no poems today

a prose piece

Once I had to leave you I arranged for earth-tremors at night, so in your sleep you’d think I was stroking you - Bill Knott

I think it was because she said only if you promise not to kiss me, or because he replied, I’ll buy you breakfast in the morning, or because one of us, I think me, definitely me, still said, what am I going to do without your big warm hands, keeping me safe at night, how am I going to live without you, or because something dripped from the ceilings, and we did not have the buckets to collect it, so I’m in another town, being a new poet, a harbour poet, a mining poet, a sheep poet, and I have to find new ways to tire myself out for bed, and they’re all as filthy as the rest.

Now, raindrops on other raindrops, frankston bus station, lightning. A woman in her pyjamas huddles against me. the bus driver says, have a good evening, madam when I get off into more rain, and shadows crawl around, and i don't know where i am anymore.

I have found it!

What?

I have not found it.

The waves nail themselves to the sand. I don’t tell him this. Isn’t this proof enough that life is not particularly difficult? I write letters to my old friends in a black bar  asking them for money and if I get everything I want, I’ll be a millionaire.

If the world continues to exist for one more second, you know what I mean.

Plan: open oranges swiftly and decisively, using fingers alone, extremely regularly. Without looking, without noticing, without eating.

I want to come home now, thankyou, read my book in the old bed while you sit on the sofa across the room, thankyou,  look at birdless trees again, why can't I come back home?

The matted coolness of this strange moon tonight, though it continues to rain, on the bus from the swimming pool a young man is so angry he falls off the edge of his own scream, bread falls out his mouth and his little neck tendons are upside down valleys, and a young boy comes up and punches him, and there is only a small amount of blood, and I just sit there, smelling my own chlorine, when I get home T says, I found the holy bible, there were no holes in it, I’ve sliced you some green apples, and he passes them very slowly over the wooden table, and still I cannot go to bed, and Brian says, you could do anything, but you just don’t want anything enough, do you?

During the first storm, a man is naked in the waves and of course when I get closer it is brian, we fall over from laughing. I smoke a cigarette and he has vanished so I say, how could I ever leave you? At least twenty times, till the thought is gone, and I walk to brighton.

Its okay to like a little odd small fleeting life. I have proof!

The bald sun steps gingerly on the water, in the deep lap of his boat lies a dead fisherman.

The cloud’s sack is torn, the rain spills, a live nativity scene.

A golden egg. An artist can try to paint this. Rhubarb pie in Brighton with an old friend, next.

I look across the table at the cafe without him and think
(fiery with love)
Ask me, go on, ask me, tell me, ask me, tell me, ask me,

Anything

What are you invisible under? From what hard foreland of being did I fail to see you really? Is it because he said, maybe I didn't paint you enough? Is it because of the Robert Hass poem about arithmetic during the long school days? If anything is left over, you have to carry it? Is it because of carrying?

a large round slice of bread dipped in goose fat then having softened the hearts of the kitchenfolk I slunk away to sit in the bedroom, softly. • Eight O’Clock • with the old turkish physics major – liquid twinkles in the blue dusk and the old mop on his floor, the apples twirl darkly on their boughs, as the wind sweeps up the dust he chops green apple slices and fills up black tea, green slices, black tea, green again. Get ready, and prepare. Alone, for when you stumble through the next city, get up, fall over, get up again, like buttons on the back of a coat. 

During the second storm, in pine swimming pools, the steam rose up, we were vegetables, the yellow swimming suit met the black crow, we all peed, leisurely.

Plan: learn what its like to wake from a nightmare without a warm hand on a cold chest. 

There's something about you, Brian says. Makes people want to look after you, want to help you. Brian says a lot of things lately.

 Plan: remember the dawn sun on the remnants of snow, which looked to me like the bare patches on bison in the photographs, but only because I couldn’t think of a better image, as we tried to remember the mornings or what was left of them. 

Plan: if in doubt, remember, I'll buy you breakfast in the morning. 


Listen to me!
I don't want to anymore.

the sun will not will not will not rise during this very long evening.  I can – not fall asleep without your warm hands. can- not. Until the walls exhaust me, I want to ask the stranger in the room next to me, if he’ll use his english accent to talk about floodlights and knee cartilage and neutron stars, above all talk and talk and talk, else I wont be able to sleep.

You no longer understand the world, and it seems to not understand you. It starts to rain; violence on the street corner, beneath a streetlamp, rain beats down other rain.

so at my window this morning the glass steamed twisting everything up into a golden ball of spring time, ive been reading books, ive been sitting, the bars on my window didn’t keep me smoothe in the old house, they just slack jawed their long hard fingers, over an almost year. no vietnam, no hoofbeats, no big pink sow. 

I’m tired

How tired?

I have so much sleep to do. 

You’ve heard i’m in a parking lot with nothing but the music, haven’t you? You’ve heard what the bad men said to me on the beach that morning? Haven’t you heard? I’m cold. WJ appears, out of nowhere. WJ. 

The no-longer-lover, is sleeping, I whisper. There’s no one here, but the empty cars, WJ replies, and I smile, because she doesn't know anything. Where will you go, she asks. Mexico. Ballarat. Not to England. Brunswick? she asks. Maybe, I say. Maybe brunswick. 

Brian in the warm kitchen while I am cracking walnuts says, you don’t even realise you are doing it, do you?

What, Brian?

–puddle splashes as the moon slips beneath the water. The springs slather the mornings like mirrors on a disco ball. Alarming and eucalyptus and pitch black now it is 2am - I walk and walk, a cat keeps crying out, I have no jacket, I am wearing my gardening pants and nobody makes me come inside from the rain, following dead ends to the beach, where the waves are nickel flavoured.

Do you have the faintest idea what will happen to you?

Skys just great billowing folds of grey, soft folds, pierced by planes, nothing comes out

I’ll say a sunshiny thing to myself, something about how skin cells are replaced every month and soon the new skin cells wont know what you feel like, and this will be good, won’t it. Very good.

At times like this I lean my head upon my watery chest and drop my aching heart into the hand of each and every beggar, of which there are many around here. Nobody wants much to do with me.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back GIOVANNIS ROOM.

You have put yourself at great risk.

Looking at houses I do not want to live in, using newspapers to guide me gently. Like an orange pip squeezed from between fingertips, you wanted to know if there were trout in the river of the campsite. Are there trout, breeding in this river? I think you said. Trout, in the river. The gully

What's a gully?

You already know what a gully is.

And say I forgot?

A human trembling

An animal's cigarette

The only consoling thought is that somewhere along the line the idea of ceaseless caring was lost sight of.

But wait, did any of you leave a spare key in that place only I know about?

This is the last I have to say on this topic. I turn away from the man smelling of campfire smoke. I am writing, watching, preserving flowers in my sweaty fist, for the vase.


Where's the vase?
I don't know yet.