| Silk strings |
[May. 19th, 2012|08:37 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  crushed | ] |
My little dog is gone and I am falling apart. As if a tie had been snipped away and some crucial part of me were unravelling as a result. How strange to have something so constant, so reliable, suddenly gone.
I was not there, and neither were my parents nor anyone with whom she was raised. She was held and looked after by someone kind and loving, but nonetheless someone who is to me a stranger.
I said goodbye before I left but somehow I didn't realise it would be so final.
Everything hurts. |
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| Into the night |
[Apr. 7th, 2012|12:03 am] |
We go out into the night and pretend to be brave. We face the whirling lights, the swirling music, and we laugh at it, downing our fear with the drinks and singing like mad beasts. We go out into the night and become Nobody, as Odysseus to the Cyclops - voice trembling, but only just.
We go out into the night and Aeolus chides us along the streets, nipping at our exposed faces, our bare hands busy with cellphones, pushing us with his breath into the next warm bar full of unfamiliar faces. We drink some more, safe in our Nobody-ness, invisible among the crowds. The heat rises from a furnace of bodies where sordid secrets are being forged, and we stumble out again into the cold.
We go out into the night and for some of us the street under our boots is unfamiliar - we are drawn to the unsettling spectacle of commonplaces locations made strange in weird lamplights. Others are turned about the other way, seeing familiar shapes in altogether unknown shadows. We are all masked in the seamy embrace of the darkness and the stars above are invisible as we pollute the bright air with our words.
We go out into the night and become our own dissolute heroes, because nobody else will listen. We are seeking our white horses in the clouded, crowded alleyways and looking for lost rings in the gutters. We have never found them before, but there is always a next time.
We go out into the night to see the snow fall and hear the foxes cry (they sound like screaming children and the first night we heard them we were terrified for a moment, thinking we needed to call the police). We are looking for badgers and moles and all the other invisible things that we are so sure live in the night. We go to breathe the same air they do, and in those breaths perhaps we will come to know them.
We go out into the night like a hunting party, raucous and slipshod, only instead of the stag we want gods - degenerate, ill-formed gods with bad haircuts and yellow teeth, who are down to their last fag and still pissed off that Prometheus stole their lighter all those years ago. We point our fingers to shoot them through the heart, and they laugh and usher us in, promising that their foul-mouthed cockatiel will peck our liver out tomorrow.
We go out into the night because it is the only way we can be heard. The dark amplifies our voices, the vault of the sky above us an arena that returns our noise a thousandfold, the hard roads under our feet the skin on a deep-down subwoofer, reverberating infinitesimally. We shout our thoughts into street-lamps instead of microphones, laughing and making faces as our warm breath steams up the glass.
We go out into the night to escape, and we are never sure if what we are doing is the bravest or the most cowardly thing we could do. We are trying to go home without knowing where home is, only that we are so sure we will know it when we find it. It has all the things we have ever wanted and we are coming out into the night to find it.
We go out into the night because no one has ever experienced this the way we will, our cold bodies vibrating to unknown frequencies with every word. We are too busy finding new ways to be to listen to the rhetoric of other ages. We are in love with Bacchus and he is a fat greasy sleazeball but he makes a mean cocktail.
We go out into the night and become part of the storm. We cajole the rolling sea of the city, pulling the pubs and taverns all adrift from their moorings like little boats, navigating by each others' lights, a flotilla of debauchery in the ocean of bricks and mortar and secret faces. We lash ourselves to the mast and fill our ears with wax against the police sirens singing and sighing mournfully over the wind.
We go out into the night because we can. We become each and every one a Nobody, sealing our masks tight against Poseidon's wrath. We breathe in ragged chorus the biting air and take refuge in our invisibility.
We have all the false courage in the world between us, a thousand thousand Nobodys, and we go out into the night. |
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| She's leaving home |
[Oct. 19th, 2011|10:00 pm] |
I am sorry if it seems like I am abruptly cutting ties. That wasn't my intent, and I have no desire to estrange anyone simply because I am leaving Prima Spada. But I need to be allowed to say goodbye to ideas and organisations before I am able to say goodbye to people.
I have not yet phrased it as directly as this, but I am starting a new life, and this means shedding many of the trappings of the old one. I'm not taking any baggage on the plane except for the literal kind - no unfinished goals, no old prejudices, no notions of structures which can no longer exist for me. The only things I am taking are my self and my belongings.
And that means I need to put the groups and places behind me now, before I go, so that I can take my leave of each of you individually. I need to say goodbye without external influences still pulling at my identity. I need to say goodbye as who I am now, not who I used to be.
I need to know that my friends are my friends outside of any group, regardless of any conflict of opinions or beliefs. Because those friendships are something I do want to take with me. And because if I know I am your friend now, it is not so hard for me to know I am your friend across the globe, too.
I don't expect you to understand this, necessarily, because you're not me. But I do ask you to respect that this is what I need to do for my own wellbeing. |
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| Mit faden |
[Oct. 8th, 2011|12:18 am] |
It is the disease of puppets, dis-
jointed limbs
in untimed, erratic chorus,
we turn and turn
Turn inward
turn in to you
dangling
my cutthreads loose
as my heavy limbs
Made broken
Wooden-chested, hollow
no
soul, recognisable,
to speak of, no
place-that-speaks
Or is spoken of -
we are silent
as the cracked and crumbling earth
(our benefactor,
with twisted roots folding inward,
drinks its almond-milk sweetness)
We turn and turn;
and Time - grey, shatter-jointed -
is a pall. |
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| On flight |
[Jul. 17th, 2011|06:19 pm] |
I have pictures from my Melbourne trip that I'd like to share. But for now, this, which I wrote on the plane:
We are never ready to fly. When we do, the skeleton-lights of the city below us are a vast and cold indictment of the distant and limitless sun. What need have you of sun, they say, who crawl endlessly in the shadow of his warm and polar wake?
We are never ready to fly. We are as beetles with too-small, flimsy wings, beating and buzzing aimlessly against the vast pane of the atmosphere. Our carapaces are dotted with the cargo-cult leavings of a thousand tiny ships of the mind, and not one of them brings us into godhood.
We are never ready to fly. The indivisible parts of ourselves do not know the rushing of air, or the strange light of dawn-above-dawn. We are unmade in the sky, and blind to the edges of clouds - how can we fly, who are built from earth and carried ever downwards? |
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| Postcards from my other self |
[Jun. 7th, 2011|02:54 pm] |
Got knocked back for that potential awesome-sounding job. They found someone more senior who could do it under budget. Way of the world, but it's hard not to feel a bit cut by it.
Worrying too much about my students. I want them to do well, but they have to want to do well too.
Instead of complaining, here is a picture I am fond of. I drew it years ago on a post-it note. Self-portrait as an Imperial soldier. Yes, I have been watching way too much Zoids, which is what made me dig up this file. I finished watching the series a couple of days ago, and was so sad that there isn't any more of it. For years I had still not seen the couple of here-and-there episodes that I had missed initially, and the finality of watching the whole series end-to-end made me realise just how important this silly show was, and is, to me.
Maybe I'll finally get around to putting together the Zaber Fang model I bought in Japan a few years ago. |
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| Interlude |
[May. 19th, 2011|07:23 pm] |
I wrote this what feels like a long time ago, now, but never posted it. I'm hesitant to called it poetry, because it has even less meter than what I ordinarily write. It's more like... broken prose? I'm sure there's a word for it.
O-saka Counting Song
Two sisters and a stranger
met one night
in a winter city
- walked three abreast
until the scanty sidewalk
could no longer accommodate
(so fell back to two in front
one lagging behind)
A shiny red bicycle
propelled with one pedal,
one foot on the ground
- four boys playing football
laughed as they passed
Took the elevator to the fifth floor
for dinner
- two sodas
and one coke with that, please
(Counting out change to pay
wasn't allowed:
first sister always gets the bill)
Then grocery shopping
- twelve slices of bacon,
no eggs,
one more box of sweets
(just in case)
At the self-checkout,
three hundred and sixteen yen for the lollies
On empty box from out back
(the largest and sturdiest they could find)
Home was
twenty-sixth floor,
apartment number three. |
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| I just feel the need to point this out |
[May. 19th, 2011|05:52 pm] |
Because I suspect some of you aren't aware. I've mentioned it in passing, but I've been pretty flippant about it so you may not have taken the message seriously:
I am not earning much and I really really don't have a lot of money. Yes, I earn a substantial rate for the hours that I do work, but I don't work enough hours for that to have any real impact. Add to that the fact that teaching ends before term does, and suddenly that rate is getting spread awfully thin.
I didn't get paid this week because of Easter and the Labour day holiday. I only have two more pay packets before I'm on my own for nearly two months. Even if I get paid out for the work I'm doing for the Criminology department, that will just barely see me through. I am trying desparately to scrape and save what I can but rent, bills and food chew through a lot.
I do not have money to buy things for myself, and I can't really afford to do things like go out for dinner. The girls night out will probably be last for a long time, and honestly, rationally, I probably shouldn't have gone to that either.
I'm not about to starve on the streets or anything, I have safety nets. But if I'm joking around and saying things like 'I don't get paid enough to do x' or 'I can't really afford it' or 'Yeah, I get paid for my work but it's not disposable income, I need that to live' then chances are I am at least half-serious. |
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| Update |
[May. 19th, 2011|12:08 pm] |
Got to the gym: YES
Can raise arms comfortably above head: NO WHO NEEDS ARMS ANYWAY
Going again tomorrow: YES
Status: AWESOME |
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| Ostensibly, |
[May. 18th, 2011|09:04 pm] |
my goal this week is to push through and get close to finished on this project, to which end I'll be up potentially late tonight.
My real goal this week, the one that I give a damn about, is to just to get to the gym in the morning, even if I'm a bit stiff and tired. I've had enough of being a weakling. Physically, mentally, emotionally - it's time for a change.
It's possible that I've been watching too much anime. Pretty sure I can do it if I just believe in myself, or something along those lines =P |
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