trailing off, or rather - upwards

notes from above a souvlaki shop in central melbourne.

Melbourne is a patient, still in the confusion

of a drug after our operation. At the peak of this very human tenderness, I go for a walk through carlton gardens with my inner dialogue self consciously hanging out my body — unwilling to stuff itself back inside the confines of a dirty gut. While the dimpled nectarine sunshine plays around me & i liberate ruptured flowers of their green handcuffs, i secretly forget i am meant to be finding a job in this city right now, instead of ambling from pavement to garden - I think I was thinking my new book of poems in simple type on old brown paper; marvelous& tough might be the answer, but it’s not, it’s just like tossing mint leaves into the big blue sky and expecting them to float like a kite.

Do you recall the gullies I went through, trying to sever my body of poetry? And how they stitched it back? The surgeon’s heavy hand of burden; his smell of a million hot beef dinners, all fountains just sounds , tufts, wearing a navel on the outside - spring onions growing atop the windowsill - new & young vegetables, cos I’ve only been in this mangled city for two weeks. How polite; to drown and barely lift an arm, wash up on the shore of Melbourne, where the people talk to your starfish encrusted ear, &here you might become someone who is difficult to lose, and you might feel so baylike in your own room till you snooze - tentacled, opal water pouring over you; a waterfall of gardenia flowers, like cream pies, O god sweet morning of congressmen — I’ll give you my freedom, only only only — if you unleash me on a slope…

The maggot eyed noon tonight is all iris - smartened by the wine i’ve been inhaling, giving my lungs a bath, wearing these flouncy black trousers with diamonds on them from the west preston op shop, wearing tight white turtle neck vest — feeling rock and rolled. My city map curls into something military as I learn it off by heart on my floor, buy myself a bike as white as dominoes, cycle into the central business district and back so many times that words like russel street and bourke street feel like they’ve been given ample opportunity to finish me off, but I guess they like seeing me soar, and I learn that London learns to Ginsburg which leads to Brunswick Strt - where I work at my desk, and sleep in my bed, and the summer lacerates her long wings on my shut blinds, cos I’m busy now - leave me alone.

I listen to the very hungry caterpillar CD at night when i cant sleep which is either all the time or never at all, I found it sitting quietly outside a school. Lately, the nights are so sweet with insomnia you should probably sip it, &I wake with a rhythmic jolt, as sudden as the universe, cos I’ve forgotten what country I’m in, and it feels like waking up on a very high glass floored building, it feels like a three foot axe leaning on the hangman’s shoulder, cutting deep through december’s thick neck. It’s a concave oblivion wrapped in the silk of vegetable skins. It’s time to make soup from cheap vegetables again, time to pace around the kitchen in the almost light with a smile, listening to the nightclub below, where people eat kebabs and dance.

At dusk on elvin street the rainbow parakeets sit on the typewriter shop. I go in & ask if he wants an apprentice. A stare from the girl who wants to start a new life, who needs a new trade — but the tone in her voice is jam and words are bread, and he says he’s alright - thanks, he’s full but — wait — sir — I’ve already planned my life in yr shop, and the way I was gonna walk here every morning, & I’ve already titled a poem ‘parakeets while I’m on shift’ — so I leave in glumness and search for a new job, but instead of actually doing this I just go on the dole and when I’m through with one of the weekly appointments I walk to abbotsford convent; where the lazy countryside greets the wicked city and departs almost immediately, with sheep grazing like how there are only holes on one side of the recorder.

A poet pours the ocean into her pocket, however many fish there are it doesn’t matter - her heart makes an unbreakable aquarium, men with empty hands pass by, like long rain in deep mud followed by sunshine, like building a cracked skin of brown sails, like sitting in the convent bakery with a fruit pie and the pale crystal library of tears is shut, a pigeon comes to visit, I feed the pigeon, we sit together in half silence, he eats the crumbs of my love, I want to bathe his bad feet in aloe vera.

In the convent, you hear the wind before you feel it. I spoil the corridors of the top floor and onto the balcony and tell the grass he needs a haircut && past all the cells which used to house good virgins & now house bad dirty whoreish artists and they smile at me like i have a studio there, and my life plan changes cos all i want is a beautiful studio at abbotsford convent O please — lord? A priest looks at me in an ugly way and I understand because I’ve also woken up and looked at myself in the mirror and felt shame. I get the bus from johnson street to the other side of town cos it’s such a long road& its 40 degrees out, and raining bullets which steam like laundry behind candlelight.

The guy infront of me flicks his lighter on and off & all the good citizens with shopping bags are slowly replaced by green skinned doped out angels who do not pay for the bus & that is how I know I’m at cyrus’ art cafe. There is no one else here and the music exists like an echo when you yell from the foot of a mountain, I sit at the tabletop which is a child’s school desk and put all my things inside - shells, marbles, cinema tickets, loaf of bread and charlie’s essay on love and the imagination is thum tacked on the fold up roof, I walk to the heart of carlton when hunger strikes&& everything is 5 dollars and the spaghetti is hot and reminds you of the course your food pipe takes thru yr lonely corn kernel heart & burn the floorboards under my tongue & a man with long greasy hair is playing bluesy tunes on the piano, and we’re all stuffed in here together like a grave robbers bag of homemade appetites. I realise when I’m home that I forgot charlie’s letter so I rush back and look at my own reflection in Cyrus’ closed cafe.

How soft you can go if you give yourself a chance.

The men dive down in heavy helmets with loveable faces walking through landscapes of underwater rubies & knots of weeds / sawing invisible wood & fish every shade of infinite thread passing opium eyes — but nobody knows i’m made of pearls, i’m down here too, and — i’m made of pearls. Sometimes I watch someone I am very fond of drowning themself down the bottom of the ocean, having spent too much time down there myself — and it is as good as killing me to watch them — right now I’m sat in my yacht, remember that — & they can’t hear when I yell - Hey. I’m made of pearls, &

im up here now .

Its like this, you see.

I want to give people the imaginary through the steel wall that the human personality will all too eagerly build and listen to chopin often& watch marie dressler afternoons from my studio in the convent, spread out like the skirt im hemming, like a million yachts passing through melbourne port, or - perhaps you would have to be a nun to understand - that the yachts are now WORDS without a mouth to dress themselves up in, and melbourne port is YOU - you see, boy — I’m trying to douse you in my salve reservoir, while writing a kundera style novel — you see? &not walk around upsetting people in the city, going to markets and art galleries and poetry readings and boarding trams like an unimportant apostrophe between the botanical gardens and the starlight, perhaps i should be a nun.

But instead I go back to the souvlaki shop, I am a cowboy and the books my herd — I sit at the desk with cigarettes &incence & coffee & tealights; six tiny fires, we sit around eachother like venn diagrams, and the radio softly chuckles, and in the orange shadows i write, as if the whole thing was arranged, i’m the philosopher of the delicatessen, the bakery, the beach, the artist's convent -- the wind stuffs the scum of busy brunswick street under my windowsill … no ones ever bought me flowers before… despite my name… it’s true, it’s not to be poor in purse, it’s to be poor in thought … you can steal them from the graveyard, i dont mind,..

Nowadays i seem to always be on my way between two points - or paused at a traffic light in the brassy sheen that melbourne’s 7pm offers, I don’t own a sewing needle but I keep a calligraphy pen for closing the horizon. Nights are just the legs of insects, small wings buzzing together to erase the day — apart from a writer who enjoys reading their own work, we all lie, sleepless in tricolour beds - I generally lie completely alone, my creations nothing but violence remembered from a naive distance, at least - for the most part, I can’t remember how to sleep without the insects, and - when I do sleep in someone’s bed, I’m always desperate for more of them, even when there isn’t enough to go around.

Go rollerskating in the mornings in carlton gardens, next to the melbourne museum where apple trees grow in boxes, smeared in mustard light &lick a stamp travel up hill on the curve on the flowery extremity, where green tiaras fall from the tree’s congressmen— schumann playing like chalk etching my bones — S is for Sun and B for blood gushing like a whale’s spout but it’s my aorta, I fling out my arm but slip anyway, a slice of lipstick on my knees, so on and so on - with the detail that diversity allows, and the pathetically compulsory unity of bedtime informs a city to sleep, even with gashed knees & smoke mounting a fat pony headed skyward from each chimney mouth & dreams are pressed hot in place, the wallaby with his cold pad touches a star achieving momentary significance — - - i dream of the convent.

- nova cinema cos its a mondya and on mondas cinemas are 7 dollars, watch ‘theres still tomorrow’ some italian black and white gem which makes me feel like a ruined soul then

— wipe the city dust from frothy lips — wake only by habit — adhering lichen-wise to the pillowcase, unlit cigarette in mouth, what should I do today, some endless distraction of free labour? Measuring mileposts of the golden eternity, in which the china calender threatens to jump off king strt bridge , in which the unemployed artists are as dangerous as the blues would have been — should Plato have listened in.

The passive blanket of sleep weaves through melbourne heat and vague dead flesh smells, & diced onion — that was how he found me looking out a window, the air of hopelessness yet groping desire that often draws women to window, as if we’d catch the solution levitating above our fire escape stairs, as if a nice fist of money would appear, can you tell that I’m happy here, O port of drowned lovers - I am happy here! Not a man in sight, it is 5:15am dear

                        fitzroy , hello. — we’re

       almost there.

On the tram home from the poetry night at claypots seafood along the beachfront, where poems smell like lobster — on the tram home, i decide to be a doctor again . it is funny the way one makes decisions on trams, something in the effortless flow of flabby muscles that makes you think you can write a play, go to War, become an instrument of mercy, freedom of fucking in the throat or whatever — anyway — i’ll be a nice doctor with my hypodermic adrenaline needles safely tucked under my armpit. But then I quickly change my mind ‘cos how will I pick my true love out the crowd if I’m working all the time? And how will my kids feel love and safety if I’m the profound silence of 12 hour shift lifetimes?

There’s a worm in the wood of most women. We like being on our knees. At least until the patient is asleep. Then, we run - to another city, to another fella , to another moonlit comb plaiting our grey hair. Oh but before I catch the tram home I find myself eating ice cream blacker than a camera lens opposite a boy who was sat at the poetry bar & i decide to be someone completely different you wouldn’t even recognise me.

The effort of giving birth to originality is exhausted by degrees of its own definition and satisfaction, thus the mother must develop resourcefulness... So originality is now on trial. So blossom’s history is now on trial? Anyway I go to the art gallery with him, and a painting by August Friedrich Schenk makes my tale complete, the shuddering self inscribes itself on a sheep - for every pore of wool and ridge of meat, there is a hectare of death / anguish / horror , and we go to cyrus’ for a coffee, and we rinse our pails clean, till they glisten from laughter & talking, cornered by cars honking & all the rumbling and roaring from commentators of the street, and I don’t really want him to leave, so we go to the park and watch a half inflated beachball being smacked around, and he goes to sing in a bar - and I catch him up later, but I’m too late, I got stuck in the middle of a roundabout on my bike - the inhumane cars a halo around my body — and only hear the last song, so we drink lemonade on the sand of a prowling shore, which is closing in, and the toothless dog still wants a bone, and I cycle home, shouting memorised poetry into the underbelly of albert park while I speed. Why must poets be lonely all the time?

It really is such a bore.

—and I stroll unlimping from my room to the bathroom, for my bath is ready, and I must retire soon. Meanwhile the cows arrived to be milked at their convent, walking heavy with drugged shadows sprawling from cream eyelashes into the matriarcal curve of the rosy chapel’s stained glass waist, well actually – I cant see the cows — then i get up without realising it to the bar down the road, but brunswick street is the saddest - loud as a harvest , not a single one of those trees with any charm, I hear severed footsteps in the evening and see no one, I read Ntozake Shange, and accuse the wind of falling in love with the papers in my room, for they are spread everywhere and paining when I return.

Wake up go to fitzroy pool and decide i will train to be a lifeguard, imagine all that time pacing back and forth, one could think up such wonderful ideas, but I’m not fast enough for the slow lane, float on my back with the toddlers and watch the clouds descend on all of us creatively constipated swimmers. The smell of his leaf blower in the garden of my mind, sunshine jogging over the hills of my face, untentacled, gutted of noise under the huge citrus rind of chlorine, until i’m softly naked like all the other women in the changing room, and feeling good in my body, the day with cold forceps beckoning, step into milky labour, order poached eggs on toast at my local bakery, chat to Nook the waitress from thailand about idiot boys— she says wheres yr sweetheart — i say he’s at the great table where all my masters dine—recieve a few letters in the post — write a short story about a swimming pool and that is all i do.

Sure - no problem, I’ll empty the garbage bins of your eyes, I’ll swill out the murky bottom and we’ll drink the year away from the container, we’ll pretend we can move so carefully with each other despite ritual claustrophobia at the runt of the suburb, we’ll slope toward the shore or the markets - there are an infinite number of faucets to turn off, would you let my spine be the stairs of your flooded building? Well? I think of myself as a bare brass philosopher. I print out van gogh’s letters to his sister and read this in the sickness of insomnia while I’m in the bath yet again, and the bubbles sound like hail, like general congestion in all of my pretty systems.

Me and Maxwell play tennis thursday morning and after get a creme brulee from the italian place in brunswick, on sydney street - the one with maroon walls, which is a woman’s way of saying purple, and i like this and when the cafe girls remember us and our creme brulee, i like this most of all, because this is the first sense of routine i’ve had in years, sense of place, because my uncovered shins flecked with opal bruises are in melbourne now, which is home, & nick at the bookstore says hey chick &

cycle to queen vic markets, get dates from the greek man, he gives me a whole bag of mushrooms for free & the rest of my veggies from the afghanistani brothers, listen to a child playing beethoven while eating spinach pie from the tunisian fella — so i take everyone home in my basket and make a lovely moth grey soup & while it cooks i sit on the fire escape stairs with a cigarette and i bite my arm so hard it bruises, and i finish my cigarette, no net of time to lay over my pillow, just my blonde head having a nap, wake up, car crash cos a pack of wild dogs ran over the chinese mountains and im at the cinema again watching black dog on mnday - 7 dollar ticket — The girl next to me cries at the wrong part — she thinks birth is more tragic than death — next to a photobooth in flinders station and take a photo of myself incase I forget how I looked one day.

If only I could strip off and become something other than naked. Just to be clear, the skies are trembling with the heat tonight; grass makes sauce out of the sunset … we’re almost there… thankyou for reading — hold on…

a good morning for solitude — cycle to the cemetery where the hebrew slabs are opposite chinese shrines which lead to the children’s memorial garden, cos I feel like at least I’m doing better than everyone here — i try mourning it doesnt work — and if you go up tenth avenue to the top of the hill you can see all of melbourne unfold like a dirty napkin with a haemorrhage which is the yarra river , and you can practice taking both arms off the handlebars as you fly down ninth, and the stretched muscles of a mouth tense to allow extra air in — listen to a song by The Painter who reads 15th century books on how to be a gentleman && when you get home you can eat balsamic vinegar on bread in your bed, and lay the tealights out like an odourous landfill of you

 thanking the lord i didn’t stay —  you right now, I            

     know you

       saying that . right now

What is it?      [he asks]

A man with a bunny rabbit on his shoulder ploughing the wheat fields of sand, to walk into the black liquid, to cover himself all the way to the neck - and the bunny, like a king - barely sniffing the ocean air, on top of his fleshy surfboard — and the sky turns coppery - but The Painter thinks its blue, and the wind picks up, so we cycle to his suburb and exhaustion is a desperate pose, and there are nights that never end & never begin, the sun extinguished cos God fell asleep holding a cigarette, tired after a long day of holding me upright, like pouring wine into a metal jug it feels like —

Now we’re coming to the end of the year, and my legs are sore from cycling from gardenvale to this cafe in st kilda, when I walked in a moment ago - to turn a page from white to the scrawls of a maniacs thoughts — the girls eyes are churches they say hi bloss and i sit where i sit, in my spot in the window, O saturday morning I will give you all my congressmen as promised, just not right now …

I like how no one has to say sorry at the end of the night anymore. I like how minutes pass through centuries of those yachts which were only ever words, built under the influence of jazz downtown, and how I can leap off Swanston Street to St Kilda road, and follow the beach down, and I like how that leads to a house with Jimmy next door - who says I must not waste my youth writing short stories, although I probably will, and I like falling asleep with Mongolian films like cellophane over my malleable dreams, seeking the transcendent & don’t I try to capture it, my fists just blunt fishing hooks - but they soon tire, and sleep on the ocean bed, which is his stomach - and, when I get to MY home the house is dark - and, the patience of ordinary things startles me, waiting for my return - what is more generous than my window with her heavy feet and numb flesh — the smell of tobacco curling into nostalgia - so — goodbye all and — merry christmas and, speak in

the new year.