Humbled

I have fallen from grace and I am humbled. I am never too far from this crash and this burn. I anticipate it. I hold myself rigid, knowing that soon there will be another fall. I dream of the kids I used to know who were cruel. The cool cruel university clique and their barbed humour. I was always too slow to find their chatter amusing. Success was something to be celebrated, but if you fell, then they would step away and turn their heads and I would be alone with it. It is never easy to fail, but this is something I must learn to take gracefully. Something that can only come with age. I feel old. I feel a million years. I'll teach you to surf, he says and for a moment I ride the wave, but there is always the fall. Hard fall, onto water like concrete. Onto the stony faces of a crowd who have watched you come down heavily. I fall. I remember all the falls. And I am humbled.

sex in the city

so I was like the sexual super-hero. My superpower aimed and fired and them walking off together hand in hand. It seems my special ability is to help other people have sex with each other. This kind of reeling them in just like I used to do, but when I have caught them I pass them to others without taking a bite. I am left ravenous. I return to my beautiful boy emptied out and desperate for a feed. I return with the stories of the love that others have consummated for me and all the complicated emotions that accompany that kind of oblique loss. Pick me up my beautiful boy and hold me because I am still raw from the chase and catch.

Thank you

Thank you Krissy for the care, for the effort, for the stepping out on a limb. Thank you for abandoning the safety of a simple world to introduce me to one that widens my horizons. Thank you for the risk and the effort and for the love that is without boundaries. I know that you are unique and that your care is rare and special. I know that you have put yourself out on so many occasions to ease my fall and to make me feel valued. I feel safer for you being in my world. I feel loved and supported. I am so glad that we met.

Thank you.

Thank you.

lost 3

I don't know where I am?

Really?

Yes.

Well what do you see? Do you see any signs? Street signs.

Not from here. Not from this phone box.

What shops are there?

A cafe.

Called?

Cosmopolitan.

Brunswick street mall?

Really?

Stay where you are. I'm coming.

But it doesn't look like the Brunswick street mall. I can't see anything I recognise. How come it is so different?

Just stay where you are.

lost 2

so suddenly I was lost. I stepped off the bus. Maybe I had missed my stop. It was unfamiliar. But things become unfamiliar suddenly. I lose my way in an instant. Edges, corners, sudden fluctuations of colour. I am suddenly removed from the world and placed somewhere new. This is what the panic does to me. Lost in the Brunswick Street mall only it might have been anywhere.

Lost

I was lost in the Brunswick Street Mall. I need to precis this with the fact that I know the Fortitude Valley area particularly well. For a year or two I would wander into the Brunswick street Mall, chug shortblacks as if they were shots of tequilla, follow this with shots of tequilla at The Beat or vodka and soda in the strip club where I waited for my girlfriend to finish her shift. Sometimes I would walk into clubs just to see what it is like to hang with a crowd that I would never loiter with without the buzz of the alcohol to bouy me. I would dance. So much dancing. I would dance by myself and think nothing of it.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

at 4 am with the wide awake horror of the sleep deprived. Loneliness. When nothing would be better than waking the beloved and seeking comfort, curled and snuggled like a marsupial crawling to the breast. But there is nothing but the comfort of a blanket and an unmarked lined page, soft as skin. Perfect to make words on. But the words and sleep are in collusion. I am left alone with eleven kinds of loneliness and the bitter dark.

Lessons

I need to learn some lesson from the last six months, something that I can take away with me, neatly packaged. A platitude. Or, maybe a novel I can beat together from the mess of complicated emotions that have plagued me. I need something concrete to be done or learned or made from this. But I am back here in this endless cycle, the self critique followed by the self-assuredness, followed by the tears and fight and hurt and anger and elation. A carousel of this and that, a pot pouri. None of it, nothing seems salvageable. I am a wreck of the different pieces of myself.

I will write a book, I tell you about it. I say it will be based on this and that and some of it things that have happened and some of it just some joke I made up for the sake of conversation, but it all seems possible. I will write this book and I will do it in your voice and it will be the best book, the one book, and for just a moment, conceptually, it seems like I could make something out of the muck of what has been.

Philipp Meyer

So yes, there was the alcohol. So yes, the thrill of an event, the best event. The one that you will remember forever kind of event. So yes there was the wide-eyed youthful stares and the scotch and more scotch and probably too much scotch. And the kind of excitement that should be sexual. I am looking around for something sexual to pin it on, because surely Meyer isn't exactly my thing, although he is fine, gorgeous even, fun. But damn, he can write. And damn they can write, those young things who read alongside him. And I am in awe.

lack passion

Maybe I am tired because I lack passion. Because this is my only output. Because I have settled, albeit briefly into the routine of marriage. Maybe I have no energy because I am vaguely happy, sitting atop things I have wanted, guarding my treasure jealously but not reaching for treasure that is not mine. Maybe I am tired because this kind of contentment makes me a little sad. Nothing to hope for. Nothing to covet. This is why I am tired.

I sleep a lot.

archived

I have been archived by the National Library, which elevates my sex. Someone can do their PHD on my vagina and they will be able to easily reference it in their bibliography. When I am dead my vagina will still be accessible. Oh the jokes that could be made if it weren't for my complete respect for the National Library.

So shhhh! The word vagina can only be whispered. And no running. Inside voice. Inside voice please...

You

you have dropped off my evening posts. You have slumped out of my conversations. You have drifted slowly away, but I still hold you at a little distance like a favourite toy boat held fast with a piece of string. I feel the tug and pull of you as you float in a different direction.

I will not let go, but if I did, I wonder if I would find that it was you, toy boat, who was holding the string. I am but a person drifting along in your wake. Sometimes you tug at me. Heartstrings throbbing in unfortunate sympathetic vibrations. Sometimes you are rough and I turn my back and pretend that I don't know you are just there at an easy distance, close enough for me to call out to you.

So I am lonely without you now and yet you are still there in the moments before sleep, still sharing my silent conversations when my mind wanders towards that kind of thing. I think of you often but things are different now. Sadly. Achingly at a little distance.

different devices

They all have their uses. Different devices. I rarely go without a device these days. Read crutch for the convalescing, stick for the blind, walker for the old and infirm. No one has seen every one of them but me. Some people have seen some of them, all are secrets from almost everyone. Once the painters saw half of one. A friend, with me when I purchased. Someone curious, shown. These devices that I know intimately. These useful tools, like a pencil, scissors, or a frying pan. A clattering drawer full of them. Timewasters. All smelling faintly of me

shared event

I put it in my calendar but it will never happen. Never need worry. This event that has been flagged as a dual activity will come and go never to be actioned. The most action will be a surprising pop-up reminder at some odd point on the day in question. I will noticably sink. Shoulder sag. I may feel sad for the rest of the day, or two or perhaps most of the week after. It is a reminder to be kind. To show the kind of love that I am not noted for. Chaste, genuinely free of any need for a returning gesture. Still, in advance I am sad. It is not about passion. No flesh to flesh that isn't mediated by clothing and a respectful distance. But it will probably not be done and that, my friend, is why I will be sad.

forgot

I forgot to masturbate this morning. Somehow, I got distracted by the washing and the dishes and the printing out of things. I was sitting on the bus and I almost got off, turned around. How long have I got till my shift starts? Do I have time for a quick trip back. Time? possibly. But how ludicrous to take the bus home, only to catch the next one 3 minutes later.

All day at work I was distracted. I had every opportunity and I forgot. It was on my to do list. Why am I not more thorough about my to do list? Is my memory failing me? Am I finally slipping into old age. Next will I forget to pull my pants up or wee in my bed? I wish I had remembered. I wish I had just got off the bus, turned around, begun the day again. Now I am just rattled.

Capgras

capgras syndrome, and a hand that is not my hand, which is weird, but useful when you are alone perhaps. kind of creepy to wake up in the bed next to it, but it touches the sex of you with fingers that look like but are not your own. It rubs at the places that have become so familiar, you read them like a braille version of a thing you have memorised. You want the hand gone, but it is here and so you may use it as an extention of yourself while you think about someone else, in this game that is a repetition, comforting, boring at times, satisfying as sleep. Capgras syndrome and you think, yes, that might be useful but annoying. That might be something to stave off the ho-hum. Use it wisely, because what is novel may never remain so.

Boyfriend

The boyfriend returns with renewed vigour. Swept up by. Oggled by. Played with. Petted. And it doesn't take much really. I already feel love for, am enamoured by. One flower bestowed without prompting. One moment of looking at my body and actually seeing. One word of appreciation. I blossom. I feel beautiful.

Hair Salon

Speaking of Cindy, she does my hair. Very home-made, out the back at the bookshop, no head massage, no water, just the scissors that we use to cut the ribbons with, sharpened on the edge of a glass. So you should open an S and M salon, we tell her, you are almost there now. We talk of clients strapped in to their chairs, you get what we give you. Cuts with odd names, the hard perm, slash and lash #2. Hosed down at the end of it. Just a joke I suppose but I can see the appeal. Sometimes you are just too tired for a hair cut. Sometimes you are just too tired for the idea of love.

I am exhausted. It has been an odd two months. I haven't the patience for games, flirtation, apologies, niceties. I just love you so shut up, I say. I don't care what you feel or think or say to me. I don't care about your needling or your little barbs. If I had three days to live we wouldn't have time for all the toing and froing. We would just lie side by side, chaste as children and hug. I would rest my breath on the back of your neck because that is what I like most. It would be like Cindy's salon. Shut up. Accept love. Don't be an idiot. The same can be said for myself.

So strap me to your chair. Cut my hair. Tell me what to wear. Wrestle me into a hug, because we are all going to die. Sometime. Tomorrow.

famous

You maybe will be famous one day. Yes. You know this. You feel it in your bones. Overnight success 20 years later. One thing that you can feed off for years. You maybe will be famous enough for people to send you love poems. Letters, Small signals of distress and delight. Gifts.

In your mailbox. Your mailbox which is so often empty. But you check it in case he has sent something. A postcard perhaps. A letter. But there is never anything but envalopes with windows.

Then, maybe, you become famous. And there are all these offers of love. Lonely people undressing and lying on your doorstep in winter. Your mailbox is full of underwear. You search through it for a letter from him. He was your friend once, you remember and you have never quite shaken the habit of waiting for him to call.

Another life. A better one. But we never outgrow ourselves. We are always searching for that girl who left and made us cry. That boy who never asked to go out with you. Trying to rectify that one mistake, the lost chance. We have one life and we live it not once, but over and over. Compounding regrets with repetition.

I will repeat you. You will repeat her. He will repeat him. Ad infinitum.

steps

1) remember

2) pretend not to.

3) breathe through it.

4)If you have to go through with the little hands free orgasm do it, but do it without blinking.

5) forget it. Put it out of your mind.

6) go on with your day. These things come and go.

Cindy Mount

Cindy Mount Cindy music to itch to to kiss to to smack to. Shake. Utterly shake in the big big shake up that is ahhhhhhh! Cindy Mount Mount Cindy cranky smack upstairs cranky wet teatowel.

And if you think this is not about sex then rethink. Rethink it now. Please miss.

other people

the smorgasboard of other people. Them in the flesh, this daily passing by. The facination of them sharing a fragment of art that we devour together but separately. The lives. All these endlessly passing lives. People who read and think and slump and love other people. These people.

I am free to watch them. To follow them to their houses. Sit in the dark and watch the lights come on in room after room. I am free to listen to the flushing of their toilets, the whirring of their vibrating toys, the cries that seep out through their walls. They are all separate and different from me. This is the beauty of them. They are not like us, the tiny handful of people in my heart. They are other lives. I could eat them.

Basket of polite images

It has been a long time since I watched pornography. That time in the bed with the link that was new. Instead I sit with my little collection of polite images that I flick through like postcards. Real paper things sent in the mail. Chaste images. A basket of feet and lips and fingers.

It seems I have grown out of lewdness. Grown mild. Talk of love. Love, love, love whispered so often that I have almost grown to believe it. Dream of things that have never occured. Dream of one step over the line two steps, naked perhaps but only for a minute, tasting of salt. Naked except for the salt. The idea of naked when I will never again be naked, stomps all over your fisting and your double entry and your circle of men with her on her knees. Just me standing in a clothed hug and the tickle of fingers on the naked small of my back and it is done.

Basket of polite images to dip into. Mind flowers, plucked. Petals one by one - loves me not. Same ones emerging like a surprise. Familiar surprise. Surprised into orgasm yet again.

Dead

think that you are dead because you beat so rarely, odd times, on the bus, in the cinema, suddenly overwhelmed by memory.

You think you are dead because when the moment arrives you are just going through the motions, but it hits you a month later, six weeks later, years after the fact, the visceral being in the moment long past. Your nipple tugs errect as if it has been nipped by tiny back teeth, you feel a moistening, a warmth, a blush in hidden places.

it was nothing at the time perhaps but it has stayed with you. You could tear down your top and expose your breasts to commuters. Your breasts that must now remain hidden. Your breasts that have had their last moment exposed to view. Too late now you ache from it. When it is all over.

self

blanket like a boat on grass like a river, near a river but not in it. Watching the river. Bridge like a crossroads and a phone call. Calling someone. Calling for help or for sex or for inspiration. Calling across the turn of the tide.

We speak on the phone which is a new thing. I dream of telephone booths lit up in the night and a creek that is mostly rocks that must be crawled over. You dream of deep water, all that stuff you are sitting on, fathoms of it.

The ocean spills out of my mouth and all that is left is a trickle and a slither over shale. I have been here before. I have dreamed this before. Barely wet. As always. Often. There was that one time. There was that once but that is way over. I am way over it. See now it would be better. The irony. Now when my river has drained out to a tiny spill it would be better. Laugh. hahaha like the young folk say on their status updates. hahaha.

new

In this new time I return to the romantic attractions of art. I read books I had abandoned for flesh. I find the erotic potential in a painting or a photograph. I sit with women. Beautiful women of all ages, young girls with all the energy of someone discovering things anew. Older women, wise and articulate. Women of all shapes and sizes and all of them so sensual each in their own way. I feel better in my skin. I do not need you or anyone to see me. I see me. I change my hair. I become new for myself. Nothing for anyone but me. And I look and I nod. I am fine. I find myself so.

Soon. Not now, but soon, in a day or two or three, I will go out and drink a cocktail that tastes of tobacco and I will dance out in the open where anyone could see me. I will be alone. Comfortably alone. I will have a book and a pen and my Moleskine. I might write.

This now excites me. The idea of this and the potential of a future not tangled up in someone elses view of me.

no sex

they who have no sex

day to day without

by choice

I am amazed and confused. All her life without and I am uncertain how this could be achieved.

Except now I am tired and it has been a couple of days and I don't seem to mind. But still, all her life. I stretch back, trying to take in the weight of a life that is longer than my own. That chaste life. This one life which is trickling over like sand running out.

Arena of masculinity

The arena of masculinity and the pleasure book for boys. Boys boys boys in your gym shorts. In short. Kinda short. That's ok. Short is ok. We have other ways. And we're no oilpainting either. We're too wide or too tired or too sagged or too stretched but we are oh so good at the chat chat. And we have found her. Finally we have found her and we don't wilt with longing, thank fuck for that. Skip in the step and who gives anyway.

Light. Lighter than we have been. Lighter and messier and all over it. And still liking you despite all this. Joyous likeness. Still liking and thank christ she didn't break it. Chipped. Happy.

I will cook a storm for you soon, only it will be for me. I will cook a storm for me. I will eat grey cloud. Feast on hail and thunder. Watch me eat.

lover boy

lover boy. finger in all pies, smelling of cherry pie. smelly pie. you, you, reading about you you. So always about you and always (sigh) forever heartfelt crapity crap. and your tiny little fingers not quite maybe but if you slipped them up with slick then never know. But worth thinking about Mr lover boy. With that facade and all the regrets underneath it. Her regrets cause maybe she should have in that one chance in that one if only feet stamp never to be repeated bargain basement. probably not worth the fire sale anyway. all flashing lights and hurry, hurry, hurry never to be repeated. Ah well. Never mind. Now we have that.

Now I have this.

That.

Whatever.

Mmm.

silent

He does not want me to talk about our sex. If it happens or if not, if it is problematic, or wonderful. Whatever. I am not to speak of it. Without you, my faceless other, I would have nothing much to write about. No 2009 story at all. I return now to the past because there is no present or future. There is just the silence of what is between me and him. The secret sacred marriage vows that strangle me mute. I understand, but it leaves me alone with you, my invisible compilation. My longing and desire made flesh. My mix tape of people I might love.

sad endings and shrugs

In the real world endings are sad.

It is only in fiction where there are resolutions. I search about for some kind of full stop, some parting line that will make sense of all the rest of it. We are not parting, but there has been a shift, a rending of the ground between us. I glance across it and you are so far away from me. Too far to whisper secrets to you. Too far certainly to hug. I wave. Yes, I am here, you wave back as if nothing has changed. For you, nothing has changed. You never saw yourself twinned in me. You never felt the same closeness, as if your organs had been ripped from your chest and sewn roughly onto someone elses.

I chat with you but you are talking happily to someone else. I know it but I am no longer angry. I do not feel abandoned. I do not need your attention with the same ferocity.

In other circumstances you would say I had fallen out of love.

I stand here at a safe distance and I miss the habit of you. Two souls snuggled in intimacy like children whispering under the sheets. I thought the innocent ferocity of our friendship would last forever. I thought I might die from it, but I didn't. At the end I am just numb and lonely and perhaps a little bored. At the end of it you shrug. Nothing has changed for you. You have other intimate friends. I am not your only. It was good, the best, but now you will move on without a trip in your trajectory and I realise that I was not that much really, not anything different. Now you have your whole bunch of friends. And I am alone.

I will get more work done.

falling in love

I have fallen in love with my husband. This is something that earns me gold stars, thumbs up, a world nodding and feeling that all is right again.

There are times when it is only struggle. The two of us negotiating a life lived too closely, following behind each other, grumpy and beligerant, wishing we were forging separate paths. There are times when it is just two separate people tied together by posessions and promises. All the differences highlighted. All desire fled.

So I practice falling in love with others. I remember the things that soften my brittle exterior. I remember how to be generous, how to flirt and to laugh. I remember about longing and the frightening power of my lust. Perhaps it is all for this, for this turning back to the status quo and remembering that I can love my husband.

He has put himself out for me. He has driven for hours. He has fought with me then reached out with one hand to check that I am ok. He is extremely beautiful and becomes more so with the passing of years. He is unlike me, the opposite of me. He is a stranger and yet, he is kind and at times generous. He has stuck by me. He has made mistakes as I have made mistakes. But we come to this moment now when I look up from chopping the broccoli and I have that small, falling in love feeling. I know better than to reach for him as he may just struggle away and I will return to the cycle of rejection and self loathing. Instead I smile a little. I thank him for his tolerance and his care. I think I am falling in love with you, I tell him and he comes to me.

The men I choose do not want to be touched. They need coaxing out of their isolation. They need time and patience. If I wait, eventually he will come to me. He comes to me now and there is love.

dead flowers

The flowers died overnight. There is some explanation, Something in the water, some floral alchemy, and yet, I can't help wondering if it is because I have become my grandmother. The power of her will that could shrivel roses. The fierce strong anger that is a fist around all our lives. My grandmother looms large in my past and in my present.

She tells me she has a magic power. Her power and the power of her grandmother. It is passed down, skipping generations and the witchy mark is in the white streak of hair that we share, her, me, my great grandmother.

I wake the morning after and the flowers have wilted, resting their fragile heads on my desk as if they were sleeping. I cut their stems back. They are beautiful flowers. Despite my overwhelming fury that led to flowers in the first place, the flowers themselves do not deserve to die. Another day and they are crisp and mummified.

Hilarious, I tell him. Frightening, he replies, and it is true, I am unsettled by this metaphor for what has transpired in the real world.

I cut the few buds that have not yet expired and I put them in a wine glass. They are pretty, delicate. I wish they had all survived my fury. These few stems, perhaps, I can rescue from whatever emotional outburst has risen like a poltergeist and sucked the life out of a peace offering.

We have powers, my grandmother tells me in my memory. No one crosses us. We put a curse on them and that is that.

I do not want her power to frighten people. I do not want the strength of character that leaves her bitter and alone. I do not want her cold, hard fury or her inability to forgive. I pack the car to visit my grandmother, my hard, cold, angry, tough, all-pervasive grandmother. She has been felled. She is down but the count has not yet ended and I imagine that she could spring back up at any moment. I imagine she could still outlive me.

I should dye the white streak out of my hair. I should learn to hug and to smile and to laugh at inane television shows. I should learn to forgive.

We are still speaking, even after the fury of our arguments we are still speaking. These last few buds have remained upright, sucking in the water in the wine glass, keeping their heads above water.

Maybe there is hope for me to outlive my grandmother yet.

You

You know I am talking to you directly.

You know I love you just as you are. I don't want you to change or become my image of you. You are what I have snagged on. Just you. No amendments. Sometimes I make it difficult for you to know this because I am skipping from thought to thought. The real world is sinking and I am drowning here alone without something solid to hold onto. I hold onto my idea of you, and, in my panic, I become confused.

But really it is you without adjustments. I am so glad of you.

the girls

three days in a row I sit with them, the girls, the women. They are varied in age, but mostly they are younger than me. All strong and tough and fiery. When I wonder why I like them I think of their ability to be completely who they are without apology. The women I admire are not pretty. They each carry their beauty like a weapon. They do not put on clothes for men to view. They have partners or they are single, but most importantly they stand for themselves. I stand with them. I hold my own up here amongst these ever-powerful women. I am attracted to them. I could stand with them, naked. I could hold them. But I am happy to just be amongst them. I do not judge myself against these select few. I am made stronger by their proximity. Strange how this works this mirror to ourselves. These smart, sturdy girls and the calm they bring me.

Fierce woman

She is so beautiful. I look at her beautiful face and her wild hair, barely contained and I wonder why she hasn't been snapped up. Too fierce, she tells me. Perhaps she is too frighteningly intelligent. I can hold my own with her, but many couldn't. She is straight talking. She is honest. She demands that people treat her well. If not she will walk away. I like her. I imagine she would be passionate with a lover. The illusive lover that is missing out on something wonderful. I see her running away to some house on a wild shore where she collects shells in the morning and runs naked into the icy waves heaped with seaweed. I imagine her finding her passion and writing her book and I will come and visit her there. We will talk like life-long friends. I like her. I would like to take a break from the world for a moment. She and I talking. Up late with a bottle of scotch settled between us. She is so beautiful. With her I feel beautiful as well. I think we have become friends.

lack of contact

From every day to nothing.
From twice a day to nothing.
From five times a day to nothing.
Is it just me or has something changed.
Have you changed, or I changed
Or just the space between us which is ever-changing but seemed to be constant.
Everything to nothing.
Pendulum swing.
A good distance.
All the space in the world.