We are many.

Of the many men who I am, who we are,
I can't find a single one;
they disappear among my clothes,
they've left for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as intelligent,
the fool I always keep hidden
takes over all that I say.

At other times, I'm asleep
among distinguished people,
and when I look for my brave self,
a coward unknown to me
rushes to cover my skeleton
with a thousand fine excuses.

When a decent house catches fire,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and that's me. What can I do?
What can I do to distinguish myself?
How can I pull myself together?

All the books I read
are full of dazzling heroes,
always sure of themselves.
I die with envy of them;
and in films full of wind and bullets,
I goggle at the cowboys,
I even admire the horses.

But when I call for a hero,
out comes my lazy old self;
so I never know who I am,
nor how many I am or will be.
I'd love to be able to touch a bell
and summon the real me,
because if I really need myself,
I mustn't disappear.

While I am writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.
I would like to know if others
go through the same things that I do,
have as many selves as I have,
and see themselves similarly;
and when I've exhausted this problem,
I'm going to study so hard
that when I explain myself,
I'll be talking geography.

--Pablo Neruda, trans. by Alastair Reid.

orphan child with
one wing of passion, one of resignation,

trying to take off.

What are words but stepping stones between us?

so I went drinkngin tonight and it turns out that I started thingkning about hte important people in my life and my god i loe them al so much. such godo people who deseruve such good thnngs to happen to them.

where twill they be five years form now? nobody really knows but we wil l no doubt try to guess and control deciisona and try to form th efuture according wot what wwe beleive is better for us and them. who knwos what we will want later on, I suppose what is imposrant is what they and we all want now.

It's funny how we change over time and notice what s importnat and what is not, and relaise the traits that ar eimportant in people wwe want t spend our lives with. How do we know this before it's too late? TH poets have thewir ways of saying things and writing and speaking aobut the world but really, what are words when you have feelings...

We were maybe sixteen, bored in class, talking of big things, when he swivelled around in his plastic chair and said,

'Love is a bunch of people standing in a circle, facing each other like dominoes. Everyone's looking towards somebody else.'

It is nightmare season again.

I dream heavy and wake with bruised limbs. The fear is visceral,
the images frenetic and tremulous. Hair and trees,
the ocean's drag, loyalties tested and
the forgotten are resurrected in the twilight land of the living dead.

Swept away,
I drown and fight the sheets.
The next night I succumb gloomily to the cerebral slaughter again,
the war that lasts until sunrise.

One day the sun will fail to wake me, and
I'll creep forever in the world of shadows,
a soul that used to be someone with a dream to live.

I’ve got clouds, I’ve got stars
I’ve got long nights spent in bars
I’ve got sunshine, I’ve got rain
I’ve got pills to hide the pain
I’ve got smiles, I’ve got frowns
I’ve got a boy in every town

I’ve got a hurt wide as the sea
but all these things, they comfort me.

The Audreys -- Comfort Me

It is in the deepest of night that the future feels furthest away.

Darkness
Lord Byron (1816)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;--a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful--was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir'd before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

in correspondence

the letters we wrote, so many, many words. our lives, day by day, replayed for each other in each other's days. i re-read them now, somewhere and someone else, re-read our promises and plans and wonder where they've gone, if they're waiting around to be claimed again. our loves, our dinner plans and illnesses, the wonderment of watermelons and worms, one christmas after another, autumn following summer around, wagging tails and raising our sails. let's go let's go let's go. there were holidays abroad and home, together and apart. many long silences as we found others and lost them, then another letter would arrive, digital but there nevertheless. pages and pages, i've kept your side of our conversations, i wonder where mine are. you've found another, kept another, so please write and tell me if i'm still bound to cook you breakfast on your ninetieth birthday because when that day arrives, i'm not sure if you'll be looking out your window, waiting to collect your dues.

it's the good, the bad,
the house i furnish,
the crystal clear sea,
the sound i worship,
the rush of the city,
the calm of the Outback,
the film called Life,
where my heart is the soundtrack.

Bliss N Eso -- Eye of the Storm

drink up, dreams

and then she and I shared two bottles of chards between us. The two of you sat with your dark brews and talked of old times, and all I could think about was whether you could see my well-placed lingerie peeking out of my shirt-dress. And four hours later when we were rolling drunk and I'd desperately had four glasses of water and one spew to no avail, you leaned closer and spilled the troubles of men finding women and women not wanting men, I realised that in another life perhaps we could have matched, would have completed one another like cheese completes a chicken parmagiana and a marshmallow completes a hot chocolate. We looked at each other in a way she didn't recognise and we thought maybe, but I leave in over a week though I don't know it yet, and you are searching for someone a bit more different, a bit more, I don't know, less stable maybe, somebody you can lose yourself with because with me you can't get lost if everybody reminds you what you should and should not be doing with me (or more to the point, they don't even know), how are you supposed to be that

and she sat with her vodka lemon lime and bitters and I sat with mine and she waved her hands about her head and said see, you're both dreamers and I'm a realist, and I said yes you need dreams apart from your work life, though she could not understand this, my fifteen-years-long friend, and you and I sat beside each other with thoughts of our respective will-never-be-published novels, and the world will move for us, because as much as you might not know or realise or want to know, my friend, the world does move for dreams. The world feels the power of a real vision, a truth and a goal of a person with a good heart and good mind. And you and I sat at the table with metal chairs and cold air drifting over the land and I thought yes, you know what, maybe I don't want you but I want this

Song.

The lemon floats in his tea as he sips, slowly thinking
And the sun divides his face in two, westward slowly sinking
Youth is wasted on the youth, but where does it all go
The sleepless nights, awake till dawn, if only we had known

He said 'Why can't I be alone,
have a place to call my own?'
Wraps his scarf around his head
and sinks into the ground.

Fighting the good fight, if only they will let you
Being kept in sight, if they don't remember to forget you
Give me your hand darling, we'll pack off, go away
Find it in some distant land and then decide to stay.

He said 'Why can't I be alone,
have a place to call my own?'
Wraps his scarf around his head
and sinks into the ground.

A life, a life, somewhere, a life. See him, there. Him, you, we. A sum total of others, of Oprah, punk rock and pedestrian crossings, of interest rates and sex tapes, the sugar content in Fanta and stem-cell research. All of this, the grey betweens that filled his hours, his cells. Running for trains, piled dishes, offers of upgraded mobile phone deals. Picking the keys off the hook on the way out, throwing bags down on the way in. Everywhere things ended, everywhere people left. Pico Iyer's continent of jet lag. Howard's taxes. Our own inner wars.

it's cocktail hour all night tonight;
we'll be roaming the dark streets like
lazy leopards who've escaped their cages.

I am cured, signori, because I know perfectly that I play the madman, and I do it here, quietly. Your trouble is that you live your madness in great agitation, without understanding it or recognizing it.

-- Henry, in Luigi Pirandello's Maschere Nude.

At the worst of times we think, Life cannot get any better.

At the best of times we think, Life cannot get any better.


There's only one wor(l)d of difference, but it's everything.

It had been months upon months of dry. A late spring lagged into a late summer, fumbling into a scorching autumn. Suburban lawns turned to hay, overheated cars held up enervated traffic and birds fell out of the sky in Hopetoun and Mungilup. Tourists sat on benches in dehydrated stupors while petrol stations ran out of bagged ice. On the hottest days, air-conditioning threw the city's electricity usage over the possible maximum limits. Pedestrians' journeys were considered in terms of shade opportunities rather than distance. Beach sand became lethal.

One Monday in late March, they finally predicted rain to the disbelieving, panting population. It was a cloudless thirty degrees all morning until, suddenly, the heavens opened in late afternoon, crashing down in rain and then huge balls of hail. People spilled out into their doorways and rushed to their office windows, looking out at water and ice covering the streets. Dogs cowered in their kennels, believing the end had come. It became night and winter at five in the evening, a violent crescendo of thunder percussion and flickering globes. Office buildings were evacuated, their waa waa alarms ringing all over the city. Workers remained at their desks, choosing to sink with the ship rather than drown on the street. It was a chaos of wind, water and leaves, a battle of umbrellas and skirts and puddles. Traffic once again ground to a halt but Nature had balanced herself again with a swipe of her hand: the rains were here, the air was petrichorous, the heatwave, broken.

The white galahs snowed onto Langley Park like a heavy Asturian winter.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

--Don DeLillo in a letter to Jonathan Franzen, 1996.

I am plagued by nightmares. I thrash, awake, asleep, awake, until miniature lightnings spark my sheets. Electric on all counts. I can tell you they do not burn.

In the harsh glare of day I remember the curve of her unclothed spine. I pick up the phone to call him back, only to remember they were all dreams. No one is waiting for the call, no skin was on show. Once I almost didn't turn up to work, believing they'd truly fired me.

My mother would recount my haunted child body sitting up straight in bed, wide-eyed and mumbling, sometimes shouting, demonic with fury. I'd wake in different parts of the house, different beds, the light entering from different sides and different windows. I'd keep a dream diary and awaken to read my seven dreams that night. There would be train trips, fleeing from slow criminals, concrete feet. I dreamed about my much-desired rollerblades, only to have the imagined store assistant emerge in the daylight, same name, same everything. I told him they'd sold out, hadn't they.

Later I would make coffees for the academics during the university semester, return home and continue well into the night, standing at my chest of drawers--the exact height of the espresso machine--shouting orders for cappuccinos and long blacks. I'd dream the impatient crowds, sugar sachets, muffins, the spaces wider than the walls around. In a drowsy dark grey world of blurred faces, I'd be the star barista who conquered time and froth, appeasing the masses, moving in flurries. Suddenly I'd be lifted out, what what what is this. The shuffle back to bed, only to repeat the night after.

I had to leave when the sleep-deprived migraines began. In some ways I guess was the best and most underpaid worker they had.

To lose control in sleep, to not be aware and be aware, to fall around furniture like a soulless night walker. A prostitute of somnambulism, I live two lives, in sleep and out, but they melt into each other until it matters less and less. I have headaches, leg-aches, back-aches from moving to the rhythms of my dreams. Life and sleep-life. These days I have trouble remembering which is which.

tumbling, crumbling,
shattered, scattered,
today, today.

disappointing, unanointing,
rejection, dejection,
grey, grey.

feigning, staining,
stakes, fakes,
away, away.

He found himself momentarily paused in the chewing-gum-ness of time. Clocks had thrown themselves out and in before, expanded, contracted. Hands pulled the minutes and pushed the hours. It happened in the searing agony of pain, when his body bent towards death. In letters of rejection, when the future seemed to fall right away. In spaces of memory, when photographs of the past crashingly hurtled events back into the now. In lingering looks of desire and all the promises that yearned to be spoken. Music brought countlessness and endlessness into four minutes, certain touches would warm his skin long past the first brushing of limbs.

The times he held his face stonily unmoved as tears gathered in his head, those felt like eternities. Also conversations that demanded unconscious replaying deep into coming nights. As he became older, he tried to impose limits on time, bordering it with calendars, stopwatches, routines. He would, with mechanical regularity, abandon himself to its scorn through alcohol, and envelop himself in its mendacity through pills, potions and smoke. Eventually, at moments of pause such as this, he simply succumbed to the relativity of it all. He left his office, locked the toilet door, and sat, and sat, slumped, boneless. Flora had died today. It began and ended there.

The balance.

It's often thought that being slow about language is an indulgence. Choosing the best words with careful consideration, pondering over the metre of a phrase is a luxury for those who gluttonously consume time. But when one strikes the perfect balance between meaning and linguistic aesthetics, a sentence can sing. It resonates with deep generous tones of beauty, the words have arranged themselves in perfect order. The pieces fit into their places and prose becomes poetry. Meaning is denoted, inner worlds connoted, and even the individual glyphs have found themselves a home. We temporarily hire words and send them on their way. The syllables are balanced by the pauses. The pauses are given their signs. There emits a glow from the writing, we hear the thrilling sound of speech, and remember that we were born simply to communicate.

There is a point in the process of loss when crying begins to hurt. Skin chafes, eyes burn, and the body weakly dwindles in emotional collapse. The pain that began the sadness reverses so the sadness causes pain. Crying becomes dying. The inner becomes outer, we pull ourselves inside out with total desolation. Our lungs fail us, breathing is ragged and jagged and we fall to the ground. Muscles refuse, limbs shake in convulsion. Our hands hold our heads together as we wonder how we will ever continue. Time hurls itself backwards to memories and forwards to plans. Goodbye to it all, goodbye.

Maybe we were never made to feel pain as devastating as this. Or perhaps this is when we shed our bodies, stop being men and start being gods.

Córdoba.

The southern Spanish heat rises from the cobblestones in waves, lighting the ancient bricks of the castles and churches from the inside until a scorching orange glow permeates the town. Palm trees droop in complaint and small birds hide in window corners to escape the dusty forty-eight degree suffocation, shooting out from their cool hideouts only to sip and bathe from the fountains that dot the streets and plazas. It is all cobblestone and brick, a dizzying breathlessness in the narrow terraced calles where the street numbers are tiled and the tourists forget their names. Cars bump along the stones, tyres rumbling in incompatible technology. Horses clip-clop you back to fourteen fifty-five.


We red ghouls pour agua down our gullets and wander the closed shopping mall only for the cool relief and takeaway joint toilets. The Japanese look at spun silver, the Americans peer at flamenco costumes and flies the size of bees settle on foreign arms during the day while mosquitoes mix our blood into a modern milkshake at night. Postcards show pictures of La Mezquita from every possible angle except Allah's, reflecting sunlight into the eyes of passersby. The most important Islamic building in the West is reduced to card and plastic depictions. In reality, the red archways throw goosebumps down my neck, a humbling sight of precise geometry and re-written religious history.

Jamon serrano is covered in bread and wrapped in plastic; consumption comes in tapas, half or full size. At night the winds blow dusty clouds around the feet of hungry pedestrians, knocking over wine glasses and leaving shards for crisp white-shirted waiters to crush on their routes around the tables. The organ player's organ doesn't want to play as the waiter speaks English to me when I bid ciao in Italian, sling my Indonesian bag around my neck and think of the Shanghai sun.

Traditional guitar music rings out of the bodegas and tapas houses. Glimpses through the open doors reveal wooden walls and terracotta tiled floors, brick archways on the sides create small eating spaces where chatter fights for space in the air with the music. Souvenir shops sell enough multi-coloured plates to fill the world's kitchen cupboards, more aprons than there are cooks and more keyrings than there are keys. Córdoba is manufactured, represented, symbolised, captured, recreated and reinvented through a multitude of objects for walls, drawers, body parts, shelves, cars, windows and fridges. Any part of your life can be Córdobised for five Euros. Fly a flag on your chest. Wear the country on your head. Adorn yourself in an exotic language. Smell like a local.

I buy my knick-knacks, an oil painting and some shoes, and take away a piece of the city like every other sunglassed, wild-haired visitor does and every shop owner hopes we do. In Seville I will do the same, as in Granada, Amsterdam, Berlin and Sofia, and although grand things still move me to poetry and prose, and although I try to buy local products, I am left wondering whether I am selling out to something frighteningly bland and disposable. Paul sings that every fucking city feels the same. Is it that, or do we just get better at walking over and past the differences?

city spring.

backpacked tourists traipse down the Terrace
golden camels, journeying, sucking on water bottles.
the sun throws itself off the glass towers
and they speak in tongues
as I guess which ones.

i wait for three buses that do not come,
buy lychees in cans and
prove who i am to the video shop girl.
murmuring down the aisles of discs
i speak in tongues,
guess which ones.

Pardon me.

I am the side platter at the table. Tasty but unsatisfying, special but simple. I am the forgotten supporting act, the bumbling sidekick, the truncated blurb. I am a summary of multiple parts, the labels on a graph, the scribbles in the margins.

Show me the right direction and I will go another, following the river, darting through the crowds. I trip myself up trying to get out of your way, but you will not look back.

Stay and play.

Standing, saying nothing, just looking at each other. Just looking. The gazes, the pauses, the eye-wrapped gauzes. Cover me like a gift with your lanced glances, but not too tightly and not too forever. You know I have trouble breathing when you ask me where I am.

Stay, I say, stay and play. I'll do the chasing while you run away. We'll undo each other, the knots of time and of loss. Pretend to be my everything and I will smile, knowing that we'll die someday and I'll stay free.

Where ARE you,
you bark,
and I sink into the grass.

I like to move. I do return, but one day I'll not, and give you another knot, ready for someone else to tug at your ear. Hello, I'm here, come and peer.

Don't give me a watch because I'll never wear it, and don't ask me the date because I'll lie. The corridors are made for us with our futures in open diaries, to fill the time and space with airs and grace in our Converse and denim. We eat like vultures, love like germs. I wear a ribbon in my hair while I plot murder, say a prayer for a doomed bug. Churches are photographs waiting to happen.

Postcards are for the poets.

Play your part, I'm auditioning. Don't forget to speak up because sometimes I'm hard of hearing. I like to let the phone ring out in my hand, chirping earnestly, so write me some words or wrap me in your gauze. I may be hard of hearing but I know the love laws. When I don't speak, I have the most to say. Standing, saying nothing, just looking at you. Just looking, as you do.

Sufletul meu.

muerda mi lengua y come mi piel,
danzamos en ritmo. el tiempo corre.
sufletul meu debajo, adentro, alrededor,
cogemos horas de la casa del Dracul.

la ventana, abierta,
las cortinas hacen el tango con el aire.
respiro hondo y redondo
y digo, 'para'.

You're made of light.

Light so bright the night will send you away to play with day.

Excerpt from Ian McEwan's 'Amsterdam'.

"He left the piano and poured some coffee which he drank at his usual place by the window. Three thirty, and already dark enough to turn on the lights. Molly was ashes. He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die. After the coffee he recrossed the room and remained standing, stooped over the keyboard in his overcoat, while he played with both hands by the exhausted afternoon light the notes as he had written them. Almost right, almost the truth. They suggested a dry yearning for something out of reach. Someone. It was at times like this when he used to phone and ask her over, when he was too restless to sit at the piano for long and too excited by new ideas to leave it alone. If she was free she would come over and make tea, or mix exotic drinks, and sit in that worn-out old armchair in the corner. Either they talked, or she made her requests, and listened with eyes closed. Her tastes were surprisingly austere for such a party-loving sort. Bach, Stravinsky, very occasionally Mozart. But she was no longer a girl by then, no longer his lover. They were companionable, too wry with each other to be passionate, and they liked to be free to talk about their own affairs. She was like a sister, judging his women with far more generosity than he ever allowed her men. Otherwise they talked music or food. Now she was fine ash in an alabaster urn for George to keep on top of his wardrobe."

Nightminds.

peak hour traffic
gridlocked, stuck
jammed in sealed avenues
tree-lined
outlined
turning left. left. left.
halted, jarred, tumulted
until sleep finally comes

blackened streets
raspberry plums
jumping castles

deep dark drums
deep dark drums

"Sugar, sit a while."

This song comes on and I can hear the clink of wine glasses, the cool sea breeze over goosebumped skin. The stuffy air of enclosed spaces, hot skin dancing over one another. Tasting each other's food, sweetness of chocolate-coated strawberries, burning bourbon. Crisp clean shirts, the softness of belt holes. The sharp sound of a ringing telephone, the familiar car motor. Turning off lights. Burning candle smells, fingers through hair.

The Great Marinade.

There is something that draws me to the ocean, beyond aesthetics or culture. It's not the beautiful bodies, though they are nice, nor the white sand, though that is nice too, but something deeper and baser. In the way the horizon flattens into deep blue, I feel like there is a future. There is a sense of moreness and floorlessness, of vastness and everlastness, of a life without wheels and currency and gravity. The roll of the tide, the pulling and pushing of the arms of the sea gives me a freedom down to my core. It's the saltiness, the abrasion and healing. It's the beneath, the through and the all-encompassing. I am lost in the here-and-now. I watch fish watch me and there is an exchange of what-ifs, of how-ares, of mutual fascination and mutual disunderstanding. I am not here nor there, but everywhere and everyhow, everywhen and everynow. The coral so bright, the urchins and stars, the sharks, somewhere, but not too close. There is impending doom, yet a chance at salvation. In the water, we are equally heavy and equally as stupid. We breath sporadically and with difficulty, always resurfacing, birthed into light and solidity.

As I heave away from the ocean, stumbling mortal again, cutting feet on rocks and spluttering, I turn back toward the horizon and gasp. I see, I see!

23, 78, 102, 107

Each morning I would stand and wait for my bus on William Street while the remote, jovial city yawned, stretched and readied itself for another December day. I'd stand on the grimy bricks outside McDonald's watching the homeless man rummage through the bin for fatty scraps. Numbered green buses would rumble past towards the slick river, leaving puffs of choking smoke to mingle with the meat and oil smells coming from the glass doors behind me. Business women emerged from the take-away joint clutching cheap hot coffees with sincere dependence, their clickity-clack heels carefully stepping over drains.

The puffy clouds parted and a blanket of pure golden light instantly warmed the street, thrown off the great glassy skyscrapers and sending weary, warm just-woke-up workers reaching for sunglasses. German tourist girls with backpacks and deep yellow tans passed the knick-knack shop across the street where the Korean worker was arranging wheeled tables in careful rows. To my right, the mobile phone shop guy was emerging for his third morning ciggy, brune and angular with a dramatic lean against the doorway and a gaze that had seen it all.

I turned away to join a commotion and when I looked again, I met his eyes from my bus, two background characters within the short story of a small beachside city with an azure winding river and a history yet to be written.

but only until*

lover, be careful, your tea is too hot
one day we'll decease and then we shall rot
the worms will devour our eyes and our hair
our dreams live no longer, thinner than air

we never did meet, I sawn't you again
I checked all the trains at a quarter to ten
no platform'd you in it, no luggage sat still
I waited and waited, but only until

the stationguard whistled, and then it was clear
our now had not come and nor were you here
forever is through, our tomorrows alight,
the mice darted over the train tracks all night

lover, amore, your tea remains hot
you told me you loved me and yet you prove not
I caught my plane home, alone with my sores,
you lingered in shadows and then you caught yours.

*pickled in espresso martini

He sat very, very quietly and watched her dance.

we'll follow the road

lover, your tea, your tea is now cold
one day we’ll awaken vacío and old
the rivers will drift us far into the night
dragging the silt and throwing the light

don’t tell me your plans, we have only now
the hair in my eyes and the sweat on your brow
roll down the windows, we’ll follow the road
you forget what you said and I what I knowed

the acres of forest run cool and profound
the deserts will swallow you to harder ground
I’ve been to those places, I’ve worn out the maps,

I've walked cobbled streets till my sandals collapsed

lover, amante, your tea is now cold
we’ve spoken too long and acted too bold,
you’ll miss your plane, forgetting the time
I’ll find a new café and then I’ll miss mine

Traces.

Sometimes it turns into a guessing game with the lines.

On cool evenings sitting up in bed with the bedside lamp glowing, I would have a book nestled in the warm valley of my lap. My knees drawn up into a doona hill, one hand would hold the book open, and the other a pen out of habit, flicking, biting, poking, ready to jot rare notes onto the pages on the bed next to me. But mostly to hold onto something, mirroring the birth of the book.

It would be warm and cozy in the room, a cave of reverberating words by Kristeva or Lyotard, and then I'd turn the page softly and there would be lines. Phrases underlined, usually by a scholar's pencil or first-year's hurried pen. Sometimes it would be a fairy line, thin and light grey like autumn clouds, as if subconsciously made while thinking or discussing the point with a pencil on the page. Other times they would be great gashes of spread lead, veins through the ink by one with conviction, confidence, criticism. If I'd be lucky, the annotator would leave crosses in the margins for emphasis. Or asterisks, or hyphens, or ticks. If contempt flared, great question marks sneered in the blanks on the sides. Notes would vary in handwriting, from young to old, male to female, teacher to student, hurried or relaxed. Even languages altered according to the subject.

And finally, after attempts to draw my concentration back, I would cease to see the text, but drift back to the markings, etchings, possessions after print. My mind would tick off the academic staff who may have prepared this week's lectures using this very book. How many had their own resources in their offices. What units were on offer on the subject this semester. How old the writing looked. Whether it had seen a war.

And then I would think of the students, my colleagues, and who had borrowed the book and why they kept their pencils at hand while reading it. Whether the difficulty level suited an undergrad or postgrad. Were they eating forbidden lollies in the library at the time. Were their parents still alive. Would death show in their scribbles?

I've found post-it notes and bookmarks pointing every which way between the pages. I've seen blood, coffee and juice stain the sheets. I've had postcards fall out. Photocopied passport info pages, leaflets, receipts. I've found business cards. Cafe vouchers. Flight boarding passes. Snatches of lives, desires, regrets. Snatches of humanity.

Each of the bundle of sheaves has a breath that absorbs the living world. Recyclable, circular, cyclical as the seasons.

Sewn in.

I don't know where to put my hands when I speak to her. Painfully aware of my extremities when we meet, I feel the sudden need to hide behind myself or perhaps hate her instead. Fingers crawl up and down my arms, finding pockets, tags, loose threads to cling onto. My feet shuffle into non-verbal conversations while I stammer my way through not telling her what I need to.

The photocopier whirrs. I pull off a button.

I take coffee with no sugar because there is no sugar to put in my coffee. Sharp and bitter, I talk too much and incoherently. The words throw themselves at and off the walls and into the sink to be washed.

The doors lining the corridor mark a game of cuckoo as they open and shut all day. I often walk past my door, thinking the corridor is longer than it is. In one week, sitting at my desk, I will recognise the professors outside according to the weight of their step.

We dusted the bookshelves and then they disappeared.

The dreamer and the realist.

I had a drink with her again last night. Seventeen years of friendship and we still manage to see each other every few months so I can be content to know she is still governing the world and she can be relieved to know I am still analysing it. I had a lemon, lime and bitters and she had a coke and I thought back to that other time when there were four of us around the table. When things were riskier, lights were dimmer, and we rimmed our eyes with kohl. Back then two bottles of wine had been between me and her. Sometime after I puked grape juice in the bathroom and came out trying to look as suave as possible, thinking I should have eaten and grateful that I had not, I prayed nothing would change.

Across from us was a bunch of mothers and their babies - in a pub, things had changed, had they not - all talking and laughing and leaving me and her to speak of important life things like mortgages and moving overseas. She has a man the same age as he was when we began our friendly liaison, oh the irony, and I had to give it away when we were in the car rolling towards her place. 'We were close, probably too close,' and I waited but there was just a solid quiet of the sort that two old friends can bask in and save for later to think about when the lights are red or you sit peeing in meditation. And I told her about the other one, the one who has the baby, and she gasped so that things changed forever and could never go back.

She will move into her house and I will sell mine. She'll give presentations to government types and I'll offer hot coffee to my bleary-eyed students. One of us might conceive and our parents will die. We will get old, the city will gain energy and lose us. The pub will always be there and months later one of us will write 'I think it's time' and the circles will merge into an inclusive venn again.