Phoenix

2011-08-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

From the depths of some frozen Slavic sepulcher, where the dust is the remains of 50 year old peony blooms and some woman’s tears, all disintegrated with the years, where no breath has disturbed the still air for decades and all is still and silent, there are thin feathers forming under the dust on the ground. Wherein once lay this creature, forever dead and turning to dust, as we know death to be; mourned with November’s flora, comes the shaking of new life.

The ground around this skeleton, littered as it was with powdered relics of feathers and splintered beak, is smoking slowly and it blackens and becomes cinders; which slowly pull together into clumps of charcoal. As it reassembles. It smoulders and grows and the ever-blackened walls of this lightless tomb are then slowly illuminated (as one feather can flood with light a whole room if not concealed) and the patterned tiles and great shifts of frozen airborne dust reveal their cloudy presence. Because ash was not always but is a byproduct of some hot tumult and this collapsing of matter can be undone in this sepulcher.

So it stretches out in all directions from its collarbone, pulling skin and muscle and shivering itself into life, heating this deadened, tiled cave until the furthest corners are alive with pulsating heat. There she roosts, bristling and flickering, ready to set these walls, built by cold deathly men and women now long expired, on fire.

Diary Entries I Probably Shouldn't Publish

2011-02-27T02:20:00.000-08:00

If I turn around I feel my presence as a tempestuous and romantic young girl, a beautiful face and a secret, fanciful mind racing with terror and wonder. I grew and became a young woman, disturbed and terrified of life and stuck fast in a mind without peace. A repetitive stream of images of skin tearing from my fingers, blood coming from behind my teeth, men screaming in hatred at me; madness like a bag over my mouth that I couldn't help but to inhale.

Its a chaos that is persistant and trustworthy but it is no replacement for a true and everlasting love. It is, paradoxically, a private reality I find to be an improvement on the banality and predictability of real life.

And I am not unhappy today. And that is okay.

DOLLY DOESN'T DIE

2010-11-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

BIRD

ABCDEFG

2010-09-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

A little mind like mine

Belonging like it does to you and

Cataract pupils hold me blindly, like yours

Digging, mining in my

Ears your blinded masculinity from your machinery.

Forests swaying with

Girls of his past, legs wooded and

Hewn

Infected with his honeyed

Jelly;sap

Kettled

Like it is by this collective

Menstrual Heat. Like it is

Napalm, it is bubbling in caustic

Opulence, it is dripping; Faberge ova of

Puce; as it does

Quartz itself in half his image, as he was

Reigning over some of us with a

Stare given

Twice, three times, like you did

Under my skirt, just once in that place of

Vengeance where she meets your

Wrath, like we did

XXX

Yours, like I am a wife, a

Zenith, like I am not.

On the panic Attack

2010-09-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

"A Pantoun... Its Malay originally, but Victor Hugo did use it. Its basically interlinked quatrains, usually rhyming a-b-a-b, and the second and fourth line of each stanza go on to be the first and third... Is that right? No... -the first and third lines of the next stanza -mine's a broken Pantoun anyway. Its better just to look at one."

-From On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the Panic Attack

Yes, you can hold me upside down, I’m

Under the water with your cloud skin

Grappling with the whispers and their fingers

My idols walked as a feather on lake

Seas foam dirtying in wind

With cork-bobbing couples, legs tied

My idols walked as a feather on a lake

Intertwining in two veils

Talk with her, her feathered teeth

Useless breathy hazes touching my wings

Intertwining in two veils

Snow falling thick like night; to drown

The birds scream for me

And on all our sin, we lay me down

Snow falling like night; to drown

As us, we pillars of salt

And on all our sin, we lay me down

Grapple with their fingers your whispers

As ours, we’re pillars of salt

Yes, you can hold me upside down.

2010-08-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

There are a million people on every side of the door.

With each drink swilled the talk swings back and forth from pleasantries to laughter and back. Then little jabs at each other's work -failing professional expectations. All spending all of our money. Criticize the two who love each other too much. Criticise the drinker who drinks at a slightly faster rate, with a little more regularity than yourself. Drink, drink, down. I wish I could go to sleep, but next is dancing and then hours and hours of lingering on the couches and in the kitchens. They'll talk. A girl will cry. When the sun comes up they'll all go home, the millions of drinkers. With empty wallets, spitting in the face of all the Capitalism.

Essay Snippet

2010-06-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

I can't wait to go back to uni.

The human race is a group bonded by our indefatigable similarities. No matter the context, a similarity in our nature can be found between humans. The self-righteous Wall St. suit will have the capability of connecting with Sudan’s most furious refugee, whether for necessity or companionship. Empathy has the power to exist anywhere, anytime, between any two individuals, because when a situation arises, it becomes apparent that differences in humans are minimal. Similarity, however, is rife, and the overwhelming majority of human civilization has been affected in one way or another by religion. When studying a culture or civilization, an understanding of religion is just as important as an understanding of human necessity, because religion is often somewhere between the driving force and the downfall of human development.

The Truth

2010-06-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

'I had a dream you and me had to go back to highschool in Coffs. We went in this big round the twist style school adventure race, and you caught a cockatoo, and kept it because it would be friends with Remi, who lived with us for some reason. Also, we could fly.'

-DJF

(Zombies)

2010-06-14T04:30:00.000-07:00

There are morons clutching clubs dragging lines in the sand followed by drunks and miscreants drooling on themselves and bunnies hopping madly tripping over themselves and each other and great barbarians; moaning in a chorus and they’re following me far from the Lethe and up a mountain that will burn us all as it shoots gases and molten rock dribbles down near my feet

They follow me with their empty heads yelling clichés and recounting proof: the colour of my bed sheets or some obscure drunken limerick I once spoke. They moan and moan at me as their legs begin to ache and their steps falter as their charred feet crack and blacken with each step.
This parade of all my lovers.

(I believed in the ocean. Its surge for recoil and recuperation. I thought of water as a Lethe. I thought my problems sank down into to the depths and were compressed into basic elements of carbon -my past was raked sand. But my heart is the Gulf of Mexico. You try recovery but some things are too far gone. Some things so massive they never sink, but cover you in their shiny coat of failure. Give me your hair and I'll try to soak up the newest mess.)

Water

2010-05-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

Permanap. Baths. Plateau.

Medicine. Permanap. Baths.

Heat Anxiety

2010-05-16T01:24:00.000-07:00

On global warming and the process of ignorance so commonly professed by lay people considering the subject and its implications on our way of life. The phenomena is one where the individual, when considering a subject (say, the hypothetical melting of the ice caps) becomes so overwhelmed as to trigger a physical response. That is, the mind has trouble comprehending the enourmity of the terror and goes into response (fight or flight) mode. The results are physical (tightness of chest, shortness of breath, sweating, dilation of the pupils) as the body prepares either for battle or to run.

This response is virtually identical to a panic attack. Consider the task of meeting a group of people for the first time. A person begins with the 'what if' thoughts (What if they don't like me? What if I can't keep up with the conversation? What if I humiliate myself?) that escalate into a circle of constant rumination. The stress this imposes on the mind triggers a physical response. For somebody with anxiety, simple everyday tasks begin to trigger responses like you are being physically threatened. The brain really has a tentacle like overarching reach over your whole body. But if you look to medical professionals and experts in any certain field, you find the most amazing quotations of perspective and wisdom.

I envy the scientific mind, as I've always leant more towards painting and writing poetry and Romanticism. I envy the solace found in concrete facts and I envy the calmness that comes from fact. The fact with anxiety and the fight or flight response is that these reactions are best treated by dealing with the situation that makes you uncomfortable. If you run (flight) the sufferer feels a strong kick of relief as the physical sensations ease. But this same relief comes with staying and dealing with the situation as the sufferer almost always realises their, 'What if,' thinking never actualises. When considering that 7 out of 10 young people suffer at some point in their lives of a period of mental illness, overhwhelmingly depression and anxiety, it is worth considering the link between anxiety and the global issue of inaction on climate change.

Consider that the enourmity of the problem terrifies a lot of us, and it is a lot easier to take your thoughts elsewhere (flight) than consider millions of individuals in refugee camps in 50 or 100 years time, after their homes in the South Pacific have become submerged under the ocean. But pulling out one's perspective a little wider, its interesting to look at cosmology and the uncertain fate of the earth in its entirety, regardless of the human race. One thing that people find strange about cosmologists is how calmly they discuss the universe literally being violently torn apart by a battle between dark matter and dark energy. One thing I do know is that this isn’t going to occur for another 50 to 100 billion years if it happens at all. I take solace in the idea that our sun will die in about 5 billion years and cook the earth in the process.

Light and Din

2010-04-29T02:13:00.001-07:00

When we climbed rocks I hated to look down. I lived with you in a land of sunshine and there were deep shadows down there.

Leaning over my old friends’ faces, I’d sway to fall into my mind, I was dead every time. But you thought in there was some bud, some tight blossom of genius like your own. Like you and your strings was me and I had little wings.

You filled me with different smokes and drove me there, pulled me up too high in the light. Love taught me to photosynthesise. I don’t need all that. No food or water or habitat. I was all arms and legs apart, broken up and leaking

Down spurs and pebbles

I was entering the ocean. I was dripping down the rock wall.

And the harbour –it spreads out of the city and to other islands. It runs its fingers through the earth and my scalp and it pulls my hair.

Under summer trees you drugged me with fermented apples

And I looked up at plump pink blossoms and they covered the sky. I watched them wilt and fall onto my skin while you looked at my clothes and my limbs. You’d cut my flesh to see my sap. My wounds were bruised petals for your tongue to lap. So I open everything. All my bottles and jars. All my cupboards and wardrobes. I reopened my scars and the contents came tumbling. They came tumbling out. Your fingers ferreting and reaching out for a wound, while children walked by giggling. We were stoned and I thought

Being chased by murder upon murder of crows.

A kitten here or bird on my sill couldn’t stir you.

Sleeping next to me night after night like the dead and when you woke, somewhat undead. Filling your veins with a cannula of black

While I wandered like a child picking flowers and showing you rainbows and pots of gold and butterflies landing on my nose

And you played idly in your hands with a tarantula and a thicket of woven laurel and lantana made an arch of you, dappling and darkening.

And it didn’t move you.

No sunshine for us, mine or yours but not to be shared. I am your freezing shadow and you like that black marauder.

I basked in the sunshine and you hid your eyes from the light

Like violent hangover counterbalance of hand

Over eye lids. I am free of you but I still see you. You’re wandering blindly through my dark dreams

The nightmares of my din, my silent primal scream and in a cage I will drown in your own salty ocean cannula.

Romanticising My Prison

2010-04-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

Or Everything Is Just Cutesy and Dandy

Or I'm Still A Bit Sexy

Or This Kind of Thing is All I Care About

Or This is True Love

Or There Are No More Nightmares

Recent Nightmares

2010-04-13T07:06:00.001-07:00

Or Posting Instead of Sleeping

Had a dream of a spider on my wall, sitting on one of my drawings. It had too many legs and long, thick fur. Not hair, fur. It was quivering and making sounds like a rattle snakes tail. Woke up screaming.

Had a dream I was in bed and a party was going on outside. It got louder and louder and then the party kids were climbing up the walls and scrabbling in through my window. I ran out into the hallway to wake up my mother. I was scared for her. They backed me into a corner. I couldn't see them, just their looming shadows with claws, eating up the light. Woke up wimpering.

Had a dream some friends were dragging me from bar to bar by my hair. I was screaming and crying, unable to move. Across the tar road and up onto the kerb, then down a flight of stone stairs. My clothes were tearing off. It was humiliating. Then my skin was tearing off, great chunks of it strewn in a trail behind me.. Woke up sweating.

What This Blog Used To Be

2010-04-11T21:52:00.001-07:00

And What, Today, It Is Again

Going to bed in the early afternoon because I am tired. Shutting the blinds with a snarl at the persistant sunlight. Dreaming in great detail about everything in my life. Dreaming about his arms, trimming the house plant, watching its stems fatten, dreaming about trying not to sneeze into my tea. Dreaming about a life I don't have anymore. Waking up late, after 13 or 14 hours of sleep, still exhausted. More exhausted than before. Crying because I realised I'm no longer asleep. Having conversations and forgetting the subject, because my mind wanders into blank fields and my vision blurs while I'm trying to listen. Forgetting where I've been. Forgetting where I am. Missing my train station and going to the wrong suburb, too tired to realise, walking out onto an unfamiliar street and bursting into tears. Stealing prescription drugs and taking them all over the following two weeks, so I can sleep deeper and without guilt, like I don't have a choice. Losing interest in everything. Despising my family for their prying love. Falling out of love. All from synthetics. Falling back in love, crying. So much crying. So much crying at anything and everything. Hating noises. Hating films. Hating parties. Hating conversation. Hating people. Hating any kind of stimulation to produce affect. There is no reaction in me. Remembering my old self. Remembering how I brimmed with ambition and passion and excitement. Remembering that I used to laugh. That I used to be so strong it frightened people. Remembering that sometimes I used to get out of bed. I now understand the shame of mental illness. A lot of people suffer. It is more common than the flu. Admitting I have a problem. Admitting that I am extremely sick. 'Seeing the doctor,' crying, the doctor hugging me in a display of unprofessionalism and empathy. Seeing the doctor. Seeing the doctor. Day after day of seeing the doctor. Taking the drugs, reading the advice, being told about precocious intelligence and how it opens you up for bad reactions. Being told it is like when I was fourteen and mt tonsils exploded into noids of caustic sickness and ruined me and changed my voice for months and months. And like having my tonsils removed, it can be helped. Halted. There is a healing process. Looking at my brain as a computer with years of training for negativity. Trying to fix it all. Feeling synthetic. That means feeling nothing. Trying. Really, really trying. If I live to be an old woman, perspective will reveal this as a blip in the long line of my life.

2010-03-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

The most torrential and horrible of abuses I can offer is to say Ian Rilen's god child DOESN'T LIKE YOU

STICK IT UP YOUR REVOLUTION

Sydney's Changing Warehouse Scene

2010-03-21T23:47:00.000-07:00

Or How Mum is Trying to Get Her Groove Back

To clarify, I work casually for one of the events mentioned in this article. I am not trying to advertise.

The other day I spoke with a friend about the Warehouse music scene in Sydney. He highlighted for me the reason for the commencement of Sydney’s Warehouse scene. Once, these dilapidated havens serviced the kind of esoteric, noisy, trashy, garagey, country noir, frankly kinda wack-job bands that, for the purpose of the almighty dollar, had been forced out of more legitimate venues and replaced with generic folksy /dirty girl bands and hack Nick Cave imitators.

But, as these artists garnered a little more credibility and the confident swagger became more pronounced, the oeuvre of these warehouse venues came to pick up wider popularity among the gaggle of hipsters Sydney so lovingly accommodates.

Speaking from experience, after a few months of blowing cash away at for-profit venues like Oxford Art Factory and even the much-praised (but overwhelmingly underattended) Hopetoun Hotel, trekking out into the backstreets of Marrickville with $12 worth of long necks under your arm was especially exciting. Not to mention the sense of higher knowledge and hipster entitlement that comes along with the relative mysteriousness of these venues. First timers hover around in the dark corners and make comments like, ‘I wonder who runs this place,’ and ‘Do people actually live here?’

Catching a whiff of the rising of this successful mixture, the proof is in the pudding when checking into these warehouse parties. Aforementioned Nick Cave rip off artists and otherwise mediocre and uninspiring artists choose these venues for EP launches and other unpaid sets because of this magical, dark and smoky vibe that only an illegal and ill-advertised event can bring.

These venues can dress an otherwise mediocre artist in a wreath of cultural references and tint their sound with something shrouded in secrecy.

The result has been that these bands that were originally filling these unconventional venues, these artists forced out due to unusual and secret places, are again finding their place in the legitimate (not to mention occasionally artist-supporting) venues.

So, cue example. The Mum Birthday Party at Kings X’s World Bar will be featuring self described country-noir act Psychonanny and the Babyshakers, and the damn fine aching wails of The Walk On By, not to mention Whipped Cream Chargers and Le Mancha Negre.

This is a massive departure from Mum’s Birthday Party last year, which hosted the pop prowess of art-history-informed Yves Klein Blue, the ‘I’m already SO famous’ slaps of Wyong’s The Protectors and peppier than Coco Pops, Brisbane’s The Grates.

The outcome of the trend is one I will throw my full endorsement behind. Whilst these more unusual but wholeheartedly Australian sounding bands may slowly graduate from the Warehouse Scene into more legitimate shows, the end result will hopefully be the proliferation of these previously maligned artists. While this may send shivers of entitled fury across Sydney’s somewhat cliquey DIY scene, lets just hope these artists might actually make a bit of fucking money.

Sap

2010-03-16T18:43:00.001-07:00

http://phoebenix.tumblr.com/#453211757

Lera and the Lethe

2010-03-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

A short story. It has been a while since I published one of these.

This is a story about a lady and the water. Lera moved from a small town into the nearest city soon after the death of her close friend. She cried a lot during the move, whilst she unpacked her t-shirts and jeans and ruched floral dresses. She cried whilst she pulled out her sheets and for the first ever time made her own bed. While she was climbing up and over this obvious hallmarked milestone in her life (your new life, your own place), her tears were not unusual. She’d always been soft and weepy. Crying beginning from being taunted about her weight and home life when a child, it continued as a static form of release for Lera. She liked to cry and let it all go, wailing cathartically when she needed to and feeling cleansed in the aftermath. Bathing her face in her own salty Lethe. The only objectionable part of her habit was her reactive complexion, which after tears became inflamed and splotchy pink, swelling like lupus under her eyes. It gave away her weakness shamelessly for the remainder of the day.

___________After the first night, she woke and hung her legs over the bed and recoiled at the carpet; it was cold and wetted through. This new house held onto her tears. Unlike her home growing up there seemed no drain under the carpet to soak it all up and let it dry overnight. So from the day she pulled those linens from her old home over her bed, she had set a dampening film all over the carpet of her bedroom. It kept her feet moist and got through all of her shoes, so she carried the squelch wherever she went. Nobody noticed her sopping sneakers and with time she came to enjoy the secret slipperiness inside her socks. She cradled it like a dear secret about herself. She didn’t even tell her lovers.

___________As time went on she cried more and more. Missing her family back in her suburban home. Friends disappointing her. A birthday party she reluctantly threw which only two friends attended. Months aching along with no men in her life. Times with no money in the bank. Too many nights at university bars or drinking fortified wine on her fetid balcony whilst maggots bred under the tiles. Little things with which she secretly indulged with overly emotional responses. Weeping into her pillow like it was a sponge, then squeezing it out each morning into the pooling map of her dissatisfaction, a tide marker measuring the betrayals and the heartbreaks and the academic disappointment.

___________So it swelled at the banks of her bedroom door, reaching her knees with time and then quickly rising up to her waist, making her shiver as she walked from wardrobe to bed. The raven-haired girl next door would sometimes wade in and lay with Lera as she wept, burying themselves like cutlery on the mattress, still just dry from the tide. The neighbour would look at Lera with sad and longing eyes, trying to extract from her some explanation or plea for help, but Lera was no longer in control of the drips and they stopped coming just from her eyes and started to weep from the ceiling and the walls. The water rose to their belly buttons and she summoned a tide which pulled the raven haired girl out of the room and away.

___________Lera felt it now. The water had awoken and was behaving like a mote. It locked her in and kept everybody else out. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn’t heal. Lera became more and more distressed and took to crying from her window for help. One after another, knights arrived at her door trying to fish her out and take her to safety. When with panic she beckoned them in they were sucked under with the tide, left to choke and drown and ossify at the bottom of the pool. Unable to halt the drownings Lera swam to her bedroom door and eased it shut, sending a great ripple all through the room and upending her bookshelf and washing her clothes out the window. She locked the door, sealed up the window.

___________Now she is just waiting. She is treading the water that rises and rises each day and she can no longer touch the bottom. Slowly she pulls her arms back and forth in a figure eight, while her legs kick weakly and her mouth drops back and forth below the waterline, sucking for oxygen when it can. There still remains an air pocket between the water and the ceiling. It has a few days left with her until it escapes from her into the atmosphere.

St. Clair Burke Definitions

2010-03-08T21:12:00.000-08:00

Burke (n) slang

Old cockney-English word meaning cunt. A profanity referring to the boxal region of a lady.

"guvna, i had a right funny time tryin' to get up them there stairs"
"shut up you fucking burke."

source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=burke

Loyalty

2010-03-04T03:37:00.000-08:00

There is none. Oh, well there is one. I'm going to dig into a deeper hole with him. G'bye.

Panadeine Forte or Tramadol

2010-03-03T20:51:00.000-08:00

Or Now I Can Only Write When I'm High

I hear the odd thing. A huntsman tapping its faltering zombie legs on the window. Something minute rustling in the jasmine vine, a cricket or a roach, stuck between snaking stems as they spiral and twist tighter and tighter. It looks enviously through my window at the stunted Venus Fly Trap on the sill inside. I hear frightening things that don’t frighten me.

I hear my own breath, run my hands over my stomach and hear the skin and cotton hum. Vision turning back and forth between blinding whiteness to the speckled glow of the ceiling light, tiny moths dehydrated and cooking. And I laugh at my own insanity and moan at the waves of pink enfolding me, sweating but not hot, cloyed onto my pillow by a gentle pharmaceutical incubus. The pain in my groin a long distant memory that also seems now so dramatic and funny. Seeing myself an hour previous, weeping and clutching at the bed sheets, a look on my face of heat and anxiety like a martyr caricature, my pupils dilated like strenuous activity. Pulling every muscle in my stomach and wrapping it tight around my spine until I was catatonic, all done with my mind.

Now I feel this sarcastic euphoria slicking itself around me like lying in an empty tub and watching the bubbles rise up around your face, leaving a tunnel with edges of iridescent foam like a periscope up to the ceiling. So giddy, thinking of facial hair and guitar strings and this deep voice coming out of the dark. Hands larger than my own on my back, pressing in and pulling at my skin while it talks. Its pleading with me, getting louder and a thousand arrows fly over my head and I bury my face in the pillow as it gets louder and eats into my ears and I’m crushed until I can’t take it anymore and the wave recedes.

And I can hear the tiny rustle in the vine again.

And I roll over the look at the green flytrap.

Whispers

2010-02-21T05:26:00.001-08:00

or Your Own Private Hospital

I can't even imagine what it is like to be you. Everything must be so dry, so crisp. When I am sad I scrub floors and vacuum the carpet. If I came to your house my nose would sting from linens and surfaces so clean, redolent fumes of astringent with which you surround yourself. I pick things up off the side of the road just to fill up the small gaps but you, you just dig deeper and deeper into yourself and carve out a burning white hole. All your white vases and your unused bath tub and your crisp linens terrify me. You are wiping yourself away. Let me tell you this: last week I was in the hospital weeping and sweating and moaning. When they dragged me out of the emergency room into a bed it was too clean -the blankets were dry and scratchy. A man in mint scrubs stabbed me in the bend of my arm and I screamed. When I looked down he had blood all over his hands- and he smiled at me. Then a woman in a white coat took all my clothes off and jabbed at me (she forgot to give me the gas) while I cried and writhed around trying to get away from her. There was someone on the other side of the curtain for me and he was listening, panicking, he was sweating, pulling at my anguish and making it his, running in and out of the hospital manically to refresh his nicotine veneer. When he came in afterwards he fell on me, grabbed at my arms and wept. And he reeked. Thats when I felt okay again.

Cannibal

2010-02-20T15:39:00.001-08:00

Would you be okay with my saliva? If our mouths touched and brushed would you be okay with the feel of my tongue? Would you lick my eye if it had tears in it? Could I take off all my clothes and would you be able to look at it? Would your hands be okay with being on my legs? Could they reach for the soft dry and up into the sweet and sappy? Could you look at as both standing in front of a mirror? Could you stand for that fleeting glass portrait of us? Would that make it official? If I could put myself in a cup would you drink it? If I could come would you swallow it? If I was sick would you take it in with you? Would you breathe deep when I coughed and put your hands on my feverish sweat? If I died would you

I Feel Like This Could Be A Conclusion

2010-02-08T19:21:00.000-08:00

Its like summoning your own will

and determination.

Its not easy

and at first it feels fake

but soon you convince yourself you

really do have the drive.

you create it in a little bubble

and it floats and becomes thicker

and thicker.

the flaw is that it all

crashes down

eventually

making a great splash

and violent waves

before it sinks down into

the ocean and you go calm

on the surface

again.

i know now that

as my ocean floors

clog up with good intentions

I get shallower

and
more hollow.

Drawings

2010-02-02T22:55:00.000-08:00

Phoebe Nix

Or things for your bedroom walls and that. Ltd. time.
Click the image for examples.

Leech Bite

2010-01-27T00:35:00.000-08:00

Or A Thing That Keeps on Giving

(Image gets bigger with a click.)

How Do You See?

2010-01-24T19:45:00.000-08:00

Self portraiture very quickly degrades your integrity without an ample sense of humour. You yourself are not, at the end of the day, the real subject. The subject becomes your ability to separate your process from your self.

Driving

2010-01-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

Or Murder Plot Ballad Part I

Sometimes we had a car that would growl and vibrate beneath us. Lady-Girl, Dolly Bird –me, she was driving. Pushing her ankles down and lunging two of them forward, trying not to falter in that tough use of the accelerator pedal. Feeling that cold kick of wind in her hair and muttering under her breath, ‘Mother of God, help me,’ and felt her words picked up and whipped away by the wind. They had ginger ales rolling around at their feet, their condensation picking up stray shreds of tobacco and lost skin that caked the jalopy carpets. Forward at the legal miles per hour limit, at the green lights and the bottle would roll around and up my foot, then back again, clanging on his gun under the seat. It sounded like a sonata; the purring engine, the tympani thud of the ginger bottle while the man in the passenger seat hummed ballads about sailors.

The sun was laid out low on the horizon beaming pink and yellow streamers into the back of her scalp and there was wind for her hair. It woke her up when the colours got too dreamy and her mind wandered off the road and onto the footpaths or the park benches like the neural path of a delinquent child. They had the wild and wondrous minds of people who have just fallen in love. It was the same as stepping into a foreign country –the heightened sense of wonder (her eyes sat wider, breath was deeper like to take it all in; they were tearing each other open at the chest). Reveling like lunatics in the banality of the motorcade, like this wind and sun were new and magical pets for our indulgence; they were both caressing an indifferent Mother Nature.

So he kicked his boots up onto the dash and sucked the life out of string of cigarettes while she thought in tandem about his body (thighs, oh my, mine) and her sickening past. She thought about her wirey fingers in a pincer-claw vice of tobacco stained digits and it twisting and twisting like a run of cogs until her ring finger fractured (green stick;small cast set;two weeks) and twisting until her arm came loose from my shoulder blade and hung limply inside her flesh releasing sonic boom waves of pain through her body (dislocated shoulder;tendon damage;muscular scarring;realignment surgery;two months).

She thought about those four hands of theirs and clenched the steering wheel tight. Her knuckles paled and the leather cover on the wheel whined with stress. She thought about knives and blood and jokes he'd made about graves under our front steps. She thought about ropes and vengeance, gritted her teeth and tensed her neck and felt that panic run through her veins like hot lead so it burned and it burned and then she felt his voice in the haze like spiral through like cold water. Singing like he does about sailors. Waves in some ocean parallel to the road crashed all over the sand and everything shone in the sunlight. And the past was gone. They'd already killed it.

2010-01-12T02:56:00.000-08:00

Growing Up and Out

2010-01-06T01:25:00.001-08:00

Or I'm Not There

_______Sometimes I wonder about the things I feel. I'm treading the partition between adulthood and my teenage (or childish) past. Its a curtained hallway -one side is a crisp, opaque white linen and when I run my fingers along it my sweat is absorbed. My fingertips dry out and crack. My cuticles split and tear and my nails bleed a tiny bit. Those hands are both dry and weeping, sliding on that linen like snails. The adjacent side of the hall is a cold, soft lace. Polyester woven blooms, petals and stamens and foliage. Its threads are loosening and through the sheathe I see blow up swimming pools sitting on yellowing lawns; aerosol cans spraying glitter webs over soft kid hair; a puppy on a hot day laying listlessly in its own water bowl; muddy toes stomping worn away creek bed stones; I see an upturned cake splattered on the floor through matted lashes and teary eyes.

_______Through that lace curtain everything is faded. That bright and exciting whirlwind of youth has dimmed and dimmed ever since I looked at my own suburban lawn on LSD for the first time. Five dollars in my pocket is not a day unwritten anymore. It is burnt coffee and soggy toast from a surly, unshaven street vendor. Sharing a bedroom with a girlfriend is no longer so exciting as to destroy the regular patterns of sleep -Its a version of terror through annoyance (Will she snore? Will she get fresh?). Boys don't quietly slip their hand into yours while the two of you cross a wooden bridge together - they slip their hands under your skirt while you try to sit cross-legged in a crowded bar. Everybody wants to get you into bed. Everybody is all about this white linen. Everybody wants to drag their chalky fingers across your body. They want to sleep and sleep and sleep with everybody until they're sure that none of it means a thing.

_______I still like the childish veil of lace. I still run from uncomfortable situations. I know when I've knocked a birthday cake from a table (in some metaphoric adult way, mind, like horribly insulting the person you love because you're frustrated with the kettle, or something similar) and I still get bleary eyed at my mistakes. I still cover my face in their linens and run for couch bound refuge. For all intensive purposes, however, I am an 'adult'. I work; I'm vaguely ambitious; I think, I feel and I love for people and purpose beyond my own immediate needs. Is this then my entrance to the remainder of my life? Will I wake up the same way in five or even two years' time? Will I love in the same manner (falteringly, difficultly, totally)? Will I work? Will I eat? Will I throw the same monthly big, red tantrums?

_______Of course I will not.

So where does this leave my new 'adult' peers?

Where does this leave me?

Perpetual and tumultuous evolution.

And love:

_______It gets in the way.

Its gauzey and lacey

And it makes you hate change.

Two Thousand. And Nine.

2009-12-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

For 2009.
a year like any other
of manic tendencies
with highs and
of course with lows.

And of strange things
and overwhelmingly the banal.

And like any other
I felt that what happened was
especially significant

but no doubt time will render this year
in the arch of perspective
merely as another squeal
in a line of many, many
hot cars
ferrying me out of my youth.

The Sink

2009-12-25T01:54:00.001-08:00

The quiet is a deep red. I think sonorous thoughts and sometimes I stare at my face and realise I don't really know what I look like. Everything, my hands, the mirror, the water, reverberates. It screams its way out of the pipe and bangs and clangs in its spiralling wetness until it runs through the grates and hides in the pipes. So if my eyes are like water I follow it down and its like the back of my eye lids. Its a deep red.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-20T05:03:00.000-08:00

and Come Back to Me

When we climbed rocks I hated to look down. I lived with you in a land of sunshine and there were deep shadows down there.
Leaning over my old friends’ faces, I’d sway to fall into my mind, I was dead every time. But you thought in there was some bud, some tight blossom of genius like your own. Like you and your strings was me and I had little wings.
You filled me with different smokes and drove me there, pulled me up too high in the light. Love taught me to photosynthesise. I don’t need all that. No food or water or habitat. I was all arms and legs apart, broken up and leaking
Down spurs and pebbles
I was entering the ocean. I was dripping down the rock wall.
And the harbour –it spreads out of the city and to other islands. It runs its fingers through the earth and it pulls my hair.

Under summer trees you drugged me with fermented apples
And I looked up at plump pink blossoms and they covered the sky. I watched them wilt and fall onto my skin while you looked at my clothes and my limbs. You’d cut my flesh to see my sap. My wounds were bruised petals for your tongue to lap. So I open everything. All my bottles and jars. All my cupboards and wardrobes. I reopened my scars and the contents came tumbling. They came tumbling out. Then we met on the curb and we left it all there. I woke up in your arms I walked out into a cleared out street.

The Bug

2009-12-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

Its crawled under my skin again. Once or twice a year it comes. And it gets into my heart and feeds on the saps of my reds and pinks. And it makes me different -a little more dry and wild. It makes it easy to run. It makes it feel like I never meant a word.

Wild Sky

2009-12-08T04:11:00.000-08:00

Images Chase Manhattan
Words Phoebe Loomes

I got a little sick when we ran.
When we walked through the fields I screamed dirty girl,
Filthy things.
But the place was so far and I grew bored with the rambling field
So we ran
And my neck began to drip with sweat
And my breath got shorter
And when he lay me down below the tree
I screamed filthy things
And the clouds parted like the ocean above us.

Words and Vision

2009-12-08T03:19:00.000-08:00

I've undertaken a collaborative project with photographer Chase Manhattan.

She shoots faces, limbs, bedrooms, skies and tempestuous bodies of water.

We inspire one another -her with her photos and me with my words.

Take a look at her photography or just keep your eyes peeled for more.

The Wolf in Second Hand Clothing

2009-12-05T21:59:00.000-08:00

or The New Bogan

There's little scatterings of ink on you all; there's a patch of hair fallen on the floor and it mirrors your now partially exposed scalp. My God, you're out there. You're stuck in there but you're so out there.

A little silly lock with a silly little key that doesn't work. You're all closed off in your little cave but inside it the people are out there. They're so out there.

You're skins have all leathered, its stained like an old jacket from chains of cigarettes that reach their claws through the night and drag your wasted carcass to the morning light. You need a scrub, you do; your group too, a downing with a fire hose.

You're all yelping and giggling but you couldn't mention some things.

Like the awkward silences littered through your awesome all night party rage. There's just so little to say -its obvious- when you've sat on that same couch, you've sat on that same damn couch all week.

Lets have it -there's nothing to say.

Then there's little problems -someone can't get it up anymore. He's all stuffed with limp threads of THC and its been a long, long day with those bleary dead eyes. She left that little mark on his chest and he cried until they arrived here.

Someone else hates your new girlfriend -he's doing things like hiding her drinks and calling her on off handed comments. He's a little bit smarter than her, he thinks, so he'll humiliate her the best he can. But, its a little tough to be subtle after eight or so years of dope worship -granted.

Here here here they'll judge you. They'll judge you for anything to pass the bitter time. But God they're glamorous; yes. And so interesting, yes. Just ask them about their hair cuts, their torn jeans, Dad's old flannelettes, the naked inky woman on his back, that same Incubus album squealing out into the night, the drugs they use, the different ways they use them, the unusual brand of fags they smoke, their friend that died so tragically...

To whom they regularly toast a trip, to whom they toast 40 drinks, to whom they toast a friendly freebase, to whom they pull the light bulb out the ceiling, to whom they shoot narcotics up their veiny skins, into their cold cold blood, to whom they lay in the sun. Oh yes, definitely; one more line and you shouldn't feel bad- after all its for her. Its all for memories sake.
(The little late night incantation. The self-affirming exploitation.)

Now his nose is bleeding. Thats a beautiful thing. Its a real sign.

Yeah, they're real bohemian types you know. Sure, one or two or ten is between jobs, yeah yeah sure, 'I'm working myself out y'know. Its rough y'know. Let me at another water pipe or, y'know...'
And they'll judge you for taking it somewhere different. For crawling out of their snake pit. Hissing and snapping their long tongues when you pass them by again.

The Big Scream

2009-11-27T20:05:00.001-08:00

One thing that people find strange about cosmologists is how calmly they can discuss the universe literally being violently torn apart. One thing I do know is that this isn’t going to occur for another 50 to 100 billion years if it happens at all. I take solace in the idea that our sun will die in about 5 billion years and cook the earth in the process.

Simply Breakfast

2009-11-18T21:51:00.001-08:00

I do it better than you.

Girls, Girls, Girls

2009-11-17T16:31:00.001-08:00

I've been drawing. And thinking, 'This was the nineties.'

Gonna Move

2009-11-09T21:58:00.001-08:00

(I don't know what happens now).
Its fresh to have nothing. The more I gain the harder I become. I suck it in -I suck it all in- the friends and the money and the love and the views and they fill me up and up until my skin is tense and almost coming apart. Then I'm hard and I want more and more I couldn't ever have enough. Thats what masculinity can be -that insatiable selfishness coupled with scraping in possession after possession. Get your job and your money, get your room and your woman just where you want her. Swell it all up under the zipper of your trousers. But they blow it all so quickly -so easily caught up in their desire and so quickly sapped dry. Wet sheets are white flags of surrender and weak men fly them every Sunday morning. But I don't want to be like that. There's no surrender for people who have nothing. For women. I'm so free and soft it makes me hard and I have nothing to lose. I had a good upbringing and a solid education -the only unreachables. That and little shreds of intimacy each night. Those things are mine. I could go into turn of century trenches right now and I think I might survive. So I decided on New York.
(All I really meant was somewhere else.)

Mikveh

2009-11-08T20:29:00.000-08:00

Sorting It

2009-10-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

And glory, like the phoenix midst her fires, exhales her furies, blazes, and expires.

-Rochdale

Little Tide

2009-10-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

Today I sat on a big rock and looked at my house over the bay. I've looked at those rocks and down into the filthy water of Sydney Harbour thousands of times, but its funny looking back on yourself. Seeing it all from a different angle. The red bricks look so British and offensive over the blossoming Jacaranda trees and vine-strangled silver barks. I could see from hundreds of metres away that a curtain was askew and I felt pangs of embarrassment at my dishevelled lounge room -beaming visuals of my internal disarray all over the stacked apartment wealth of Double Bay. It was drizzling and I was sitting on this rock smoking cigarettes and thinking about the foggy, polluted air shaft of my future. Thinking about the future of other things, the bulging foreheads of Twitter users and the extending fangs of the moneyed elite. I twitched in the cold and a box of matches fell from my pocket, bounced off the rock and fell right into the water. It floated in the shallows, very soft waves tugging it back and forth, then it disappeared behind another rock. I felt bad; carelessly letting the toxic phosphorous dipped twigs fall into what appeared to be a relatively clean patch of city runoff. I looked back at my house for a while and let my eyes get wet from the wind and spitting rain. Then I saw the match box again. It had all come undone -the glue quickly diluted and left useless by the salty water, the folds all relaxed and the box just a floating piece of irregular shaped cardboard. The matches expunged and drifting around like lost ducklings, the red tips glowing like detached coral. Funny how my little items of destruction are so quickly torn up and returned useless by the ocean. I sat and waited until the box and its now impotent contents were softly spat out onto the shore before I walked back to fix the curtain.

Cats

2009-10-18T17:36:00.001-07:00

Do you think each sentence should be considered on its own? Pay attention to the length of sentencesand how they vary. If so, identify where and consider how this alters the tone and effects the meaning of the piece.

Cats everywhere now.

Mewing.

Licking themselves.

Panther draping themselves all over uncomfortable surfaces

Relishing in their (albeit domesticated) animality.

In my house and my friends houses, too.

In a year we've gone from being poison sniffing miscreants to vaguely respectable young adults who think they can care for helpless and useless animals.

I'm not sure they can but they try and try.

I like being in my twenties because I feel legitimate now.

From the age of about 12 I've been acting like an adult.

Discussing politics with a stupid pre-pubescent voice and trying to jump up and fit in with my family.

I am substantially younger than my siblings and even more so with my parents and they'd outgrown the humouring-the-child phase by the time I was born.

This ain't so bad -I didn't do so many stupid things.

I never rubbed Bonjella all over my lips at lunchtime in high school and giggled and drooled until fifth period.

I never went through a pop punk phase.

I went straight from Playschool to Buddy Holly, The Cure and the Cruel Sea.

I don't have so much time for those guys now though.

I smoked pot heavily for about a year but really I think it helped me.

Before I started I was aggressive and antsy.

SO fucking defensive that boys at my high school were terrified of me.

This I'm not making up; a number of them confessed it to me in the last few days of year 12.

That was when all those walls came down.

I think it was beginning to dawn on us that we could potentially all sleep with each other someday.

And sex is a great leveller because everybody howls and screams and gets a little wild with the biting and scratching and that.

Thats the leveller -

animality.

Maybe thats where this craving for companion animals comes from.

A little reminder of our own dormant wildness

In this dusty concrete cage.

(I'm writing a short story about clocks and zombies that I will post soon. The break has been fruitful and I will deliver the goods; I promise.)

None

2009-10-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

(I don't like having to give this up. I want to keep writing junk here until I have enough useless words to fill the ocean. Then, great waves would come crash upon you all; they'd rake up all of your flaws and all of your lies and your sins. We're all awful under it all. I'm here to wash you clean. But I'm trying to give it up.)

This is Stale

2009-10-04T21:23:00.001-07:00

Going on a break. Indefinately.

phoebeloomes@hotmail.com

Tortilla Flat

2009-09-22T01:35:00.000-07:00

I miss that place.

Who are these people? Hers, His, yours? Come home, spread out
In concentric fans, like closed-eye kaleidoscopes
Before sleep. Tumbling into trees, onto chairs, climbing
The roof with their claws.
Noisy, virile animals in thick tobacco mist.
Which one is that fumbling? Fondling? Her glass eye?
That’s glowing, bright like poison algae or cyanide, she’d guess.
They talk it all out, fight for the floor, they vote on it
They buy the cups and stalks and drink from it.
Toast to fresh faces or American authors or how easy and hot
Money is when it burns.
Then there’s a bright
Red Tahitian head dress floating around and looking down the hallway,
Down the barrel of the gun. There’s a flood light
On a smoky gum.

And this one? This one climbed branches and is wedged between tree, sky;
Black like his eye. Wild and withering
Speaking in tongues while they all laugh like jackals
And amphetamines rip and twist at their cells, blood a little
Thinner, sweating and unwinding; screaming words out
Into the night like caged animals. Hating the other academics,
Blindly inhaling their way through youth’s purgatory, deep carvings
And their way to the future. Flicking pages like glinting
Embers, smoulder in his fingers
Burning her. What she had
In her hand?
It was dust.

Sixteen armchair imperialists declaring unfettered ideals
Like the Bolshevik talking to the journalist and a fringe of illicit substance advocates
Nodding about different topics and pulling mirrors off walls
A simmering paperbark face burning little mice,
Mincing words about nudity and déjà vu and how violently
The idiots flap outside in the wind. A guitarist stringing some cow-eyed poet
Onto the roof while she muttered about twinkling stars and smut and wet sapphire eyes
Until she’s silenced with a mouthful
Of his fingers.

There’s a Trip and Tear and a Sage
Hovering around the camp, there’s a muse
And she lathers endearing tropes into their violent
Bath of unobstructed discussion and
None of these are hers. Not a chosen leaf
Of this wild windy tree.
Somebody is holding her: taxidermy prize
Hooked up on a wall next to tigers, with her own bright glass eyes.
These are not hers. These weather eyes and this killer
And his killer kiss
Belongs to all of us
So tell her that. He’s feeding the possums
As they look over the stumbling, giggling horde
All screaming and teething in a bohemian pride.
While a shipwreck of aliens peer in over the ivy drenched fences
Wondering, ‘Who are these people?’
At the frenzied meeting of human youth inside.

Evolution

2009-09-14T16:25:00.000-07:00

I dream

Of words

Making what they will of me

Their inky_____________faltering

_______Lumbering swerves

Make no sense in _____waves

Of blackening petals

Folding me into a white flag

Of slumbering. Then

______Pull at your shirt

One more time; make it hurt

Like a silver dagger in skin carving

‘You did not make me.’

There is what you make of me:

A little Cathy sullen with haunted

Sweat;

The Unbridled Artist, wild crown jewels

On my head, a cantering, marish spirit;

A hollow

Face over yours

In a blue rinse set

You so viciously adore. Make it of me

As you will but

You did not make me.

Not with your worldly history

Or your brief and catatonic misery

Not punching tobacco-yellow walls

Or reeling North American beat vernaculars

at greyed ceilings. Or muted, dulcet words for strains

Or aches or terror at your heart or your head

And what

You’re feeling. No,

You did not make me.

I’ve stared at hospital ceiling neons

Like guiding lights in domestic hell

And I’ve run for my life

And had blood,

Cupfuls, leak from me.

An arm torn from its socket

Like a fist of clovers wrenched.

I’ve been licked from ponytail

To toenail by heartbreak and even

If its all dead now

You did not make me.

Even as little shiny tigers on my fingers are feline bites on your wrist.

Your carnal twitch in sleep shakes me awake

Even as I watch the same stars hidden under same city and its same smog

And crunch the same dead leaves under shoes almost the same

Even though I am you and you are me (when we’re drenched in the dark

Hue of this fermented cell)

I did not make you and you

Did not make me.

Maybe Its Because

2009-09-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

All those other girls can be, like, perfect. They have their hair brushed and their make-up done and no bruises on their legs. And I'm like BLEEEUURRRGGGH.

ZOMBIE

2009-09-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

They had soiled faces
And eyes full of stars
They rose over the horizon
In great, jilted and lumbering waves

The diaphanous and fantastically heroic dead.

The zombie is an attack on contemporary ideals of conception, consciousness and humanity. We see the mind and the body as inextricably linked, the mind feeling for the body and the body expressing for the mind. This connection between the corporeal (the body) and the incorporeal (the mind) is, in my opinion, a ludicrous and unfounded assertion cooked up by humanists. The body has no power for abstract thought; the body cannot reason; the body cannot love in the intellectual sense. The body can feel; it feels pleasure and it feels pain and it likes and dislikes accordingly. I guess the difficulty of this definition comes with Romantic and Revisionist assertions about lovemaking as the physical act of love. The validity of this argument is one I personally struggle with. All those sexually awakened are aware of the carnality of the act itself and in terms of ideology I agree with the idea that it is entirely base. A new romantic at heart, though, I feel that the act itself should be inextricably linked with love. With intellecutal love. Is that what it is? Are you loving that person or skilfully using their body as a tool for your own sexual gratification? How loving and conscious are you when you're coming?

I digress (and vulgarly) but the assertion is this: there aren't enough zombie texts available for the wider public. The idea of it is fascinating: a living, breathing, thinking human being is transformed into a mindless machine of cannibalistic destruction. They retain the same body; wear the same clothes; are ultimately the same person but for the disappearance of the incorporeal element. And it is this -the incorporeal- which our society so vehemently values. In a world where zombies exist, the possibility of your loved one rising as a violent, gnawing underling would be very real. Its a world where the body is arbitrary to one's inner self. The body is a vessel for both the human and the inhuman. This disappearance of the incorporeal is exactly what death is. Its exactly what one struggles with when losing a loved one. The body is there, it lays in front of you all made up and dressed in gorgeous whites, so preserved like it still retains a mellifluous living quality. But something crucial has vanished. Some unspeakable, unknowable spark has been extinguished and it is done forever.
Is this usurping of bodily control that the mind gives us wherein our society founded ideas of mental illness? Regardless, in death all that remains is arbitrary and a physical reminder of the ultimate powerlessness of humanity. I'm writing a zombie book.

Les Amants

2009-08-31T21:37:00.000-07:00

René Magritte, Les Amants (The Lovers) 1929

René Magritte, Les Amants (The Lovers) 1928

Please

2009-08-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

Exit my life: abdominal pains which until now I thought were normal aches from fatigue. Now I've seen my sickened ovaries and fallopian tubes on screen. Its a film; its about illness and sweet irony. Its about the impossibility of true happiness and the inevitability of bad things. Bad things happening to you. Its about how you can't ignore anything (its about being hounded by the truth). Its about me and its about you and its about everybody I ever met.

The Right-Wing Sting

2009-08-15T21:39:00.000-07:00

‘An apology is needed, and what you won’t say the nation will. The Prime Minister is a bloody disgrace.’

-Kevin Rudd as Opposition leader in Parliament Question Time, 2006.

Following twelve years of precocious Liberal governing, Australian lefto-pinkos finally snatched back the crown of a nation ruled by a Labour Government. Kevin Rudd and his horde of followers, many of them donning minimalist Prada lenses and with a liberal Arts degree under their belt, represent for Australia a precursor to a series of minor revolutions. Sitting on the far edge of anticipation are university students –grasping at the oasis-like ideal of the abolition of full-fee paying degrees- and members of the Arts sector. Already partially satisfied is the indigenous community, the previously bastardised heritage of our country, who received an apology from the nation for the occupation of their land and the attempted annihilation of their race and culture. When the damage is done, it is done. So we’re sorry, but the paternalistic intervention must roll on like tanks of Western progression. This is our shame; these are our vehicles to the future.

But, essentially, Rudd can do very little wrong. The Liberal Party of Australia has, however, after its prolonged honeymoon of twelve years in power, fallen into it’s metaphorical seven-year-itch. It’s alienation of the Australian public appears to be an insidious tone which has reverberated throughout the entirety of the party. This mess is one which appears to span not only Brendan Nelson’s assemblage of hot-headed senators (altered very little by usurper Malcolm Turnbull) but the entire right-wing of Australia. This bunch is a wetted and dishevelled rodent left licking it’s wounds after being so harshly rejected after twelve years of a seemingly warm embrace by the popular majority. What went wrong?

I put it down to the continual grimaces, the monotonous diatribes and the apparent lack of any semblance of good humour. Who, after all, wouldn’t walk away from such a repugnant character in a romantic situation? The right-wing of Australia could effectively be personified as the unpopular journalist and commentator Andrew Bolt. A hot headed pugnacious character with anachronistic ideals about race, gender and the state of the environment. While the left possesses, for all its flaws, a kind of dynamism and self-assured confidence which, more importantly than the specifics of policy and action, is teamed with a necessary humour borne of the impossibility of perfection in realism, while the Right wallows in unwavering self-righteousness and rejects Modern political trends of altered perspectives or the good old reneg (sic). This makes for embarrassing results (see Utegate). Or, more simply, for Labour political fuck-ups are taken on the chin and criticism is validated with debate s opposed to the Liberal scoff.

John Howard never encompassed the Australian archetype of intelligence. His private school past and meteoric and typical academic rise to political prominence left this man with an intelligence too restrained. He was too well cultivated. The term ocker, often misconstrued as meaning philistine and boorish, more correctly pertains to a rough-necked, masculine manner that is inextricably linked to intense insight and intelligence. The verbal delivery of an ocker might come in tirade of Australian slang with ironic and good-hearted sexism, but the message is nonetheless poignant. What happens with these right wing types is that their message becomes to restrained by political correctness and the complete removal of passion from one’s argument.

This is not what Australians want. Australian’s want a Keating-Hawke hero. A figure so violently patriotic that they will take arms against a nation’s own intrinsic flaws in an attempt to better a nation. Someone so assured of their own intentions that they will scream and spit with indignation in Parliament. Regardless of the current state of the nation, with the ever-heavy and completely humourless measures and debates taken in regard to the Global Financial Crisis, this is what Rudd represented wholeheartedly. A tirade of improper abuse (‘You’re a disgrace! Shame!’) thrown at the then PM for his refusal to apologise to the victims of the Stolen Generation and broader indigenous community of Australia in spite of a plea so strong the nation was on its metaphorical knees. Strange as it may seem, Rudd was, for a time, a gallant white knight on the horizon of this nation.

Scrawled Diary Scrapings from the 18th of July, 2009

2009-08-11T00:59:00.000-07:00

Am I becoming a better person? I'd like to know what the world makes of this life. This life I live thats very similar to the life my friends lead. Without getting finite, we like the same things; that is unarguable. We listen to the same things. We drink, smoke, eat, go to the same things. Is my sentimentality for these people rooted in this situation? When can I count it as standing the test of time? And what is time, anyway? What does it matter between 5 minutes and 5 weeks and 5 years? What if they all feel the same? Is that what makes people friends? Is it this infinite sameness? And does empathy exist? Or does understanding just come from mutual sameness? And when I move overseas will it be different? Or will I still be drinking vodkas, still be reading postmodern poets, still prefer cotton sheets and staying up until the sun rises? Will I always be overcome with this urge to run away? Is that who I am now? Will it be different in its sameness? Will all those things be the same when I'm thousands of miles away? What is the same anyway? Can I be subjective? Can I? Do I deserve this thing I am getting? This thing I couldn't give up. And do I ever escape the past? Or have I already? Are my ghosts still lurking, just dulled by my situation? Will they become more dull? Will they die? Will they?

Paddington

2009-08-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm looking at a place on Glenmore Road. I want it leased out to me. It has two bedrooms, bathrooms, tiles, walls, floors. I'm looking into it. I’m looking into its windows. Up at its eaves, they hang stony over the exteriors for people to gather under when its raining. I'm looking and its true love. My parents used to live on Glenmore Road. My parents moved in together there for the first time. No flush in the bathroom. Mum, drawing up drafts for architects of Brutalism. They were adding the finishing touches to the Nation’s Capital. Dad, prosecuting and defending violent offenders, depending on what day it was. They didn't care. They went home to rag on Thatcher over wine. When they met, my mother had a previous responsibility (in the other room, if you will) with another man. My mother is very honourable, a good woman, a great woman. One to admire. She would never do something in bad taste. But my father proposed the night they met, down on one knee like a knight. She laughed it off and that shut him up like a clam. He waited. He waited and waited. A few months. He kept tabs on her. Waited. They didn't break up. But you can't halt fate. It’s a seething tempestuous cloud and it hangs heavy over obstacles. Other bars, other parties, other boys; it was all just things in the way.

"What’s going on with that Margie girl?"

I think there was some overlap between the two relationships. But what does it matter? What does it matter at all? Who cares about that other man? He was an inconvenience. He had Margie; he had her fettered from her fate. I'm sure he was not a bad man. I'm sure he wasn't. But he was incidental. My father drove my mother over to his place after they'd spent a week together. An uninterrupted week of fate. I've had one of those. I'll have it again. I'll have it again tomorrow. Tomorrow will be their thirtieth wedding anniversary. I know it hasn't always been perfect for them. But true love lives. I’m looking at a place on Glenmore Road.

Semester 2

2009-07-27T18:06:00.000-07:00

Fictocriticism is just textual cross dressing.

Discuss

Fictocriticism is a filthy fuckin' word. Aurally people mistake it for obscenities like, 'Fuck until cataclysm,' and 'Flick my incision.' Aurally the word dons filthy four-letter-word-type glad rags.

For the critical cannon, the hegemonic, self-righteous Oxbridge lords, it can be assumed that the fictocritical style read like some kind of obscene filth. The French Feminist process finds its success in forcing contortions on the faces of the aforementioned Oxbridge traditionalists. Look at him, muttering four letter words of outrageous confusion at the subversion of everything he and his tweed-clad army stand for. This is a fundamentalist cross-dressing as a liberal intellectual.

Fictocriticism is a cross-dresser. this means it is a style beyond the thresholds of traditional styles. It is not confined to any style; it doesn't fit but it fits all the same. Like our heroine, with feet as big as clubs and hairy like tarantulas, donning red patent leather platform heels. There is undeniably allure in something so sprawling, so unconventional. Its a kind of freedom which never before existed in the literary world. Feminists: they found it (Anna Gibbs with a flashlight) and now the lord in tweed from Oxbridge suddenly realised how repressed he has always been.

One Year, One Year Deep.

2009-07-23T05:01:00.001-07:00

I want to dedicate this one to Stuck On Repeat. While this girl is no Nabokov, she can teach us all a lot about letting go and letting loose on the web.

I've not read back on this blog before, but now its been a year. I trawled through it all. A whole year of confessionals; the purpled extrapolation of my romantic ideals and interpersonal failings. My fear and my fury and something about fur. I started this with the same reservations as everybody else; I know its indulgent, an over share, occasionally raw and often largely unreal. I know there are people who read this whom I'd prefer to know nothing about me. I know that there are people who scoffed at that cancer share shit from a few months ago. I've publicly named and shamed at least two people, entirely self righteously. I gave them no opportunity for redress and I guess that isn’t fair. What I do here is morally objectionable, particularly if you subscribe to ideals of rigid control over your external appearance. I accept that once its here it doesn't belong to me anymore. That with each confession I lay myself open for criticism (slim to nil of which appears face to face). The truth is that I don't really mind what people think. I don't mind at all. I don't mind the scoffing or the incredulity at what I disclose. I've fucked up; broken hearts, been proud of it; had my heart broken; slipped in and out of addictions; slipped in and out of academic obsessions; written things about my friends I shouldn't have; been very, very stupid and occasionally I put something on here I really love. While I always expected to regret a lot of what went on here, I never expected people to find it interesting. I started with the assumption this would remain quiet, veiled. Not so. I have a lot of anonymous readers these days. I know what I put here is a piece of me, something most people would guard with wordy armies. But my internal dialogue is staying. Thank you all for reading, even if I don't know who you are.

At Sea

2009-07-14T22:46:00.000-07:00

Some of this very old, some very new, some very adolescent.

I’m still wearing this

veil, I like the gauze

Between us. I like this veil

And you from beneath it.

I like your scars, your words; I like

What has happened to you.

The things that hurt you;

I like them too.

I like your fears, I like

The tension

And hiding my tears

Under this veil, (I see pearls,

Seaweed, this is the truth)

Mascara dripping onto

Cheeks, is veiled.

Like seashores

Lapping at my neck

Leaving purple starfish

Under my skin. I like them

And they are women.

They howl under veils

Like sand (that is my hair).

And scratches on my

Shoulders

Are gifts from jellyfish

Who want me, like my heat

Sting me with their

Stringy veils

And taste this female meat.

I like the lies, the cramping

Of your throat. The curtains,

The sheets, netting me

Onto this wetted shore.

In this storm these

Veils could fall but

Clouds would shudder, freezing

To a seething halt.

To walk in, behind this veil

Would be to walk in
on the ocean.

I Want To Know It All

2009-07-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

Tell me what you've smoked. And everything you've sucked. Tell me everything. All the sparks and whiskey in the parks, tell me how drunk you were for that fuck. I've known older guys who thought they were young, like you, thinking I was young. I'd like putting something on your tongue. Watching it dissolve into spit, down your throat and into me. I'd prefer your tongue, or spilling water down this empty hallway. Really, I'm not so young. Walking down streets with the lights and the whores and ignoring it all. Like we all live in a drunken wonderland. Like we do. Like we never even knew. I don't like being alive and watching someone die, tell me everything.

Dark Matter/Dark Energy Or How I Found Love

2009-07-05T20:20:00.001-07:00

(This is something from my Gender Studies final piece, its alien and erotic. We studied sci-fi. And feminism. Go figure.)

I came from further than humans can fathom.
Consider this; the universe was conjured
From nothing, gaseous emptiness that flickered
And exploded into billions of trillions of miles, a singular world;
A tempestuous field of matter, teetering with some aplomb
The universe is a cloud, a lost milky curd

Suspended in vicious nothingness. Monoliths of dark energy
and dark matter dancing around a flea of atoms, a hair
Which flickers like animals. Infinity produced two
worlds with life, mine and theirs, like star-crossed lovers
torn apart by the speed of light and the grasp
of insurmountable improbability. We knew humans

but you did not know us. I was beautiful here,
floating from thought to thought
with the freedom of the selfish and
the power of the sage. Dark matter
in battle with dark energy
in this universe, jousting between gravity and vacuum.
Thinking in sunlight about the universe

And how it is being torn apart. Where will it go?
The universe is endless but has an end. Polarity
Is something all worlds have in common
So my thoughts, from nothing, conjured dark energy
Ripped me from my world to yours. I am better
Than you all but I am alien. Alone. That

Is the definition of polarity.

Expanding, shrinking, stretching, crushing.

Me flying through space towards you.

And You're

2009-07-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

Going in, in for the kill. Kill,
for the killer kiss. Kiss,
for the killer kiss.

Turning Heads

2009-06-30T17:09:00.001-07:00

I suppose the staring from other people in our apartment block isn't entirely surprising.

HAIL MARY

I Want Intrigue and Terror. I Want Patton.

2009-06-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

I dedicate this to Alyx's blog about batshit crazy girls.
Fantomas' cover of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me theme.

The bit around the 1 minute 50 second mark. Oh....

From dulrum to dulrum in this tiny city, when I'm really bored I wish things were a little more creepy. I wish I could frighten people with a stare; have dreams where small men talk backwards; and the demons haunted us and had long grey hair and wore double denim. Maybe then we would look after each other with the desperation that fear brings on. Imagine how you'd feel about me if you knew I could die tomorrow? If we knew something was coming for us; imagine how severe we'd be with our emotions, how quickly we'd take off our clothes, quit our stupid jobs and retreat to log cabins to have breathy coversations about our anxiety.
(Too much Twin Peaks...)

Most Times

2009-06-06T03:57:00.000-07:00

things are good!
Like now.

And Shakespeare?

2009-06-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

He was 'Not of an age, but for all time.'

An admission from one of Shakespeare's friends, Ben Johnson, spoken soon after his death.
And did you know Shakespeare used to act in his own plays? He was the ghost in Hamlet, for instance. So I now know where I would go if I could travel anywhere in time.

The other day in one of my tutorials at uni, (where the unbridled, uneducated opinions of north shore fuckwits are allowed to run free reign all over the literary cannon with no concern for the loss of one's integrity and only the notion of being noticed for participation marks considered), this spray tanned blonde thing with a whiney slur was criticising Shakespeare for adopting common plot lines and transposing them into his own works.

She said, 'Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet were totally ripped off from older stories. All Shakespeare did was steal ideas and add a few poetic differences.'

A few poetic differences?

SINCE WHEN is it acceptable to write off the works of the GREATEST writer and poet of all time as, 'A few poetic differences'? A few poetic differences? Entire scenes written in iambic pentametre, with a vocabularly that surpasses by hundreds every other writer the Western world has encountered? Not to mention an entire catalogue of works that are endlessly performed, reworked and adored by all?

Furthermore this orange-skinned, polyester-adorned thing was an English major, who is studying a course on poetry. She is at the best university in the country, creeping closer and closer to a degree shared with Germaine Greer and Gough Whitlam, and she is yet to recognise that Shakespeare is a GOD whom the literary world and English language itself owes its strength and dignity.

Fuck you. Go back to Year Nine.

Personal Philosophy

2009-05-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

I don't think too much about the future and I try my best to keep my mind away from the past. I try to focus on the present and making the most of what is now.

You can't dwell in the past, its equivalent to boxing yourself in forever, not allowing yourself to move forward, develop and adapt. You can't plan what you will be in the future. A lot of people try to imitate the way they see themselves in the future. This sets us up for disapointment and leads people into trying to be something that they are not. All you have is now. If we could all behave in a way that is appropriate for the moment we would all be happier. I don't mean live for the moment in a careless sense and I don't mean action without care for consequence. I mean realistic attitudes and goals. See your situations as steps towards the future, not an end point that requires you to act like you're already there. No ambitious actions that have the sole aim of furthering yourself in the future.
Ambitious people scare me as they're almost always severely selfish. I don't mean to confuse ambition with hopefulness and positivity, as people often do. I mean people whose drive is solely one of furthering their own situation, even if that be at the cost of friendships or relationships, or through worsening the situation of someone who might stand in their way. These people have their heads stuck in the future and so ignore the present and this makes them unpleasant to be around as they have little concern for their consequences, their vision clouded with their plans for the future. They have no capacity to adapt to the situation they find themselves in and so cannot relate to the people around them. There is no point in living only for the future; you could die tomorrow.

How Do You Feel About Babies?

2009-05-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

Someone?

Like most young girls, I couple a deep craving with real repulsion. Every time I see one my heart aches, flutters and longs for my own. New mothers must find it strange, having their child admired by every person they encounter, whether they know them or not. Its a trigger for most people, to stare and smile into the pram for as long as they please with no acknowledgement of the mother, and feeling no shame for this. Like the child belongs to us, not her. It takes a whole village to raise a child, they say, and I guess this is where the urge to stare is rooted. How dare a mother so selfishly keep it to herself. She is doing it wrong, holding it wrong, feeding it the wrong thing.
But I also find them revolting. Snotty, fetid-smelling and psychoticly selfish. Their uninhibited sexuality freaks me out. Touching themselves all the time and wrapping their legs around you when you hold them. Small monsters.

I thought maybe

2009-05-20T23:50:00.000-07:00

that watching you fuck over more and more girls would make me feel better...
But its less validating than I thought.

I Apologise for Being Repetitive

2009-05-13T23:55:00.000-07:00

But life is a cycle.

I came out of my first long term relationship a complete wreck. Breakups are soul destroying in some way or another, all of them. No matter how amicable, how close two people can manage to stay, the fact of it is that you shared a piece of each other and took what was given to you for granted. You tear yourself open at the chest to be feasted upon, but after the frenzy, which can last two weeks or two years, one person decides they don't like the taste anymore. This post-relationship friendliness we all aspire to is a tainted one. It has to be. You both know what you did to each other, how much you hurt. A breakup is a signifier for two people that we're all selfish. Not even love can stop us from our selfishness. Inconvenience is enough to get up and walk away. This is something I never understood. I have never been able to let go of him, no matter how difficult things were.

But my first break up was the end of a world I grew up in. He took my history, four years of my life and wrote them off as a waste of his time. He loved me for years with a kind of rampant madness and then one day, nothing. He turned my best friend against me with lies about my infidelity, something he concocted in one of his amphetamine-driven rages. He thought about it carefully, as this was a part of our shared life that he wanted custody of. She subsequently passed away but not before we made amends. But he had tainted our relationship too. She'd judged me and I'd judged her for judging me and my whole world went up in smoke, sank back down to ash. And then she god damn died.

It was a black period of my life to say the least. I found no solace in silence or laughter. I was wretched for a very long time. The most pertinent advice I recieved was from a friend, who quipped, 'You can't rely on another person to make you happy.'
I still don't truly believe this and I know I probably should. But I don't. The time without him is time which I've weathered, not lived. Life for me is like a battle with the whole world and its not easy alone. Its not easy to come home and have nobody to spill to. Nobody to listen to the nuances of your life, the niggles, and get it. Really actually get it, feel it like its their own.

The worst thing about being alone is meeting new people. Strange fucking sensations. I used to meet men and turn away with guilt like I was cheating. I didn't want to be bad. Then you remember they're not watching you anymore. Nobody cares what you do or who is in your bed or what this new person will do to you when you open up to them, when you start this cycle all over again.

The worst part is knowing that I haven't moved beyond it. Not really. I tried new boyfriends. I tried a string of them in fact, but it wasn't what I wanted. I felt like a fraud, pretending to be passionate about people I knew deep down were just imitators. And while I have reconciled the pain and rage we pushed onto each other, reconciled it with him, and while we are doing all we can to rekindle, I know now how sour it can go and that really terrifies me. I know how people change, I've seen coldness in the eyes of somebody I know would die for me. He talks to me about early engagement and still I think about how long it is until he leaves again. And whether I can take it anymore.

Bookishness

2009-05-05T18:36:00.001-07:00

So I have a book out now. Its called 'Fresh Splash' and is a collection of some of my poetry from the last 5 years. All about love and life and eyes and water.
I have a surplus of copies so if any of my friends and faithful readers want one, its all yours, free of charge.
Just drop me a line at phoebeloomes@hotmail.com with your name and address.

Après Moi, le Déluge

2009-05-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

After me comes the flood.
(Not for serious.)

Coined by Louis XVI (apparently) before his beheading. A man who dragged his own country into ruin at the hands of his indulgence. So these words represent the psychology of selfish people who take all that they can and don't think of consequences.
I find it odd that two of my old flames have very recently seen their streets flooded. Its all a woman can hope to do. Stick around for the natural and flee for the disaster.
On another note have a book coming out, with a title inspired by water nonetheless. The most important part is that I was granted an IBSN and accepted into the National Library.
Things are as sweet and dirty as figs.

Sleeping Like a Darling

2009-04-20T07:21:00.001-07:00

I just had the most dreamy week.

Here it is.
I don't believe in convenience.
I won't strive for comfort.
And I won't demand control.
Not ever again.
Nothing so rewarding as this thing I've chased since I was a child.
Sleeping on soft pillows
With arms like tentacles around.
Our inky sickness all over each other.
I won't run from a struggle.
I won't settle.
I will run where my heart pulls.
I am free.

An Odd Homage to Dorothy Porter

2009-04-06T23:48:00.000-07:00

Australian verse novelist and postmodern feminist died of cancer in December of last year.

"In Wuthering Heights you have a relationship which is so violent its almost elemental, but it is my nuclear fission model incarnate. The intensity of my work [and Bronte's work] is a female intensity. The focus is on beauty, on hands and on textures. My work is female, rather than feminine.
_____Sometimes I look at my influences and wonder why they have meant so much to me. Why have I been looking for Heathcliff all of my life as a man or a woman -the ultimate demon lover- and why do I try to create this demon in myself?"

Wedding

2009-04-02T20:22:00.001-07:00

Annika and Selina

2009-04-02T03:52:00.000-07:00

Once I had two women. So much more than I could handle and so much more, more than I deserved. No holds barred in conversation, and the proximity. My goodness. One my neighbour and one my housemate. Endless 2L coke bottles full of 'Jack the Ripper' or 'Coastal Sangria.'
You two are like giant jungle flowers to me, reeking of exotic perfumes, so vivid then and now so hard for me to find in this city monolith. I don't even know if you two read this...

Womb: Seaside

2009-03-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

I live with a set of urchins
Growing inside me.
Some are spiked, in pastels
Some are soft,
Like a rotting sponge
_______Softening my womb with foaming panic
Until it collapsed
Like a wet cake.

A drink laps with my
Internal tide,
______Pulls in driftwood
Bound with plastic bags,
Singular lost shoes
And shipwreck crushed shells,
A few rotting human hearts

I feel it raking up my seabed past,
My sand of sins,
Innumerable,
Infinite
Paving a path to licking flames
______To take me forever in.

Spent

2009-03-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Youth Rejecting their Parents' Materialism
Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism.

What happens in modern society is that we have residual interests of caring what everybody thinks of us, even if they’re total strangers in a city of ten million, who we’ll never see again, who have no possible socio or sexual interactions with us, when its just not possible. That’s what marketers are really tapping into. You can see this particularly among teenagers (the need to have the labelled clothing). The alternatives, the different ways of displaying your intelligence or your personality, through more natural means of communication (like simple conversation) become derogated. So the marketers have convinced young people in particular that the only effective way to display themselves is through the consumption choices that they make. We’re deceiving ourselves. We’re flaunting it but we’re faking it.

All this is a waste of time. Really its ineffective, inefficient and wasteful. If you actually want to make friends, if you want to meet people, you have to do it face to face. That’s how we’re evolved to assess people. Through face to face conversation.

What’s interesting about young people today is that they’re circumventing all this conspicuous consumption through electronic communication like Facebook and Myspace and online gaming, where they can get to know each other and display their intelligence and personality traits, without buying anything, displaying your best traits to possibly thousands of potential audience members. They don’t need the liquid fitness of consumption.

SICK SICK SICK

2009-03-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

How imposing a party. I spent Friday and Saturday nights drunk. Lovingly, cloudily drunk. Swilling both pink Vodkas and tiny little glasses of milk and kahlua, delivered by a Chilean reformed Marijuana addict who doubles as a virile fiend. Everybody in the bar, every damn Friday, has the same face, with the look that says, I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
I'd like to be important. I was too tired to talk to anybody properly. So I swilled and swilled until I was allowed to go home. The following night, the same thing. A nicer crowd, of course, and my friend Gustave (is it kosher to mention friends? I used a pseudonym) is turning 22. There was no birthday cake but I know G is important. We all knew that. We need not even stare at him. So I drank too much and by 11.30 I was finding it extremely difficult to speak sense. I don't remember the taxi home very clearly, but I woke up safe, in relative terms.
So, on a more local level, the illness I have is an extended hangover, but my recovery time has been greatly extended by iron deficiency and what I can only assume is my immune system's continual weakening. I have been bleeding for 26 days now and I am not being dramatic. Sugar pills, estrogen, either either I continue in a mystery illness. And my doctor from back home, having been relayed the symptoms by my mother, is also extremely concerned. And my mother has a quiver in her voice when I speak to her. I know in my heart that there is nothing vicious in my body. I have no malignancy. But the buzz of medical confusion, as controlled as it is, remains disconcerting. Wait, wait, wait.

My Light

2009-03-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

Some nights I lay on my back and stare at my ceiling light.
The nausea from being horizontal makes my vision blur and some nights there are brief tears. The light gets this glow around it, -and I don't mean the natural and obvious glow which illuminates the entire room and casts stark shadows next to the vases and the photo frames- I mean this thick aura-like white body which sits around the globe like a translucent ember.

I remember it from acid trips as whispy clouds. When I giggled. But it has been there before I started experimenting with blotter in highschool. Its been there as long as I could see. And this, at night, is my comfort. My only comfort.

Lately I lay down and think about how terrible I am. I think about how everything I've ever loved has in some way been tainted or destroyed by me. By my dependence on it, or how terrified it makes me, or how it doesn't fit the loosely defined plan I have at that point in my life. My life.

So, without God, and without love, I've realised this light and its glow are all I have as comfort or consolation. Something artificial and a product of my ability to lose focus. This is a wonderful metaphor for my life, which is deeply saddening.

Like a chest weight it hangs over me. My sting. My constellation of a single entity is my consolation. Things need to change.

Unintentional Piece of Wonder by Gus

2009-03-02T21:27:00.000-08:00

Speaking in masses about the youth of today.

Here's What 'Gossip Girl' Says About Contemporary Morality

2009-03-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

There’s no veins of crime and punishment style morality. The characters can sleep around, do drugs, pursue instances of defamation, destroy their peers; generally behave badly in any way shape or form they choose. They have the money and connections to be as bad as it gets. Furthermore, it doesn't matter what any of these characters do, there are essentially no ramifications. Trust funds are occasionally frozen and friendships will sometimes take a short hiatus for more serious personal offences, but nobody is destroyed by their poor choices and selfish actions. The morality of the show hence becomes something somewhat poignant. In contemporary times, without fear of ramification for our actions, it boils down to whether, after all your deeds and crimes committed, you are still able to look at yourself in the mirror. Like great internal karma. There's hidden depths in the shallows of Gossip Girl.

Flight!

2009-02-23T04:24:00.000-08:00

I equate take-off with Hell. We reached a terminal speed whilst tiny imperfections in the tarmac sent great shudders through the craft, its heavy frame quivering violently from the stress.
As the metal mass willed its way off the ground the giant universal shiver continued as torrents of air threw the craft from side to side with such ease; Mother Nature giggling as she picked up this hunk of metal and filed her nails with our craft. Great frictional dragging shivers as she shaped her girl-claws. You know her grace, a polar to this ridiculous bumbling metal beast. And when her finger-bound razors were as precise as the subject of some determined eye, she set us free with not so much as a memory, a page in our minds of her, her tough love, our cosmic paternal breath.

*****

Flying over Siberia: an endles mass of crumpled fabric, dirtied by age and its own uninhabited, unspoken repellent temperament. Frozen and unspeakably beautiful. So the dirty, frozen crumple is sprinkled with a bioluminescent talc, diaphenous when thin and blinding in its thick, pale gore. Each peak glowing and each trough trickling with wetted powders.

I Am Confused.

2009-02-20T00:25:00.000-08:00

The way you might feel is like the aftermath of a battle. It’s a struggle to stay happy and everybody knows that. Like your fantastic achievements can seem to you undeserved or over hyped. Or you realise you struggled internally for months for something that reveals itself to be no reward at all. Feeling terrible comes to be a struggle too, like the lone attendee at a funeral who cannot for the life of them produce tears, try as they might to conjure and clone the complete terror they felt when their dog died, sadness is no switch. So it goes that you feel as an extension of that fine veil sweeping across all our eyes. Like all of us are trying to be the lead in some kind of slow and cast-typed prewritten drama. I know now I’m no star, but what I feel, truly feel, is not something I pull out to suit the situation accordingly. Underneath it all we’re the same sickening abstract character who giggles in the middle of a heated argument or feels their chest warming at the sight of any horror or their stomach turning at the sight of a happy couple. It all seems to get easier when you accept that your reactions are inane and arbitrary. The worst way to feel is confused. There are no situations that demand it.

Tooth, Ours and an Iron

2009-01-27T02:47:00.000-08:00

Over the past month I’ve watched a series of disasters unfold before me. No natural hazards; no fires searing green leaves into black ash and no streams of water flooding my kitchen and lifting the floor boards like they were trying to run away. But interpersonal catastrophes are running rife. I’ve lived the first anniversary of a young friend’s death. I’ve seen parents slowly being dragged away from a loving daughter. Her life running through hospital rooms and staring at hotel televisions. I’ve seen a man destroy a beautiful girl’s life. Stolen her hopes and dreams and stomped on them like brittle autumn leaves. I’ve watched a woman hunt down and attack another woman. For the sake of a man. I feel like I’ve lost a dear soul to a devouring external source. I’ve heard of two great friends exchanging blows, so blood dripped from one’s mouth on New Years Day. I’ve felt the great and overwhelming hopelessness that follows continuing and relentless failure. These scenes are the opening credits to a year I anticipate as being the most terrible of my life.

I’ve not been one prone to teenage angst. I tried to seize each day and live each moment like its my last. Which god knows, it could be. Being rocked by all I’ve seen is all I can manage. I can’t look up into the sun and see hope ahead. It burns my pale eyes like a vicious flamethrower. I don’t see it as a life giver. It seems only to be a wicked and torturous scorching iron. Try as I have to smile through it, to be a pillar of hope and strength, I know I’m falling behind and I know the people around me are too. What else can people do after battering and battering? Good people with souls like golden streams are mined and farmed and the ruthlessly ambitious triumph over me, over all of us. I see it all and even selfless embraces just fill me with terror. So I clench my teeth when I sleep and I wake up with jaws aching and my head spinning. Do you ever feel like there is too much you can’t make sense of? Not big picture religious junk, but small exchanged words and thoughtless gestures and continually interruptions. Small things. I don’t understand it at all. I don’t.

Untitled

2009-01-25T03:30:00.001-08:00

This is kind of old. Its over, is what I'm trying to say.

I layed out parchment
And primer, white sheets with a caress
Of laundered scent. Prepared my palette
So I could paint his green eyes thick
To sleep on for the rest of time.
To comfort me like city sirens.

‘Oh, you know me baby.
You smell like guava. I am iron man but
I feel like molten lava.’
His blinking snapped like clover uprooted
With a child’s taut fist.

Composing an image: long, thick, wet vine leaf
Covering your thigh-framed wreath.
Like all good harpies, I had plans
Laid out; to splay you out. Softly
Into your ear I alternate scream with shout.

See it: pedestal, golden. My victory
Glowing and glossy in reach. Company
Of maid all waiting for my deathly dance.
Then he put my fingers in his mouth. I felt
Tiny like dopamine mouse. Melting, I let him.
I wanted his life back, for me.

And in that second he saw a harpy soften,
Murder leaving my eyes, his iris flooded
Into me. Green-eyed-boy-feline
Was everything, all I could see.
I was dropping my dagger, my thighs dripping
My mind in a stagger.

He pounced over me, scratching my skin
With sandpaper mane. I reached for more,
Screaming contagious wilful screams, skin
In loving, rushing streams
I whispered and noticed
His claws sinking my throat.

Immortal I am, still. Alone. Flooded
With leaf iris images, a fiery
Wild-hell bed for my murderous instinct.
My lion, with a halo mane is free of me.
Rampant and running, still, with his claws
Still dripping, and his clover-snap eye lids.

Losing My Virginity

2009-01-18T07:20:00.000-08:00

(I promise something new is on its way.)

On 8th June 2004 the planet Venus will cross the Sun's disk as seen from Earth. It will cut into the solar disk at about 5:20am in the morning and will pass off the other limb at about 11:23am. The last occasion on which this happened was 1882, over a century ago.

My lover and I grew up on the same street. The cheapest part of an upper-middle class suburb in a coastal town. Parallel to the highway which gave a perpetual violent hum like an automated sea. I remember when he moved in. The giant orange truck, five driveways down, which emptied his entire life into my vicinity. I watched it all day, with my dog and orange Popsicles. We became friends, as eight-year olds do, without any complications. He asked me to come bike riding and it was almost a threat. Like an order. ‘Come bike riding with us.’
‘Fine.’

So for three years we played together. Nintendo and ocean and handlebars; creeks and eels and yabbies. Him, plunging his net down to the wet-spidery sea-life. See life. I fell with the net; he taught me to pick them up (‘Slowly, slowly, slowly’), to tempt spiders, to climb trees. He extricated my hidden male side; my tender female timidness and fear usurped by his soft taunting. The last time we played was at the end of primary school. We wrestled on a bed in the back shed. Pillows and sheets and feathers and sweat. We were all tangled up and both of us tingled. We stopped playing. Parting ways like the Freudian prediction. He went to become a boy. I had to learn to be a girl.

So time went on and on and on. My hair grew and his hair grew. I could hear guitar chords chiming up the street. I ignored it. My friends saw him around and enquired. I brushed it off and dragged endless bristles through my hair. Painted my nails like a budget car’s metallic exteriors. Plastic jewellery, scrunchies, ear-piercing, dance class, pedal-pushers, Madonna. I had hid my dolls years ago. Me and my friends impersonated New York photoshoots under the trees we used to climb. We posed next to the creek; I never mentioned the yabbies.

Time marched on. I saw him more. With other boys. Looking at me with my other girls. We started talking. He kissed my friends and I kissed his. We acted like new friends, freshly introduced, possessing a mature platonia no other pairings had. But we were just friends. Then he started calling my house. In the morning to tell me he was stoned. He’d smoked a pipe when he woke up. He was so funny. Midnight, he had been drinking moonshine by his swimming pool. Made him think of me. Made him call. He slurred and I giggled. He was wild. His hair was longer, like curled urchin arms, he was reaching out to me.

So I was invited. We met in the park behind our houses, sneaking out our respective windows, silent, silent, silent. I remember the exilaration of removing the fly screen. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Then it would creak and I’d freeze up for five whole minutes. Completely still, deadly silent. Then, when I was sure nobody was woken by the door-mouse like scrape, I’d start again. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly. We sat by a tree stump smoking water pipes and giggling at the shape of clover leaves and indiscernible noises coming from the trees and funny shadows falling across our faces. I started to realise how beautiful he was. His hair fell onto his brown shoulders and seemed to tickle him, he was always shitfting his position, like he was uncomfortable. So I would put my hand on his knee. Sometimes we’d stop laughing and look into each others eyes. We did this every week for months. What seems like years. I remember the first time he kissed me. It was awful. I felt like he was attacking me. His tongue moved like a lawnmower blade and he was wet and cold. I said, ‘Slowly, slowly, slowly.’ It got better.

I was fourteen when he invited me into his bedroom. We climbed in the window with the gorgeous, tedious rigmarole of extreme silence. Slowly. slowly. slowly. I had been telling him all night, while he giggled at me, ‘No, really, Venus is the closest to earth it has been in over 200 years. That’s a big deal, you know!. This kind of thing only happens once to us. Once in our lifetime is a big deal.’
His bedroom smelt like hay and detergent and boy sweat. We wreaked of marijuana and cigarettes and wine. We were so happy, relishing in our clumsiness. He fell off the bed and I laughed hysterically.
Then he touched me. I looked up at Venus. It was burning, huge.
‘She’s so bright,’ He said.

Fifteen minutes later I was crying, bleeding profusely from between my thighs. The blood was pooling underneath me and I felt like it would never stop. He sat above me with both hands on my stomach, singing Ratcat songs to me. I was never a virgin again.

Another Old Letter

2009-01-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

1/01/08

Dear Phoebe,

I looked at all of your pictures. They made me quite happy. You’ve gone to bed already. Megan says she loves you. She’s sitting in your basement, with people she doesn’t know properly. (Including Jai. He looks like he is about a million years old, and speaks like a fuckin’ wanka!!) (I don’t know the cunts at all.) Jimmy is up again. He is a pretty good host, a friendly guy. (Jai just called the Planto ‘homosexual’.) there are quite a few people here, how are you> I love you, sleep well.
Thanks for a lovely night,
Love,
Megan and Louis.

New Years' Resolve.

2009-01-04T18:19:00.000-08:00

Hit upon a sealed copy of my New Years Resolution for 2008:

I want this year to be like a new day. I want to shake the dust off myself. I want to become myself again, forget all my pain. Forget it forever. I don’t know who I’ll become. I have no illusions of success falling into my lap. I want love to knock me sideways; whether it’s a reinvigoration of my adoration for you, Ruby, I do not know. I want to remember Josie. I want to feel her and I want to preserve my memories of her in infinite detail. I want to know myself. Love life. Love my life. Love everybody I meet. I just want to be free.

I Finally Replied

2008-12-16T22:53:00.000-08:00

When your second letter arrived I was extremely concerned. I knew the first one was coming, and even if I had not been forewarned I would have expected it. that is the kind of thing someone like you would do. I didn’t expect a follow up, as you said in your first letter that if I did not reply you would leave me alone forever and ever. Amen. Or something to that effect. Know this in regards to your concern about your character: you are not a man of your word.

So you asked me how I am; I am very well. I’m a world away from the state I was in when you knew me. The night we met I had a black eye, just healed enough to be invisible to your drunken, staring eyes. when I danced my shoulder was twitching in the memory of its dislocation a week earlier. It was a terribly unhappy time for me. I was beaten up after my best friend’s funeral. Can you even imagine? Inside of me was a hole so black that I did not know I could ever repair it. hence the drinking, of which you were aware, and some other things, of which you were not. Truthfully I don’t think you ever noticed. Maybe once you might have caught particularly dark rings around my eyes but I doubt it, as you were usually more concerned with yourself. The circles were like my soul, which I now know had been completely destroyed.

I tell you this so you can understand that I have no guilt about you and I. I think your gender owes me a whole lot, and I swore I’d get mine. And I am a woman of my word.

I didn’t like your wisecrack about Slipknot. For that I’ll keep lock and key over my personal life. You’re not to know where I work, or who I’m falling for and you’ll not be privy to information about Ingrid or Elle. Ferret around Megan all you like, you rodent.

I’m sad to hear you’re a smoker. I know you thought this would impress me. (Pause for sigh.) you picked up an addiction that is very near impossible to kick. With every in-breath your throat is screaming and your lungs are rotting and your nerves are giving false shrieks like they’re coming. Like a nicotine vampire; it sucks. Welcome to it.

Also.
From within the muddy depths of your letter I think I extracted some intention of yours to do honours. Right? Congrats & etc. & etc. on all your mentioned achievements. I’m sure you were gagging for a stroking, so there it is.

Your letter, by the way, read like the scrawlings of a lobotomised child of Nabokov. Why do you do that? Always trying desperately to assert your intelligence with purple prose and diatribes on Kerouac (who sucks, by the by) and other such bullshit. You need to cut the bullshit. You come across in your writings as a sub-intelligent wanker. You used to say such awful things to me like, ‘I like to think of myself as more intelligent than most.’ I cannot tell you how it turned my stomach and how hard I had to clench my fists under the table. Enough.

(Ingrid always told me I should watch my tongue around certain people. She said I could be so venomous that it wouldn’t surprise her if I one day induced a suicide. She reminded me of this when I told her I was replying to your letter. Stop.)

Phoebe. Stop.

For You:
I heard you lost your virginity to your best friend’s girlfriend. You truly are a very nasty piece of work. Who needs enemies, right Dwyer? What a triangle of shame you three must be. I also heard that, luckily, the incest has been fully restored and ya’ll are the best of friends again. YOU GUYS ARE FUCKED.

So, here is my book advice, as you requested: Stop reading Kerouac.
And my other advice: If you insist on writing to me again, like the masochist you are, please don’t lash me with that purple bullshit. You are not a writer.

LOVE PHOEBE

From A Clear Head

2008-12-02T14:43:00.000-08:00

I heard you talking some nonsense. And I know its peripheral and completely missable, but nicer than silence, and the odd siren that would otherwise be all that I hear.

To Drown

2008-11-27T23:17:00.001-08:00

Ever cried in the rain? You are, with grey skin
A teary mess, we made torrents today.
I felt salt mix with fresh on my cheeks
Like the whole of the heavens
Was wet with my pain.
And the sky is a copy of your own
Grey matter. Its seething, tempestuous
And overflowing onto the ground.

Its foolish to let one drop escape you.
True to form it was raining on me.
There is no heavenly
Connection there, it was dumping
Tiny insults atop your head.
In truth the sky is a man;
feels nothing but its need.
It wants to spill its seed
and its puddles are traps while we wade around.

Wet cheeked you glisten like naked consent.
Weakness is sexy
and he loves you, he is coming to get you.
To stand in the rain
Is useless, lay on your back
Spread your legs and weep
Like a child, from every gaping pore.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre FUCKING SUCK

2008-11-21T21:29:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine saw them play in Sydney recently and explained to me the set as one jam session, which lasted 45 minutes, bearing no resemblence to any other song in their back catalogue. After thirty minutes a patron yelled out, ‘Play a song!’ to which Anton Newcombe replied, ‘Play a song? No fucking way.’

I’m not one to slag off Gen Y. All that criticism that the whole lot of us are apathetic, spoilt, stupid and lazy is a crock of bullshit. But it comes with the territory I suppose, and we’re not nearly as bad as Gen X were (watch: Reality Bites). But this Brian Jonestown Massacre bullshit scares the fuck out of me. Why do hordes of young people fan out to their shows and buy their 6th rate albums and believe there’s any merit to this bullshit? Why? This shit is terrible. A fucking jam band? That’s bullshit. This is the equivalent of your stoner neighbours jamming in their garage for eight hours. This unbridled, free-reign self-indulgent bullshit with no self-awareness or concern for the audience. They’re a bunch of wacked out, dorrito-eating, alpaca poncho-wearing PCP addicts.
I accept this new-wave Grateful Dead bullshit has to exist –there’ll always be baby-boomer fucks out to listen to it. But the huge following is fucked. Why? WHY?! That shit is intolerable.

Dicks.

Fur Real

2008-11-17T06:30:00.000-08:00

"She is a fur hag!"

RE: Lohan flouring in Paris.
You wear the god damn fur you take the god damn flour. Samantha Ronson's self-righteous blogging about the issue is god damn ridicuous, also.
L.A. mingas.

Do the Truckstop

2008-11-11T17:39:00.001-08:00

The whole truckstop environment is loaded with self-loathing and helplessness. We’re all reliant on the pit-bull like cook sweating over the fryer and into our orders. Everybody munching like rabid dogs on deep-fried death platters. Skin blotching, arses widening with every bite of steak burger and Pluto pup. Oil drips on chins like an admission stamp into fat man hell. Its an horrific nihilism brought on by tarmac hypnosis – a deeply depraved kind of evil.

At least that’s how it feels to me. So bizarre is the clinicism of the filth. Its as if the grime was given a decade or so to settle – to become one with the décor. Then, the yellowing countertops and plastic chairs are ready to begins their years of daily bleach baths. Soaked in deadly chemicals every night filling the place with a strange fresh chemical smell so discordant with the filth caked onto the bench tops. But the filth remains, just as everybodies extreme embarrassment at being in the damned establishment remains long after you’re backon the road kickin’ the k/ms.

My parents and I stopped at the truckstop’s prototype. We got to talking about my mother’s extended family. A bunch of disinterested, self-sufficient homemakers. We were more discussing the worldliness of their scatterings than their collective questionable characters. I can say all this because I’ve not many any of those discussed and hence fear no retribution.
My father remarked, ‘You’ve got branches spread out everywhere.’
My mother, in her hastiness to reply didn’t realize she was extending the metaphor.
‘They’re all dead now.’

Underwater

2008-11-04T23:03:00.000-08:00

I invested in an underwater camera as part of my, 'Kick Winter's Teeth In,' Campaign.
Kudos to Rupert and Greg for letting me get ONE photo of them.
(And as a sidenote; Congrats for Obama.)

I Like My Job

2008-11-02T02:29:00.000-08:00

I like this gauze over my eyes
Its woven, in out in out
In out. Like these people, these gauze-sheathed
Faceless figures, daggers in hand. In out.

Your crown is wrapped gauze, your cheeks fracturing
Metal, glowing strips of damage. I think
You fell into a fire once. Royal bandages
From temple to temple. You keep
Walking as blood drips
Onto your neck. Licked.

Stumbling Zeus wanders our entrances
And I say, ‘No,’ to that God. His drunken drawl
Trails out of my ears. I have armies
Behind me, poised and waiting
In that massive seething terrace.
I could say anything.

They protect me, I’m wearing
Your fierce veil, I’m bathing in searing
Waves of masculinity. Scars
And screams. They crush fingers
With their boots, kick teeth
Down throats.
My God, I feel weak.

Cotton wool wrap me, gauze me.
I’m a china vase with
Biceps to protect me.

Enough

2008-10-31T08:52:00.000-07:00

I've been single for thirteen months now. I god damn hate it, wasting all this time. Enough!

Hedge Fund Hero Blasts Idiot Bankers

2008-10-28T21:05:00.000-07:00

The best piece about our times I've read yet.

Reported by Ben Stroud on October 23, 2008

Multi-millionaire hedge fund guru Andrew Lahde published a hilarious retirement letter thanking greedy rival investment bankers this week, singling out those with ‘rich parents’ for making his job particularly easy.

“I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” he remarked.

“These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior (sic)) supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America,” he declared.

The hugely successful financier shut down his company last month after becoming famous last year for making an 886% profit from anticipating the collapse of America’s sub-prime market, though spoke bitterly of ‘destroying’ his health through stress brought on from working in finance. He concluded his statement with a well argued plea to legalising cannabis and hemp, the latter to use as a food and alternative energy source.

“It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country,” he noted.

“My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous,” said Andrew.

His letter appeared days after civil liberties champion Paul Armentano from NORML described America’s war on pot as a war on teenagers and young people at a speech delivered at the legalization organisation’s annual conference.

“According to a 2005 study commissioned by the NORML Foundation, 74 percent of all Americans busted for pot are under age 30, and 1 out of 4 are age 18 or younger. That's nearly a quarter of a million teenagers arrested for marijuana violations each year,” he noted.

“To put this bluntly, we now have an entire generation that has been alienated to believe that the police and their civic leaders are instruments of their oppression rather than their protection,” he said.

http://tinyurl.com/6n7kef (Andrew Lahde’s farewell letter in full)