two fun-sized poems found in a journal.

1.
young man in a funeral suit
barcode on the bank door
empty tram lacks character of
sweaty school uniform or foreign language practicalities.
instead the peeling paint and beer on the floor asks
if this is the future, now what?

2.
dali's clocks are a picture of a girl
in vaudeville cottons;
escaping the
still heat of hot winds
through cities clean
of interference.

balaclava II

art deco on the roof
whilst wind blows through the beard
of homeless harry.

one german backpacker smokes sloppily
whilst his coffee cools.
i called it Red Terror
(you called it ironic)

the clutched bags and closed minds
eyes darting gossip of
out and insiders
fails to keep us warm at night.

we toss and turn over
3000 years of maltreatment. what Figes
said was right;
we are all, social, historians, now.

regardless, the bolsheviks were unable to
transform themselves from the underground
to the legitimate

so we too hide in doorways and under beds.

the trust that They profess - the unharmed and the young and the outsides looking in - doesn't soothe us.
these habits are hard to give up.

on balaclava

hot espresso dribbles down throats
while old jewish women compare
grandchildren and superstitions.
a remnant from gypsy days
plays his piano accordian too loudly.
kosher meats hang in windows
whilst hairless women in
heavy hung skirts act as pilgrims;
children follow blind
to the next festival,
celebrating the pasts they have not lives
(but have to live with)
our yom kippur is palestine
and our jerusalem
is no longer a safe place.
(but that's not what the bakeries or the zionist camps tell us. that's not what exists in the minds of thick pouches of skin beneath heavy eyes of our grandparents.)

these are the faces i will always carve

lino prints of the
men i grew up with;
pouches of flesh and
wiry wisps of hair you
push under your hat
litter my bedroom floor.

several of my favourite scenes of all time

CAN'T GO PAST VIRGINIA WOOLF.
i love craziness.




also; i love coffee black and egg white and this film in general, but i think renee is my favourite. it's weird simplicity female/male/yes. plus the girl is gorgeous.



i suspect no explanation is necessary:

on the topic of dreams

i went to this play the other night. it was good. surprisingly so.
actually there were two. that's besides the point. but there was this scene in the first one - which was a non-narrative piece about the subconscious and was entirely set inside this girl's dreams - where she dreamt about commercial products solving all her problems.

oily marks on walls

developing a strange teary attachment to this electronic thinkfest.
pretend communication. email intimacy. i love/hate this.

i'm terrified about, i don't know what. on and on and on it goes.
scribblebrain.

i saw a painting the other day that was what steven hawking's dreams would look like. geometry and exactness floating around in cloudy pinks and blues and whites.
my dreams just look like mad girl's love song by sylvia plath.
with more abstract additions of people i don't really know and less blatant romanticism. only a little, though.

so, malcolm turnbull, hey?
seven dissinters.
do-nothings, apparently, have more support than weak support of a shitty bill.
i vote a mass political suicide. the potential member for higgins who stresses the presence of her Husband and Family Values in her pamphlets was at the train station this morning. i'm mostly just excited at the prospect of greens in my electorate.

enough pseudo connected rant for tonight. goodnight.

origin[al]s

there's something inately comforting about the grampians. partially it's the family history - the mother growing up and the little old ladies who invite us inside for champagne for lunch while she tells us about my grandfather. the hundreds and hundreds of pictures people pull out for us to look at and the art on the walls and the hot, hot hot hot weather and the sand in the shoes and the kangaroos and rabbits and one lone emu. olive trees and old couples making us tea and all of it.
partially it's just the town itself. we walk through the main street. buy shoes. find a health food shop. what are the chances? make friends with the owner. she makes me a soy chai and tells me about her little boy. he runs around.
if people are this open, don't they run out of things to say to each other, eventually? does everybody just know everyone else's stories?

goodnight internet. one day we'll all work out our cultural confusions. self realization in literature will die a slow and largely unnoticed death. it's kinda boring, anyway.

i miss this place i've never lived in.

hit me with a flower, andy warhol. adieu friends.

newold books

"bonjour.
parlez-vous franglais?
c'est un doddle.
si vous etes un fluent english-speaker, et si vous avez un VCE francais, fraiglais est un morceau de gateau.
un VCE level de french est normalement inutile. un nothing. un wash-out. les habitants de la france ne parlent pas VCE french. ils ne comprennent pas VCE french.
un cours de VCE francais est un passeport a nowhere.
mais maintenant 'Let's Parler Franglais!' vous offre une occasion d'utiliser votre schoolboy french!
avec ce livre, vous pouvez etre un maitre linguistique, amazer vos amies, sentir une nouvelle confiance, developper vos muscles, perdre le flab et attracter les birds.
pas mal, hein?
le franglais n'est pas un gimmick. il n'est pas un quick-improvement method. il est simplement un wonder-new-product qui remplace tous les autres wonder-new-products sur le market. non, straight up, squire, nou ne le regretterez pas si vous achetez 'Let's Parler Franglais!'. Tell you what, pour vous, pas $6. Pas $5. Pas meme $4.35. Pas $3. Mais $2.99!
je suis crazy. a ce prix, je fais le give-away.
un copy? bon. cash sur le nail. merci, mate.
maintenant je vais me rendre scarce.
voici le fuzz.
toodle-oo."

- Miles Kington

big clean out of the room.

shaking off the dusty cape
because she used to love it.

in preparation for my departure for paris/inspired by the lovely room of pretty things i slept in last night, i decided to come home and clean. my room is messier. but i've thrown out junk magazines and replaced them with my new typewriter. i threw out my trashy books and now there's space on my bookshelf for zines and all the books that have been lying around in piles on my floor and bed.
whilst cleaning i found this: (an unsent letter from me to an old boyfriend. written during an art exam. better than finding money or food, even.)

"Dear Boy,
I do not like contemporary sculpture. I do not like it one bit. It's a pile of wank. Ugly, wank. How unfortunate for the art world, that there are people making godawful trucks in art galleries and pieces of al foil and a fucking chop saw.
Studio Arts exam, what the fuck is that? 15 marks on perspective? Now that's just lazy.

There is a quote, I will find it for you one day, but it makes me happy. It's about fuck, we get it, art is everyday objects, art is ugly, art is difficult and art is everywhere. Don't dwell. As an artist, it's not your job to create something irritating. Something petty. It's no longer revolutionary to take a picture of garbage and be like oh, fuck, consumerist modern society, cry. It's not for the artist to keep trying to prove a point that's been made long enough. Yes, art is anything. Yes, that includes gladwrap. Yes, that includes 1000 hours of video footage of a plain white wall.

The role of art - as I see it - now - it's not to prove what pop art already has. It's to create something real. It's not to dwell. It's forward. It's making something, in a world that feels nothing - be it good or bad - that creates feeling, or meaning, something that doesn't imitate or make fun of life, but embraces it.
I'm so sick of cynicism in art. We're fucking alive.

I hope you agree/disagree. I love you.
Casi"