruiting lemon tree and a loquat tree that looked ready to die. Someone had left a half-full bottle of pineapple Fanta on top of the fence, which the woman mustn’t have seen yet.

'Splinters' draft: important scene set in carwash

We took Macorna to avoid the speed bumps and then stopped at the first set of lights, about to turn left onto Grimshaw. Sarah drove because I didn’t have a car. In fact, I was fairly certain my licence had expired, although I could never bring myself to take it out of my wallet and check. At any rate I’d always been her passenger. Waiting at the lights, I was surprised to find the carwash on the right-hand corner on our side of the intersection reasonably busy. I had to look past Sarah to look at the carwash; Sarah was looking at me and then at the lights and then at me and we were in a comfortable silence. Her car smelt like nothing, like an old car – it was a ’95 Barina – that had been kept well, and the only pronounced odours were those of her perfume and the stale air blustering out of the demister.

At the carwash, the scene made me think of entering another person’s dream, either through some occult passageway or in the form of that person describing it to me as I tried to give counsel. Every statement was an overstatement; nothing was nothing, or it was less than nothing, which in turn made it more. The scene looked like this: two blokes in neighbouring cubicles were washing what looked to be waterskiing boats, with fuck-off big twin motors and Need for Speed paintjobs, towed by late model supercharged Ford Rangers, one black, one dark blue. There was a small sedan and a people mover at either side of them, which were both covered in pinkish bubblegum-scented wax, the scent of which I knew from washing Sarah's car there. The drivers of those cars were overweight white ladies in their middle years. Spraying the sterns – which nosed a long way of the cubicles – with the low pressure streak-free guns, the blokes had an animated conversation going, animated insofar as it seemed to have just started, like a newly stoked campfire. It was surely a loud conversation too, even though I couldn’t hear it. Then one of them made a bold gesture with his arms, or elbows more correctly, as though he were telling the story of a recent brawl, or doing the Haka, and it struck me at that moment, like an unveiling, that the pair of them had very well-built bodies and that their faces were horse-shit ugly, ugly beyond belief, and that their heads were shaved out of baldness rather than toughness. I also realised that both the ladies were paying the blokes a kind of awkward, shamefaced attention, so much so that they seemed to have forgotten about the wax being slowly plastered to their cars.

There was nobody at the commercial vacuums, which, with their bar-fridge-like bodies and thick, ribbed blue pipes, looked more like fuel bowsers for the cars of an even more resource-drunk future. The pipes were supposed to be wound around a holder to keep them neat but were strewn all over the ground and were probably knotted on one another. The dog wash was also empty but surrounded by big puddles of water and soapsuds, suggesting that it had just been used. I wondered what breed had been in there last – golden Labrador, probably. Labrador owners were the types who washed their dogs in those things, I thought, although I couldn’t make complete sense of that inner notion, nor why it felt so screw-tight. The fur in the drain would have been yellow, or white if the animal was old. I wondered whether the cleaning products were the same for both duco and pelt. I turned back towards the road. Traffic on both Macorna sides of the intersection had peaked; the light was about to change. I stroked my arms with the grain of the hairs and looked back, via the beautiful profile of Sarah’s face, at the two blokes and the two ladies.

What I saw was the same, but what it did to me wasn’t. Maybe by then I’d woken up more completely, or fallen tired again; maybe in those few intervening moments there’d been an explosion, a conflagration of all my good sense, because this time I could hear what the blokes were saying, the same way I used to listen to, plum the depths of, flesh out or straight-up invent strange conversations as a kid, and more harmfully as a dude who spent too many of his early pay cheques on Ice Pipes; conversations which were either not happening at all or going on too far away for me to be liable to accurately interpret every word, to interpret their realities instead of those I’d pre-recorded for them, like the lines repeated over and over by dolls when the strings on their backs were pulled. I could hear what the blokes were saying, and it was about the women, or women in general, and it was bloodcurdling. Some of the women they described were watering houseplants, others were standing in line for groceries, some were sitting with their seatbelts buckled in plane cabins, some were blowing up balloons, others were on dance floors or in queues, so close as to butt noses with one or both of them, others were on the toilet, some were dancing, some were in straitjackets, some were in kindergartner overalls playing with toy animals, but most, most of the women were protagonists in scenes so fucked up that I felt like mangling my head against the dashboard to make the blokes stop talking, or getting out of the car and mangling their heads against the swimming tiles on the walls of the carwash cubicles to shut them up, or having them mangle my own head against them. In that conversation the girls were succeeding each other so rapidly that there was a kind of flipbook singularity to it, and a sense of time accelerating towards something definitive, or at least definitively towards something unknown. The gestures with which the blokes accompanied their anecdotes seemed no less gruesome, and their laughter was the laughter of two insomniacs at nighttime. I was sure, absolutely sure, that the ladies, who had all but finished washing their cars, had had their lives changed for the worse that evening, had been forced to consider the hypothesis that they were beings who stank in comparison to all other beings and who were filled with nothing but sex toys and shit, or at least to concede that a hypothesis of the sort even existed, and this by men, men of the lowest possible order, but still men. 

There were tears in my eyes. My body, on the other hand, hadn’t betrayed the slightest sign of how I was feeling; my hands were folded neatly in my lap and I was still breathing like normal. I was even the one to alert Sarah to the fact that the lights had changed, despite being ashamed, and afraid, to look at her. What she’d been distracted by I wasn’t sure, but thought later, almost with bemusement, that it was me. Realising that she was holding up traffic, Sarah hit the accelerator a touch harder than usual, and the car jolted forwards, old automatic transmission working hard to catch up to that sudden injection of fuel. At the next red, the intersection of Grimshaw and the Greensborough Highway, I thought of Cortázar’s Southern Thruway and the girl in the Dauphine. I reached over and took one of Sarah’s hands off the wheel and laid it on the centre console, just behind the gearstick. I squeezed hard, not letting go until she needed both hands to reverse park into a spot near the restaurant.