i came here to see you

behind the supermarket by your house
at night fluorescent flickers
rolling a cigarette on the step
like origami

and i thought
'you always said that
death was pretty'

bloodletting

being with you is like
pressing needles to the softest
upper thigh
just gently pressing
until it punctures

it's implicit
like the moment after saying
that i hate you
living always in the silence

it is the grammar of your native tongue

cute things happening in my 'hood'

stealing stickers off the trams that say
'when exiting the vehicle,
beware of cars'
and sticking them on things that are not tram doors


the unbearable boredom of 2008
the unbearable boredom of the internet

fog lifts off the highway
and the doorway where you mopped
soap suds splattered
frosty window panes

#4

sabotaging all attempts at giddiness
in favour of
that beautiful elusive unrequited
solitude

all eyes are
somewhere behind me
watching only long enough to say
a repetition of
your infatuations
in reverse.

i want to know the rawest parts of someone
but we are trapped by each others' mediocrities.

i never want to say
'i'm just such a romantic'

om nom vegan recipe time

oat milk porridge with goji banana cocounut and straw-berries

put one part oats and two parts oat milk in a saucepan over very low heat. cook uncovered, stirring occasionally until it reaches the consistency of how you like it. chop banana and strawberry and put on top. sprinkle with coconut and goji. yommmnomnomnomnom.

s.

glass cracking surface of the earth
like
sometimes
this is just how the world looks

wintertime

using this pattern.

clumsy

places you are not:
tent without a fly
long drawn shadow sunset beach
with sharks inside.

alley in the dark
tram ride
petrol station 2am

frankston beach
on the tiny tiles in the second floor bathrooms

sitting on my fence

the comic book store
in between
the reeds and the water

triassic period south brazil
name dropping.

welcome to the winter of our discontent OR i obviously don't write real things anymore

"Lainie, what are you doing? What are you doing? You lay on that couch all day. Those pajamas are like your uniform. You run up a four hundred dollar phone bill. You watch TV. You chain smoke. You don't go outside. You don't do anything. Man, you are IN the Bell Jar"

knitting socks

project for the break. look how pretty they are!

this is not my life

this, this, and always this:

soupe du jour

red walls
bottled
love in the corridor
stairs with a sheet of paper that says
'poetry cafe up here'

long fall to tomorrow
writers shaken
by the pure joy of
washing your hair and leaving
the house
singing in their their heads

mutually reinforced philosophies on life

reading things written by people who know that language doesn't have to be pretty, because the prettiness is really just hiding the deep empty nothingness that you find when you're jeffery lewis writing songs on the gee-tar. and i think, at the bottom of flowery beautiful language is the truth that i have nothing to say and no reality to say it with.

AND

remembering a conversation i had about writers that hated the fifties so deliberately wrote poems that they thought were terrible to teach everyone a Lesson about beat poetry, but then they were published and everyone loved them and their Point had been Proved or whatever, but a good point was made i think when he said had it really, because didn't that come from somewhere, some writer's subconscious, with the trying to be bad just making an antithesis of art; and antithesis, for all it is, can't be nothing.

procrasti-

bake some brownies, knit a hat for a baby that doesn't yet exist (if you want to be all ALL BABIES WANT TO GET BORNED about it), discover an unhealthy love for drag-queen-pop, try to learn crochet, bribe your cat to love you with the promise of being allowed to sit on the forbidden table, spend a few hours with a shoe-less pretty boy you met by a lake. pay too much money for very strong soy coffee. do not write the essay. discover japanese snackfood. write poems in the margins of your contracts textbook. fuck.

des hommes et des dieux

"Should it ever befall me, and it could happen today, to be a victim of the terrorism swallowing up all foreigners here, I would like my community, my church, my family, to remember that all my life was given to God and to this country. That the unique master of all life was no stranger to this brutal departure. And that my death is the same as so many other violent ones, consigned to the apathy of oblivion. I've lived enough to know, I'm complicit in the evil that, alas, prevails over the world, and the evil that will smite me blindly. I could never desire such a death. I could never feel glad that these people I love be accused randomly of my murder. I know the contempt felt for the people here, indiscriminately. And I know how Islam is distorted by a certain Islamism. This country, for me, are something different. They're a body and a soul. My death, of course, will quickly vindicate those who called me naive or idealistic, but they must know that I will be freed of a burning curiosity and, God willing, will immerse my gaze in the Father's and contemplate with Him His children of Islam as he sees them. This thank you which encompasses my entire life includes you, of course, friends of yesterday and today, and you too, friends of last minute, who knew not what you were doing. Yes, to you as well I address this thank you and this farewell which you envisaged. May we meet again, happy theives in paradise, if it pleases God the Father of us both. Amen. Insha'Allah."

draft/amphetamines

for lack of coloured area
there is
negative space

for lack of reality
there is
duty

in the deep sea
there are
arms and legs and
lungs and mind
that don't, won't, can't

in absence of a god
there is only
responsibility for what we've
failed to do

you, only happy in the
war that broke you.

can't glorify

four of us
(and two of you)
moving like such awful imitations of
real people
to a song you can't have heard

music like the kind of white noise that keeps you up at night:
loop; whywhywhywhywhy.
beat; nonononono.

knowing nothing but to hold the sides and
watch the middle float away.

writing again for the first time in howevereverlong OR I once read an article on hallucinations during holy fasts

the detail in delusions
you relish
a focal point from which perspectives lines
pull, the highway sharpens
until even the self is distant; legs
wobbling hands shaking eyes fluttering
mind blanked and
pure.

you would say; visually stunning.

venetian vampires/fish from space!

trace a straight line
on the backs of no-one's hands
on the
curling cliff riddled road
in this wreck of a car

writing neatly notes to
you
rolling backwards at the lights on the top of the hill

observe the fall
the third reich in my
badly beaten brain