new directions

for anybody who has stumbled in here – be careful, the gases can be toxic – i’ve moved on to a new space. i am now hedging my bets.

 

return

the once a day blog will return. obviously, when i am standing still. i might move it though. stay tuned.

 

englaissement

with your hair like that, your shapes fold out
into lines of flight. not out-folding, they elaborate.
semantically of course that is off the mark.
movement is different to expansion. dispersion
is closer, but with the sound of the word lavender.
Though that isn’t the right kind of softness. And
there’s an oily sweetness there which is probably
important. not cloying though. this is the sweetness
that comes at the back of the mouth, so to speak.
I think of french, or at least of english words
pronounced frenchly. of hard ‘a’s. if englaissement
were a word that might be it. and franchising might seem
a cheap way to get hold of something, but
the hard a at least is germane. in that moment
of engagement, with your hair like that,
as you look at me there is deliverance.

 

egret

i revel in the space between revile and revere.
i file things next to thoughts and take a step
back to take a look at the bookcase. A bookcase
is a thing like any other thing in that it resembles
a number of things. the first is its own reproduction or reflection.
The bookcase, insofar as it believes
that it can believe, does not believe
that it resembles its reflection, as it has a self-sense that cannot be
withdrawn from interiority, enclosure, from shoulders
arching around the frame of a torso, and the resultant hollow
on the reverse side. flatpacked, a body is a body, but a shelf
has more to it than that. taking a phrase at face value,
old flames take to a fence and say: now who’s old!
we walk out to the yard and lift our palms to the heat, but know
that tomorrow this will seem bad. tomorrow, our hands will
still ache with cold and the neighbours will be out for blood.

Letting down the shutters, the cold air seeps from our mouths
and we huddle in the corner of the room,
now fools, drowning in regret. we stew an ibis
and take to the table, as egrets fly past.

 

half life

I count everything out and wonder if others do the same.
Heat beneath saucepans, panting as the water becomes syrup.
A froth comes to the surface or the liquid thickens.
All of this will be embarrassing within a week. Halved
lives are replicated eternally, and there is no limit
to diminishment. We know that speaking is like this.
Whether or not there is a point
at which water boils is beside the point.
The deep sleep of lobsters is on a par with our own.
Let the thing rest a minute, and the blood will
redistribute throughout the greater mass. On cooling,
we feel that we are closer than ever to getting it out.

 

a week or so late to comment

for a while there, things were getting really good. the ones in skivvies were upset, and had to go home. luckily there was wine there too, and many have children of their own now. the cops were sending emails between themselves and going through the back rooms of galleries. we were calling them stupid and they were calling us sick. which is fair enough, because we are sick. the ones with the money slowly and demurely became disappointed, realising that populism is not all it’s cracked up to be, unless you’re just talking about the cinema. we were all warned off using words like crack. even words like larynx were advised against, until we figured out what they meant. the word titillate fell under a blanket ban and restaurant reviewers went on strike. next thing you won’t be able to say senses or sensual! the following day both words were banned. the following day delicious, seductive and sauce were canned, and Good Living went out of print. the great butternut pumpkin came out in defence, but once that soup had reduced to a simmer. he won himself a vote, but only on a day by day basis.

suddenly reputations both counted for everything and were worthless. we called them idiots while they vomited in their children’s cornflakes. the children were not impressed and asked for more honey. the search was on and spencer got a little hot under the tunic. someone called him a dick and was arrested. i got caught up in it all. police shot at me when i took off my jumper. they threw up all over their guns until i explained that i am merely slim and whatever the opposite of the word hirsute is. not knowing what to make of those simmerings, they went home and told their children to go their rooms, and to cover up on the way to and from the shower. you are disgusting! they yelled. go to bed. (though they had already thrown out their beds days ago, as a precautionary measure). he threw up all over his wife and her suit was ruined. meanwhile, galleries continued to report increased visits and increased theft. things were walking out the door with people on either side like wheels. the cops, without so much as raising their batons, remembered what it was to smile. closing their eyes before art, they fell into each others arms and kissed a little, before straightening their caps and moving their eyes to the side. catching a glimpse of art they straightened their glances and saw each other, all in view of a woman in angular glasses or a man in a turtleneck, who were probably, they reasoned, getting off on all of this. having always thought of myself as a ‘writer’, it seemed strange to know that art was now ‘art’. porn enthusiasts, on the other hand, were disappointed with the turn their industry was taking, which they found to be overly high-brow, uncompelling, and plainly lacking in popcorn erotics. back at the station, on the toilet, a cop was annoyed to realise that he was reading an old catalogue for the venice biennale and not a copy of zoo weekly. he was ten pages in and hadn’t noticed a thing. out in the hall, his colleagues were listen in, giggling.

 

twin peaks

Seeing seeing in a mirror.
That is, to watch another move
looking away from yourself
with intent. With your glowing skull
in my hands, you open and close
lightly like a deep-sea creature. Sitting
on a chair though, you are drawn out
like a thing which can inflate but is breathless.
Breathless is not the word though. There is one word
for the thing, but you wouldn’t say that
to the thing, would you. For example:
A flower folds like a sack, but
then a sack folds the same way
as does a body, so go figure. We light up
in a kind of negative, our depressions
glow in unnatural colours, yet our euphoria
finds its place well enough.

Every day I receive bulletins I will never read.
Looking up, I see twin peaks. Which makes me think
that all things are twinned things. You only
have to listen to a line of speech to hear that.
I have a breathtaking desire to say
in the end, even though i know that
it misses the point. In a car, we can approach
only one mountain, while another car, from
a different point, approaches another.
Were you the first to go? Is this a race?
You ask questions to fill the time.
Other people ask to find out what it is,
and I realise that I can’t say. Not knowing
is like the embarrassment of mispronouncing
a foreign word. A blind bud fails to open
at the specified time.

 

internet survey

is endnote worth the effort?

yes/no.

(anyone who answers yes is taken to be offering a short, explanatory session on the ins and outs of using endnote)

 

L=I=N=G=U=I=S=T POEM

[written months ago, after reading an essay by quine, and then one by jacobson.]

The rabbit rustles through the grass,

following previously known rabbit enterprises

in the area. Coming into rabbithood,  it

comes across a piece of cheese.

the cheese is not known to the rabbit,

not having eaten it, or spoken of it.

But neither is the rabbit known to itself

(the rabbit cannot know its self, nor its death)

nor, perhaps, to the native. nor is there

an idea of rabbithood, rabbit enterprises,

but pressed curds? The rabbit asks:

am i here? is this cheese before me?

if an idea of a rabbit did exist, and

an idea of cheese as well, would a

rabbit-idea do well to eat a cheese-idea?

a thing moves in the grass.

 

in digits

the only thing that really pissed me off about being called to come into work at eight o’clock this morning, was that it was half an hour early. without the phone call, i would have woken just before eight thirty, to watch the spanish news as i eat my muesli (sans raisins, merci beaucoup) to hear about the tenth anniversary of the kidnapping of miguel angel blanco, the oceans of people mobilised aquatically in the streets in rejection of the violence, miguel, we’ll be waiting for you, they found him down a well nearly dead, on his way, and he got there in the end. announced from the balcony of the town hall the screams sounded like cheers. the direct inverse of beatlemania. the conservatives ruing the loss of unity before terrorism (pseudofascism).

instead, after a shower, i was left with about ten or fifteen minutes to fill in. during which time i caught five minutes of channel nine’s today show, or whatever they’re calling it now. with karl “you’re making it up, germaine” stefanovic and lisa wilkinson. and they were talking about the sorry song in primary schools. is it political correctness gone mad? has political correctness lost its capacity as a rational, conscious, unitary being? everybody’s best friend from high school, Political Correctness, has lost his mind, has early onset dementia. could this sad possibility be true? well, to discuss the issue, we have – who? – why kerri-anne kennerly! fantastic! well, what do you think of this important issue, kerri-anne? well the truth is, kerri-anne does think that it’s a case of PCGM (so sad, might there be medication or therapy that could help it? electric shock therapy?). imagine if children came home and asked: daddy, why are we saying sorry? what did i do? does this mean that our children, five-year-olds, literally stole children from indigenous parents forty years ago? PC has clearly lost its concept of time! what if children start to develop an idea that being in the world means to orient oneself within a spatial history that is collective as well as individual, which implicates them in happenings which they did not expressly carry out. that all of the things that have happened and are happening flow through them, place them where they are? what would happen then? kerri-anne then goes on to point out that she is an indigenous australian (cue me LOSING MY SHIT). all of us who are born here are! so really, we can’t apologise. how do we apologise to ourselves? now kerri-anne thought she was playing a semantics game. maybe because she’d heard a facile game played by an american referring to native americans. but the thing about semantics games – an entirely ignoble sport, to be sure – is that you’d better get your meanings right. indigenous is not exactly native. native, i think is slightly more about being born somewhere. indigenous, from my reading of my oxford, seems to refer to the original inhabitants of a place. obviously, in a completely atomised existence, the most anyone can be is a native, somebody born somewhere. only peoples can be original, which is both a historical and collective notion, and we can only apologise for our own actions, so there can be no remorse for things that happened before us, nor things that happened for us.

children should therefore sing songs that don’t ram political agendas down their throats. songs that don’t confuse them with ideas of collective responsibility beyond their atomised existences. songs like the national anthem. or maybe some good old hymns.