OH HAI

I´M IN UR ROOM

POSTIN´ON UR BLAG

 

loss/gain

think of one thing. and think of the other, too.

to get you over the line. you were asleep earlier,

but now you’re more there than ever. but y/our

presence is still in the second person.

can you read and write simultaneously?

a good artist has got to be very ordinary.

afterwards, you’ll feel like you’ve taken a nap,

the two thoughts combined, dragging you over that line.

honestly, scrape them together. things have to be brought together.

under the sheets,

 

nina cherry

people who cry in showers shouldn’t throw blank stones.

bend over my back. there, do you feel it?

even the french speak french just to feel good about themselves.

no, you have to lie with your back touching my back.

don’t they just speak it because they don’t know any better?

that’s it, right down there, with the water falling.

anyway, i speak only to make myself feel good about myself.

and because i don’t know any better.

well does it work? do you feel better?

i said: no blank stones.

 

as i go to bed.

most nights, when i’m about to go to sleep, i don’t even bother removing half the detritus from my bed beforehand. i just push it all over to the far side of the mattress and never even notice it’s there. and i think to myself: god, i’m so glad i don’t have to share this big bed with the person i love all the time. that sure would be a hassle, having to share this nice bed with the person i love. and i think about all the poor saps out there who have to share their beds with people they love. every night. poor bastards, i think to myself.

 

lab-quality prints

you came out line by line by line by line from the thigh of your jeans, through the deep blue of your shadow-wet under-singlet, and then the light-grey dark-grey top layer, the green beads of your heart, your purple underarm, line by line by line of the arm that shades your face from the sun, your chin popping out in profile, and then suddenly, out jumped the rest of you. your black hair in the sun. the tender sliver of sky between the wristband of your watch and your wrist. and the cranes drilling into your forearms. that day, in bilbao.

 

i had a post all thought out for today

but i can’t remember what the fuck it was. i worked on that unruly poem for a bit, and then i went in for that honours meeting, but had nothing to tell them (except, i’ll see you in a year) so i went for an awful lot of beers and a few cigarettes (shut up).  got home and there were a thousand emails from fucking uts. but what more do you want? you want to know how drunk i am? how much i long for that beautiful one? well fuck off.

 

manquer

sometimes this ache is so much like feeling sick in the stomach, or having a sore throat, when you dread swallowing. and you see how long you can just let the saliva build up in your mouth, you dribble some of it out, and it dips away from you and breaks free, but eventually you just have to swallow, whether it’s reflex getting the better of you or necessity, and it hurts so that it closes your eyes and you think i don’t want to have to do that ever again, as the saliva starts building up and your throat starts itching to swill it down, as if it doesn’t know how swollen and red and raw it is. and the whole process starts over.

 

the room on level two of building three.

s once told me that her mother had said that she never felt that this was her new home until she gave birth to her first child. then she said to herself: this is home now. that idea terrifies me. of being somewhere half-heartedly, kind of longing to leave but not knowing if you would ever be able to. when i was away i knew i would return, so i went about knowing places as deeply as i could while i had the chance. had i just found myself there, exhiled, not knowing whether i was staying or returning, i think i would have broken down.

i feel like i’m kind of losing my mind in sydney at the moment. i’ve never found myself in a situation like this before. whenever i have changed place (only a couple of times) i have always set about immediately rooting myself into that landscape. high school took me out of place but you were out of place amongst other lost boys. the same thing happened in europe. of course coming back was different. because i entered into something that was formed an functioning. the hole i left in it had healed back over in my absence. because i refuse to settle into/for living with my parents, i have to maintain this sense of placelessness. this unbelonging. it’s like standing with your stomach muscles flexed. and it means that i do it when i relate to people too. not everyone. but at times i reflect that coldness onto people around me. when i know what i’m doing, where i’m going, where i’m staying, i think, might be able to treat you properly.

at the moment, i feel hyper-sensitive to the spaces that i inhabit. and usually, uncomfortable. the room on level two of building three, for example, has about six or seven rhythms of cold. there is the air-conditioning that quivers against itself with the circulating air, kind of like a thin, closed hi-hat. there’s the stomach shudder of the lift as it slides up and down the building throat. every time announced by the sick wane of its bell. one ding for up. ding deungggg for down. the computers in the corner hum like they don’t want you to realise, but if you listen, they don’t shut up. they just move up or down in frequency as they think more or go to sleep for a bit. then there is the bubbler, which has another motor in it somehwere, keeping it’s dribble-flow cold, and my brain on edge. there are other breathings that i can’t pin-point. but it’s like feeling someone inhaling beside your shoulder. one thing that worries me is that i’m feeling a similar sensitivity to my uni writing. a sensitivity that actually goes too far and doesn’t let me write. because there’s a tightness in me. like asthma.

 

wallet

you know,
i’ve kept you in my wallet the whole year long,
though i moved you from the pocket with the phone
on the front, to the bit in the back where the bills go.
to a place between the facing orange faces
of a twenty dirham note.

 

day folds

man, everything just started closing in on me. all the days were folding into quotients of themselves. absolutely everything was smaller and shorter than it was. and i had this poster thing that i had to do and i had at least beers to have with a friend and it was important because she’s going soon and you know when it just feels like you are forever losing people and even though many or most will or may be refound and wonderful things can happen at the refinding – some of the most wonderful things have happened at the refinding! – every one of them still tears a bit off you when they go. and yes they leave deformities in your side that echo them, they break you in their pattern and you are them as well as you as well as all those other things. but still, the days do fold in and leave you breathing tightly in their smallness.