As do the birds.

Until I fall from this perch in this mineshaft I will paint myself yellow and sing like a canary. I will swoop with the grace of a magpie and steal small wisps of yr hair. I will hold it all in my pelican beak, sift through the fluid and find the fish. I will duck below water and resurface with light droplets that run off my back.

Until the last flower is forraged. Until all the nests have been flown and the water dries up and the sun ceases rising, I will warble and swoop and soar.

the dark side

It's like falling in love, but more useful. The gutrush and nights without sleep. The waking with intention, the rushing of tiny breakthroughs that surge you off your seat and into the screen.

As if I ever meant to leave. As if you could swear off these things like one abstains from alcohol, sex and stupid fun. I am mouth open free falling and pacing. I am ageing faster but somehow living more. The romance of a creation feels like some devine force is present, even through the frustration and the angst and the screaming.

Did God come up with existenstialism in his underwear?
Is enlightenment less sleep, more coffee, and a head full of ideas?

so that you know

I want to]peel back responsibilities like wet bathers soaked in chlorine. I want to connect like punchs, like phonelines, like batteries, end to end. I want to do more than request, respond, resolve. I want to recline, with you, who save me, all of you. Spend hours lying in the shade as the land is seared.

These hands are not grabbing but holding. If they were empty, I would open arms wide and embrace.

so long

It had been so long that we'd imagined these chasms, in places where only ditches exist. Skirts hitched we leaped across them. Retrieving childhood games in service of salvation.

Under a big cloud sky we are reminded of that old place where the breeze blows 200 million stories into a small tropical town. We reflect on landscape and it's impact on culture; the imprints it leaves on our lives. This country is small indentations that are at once transient and irreversable. It is a paradox that exists in isolation, that is passed over in the glossy icons of metropolitan dreaming. Sprawled beneath the caterpillar head we invest in our transformation.

I wanted to tell her that she saves me, everytime our footpaths overlap
but sand is not sentimental, and my words, like everything, get blown away.

if all is inconsequential

In these times of upheaval my heart does not go wanting. My dreams oscillate between vibrant disturbance and gentle placation. I sink into these waterholes until waking finds me somewhere between dampness and refreshment. I lay staring at the ceiling, trying to remember how to float.

Some days I forget that I am surrounded by endless spinifex and red dust. That the landscape takes its time to transform from claypan to salt lake, from desert oak to desert itself. I forget that even physics itself must surrender to the paitent march of corrosion, that regardless of our posturing, the mountains will descend upon us, sweeping us aside.

This reassures me that every decision is inconsequential
and in this way, I begin to be freed.

comfort and control

It has been so long now, I have only memories. My skin no longer recollects. In dreams these things seem distant, hollow, as though listening to a voice on a long distance phone line.

I am a photocopy of my desire. Endless reproductions of fantasy grow faded and less defined. My senses become measured and restrained. I find abandonment in books and ideas and such sensible things.

The horizon speaks only of solitude and independence.
There is little comfort in control.

not to be misconstrued as anguish

I am reassured that vultures fly as well as other birds. That my tendencies to circle disaster is an acceptable ecological niche. If I lick my bones too clean at the table, please remember that waste has only recently become fashionable.

I am an eraser of footprints. I am as wind is to sand, as salt is to water, as indifference is to love. I am the peice in the puzzle that leaves room to shuffle. The fire door that slams shut under heat.

Tears are not solid. They are liquid. Renowned for their fluidity. They are as mutible as all my ex boyfriends. They are joy and sorrow and boredom and pain.

I often laugh when I don't know how to react. It provides as little comfort to me as it does to you. You might see me cover my mouth when you falter. I am protecting us both from an akward mistake.

Less perfect. More practice

Between preparations and conversations I slip away to tell you how I really feel. Less perfect more practice, these wanton rehearsals of an ambition I chase when I am bored.

I remember joking about thin veneers and you sneered that they weren't that thin. That every body knew.

So raw that it was bloody.
A butchers shop.

My vivisection complete and reports all written. Detailed painfully in black and white. Drained of colour and movement and sound. Yet captured. Penned in.

Some would say caged.

featherweight

I am a feather weight.
Blown off course by every breeze.

I am learning like a four year old.
Fist clenched and thrust to the ground.

These seams are sown with double edge.

At the end of the week i am searching for a site that is refreshing and silent and dark. I want to reveal all these secrets, but the web too highly matted. I know too many people to ask for support.

Scorching or soaring.

She told me to slow down. threatened to mimic generational gaps. a constant nag like a telemarketer late at night.

I need a pace maker to regulate my heart. Every surge of desire that propelling me forward is balanced by the gravity of fear. The what ifs pile in the corner. A cycle of laundry cleansed and soiled.

Yet these days are mostly uplifting as the thermals sneak through the gap and in to the town. I rise with it. Earlier each morning. Scorching and soaring until the last of the light.

depth sounder

These choices are plauged by life and death.

I'm out of my depth

Breast stroking.
moving hand away from heart
and back again.

The learning curve
is steep
i am breathless
chain smoking

fear
of heights