When it leaves
And the ground stops moving
And churning and swirling
And my cat pleads with me to turn off the dryer
.
I can’t puss, they’re not my clothes!
.
You begin ride in a boat in the sea
just beyond a sharp coral reef
and every wave coming in from the giant ocean
pushes you a little bit further to the shore.
.
I forget how the boat loses its oars.
Snail Day 2009
Sorry snails
I forgot it was snail day
It was really dark
And it was raining
.
Darling it hurts – Paul Kelly
I see you standing on the corner with your dress so high
And all the cars slow down as they see you driving by
Thought you said you had some place to go
What you doing up here putting it all on show?Darling it hurts to see you down Darlinghurst tonight
Do you remember Darling how we laughed and cried
We said we’d be together till the day we died
How could something so good turn so bad?
I’d do it all again ‘coz you’re the best I’ve ever hadDarling it hurts to see you down Darlinghurst tonight
See that man with the glad hands
I want to kill him but it wouldn’t be right
Now here comes another man with the gladbags
I want to break him but it’s not my fight
In one hand and out the other
Baby I don’t even know why you botherDarling it hurts to see you down Darlinghurst tonight
.
i’m sorry i’m a miserable fuck
I imagine myself strutting down every
street
like I own the place
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
.
I used to look at this and believe that it meant all my problems were almost imaginary, a matter of my state of mind. I think its closer to the truth to say that a man will be imprisoned in a room because he doesn’t understand his surroundings.
.
I wouldn’t presuppose that it is possible for someone to come out of the state of mind. Or you could take a page out of my mother’s book, one should choose to be happy.
Its a mystery
mystery, they say
let’s make this rambling
it just hurts me
I tried to explain
that perhaps it’d turned back on itself
and I was so certain at the time
.
It’s obviously not that easy
somehow everything feels
designed to make me feel the hurt I’ve caused
like a stupid Harry Potter pen
.
Maybe people give their tickets back
all the time
You know today I saw some men walking down the street with a big gun. They had clean clothes, and they had boots. They had new boots. They were black and I swear I saw my face in them. I saw the clouds and the sun and the sky in those boots. Ten boots.
.
Their gun was big and black, but it was greasy. It was enormous, that’s why they needed five of them to carry it. I’ve seen the guns they carry around the mines. Miners are worked very hard, you know. Mining teams spend weeks underground and get very bad food. Ever since I’ve known, everyone’s always known that its just a matter of time before there’s a breakout. A young man, an old man, two mothers and their daughters – they use the big guns to punish the whole team for their disunity. You’re unlucky if you live from being shot at with all that shrapnel, you might lose your arm or your leg and still have to mine.
.
Its lucky we Gremano are so many – if the northerners decided to kill as many of themselves as the Leaders do, their world would end, surely. I think we like the taste of gunmetal. A man once held a gun to my mouth while I slept. I woke up because I realised two of my teeth had been knocked out that that I was bleeding onto my arm. The warm blood woke me up, I thought I was swimming in a hotspring. I opened my eyes and I saw his long rifle in my face, my mouth powdery and metallic. I didn’t feel like dying so I gave him all my money.
.
The bank was down the street. My feet moved after the gun, and I lazily followed the dust cloud of the hurried carriers. The bank was closed, the leaders were dead. The carriers put the cannon down on its stand, loaded it, and fired. It took only a moment for this to happen, and the bank facade crumbled, and the ground shook. My ears rang almightily, the five men moved into the rubble, re-emerging soon after, as the dust settled, the sky dissolving back into blue. They were laden with gold and paper money, and they loaded it all into an iron steam-carriage that arrived at the scene of the rubble the moment the heavy men stepped into the middle of the street.
.
The steam-carriage groaned into gear and it hissed angrily into gear as the five men took their leave. They’d have a long trek through the jungle in the direction they were headed – steam-carriages don’t turn without a loss of speed that takes hours to build. I heard stories of men murdered near the Great Impassible Jungle. I was told it might’ve been the local Lords, or the purposeless High Guard maurauding the borders, waiting for them on a manor’s rumour.
.
Or it could’ve just been another miner’s breakout. People die all the time, mostly by the sword, these days.
The grass is green in Grou. Deep out at sea to the south the glassy waters are green, wave-breaks white and splintery, as in the north, treacherous and impassible: sail too far and you’ll fall off the world into the sky – your remains will become a shooting star when you fall into the sun.
The sky is blue. Why would the grass and the water be green, for the sky to be blue? Wouldn’t the sky better be green? Everything could be green that way, the whole of the Safe World could be united in the symbolic colour of life and purity. But the sky betrays such a unity, because it has been invaded by evil. Earthquakes, droughts, floods, hurricanes – all the work of chaos – are caused by the sky. The sky is the origin of chaos and disorder, and when night falls no-one must ever look at the sky, because he who does will surely die.
The bloodied, disfigured faces of the martyrs were a public spectacle. They’d been shot with clinical precision, the killer had aimed for all of their foreheads, but the size of the slug from the Gremanese rifle he’d used had almost removed their heads. After the deed had been done in full view of the worshiping prefecture, the masses had looked on in complete confusion, not understanding why the ritual had been disturbed.
White robed men were then carried through the streets, right back to the Holy Palace, where they received their commendation to the Lord. The High Leaders of the Gremanese Empire had been killed on the holiest day in a generation, and the Empire stopped. Bread was not made, animals were not slaughtered. Scarcely anyone talked. This was the third attempt on the power structure of Gremano in a decade, and it had been done with the most blatant disrespect – no – contempt possible.
**
Jacket, boots, pants. Hair cropped at the neck. She was dressed very strangely for a Grem – the strangest of all her clothing was her incredibly masculine shirt, buttoned right up to the collar under her grey jacket – it was incredibly reminiscent of the Malasrionese.
She stood and walked with a very large gait for a woman. She stood with this gait on the frozen mountain that constituted Mirabile. Below her out spread the desert, the enormous Great Lake and deep, deep in the distance smoke billowed between green-grey hills. Behind her two Nelen miners guarding this face of the mountain lay dead, their pooling blood freezing.
“I like a bit of freedom,” she lowered her binoculars, stolen from the dead miner behind her. A strange contraption.
“Of course,” her attendant said. It was this attendant – whom she had taken from the Gremanese mines invisible to the mountain – who had driven her up the mountain. Her head was once shaved, but her black hair had begun to grow. She wore a shirt with small lapels under her frayed and faded overalls – both different shades of green. She was a worker. Her family had been workers. Her children would be workers, her children’s children would be workers. If not head-shaven and soot-faced from the mines, then greasy and fingerless from the machines. Her dirty green rags were called a Bosta, they were part of her religion. Everything about her life had been about religion. This uniform that she had always worn was a constant reinforcement of her world’s order.
“Did you know -,” the woman on the edge of the mountain raised her spy-glasses. “The Leaders are dead.”
The girl in tatters almost lost her footing in the freezing winds. “Was it you?”
“No, funnily enough. No-one saw who, but it wasn’t who follows my orders. Makes things easier, really.”
“What’s going to happen, Sarva?”
Sarva Narsh laughed. “We didn’t take fifteen thousand thousand tonnes of steel from the Malasrionese to build churches.”
