Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

--John Keats

and softly, and slowly, and completely, and naturally, and forcefully, and spectacularly, and otherworldly, and authentically, and generously, and understandingly, and realistically, and thoroughly, and riskily, and daily, and healthily, and extraordinarily, and altruistically, and inclusively, and unashamedly, and somewhere as close to as long as we can.

2007 #2.

It bothers me that I know your number by heart, and yet I haven't called and neither have you, and I haven't written and neither have you, and I plan ways to leave your books at your front door without a message, in a plastic bag so they don't feel too lost, beside the door because in front would seem like a happy delivery.

And I wonder whether you are leaving me like I left him, quietly and brutally, to prepare yourself for the distances, the silences and the love affairs. How else does one operate on the heart, but with instruments that slice.

It bothers me that I would know where to find you tonight
With foam upon your cupid's bow in the dim and dusty light.
Filling the lack in your gut, filling up the lack,
Since you don't know I'm back in town, you don't know I'm back.

2007.

From across the world I told you I loved you in my own way, in three times the words and half of the time. I placed you in the no regrets bag lined in silk of the reddest red. You replied in half the words and twice the feeling, landing me in a black velvet jewellery box of mirrors and cushions to help me stay beautiful despite my dirty jeans and rumpled hair. We touched like in the movies we so adored in the dark, I flew across the continents and oceans to knock at your front door and you let me in with the slow smile you reserve for those about whom you thought the night before.

2008.

The dress Tia Toni knitted was pink and grey like the galahs outside near the parking lot. I was standing holding the bar above my head, two metres high, looking at the planes and not understanding. The photo shows the dress hugging my strong little body as I look out, uncertain about everything.

I used to think I could hear heartbeats in trees. Jodie and I would climb up to the tallest branches and look across to the hills, and I'd put my ear to the smooth bark and not hear a beat but wish I did. I knew they were alive somehow, and that they were important and felt pain. Years later when I heard about the kooky experiment that found plants screamed real high so people can't hear it when plants next to them were hurt, I smiled and thought to myself, I knew it.

Me and Pauline used to play netball after school. I ran fast to get the ball but we weren't allowed to play in school shoes not runners because the ground was bitumen and the shoes had no grip. I was wearing school shoes and shouldn't have been playing, and when I slipped and skidded on the little tiny rocks, and I was still pulling my stockings out of my leg an hour later, I wanted to know whether you could see bits of me left on the ground but I had nobody to ask. I think I went maybe fifty metres far, it was really far. Pauline had to sit out because her knee was sore. She went to the doctors and found out she had cancer, then she stopped coming to school. I looked inside her desk and there were still books. When she came back she walked funny like her leg was a stick or she was a robot. They took her hair and then they took a bone out, you know the sticking out flat one at the front that makes your knee bend, so she really did have a stick inside her leg to keep it straight. She couldn't run around anymore so we talked instead. Nobody talked as well as Pauline did.

When I threw the rake at him, I didn't think I'd hit him. I was angry because he said something mean and I was far away and I couldn't throw perfectly that well but I hit him perfectly. It scraped the skin on his back and he yelled loud till mum came out. I told her it was the pool water that made it hurt but she hurt my arm when she pulled me out. Mum shouted kind of quiet that I could have killed him and sent me to my room. I cried till it hurt because I thought God would make me die. He wasn't allowed to come to my house again.

2006.

She leaned forward a little and the neckline of her black top moved slightly down and to the right, revealing a soft wart or a dermal bubble of some kind. For a moment I thought it was a quirky misplaced nipple, romanticizing what was only an accidental biological bump.

An instant of unveiling. A secret of the flesh. A personal shame. She'd written about lovers examining each other's skin in the morning haze and I couldn't help thinking of exotic lips kissing the delicate raised mushroom at different times in different places, crooning in strange languages. Such unsurpassed mental clarity, chinadoll face and luminous unveiled eyes, and yet, so ordinarily flawed in body.

She would have liked this accidental show of miscreation, mortalised forever. The vulnerability of skin, the clothed disrepair of corporeal substance. Had it been in a movie, it would have been her favourite scene.

A life in the face of an eventual death.

It's a playground of sorts. Swinging back and forth, push, pull, closer and further away. A see-saw of highs and lows, the heights reached and the inevitable fall to the ground. The monkey bars gripped so tightly, hanging white-knuckled and shallow-breathed, struggling to continue to the next bar to grab. A balancing act atop the rope bridge, carefully moving over something crossable. And through it all, the white crunchy sand that fills each pocket, each sock, each fold of skin, so that always our delicate marshmallow bodies follow us around without our forgetting them.