Monday, August 6, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Fabulous
Fierce, flickering flashlights
amplifies the angst and
becomes bothersome blocks
underneath
layers longing for lust
on opium of
understatements upon
satin sneaking slowly somewhere else.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Stone Baby
lithopedion:a rare phenomenon, which occurs when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy and is too large to be reabsorbed by the body. It then calcifies on the outside, shielding the mother from the dead tissue of the baby and preventing infection. The "stone baby" can remain in the mother's body for decades without causing her harm.
Stone Baby
A bleeding crack snapped open as the baby's heart cut short,
and sounded like pork crackle on a juicy tongue,
while the mother paid for groceries.
Her doctors called it lithopedion,
but the mourner did not appreciate their cunning frowns;
they were heavy, hasty, too hungry for their scientific feast to come.
She named the rotting thing Stone Baby.
Next winter's snow blended with the grey crystal child,
and the mother transformed to an awkward spectacle;
a bump on her belly and congratulating smiles
from strangers who hadn't noticed the husband's car
being sold to the Chinese couple
a little further down the road at a good price long ago.
Stone Baby twirled further into her shell,
her eyes whitened balls in frozen, festering ice.
Swift in his withdrawal across the ocean,
the husband had flown to a waitress with smiles and curves
in the right places at the right time,
and no dead daughter calcifying inside of her to speak of.
A rock of chalk in a pool of hard stone;
the woman's failing, faltering womb,
where Stone Baby found her fortress
and lay perpetually still.
The rain drops, wretched and wicked, were pixels in gigantic
sheets; black and green surrounding the deserted backyard
where the mother stood naked, nibbling on her defeat,
as a couple passing by wondered why she rubbed
her inflated belly with pink washing gloves.
After the shower, she could hear
the slow, sneaking, sniggering clock
ticking in beat with Stone Baby's hardening retreat.
"Get her out of me," the mother pleaded by the fourth spring,
and the short men in lab coats could not help their pulses
when a surgeon called with news of a lithopedion
so evolved its brain may still be intact.
The mother lay silent in dark hours of the night before;
cradling Stone Baby with all her strength and love;
ballet shoes and birthday cakes passed through her thoughts,
as the woman changed her mind.
A nest of baby birds pip pipped in the oak outside the next morning
as the woman pulled her suitcase from deep within the closet
and placed it on her moist, moulding bed;
the crystal child had quietened down, and left her
silent enough to ignore the hospital's pleading ring ring, ring ring.
She had used her plastic money in the night,
listening to the soothing sound of swaying spring trees
as she named her stone baby April.
Stone Baby
A bleeding crack snapped open as the baby's heart cut short,
and sounded like pork crackle on a juicy tongue,
while the mother paid for groceries.
Her doctors called it lithopedion,
but the mourner did not appreciate their cunning frowns;
they were heavy, hasty, too hungry for their scientific feast to come.
She named the rotting thing Stone Baby.
Next winter's snow blended with the grey crystal child,
and the mother transformed to an awkward spectacle;
a bump on her belly and congratulating smiles
from strangers who hadn't noticed the husband's car
being sold to the Chinese couple
a little further down the road at a good price long ago.
Stone Baby twirled further into her shell,
her eyes whitened balls in frozen, festering ice.
Swift in his withdrawal across the ocean,
the husband had flown to a waitress with smiles and curves
in the right places at the right time,
and no dead daughter calcifying inside of her to speak of.
A rock of chalk in a pool of hard stone;
the woman's failing, faltering womb,
where Stone Baby found her fortress
and lay perpetually still.
The rain drops, wretched and wicked, were pixels in gigantic
sheets; black and green surrounding the deserted backyard
where the mother stood naked, nibbling on her defeat,
as a couple passing by wondered why she rubbed
her inflated belly with pink washing gloves.
After the shower, she could hear
the slow, sneaking, sniggering clock
ticking in beat with Stone Baby's hardening retreat.
"Get her out of me," the mother pleaded by the fourth spring,
and the short men in lab coats could not help their pulses
when a surgeon called with news of a lithopedion
so evolved its brain may still be intact.
The mother lay silent in dark hours of the night before;
cradling Stone Baby with all her strength and love;
ballet shoes and birthday cakes passed through her thoughts,
as the woman changed her mind.
A nest of baby birds pip pipped in the oak outside the next morning
as the woman pulled her suitcase from deep within the closet
and placed it on her moist, moulding bed;
the crystal child had quietened down, and left her
silent enough to ignore the hospital's pleading ring ring, ring ring.
She had used her plastic money in the night,
listening to the soothing sound of swaying spring trees
as she named her stone baby April.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Gotta love that apathy
Uni has come again (though not to stay for more than 12 weeks) and kicked me in the ass. When I start writing in school - and I don't mean just a couple of sentences here and there; I mean WRITE - it seems to me that time for other kinds of writing disappears quickly. What I will, however, comment on right now (sadly related to uni) while I have a spare 20 minutes, is the apathy of my generation. In Writing the Zeitgeist, we talk about our time ghost; what makes now now, and not yesterday or tomorrow. And what has become absolutely clear to me in these past five weeks of tutorials, is that my generation is so overwhelmed by everything - cause let's face it: the Internet makes the world in its almost entirety available to our senses - that it has simply decided to not let anything get under its skin. We are the collective carefree, who will with the click of a button, move from the KONY 2012 video (no more than 6 minutes in, of course) to Charlie Bit My Finger. We will not care, so long as it doesn't affect us. Then we can care a world and a half. When Curtin Uni implemented Pay As You Go parking, the protests, flyers and opinion letters to the administration saw no end; students were talking, complaining, fighting. Over parking. "Don't make me pay 200 dollars more a year for parking!" I don't own a car. I do own a computer, however, and the absolute frustration and grief I am experiencing from the realisation of my generation's (that in my opinion should be active - we certainly have all the means for it) indifference, has made me think hard on what I use my Mac for. The BBC radio is now on whenever I spend more than five minutes on the bus; I try to watch news on YouTube. Why can't we use technology for something good? Why must it be used for further lack of interest; for a decreasing sense of empathy and humanity within us? I am saddened that 30 000 students will cry "Wolf!" over parking, but not over child soldiers. I am angry that my generation seems unwilling to be passionate about absolutely nothing existing outside its private universe. 200 dollars more a year? How about you tell me 5 of those dollars were spent on someone else than yourself before PAYG parking was implemented onto your poor wallets. Perhaps I'll listen then.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Awake My Soul
Awake my soul, but with something else than pain and misery. It doesn’t matter if the lying and the cheating of the heart are to someone, something, somewhere or sometime; the bleeding still persists and the hard shell that so quickly tightens itself around poor experience is closed up and must be slowly broken down again from scratch. It is a heavy burden, like stones constantly brushed by cool water on the ocean floor that I imagine is filled with magical creatures and terrifying monsters. I wouldn’t know – the ocean scares me. It is too great and too deep of a void to grasp and thus to be comfortable with. My heart is lying on that ocean floor, among the rocks, and is being held down by the powerful waves that created happiness yesterday, fear this morning and sorrow this evening. I am not what I was those few and seemingly irrelevant hours ago that became so important with what was said and discovered and felt, and I wonder at the time that will pass between now and that point when things are a mirrored but still blurry image of what they were before I fell asleep last night.
I am lost. At a loss of words and pages and ideas and merely a shadow of the person I had started to become as everything unchanged itself and I was back to that place between icy fragments and crystal clear stars somewhere far away out in a deep I don’t know. The ink dots scream out to me. “Read me! Write me!” – I cannot any longer remember how to do either of those things and am staring at a word count that does not grow to the same rhythm and beat as it did before. It used to be a dance between me and the phrases; an eloquent piece of beauty that I felt confident and safe and certain in. Something that made me utterly calm and filled me to the brim with peace and serenity. The sound of my fingers typing still creates a soothing atmosphere as I look out to the glorious park I face and marvel at the elegance of the heavy leaves swaying in the wind to a song by Jamie Cullum in my head.
Unlike the ocean, trees comfort me. They are living testament to the eloquence of time; to growth and wonder and creation, that have been around for long enough to remember that time can heal all wounds. Great big bulks of green that seem to exist in utter unison with that other glorious force of beauty; the wind, with her many tales and memories blows smoothly out and in, in and out, and lets the leaflings enjoy themselves like children in a toy shop on Saturday afternoon. The sun touches lightly upon it all and crafts a stunning light that reminds me of picking strawberries off the side of the road right after school had ended in May. I remember it as a simpler time, although it probably wasn’t, when those heavy stones had not yet been let into my life. When it was all butterflies and scratched knees and dirty pants and smiling faces waiting for one miracle after the other because everything surrounding us was a miracle. The snail crawling steadily from one bush to the next; the drop at the tip of a leaf waiting persistently for a little more water so it could help feed the earth. Running quickly inside to eat and quicker even back to make more marvellous discoveries. It seems lost to me somehow, that time when all was well and nothing was worse than a boring day. I miss the simplicity and that gorgeous sensation of naïveté, which was wholeheartedly called for at age seven. Now I am almost twenty-one.
The sky has turned purple and blue, like my favourite something I cannot remember. I think of the time behind and the time ahead and pray to my own universe that I will somehow remain in this vacuum between the two. Paolo Coelho talks of losing faith; I think of losing myself. It isn’t a silly identity crisis or a case of pre-menstrual grieves. I believe this may be the wandering of my spirit from one space to another while it screams out in agony at the thought of being left away from its place within me, forced to walk lonely in the dark until it is swallowed by something that is surrounded by dust and mist and will not leave it be for its purpose of love and hope and creativity and strength and growth. Where am I? I was all those things sometime not too long ago – I can still remember it – but this never-ending stretch of unorganized time has left me like a pathetic piece of pudding at the end of a boring house-warming party while I know painfully well that I am my only solution.
I must write. Even if just a sentence a day. I must write. It is like that beautiful old man told me once in a continent far away from anything I sense or feel now, because he knew that if I stopped it would be the doom of myself and I would go tumbling down a hole and be left to rot among moulded rocks and cold, hard emptiness. There must be some grain, some essence however small, of what I was before everything became unchanged that can lift me back into the dome I once inhabited in piece with its climate. I have to re-discover that dome with the different eyes I now lay upon my reality and re-build it, re-decorate it, re-live it as I calmly breathe in and out like I used to. My breath tells me to relax while bolting down its highway from heart to vein, vein to heart, and screams out to me that the present is my now, and not my future nor my past.
I am lost. At a loss of words and pages and ideas and merely a shadow of the person I had started to become as everything unchanged itself and I was back to that place between icy fragments and crystal clear stars somewhere far away out in a deep I don’t know. The ink dots scream out to me. “Read me! Write me!” – I cannot any longer remember how to do either of those things and am staring at a word count that does not grow to the same rhythm and beat as it did before. It used to be a dance between me and the phrases; an eloquent piece of beauty that I felt confident and safe and certain in. Something that made me utterly calm and filled me to the brim with peace and serenity. The sound of my fingers typing still creates a soothing atmosphere as I look out to the glorious park I face and marvel at the elegance of the heavy leaves swaying in the wind to a song by Jamie Cullum in my head.
Unlike the ocean, trees comfort me. They are living testament to the eloquence of time; to growth and wonder and creation, that have been around for long enough to remember that time can heal all wounds. Great big bulks of green that seem to exist in utter unison with that other glorious force of beauty; the wind, with her many tales and memories blows smoothly out and in, in and out, and lets the leaflings enjoy themselves like children in a toy shop on Saturday afternoon. The sun touches lightly upon it all and crafts a stunning light that reminds me of picking strawberries off the side of the road right after school had ended in May. I remember it as a simpler time, although it probably wasn’t, when those heavy stones had not yet been let into my life. When it was all butterflies and scratched knees and dirty pants and smiling faces waiting for one miracle after the other because everything surrounding us was a miracle. The snail crawling steadily from one bush to the next; the drop at the tip of a leaf waiting persistently for a little more water so it could help feed the earth. Running quickly inside to eat and quicker even back to make more marvellous discoveries. It seems lost to me somehow, that time when all was well and nothing was worse than a boring day. I miss the simplicity and that gorgeous sensation of naïveté, which was wholeheartedly called for at age seven. Now I am almost twenty-one.
The sky has turned purple and blue, like my favourite something I cannot remember. I think of the time behind and the time ahead and pray to my own universe that I will somehow remain in this vacuum between the two. Paolo Coelho talks of losing faith; I think of losing myself. It isn’t a silly identity crisis or a case of pre-menstrual grieves. I believe this may be the wandering of my spirit from one space to another while it screams out in agony at the thought of being left away from its place within me, forced to walk lonely in the dark until it is swallowed by something that is surrounded by dust and mist and will not leave it be for its purpose of love and hope and creativity and strength and growth. Where am I? I was all those things sometime not too long ago – I can still remember it – but this never-ending stretch of unorganized time has left me like a pathetic piece of pudding at the end of a boring house-warming party while I know painfully well that I am my only solution.
I must write. Even if just a sentence a day. I must write. It is like that beautiful old man told me once in a continent far away from anything I sense or feel now, because he knew that if I stopped it would be the doom of myself and I would go tumbling down a hole and be left to rot among moulded rocks and cold, hard emptiness. There must be some grain, some essence however small, of what I was before everything became unchanged that can lift me back into the dome I once inhabited in piece with its climate. I have to re-discover that dome with the different eyes I now lay upon my reality and re-build it, re-decorate it, re-live it as I calmly breathe in and out like I used to. My breath tells me to relax while bolting down its highway from heart to vein, vein to heart, and screams out to me that the present is my now, and not my future nor my past.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
2011: 2012
20 minus. 35 plus. Shitty fans. Empty apartment. Apartment full of cardboard. Ice cubes. Beer. Beer. Beer. Pouring beer. Pouring more beer. IKEA. Pass. Distinction. High distinction. Curtin. Freo. Late for orientation week. Bus breakdown. Friend from Malaysia. Ridiculously warm nights. Text messages. Ice skating. Grill'd. Couch. Closets. Table. Chairs. Bookshelf. Bookshelf full of books. Tips. Late nights. Bicycle. Broke. Macaroni and cheese. Bread with ketchup and cheese for breakfast. Bread with ketchup and cheese for dinner. Love. Heartbreak. Cape Town. Swaziland. Cold. Colder. The Ellington Jazz Club. Amazing music. Amazing people. Beating heart again. Smiles. More smiles. Visit from Norway. Holidays. Working in the holidays. New semester. Warmer days. Slow weather. New job. Birkenstock shoes. Sanne. Room mate. Wifey. Domino's on Friday nights. Gelare on Sunday afternoons. More money. Shopping. Malt Supper Club. Best Cosmos ever. Happiness. Animation in Art and Creativity. Leaves. Warm days. 1/3 of bachelor completed. Staff party. Little Creatures. Happiness. Adam Hall and the Velvet Playboys. Deville's Pad. Chinese food. The Troll Hunter. The movies. More Grill'd. Properly warm days. The beach. Taco at the beach. Parties. Airplane. Norway. Dad. Tone. Rakel. Elias. Best Christmas ever. Oslo. Kanelbullar. Happiness. 2012.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Malt (raw)
On Sunday night the stars are sometimes so bright I can't see them. It usually happens somewhere between my Sunday arvo fever and the late night grooves that aren't there; when I brush my hair hoping something will actually happen.
Something or anything - it doesn't matter. Le Carré said "the cat sat on the dog's mat" is the beginning of a story and I wondered if he's right. Maybe when I'm all written out and my mind no longer fulfils the pen's needs I will write about a cat. But that is for another day, when all the little pieces of glass have shattered into a million more and Jack Johnson has stopped telling that girl "don't let your dreams be dreams". Which is a beautiful sentiment in itself, but I'm not really worried. Jack Johnson is married anyway and poets like him don't grow on trees.
The bookshop was still lovely today though not magical like the one in Freo. It had shelves like before, filled with works that aren't mine, and a guy from uni with a funny tremble in his voice. Somehow, reading without purpose other than that of creativity is a harsh process. To notice the sentiments and the words and the brilliance, all with the eloquent stamp of "published". Where are my words? I refuse to accept that they are lost or out on some limb in my body that I am not aware of and won't be aware of again.
On the table next to mine sit invisible people who used to be tangible but somehow got lost inside my mind. The hat with a feather from South Africa, where the bartender is from, and an argument that was mine to play out. I wonder if they got left by choice or if the doorman kicked them out for being too tangible.
Perhaps they were never there and always existed as things only real in my wild and loose imagination. Or maybe I need to go treasure hunting to find them again, in between the laughter I'm pretty sure is going to out-compete mine.
The walls are black but the mirror sparkles and I'm not even halfway through my drink. Yet.
But wait! A sentiment, a whisper, like the dream that was Rome in Gladiator, of something that may be. It tingles within me and perhaps even when the stars are shining bright in the evening sky we can finally see, something might actually happen. On a Sunday, maybe. I sit still; tired alcohol mixes and the paint strokes are mere paint strokes and not waves... Here we go again.
There is a story that needs to be told and just like the chandelier in the mirror I know it's somewhere inside my mind. That place or which I don't know - no clue at all, and Mr. Pugh's voice rings in my ears: I mustn't stop writing because I'm good at it. I wonder if Mr. Pugh knew that the pen runs out of ink even in the good writer's mind; the bottle openers stop functioning and the cocktails mix themselves and there is nothing special about them anymore. It all becomes boring and dry like that tutor who tries to be the teacher but is really just the student. Nothing wrong with that, he's just being his best, which isn't much at all.
Perhaps the story is somewhere inside all the colours the light makes over my head reflecting on the cranberry red drink I have in front of me. It stands untouched, for the most part, as my eyes wander towards the bar I can't really see through the wall behind that blurry, liquid thing.
Something or anything - it doesn't matter. Le Carré said "the cat sat on the dog's mat" is the beginning of a story and I wondered if he's right. Maybe when I'm all written out and my mind no longer fulfils the pen's needs I will write about a cat. But that is for another day, when all the little pieces of glass have shattered into a million more and Jack Johnson has stopped telling that girl "don't let your dreams be dreams". Which is a beautiful sentiment in itself, but I'm not really worried. Jack Johnson is married anyway and poets like him don't grow on trees.
The bookshop was still lovely today though not magical like the one in Freo. It had shelves like before, filled with works that aren't mine, and a guy from uni with a funny tremble in his voice. Somehow, reading without purpose other than that of creativity is a harsh process. To notice the sentiments and the words and the brilliance, all with the eloquent stamp of "published". Where are my words? I refuse to accept that they are lost or out on some limb in my body that I am not aware of and won't be aware of again.
On the table next to mine sit invisible people who used to be tangible but somehow got lost inside my mind. The hat with a feather from South Africa, where the bartender is from, and an argument that was mine to play out. I wonder if they got left by choice or if the doorman kicked them out for being too tangible.
Perhaps they were never there and always existed as things only real in my wild and loose imagination. Or maybe I need to go treasure hunting to find them again, in between the laughter I'm pretty sure is going to out-compete mine.
The walls are black but the mirror sparkles and I'm not even halfway through my drink. Yet.
But wait! A sentiment, a whisper, like the dream that was Rome in Gladiator, of something that may be. It tingles within me and perhaps even when the stars are shining bright in the evening sky we can finally see, something might actually happen. On a Sunday, maybe. I sit still; tired alcohol mixes and the paint strokes are mere paint strokes and not waves... Here we go again.
There is a story that needs to be told and just like the chandelier in the mirror I know it's somewhere inside my mind. That place or which I don't know - no clue at all, and Mr. Pugh's voice rings in my ears: I mustn't stop writing because I'm good at it. I wonder if Mr. Pugh knew that the pen runs out of ink even in the good writer's mind; the bottle openers stop functioning and the cocktails mix themselves and there is nothing special about them anymore. It all becomes boring and dry like that tutor who tries to be the teacher but is really just the student. Nothing wrong with that, he's just being his best, which isn't much at all.
Perhaps the story is somewhere inside all the colours the light makes over my head reflecting on the cranberry red drink I have in front of me. It stands untouched, for the most part, as my eyes wander towards the bar I can't really see through the wall behind that blurry, liquid thing.
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