grand plans

He paints in oils when he should be studying. Paint drips onto his shoes and through his worn-down carpet and he doesn’t really care.

He will not sit his exam tomorrow. He thinks it doesn’t matter, really. He’s considering someone he could call instead. They’ll smoke another cigarette on the balcony, drinking coffee saying nothing. Later, they’ll pretend that wasn’t all. Company is fickle. He knows this.

He writes in blue biro on public transport. He doesn’t care much for probationary licenses or rust-ridden cars. He likes delays and babbling strangers. There is no-one at his destination. He thinks he doesn’t mind.

He wonders about plurality and grammar in the collected works of William Shakespeare. Anything much beyond that is just a walking shadow, to him. Anything much behind is just a clutter of 26.

He’ll drop out and make coffee until his eyes burn with sting of caffeine and his clothes smell of sweat and espresso. His hands will fidget with the labels on takeaway cups, and his hair will be tied back, like it used to be. He’ll talk to the girl in the fruit shop next door and later they’ll pretend not to see one-another.

He misses kissing, sometimes. He says, just you and me, please, can we?

He paints in oils when he should be studying.

(He thinks it’s all a bit pathetic)

He will not sit his exam tomorrow.

even if i quit, there's not a chance in hell i'd stop

in a heavy front room we compare insomnias
breaking each others' fingers with each turn of
conversation; bigger than this night, or the next, or the next, or those that stretch
in front. like bottomlessness
there stops being a glamour to the light-headedness, hallucinations, falsely constructed words and grammatically awkward shake hands
and truly, you'd just like to finally hit the bottom where
at last the frustrations
we cynicize
become the ripped red insides of womanhood which
can curl around your cloudy mind.
go to sleep.

traumatism

these projections are the gaps between old train carriages where we shot up:
you, eyes gleaming with
metallic thrill, smiling crooked moving with the
tracks
while she
pulls her posture to forget.

'i don't want a career'

hopelessness becoming
units of our mapped out futures
placements in the twitching eyes

chasing another cigarette the way we used to chase
the things
to know, collector cards and grainy tv
worn scratchy blanket in shades of brown and
backs burning in the afternoon sun. my eyes water

at how young i am around you.

because people say clever things at various points of this technology-fest we call life

"all the little letters on the page represent pictures in your head, but you only paint pictures they want to read"

exit

- cornelia hediger
http://www.corneliahediger.com

biggest army the world has ever seen.

today a woman on the train was crying. sobbing into the phone that she'd just got a train ticket that she couldn't afford, couldn't pay her bills, hadn't eaten in days and was running out of phone credit and never knew things could get this bad. her phone cut out and she looked out the window and just kept crying onto the dirty plastic windows. i wrote her a letter i didn't give. the woman across from me gave her a fifty dollar note and a ham sandwich. a businessman looked embarassed as he passed her a tenner on his way off the train. an old guy gave her directions. there is no, international, co-operation without grassroots things like this. we help each other.

88 and a half seconds later

good time charlie falls
asleep under bruises,
blanketing the garish night.
eyes close on delicates, veined webs
and he watches from the inside as
banks break, and our lies of drought
(farmers falling onto browned grass, hot sun
of our searing plains)
become lies of the departed.
(and the wind curls around him)

sleep clatters like a train on
rusty tracks but
you; you are silent

pilferage of a conversation i once had

you spend your youth
feeling self-indulgently misanthropic
delaying the
making of good or bad decisions.
he says: your twenties, that's the time to explore,
you know? know the world. know yourself.

i don't feel like talking
so i nod, yeah, yeah, the eyes, the cheeks, the nose, i nod
and really - this is all he wants.

innocence is stubble hiding fears
(of friends
youth
passing
by)

a steady drip of information poses
no threat to a sturdy cocoon.

metlink

we rumble past our empty river and the trains congregate, unused, in train yards, and the tinny voice overhead speaks in time with the slow grunts of the engine on tracks and the helicopters catch up with the clouds as we pull into our station. geometries become us.

watercolours and francois

i love this band and the lovely videos they make. nom nom nom.

suburbia

The dog which used to bark as I passed, scaring me every time, lies vacantly behind the mesh metal fence. Afternoon sun pounds heavy on the pavement and my worn black stilettos keep getting stuck in the cracks. Someone is playing piano at the dead boy’s house; though I know it is just a recording. I have heard the slightly off timing and one bad note a thousand times before. A little further down, pouches of flesh, soft and pillowy, hang down the back of an old lady sitting, topless in the shade of her front yard. As I walk past she does not flinch, but simply continues, big band music tinny and quiet from the small radio on the grass.
Last night this street was empty, shadows making holes in the asphalt, cracking open to show the roots of old trees and dust of moon-white bodies stepping, grasping, falling over. I traced with my fingers the quiet blue veins which twisted around the thin arms of a little boy. He didn’t pull away just held his arms heavy with the meaning we assign to trivial things, swinging slowly back and forth in the night. The street lights glared, whilst stillness and wind intertwined through the leaves and branches overlooking thirty-one old houses. Behind fences lay front yards and verandas, hallways and sitting rooms, kitchens and bathrooms with laminexed cabinets. My eyes closed and opened again, every action an eternity whilst the dark-grey ground, still warm from the day, got caught between my toes. A voice like a bird but sadder, very much sadder, was pulled out in the empty street, and it shocked me when I realized it was me who made it.
We pushed and pulled at each other’s bodies, staying awake and never eating, growing thin and dreamy and delirious, speaking and thinking of nothing at all. The emptiness of a clean slate, the beauty of a body reduced to its purest form, floated, and each shaking finger, half-closed eye spoke of something different to each of us.

a whole bunch of quotes from an interview with an artist i don't really like

I don’t like the things I make existing in real life because of all the baggage associated with physical spaces and the problems of perception with the viewer.

Images are not objects for my generation. If we really follow the Pictures Generation’s ideas to their logical conclusion we see that images as objects are just a bastardization of a bastardization.


I also don’t believe objects will be objects for long.

Our cement bridges collapse and our levees disintegrate when confronted with what they’re designed to combat.
Glaciers miles thick have melted away.
Every bit of new technology around me is made obsolete in months.T
he looming threat of global warming is a physical one that threatens the permanence of the ground we stand on.

All of this and people still want to press paint on a canvas that can be ripped, or stitch fibers millimeters wide.

These types of art making art futile. Objects don’t stand a chance. But in the mean time, in the brief historical period before objects are permanently annihilated, they serve as our greatest inconvenience and take up all of our space. One day we’ll run out of space for everything- for our collections of Furbies, for our families of 12, for our 3 ton $2 million dollar reflective egg sculptures and everything else.

- Brad Troemel

c'est eden la.

the earth looks better from above

before i was born i would thrash, says mum, small red legs kicking the sides of her stomach. making indents in overalls, white cottons in summer and her heavy green knitted jumper, kick, kick, kick and she cried out, bent over in pain. my father would crush banana for her, peel apples with a breadknife and watch while she lay, sweating, with feverish face up against the cool brown tiles of the kitchen floor.

later, despite all this, he stopped at too many traffic lights on the way to the hospital and his old blue car rocked back and forth in the rain with the force of two redfaced women screaming to get out.