Month: August 2022

we do not know ourselves

let me tell you about us, all five million of us:

we are a city allergic to the damp, when waters rise, we forget to flee

instead, we gaze upwards

searching for sky fire, mistaking light mist for feather embers.

we are a people programmed for brightness, in this postcard, bridge framed city

coaxing bud to open into wisteria and mulberry and

shoving tufts of jasmine into windowsill jars

herding spring like sugar fuelled children onto greyhound coaches,

and all the school fetes and blossom festivals,

fairy floss and food trucks:

Turkish gozleme and vegan donuts

a Filipino family singing

on open mic:

a high school teacher brings her newborn to the festival and

the basketball boys/the almost juvie knowntothecops boys

clear a path for her child,

space, space they call to each other

shrinking as a sign of respect,

let me tell you about us,

without sunlight we do not know ourselves.

ways of holding space

Mark the calendar:

the 29th of August, the day you failed her. After years of trying, imagining yourself a one-woman Marvel multiverse, you have turned out the lights,

and curled as adult foetus, beneath your fur lined, patch work quilt, one hand on your Calico cat who has curled beside you. Another hand on that blood pump other people call a heart.

You will not spend 12 hours in A & E in the bustling inner-city rooms where it is not uncommon to see a half clothed, stale breathed man handcuffed to the bedframe, a uniformed officer at his bed, and neither will you spend 6 hours in the smaller suburban A & E, where traces of blood have not been cleaned beneath hard plastic chairs-

You can no longer hold space for her, though this is your job. Holding space. Leaning in and listening to the themes that reverberate in the pauses and the sentence periods.

Because the way you listen can speak tomes,

listening as echolocation,

as homing device,

I am here, I am here

you are there and I travel beside you,

but tonight, you scream to be the heard, the listen-ee, not the listener,  

instead, you rest your ear against the Calico, letting her breathe softness against your chin, and she shares her purr with you, the vibration that travels through her when she is in her vet carrier, or when the neighbour’s Chihuahua ventures not too close but close enough,

she shares her purr, that self-soothing soft rumble from deep within her larynx,

come, the Calico says,

there are other ways of holding space.

a week of seeking kindness

will AI one day make men redundant, he asks, not humans, I mean just men because women will always be useful, and do you know how existence travels in cycles, and men have been on top for millennia, well it is probably women’s time now-

and you can’t get rid of him, the college student who arrives in your class before you, and leaves after all the students are gone, despite the torrential rain and the assignment deadlines, he likes to follow these threads of thoughts, likes to ask your opinion-

the day before you are sinking your own fingertips into miniature tubs of sticky acrylic paint. Your client is drawn to the IKEA bottles that squirt paint like tomato sauce and he is delighted with the swirls of gold and silver and fluorescent orange on the A4 paper. Earlier another little girl is painting a sunrise with glow in the dark rave colours, and there is colour everywhere. On everyone’s hands, on the table, on school uniform, hijab, wall, floor mat

and these are children whose minds slip-slide from surface to surface. Never settling. Yet here with this beautiful, fractal rainbow mess they are calm, and it makes you wonder whether therapists should simply be replaced by artists and acrylics, watercolours, oils, pastels available at every medical and allied health service-

before the colour smear, you sit three hours with a grandmother, a guardian of a teen whose mind doesn’t conform and therefore no one else will have him, but the grandmother talks and you lean into her talk, which is both direct and circuitous, and anyway

you have been trained to hold space,

and she says, no he cannot tell the time or understand his multiplication tables, but he can play the piano by ear just by listening to a song once. You tell her that perfect pitch is rare, a unicorn skill,

and she says,

yes,

my grandson has a gift.

**

Later, you remember what your mother once said, that nature seeks an equilibrium, where one talent or gift is outweighed by a deficit-

earlier that day you had called your own therapist because there was that familiar hatred, the urge to slam your skull against a jagged stone surface and over and you would do it, damage the parietal and temporal lobes to have a moment’s respite-

because you were never enough for people who charged inflation prices for their metered love.

Then you think maybe this is nature’s balance, that your patience, that your ability to hold space and colour and meandering thought, your patience with paper cup water turned muddy with children’s paints, your ability to delight in strength over deficit-

Is nature’s counterbalance.

Or, or as you want to tell the other therapists, the teachers, the condescending colleagues who say you are too kind, as though kindness is an intellectual deficit-

Maybe this is nature’s law, and there was no gentleness, no kindness in a home that forced psychic and bodily submission, that now, as an adult, you would sell your right eye and left lung and excess haemoglobin to live in a kinder world.

Five year plan

For Asha

“In five years, I will meet
strangers who wear my words as talismans, 
and those that cast my tales as anchor or sail-
I will cram ten lifetimes into five years 
brimming with laughter and rhythm and kindness, 
and my factory violin, sticky with rosin, chin rest 
fastened by lurid purple tape, 
will consume the cadence 
dormant in my bones so
in five years I will sit in the Gaelic club and over too many 
half spilled pints play a fiddle reel 
to time…

And in five years, Asha’s van will be a lighthouse, 
smithing journeylines into reclaimed 
carbon, metal, and stone.
Holly will have her pick of Othellos/but Mia will be her own Portia 
Kat K will travel lightly/but Gin will travel with abandon
and Nadia will speak sound into undulating air 
from the back room of a sanctuary
for animals saved from slaughter-
and why not include your friends 
in a five-year plan, though there is no
career enhancing movement
no property ladder on which to 
teeter dangerously.”

In the end I look at the doctor
measuring my meandering mind 
against standardised norms. 
“No,” I reply. “I have no five-year plan.”

a week of seeking solace

I feel broken, I have not felt broken like this before,

and the wise woman that reads your whispers,

 the one who breaks into Italian when she is delighted or drops her guard,

 she says maybe, maybe you are simply aware of these long-broken parts

and you speak these beautiful, awful truths to a forever friend

whose fingers are always moving and she says

think of pottery though

when the ceramic is being glazed, it looks like it is breaking,  

but no, it isn’t breaking,

and you’re not breaking, she says,

your surface is splintering but your interior is still intact

as she drives you to the ocean to comb moss

that grows like human hair on sea rocks

and there’s your friend with the renaissance soul

the latest one to make a new life and weary and sleep stolen

she introduces you as a writer first,

 not a teacher/therapist/ academic,

not a failed woman nor a would-be wife

and she says we must create because

nothing is secure and

life is uncertain

and life is short-

and this same week you are running to the river, and you are never too

quick that you cannot stop for the burst of cherry blossoms ushering spring

and this is a delight,

a kindness,

that you can stay still enough to capture the bees

dancing across blossom and bud

and across the road

you hear the man you cannot stop loving for his improbable love of unlikely song

and he’s playing the uillean pipes across the field

and you are breaking

still and the river

will take you, broken or cracking you are mostly organic, and your banyan tree will hold you amongst her buttress roots and will remind you that

all that lives

is prone to break.

the soil beneath your fingers

and here in the winter sun and the August wind which today is gentle, you are seeking more gentleness, gazing at the sprigs of lavender and the tuber leaves extending their tendrils from the damp soil and

though the arugula has gone to seed before its time and the terracotta planters are cracking at the edges, the yuccas are still reaching-

this is a planet of reaching-

and here in this nation of fire and flood and medicationtokeepmovingmovingthemachine

you are scanning for kindness, and you’re not fit to be around people today, not fit for anything but staring and scribbling

calloused fingers moving through a medicated mind, and you can press word to page, soil into pot, metal string to note and your fingers are moving and

your eyes, they’re scanning for kindness

beyond your medicated mind and beneath your fallow fingers you are searching

for signs, for earth speak to whisper,

rest child,

here, here in the dirt, amongst the trellis of youthful climbing peas and purple lettuce gone to seed,

there is softness here,

there is beauty here in the breaking and the reaching and the dying and the living

look child,

the soil beneath your fingers is nothing but kind.

reasons for not returning*

*a letter to my mother

because this is the nature of our dance
I step out of time and then you yank me into place
to always feel hunted,
because my earrings, junk shop, metal, painted teal and gold
offend you and still 
my thoughts are too silent for you to grasp 
and my denim is ripped, and my eyes are kohl rimmed and aside from 
liner I wear no other makeup and I am too much gypsy punk for 
your boomer aesthetic
and I collect degrees like magazine coupons
so you can be proud 
though my bank account is in arrears and 
yes of course I am still 
not good enough

because I have spent years stripping the interior of my skull
removing thoughts that were not my own with scraper and acetone and forever chemicals 
that may one day command my cells to grow uncontrolled
because my heart is smeared 
across the brass bedframe you slammed
me against and I am too weak
too shameless 
to wipe away my own blood 
and I am still searching for cleavers that you hid around the house
or that kitchen knife for boning chicken and cutting pork
when you invited me to die with you
and I was only 7, maybe 8-

and because maybe you knew 
and maybe you didn’t
anyway, I forgive you, I forgive you
because how would you know, really know 
even though there were whispers and warnings 
but he always took me in the shadows cast by 1970s home décor
a crystal green disco ball that cast lurid pools 
contracting with the edges to never tell
so how could you know
about that architecture 
that interior aesthetic
breaking a child against the canary yellow walls
beige carpet/
tan bedpost/
cream door frame/ teak bed head
pink satin coverlet he held me down upon until
I finally screamed but by then I had fractured into carbon
and nobody listens when dust begins to speak

because you loathe me even though the science says 
a child alters its mother in the womb
chimera cells so the mother is also child
because this is how I speak now and do you remember
the gaffer tape plastered on my mouth, my arms, legs, torso
bound tight with orange sisal rope for tying boar and game
and because it started then, the words filling up 
the cavities in my mouth, the hollows of my throat
and I couldn’t speak or move
eventually the words leaked through my skin
lacerating into scar tissue and cigarette burn craters
and though I couldn’t speak I learned to write
I couldn’t stop writing
because you said ‘what can I say you are/ what profession/what worth’
when I studied literature instead of law,
because what can you say I am?
I cannot stop writing/ is all I am
I am simile/syllable/syntax
I scribble into voluminous sound
my fingers are always screaming.

my light is not for either of us

A difficult conversation….

“No she’s nowhere here,” she tells him/her/them.

“Don’t you know what they used to do during wartime? when the axis was flying across your waters, and the prescient foretold of sky exploding into fire and desert sand crystalizing into iridescent glass because in a certain slant of light even plutonium is radiant, not merely radioactive and-

don’t you know they’d send their light to the countryside, to till the fields and live amongst the forest sprites, and no you wouldn’t believe in trees though you believe in a man three days dead ascending to the firmament, and that’s beside the point, I don’t want to argue-

this is only the second date.

You ask where my light is, well she’s not for you, and she’s not for me-

when the soldiers reached my skin I sent her away, she lives there now, through the door too subtle for humans to see-

What?

No.

No, I won’t be calling her back.

I am too full of shrapnel, muscle macerated by bullets built to rip through skin. See, from the neck down, I am simply metal teeth and scar tissue and besides she’s happy in the other space-

Of course. That’s where my heart is. So you can see this is why I can’t love you even though you’re loveable and it is your right to be loved. But you can have my thoughts and words and even my good deeds,

and no, no, you’re right, it is not enough, but it is all I have to give.”

folklore

listen, a bowl of raw rice mixed with salt keeps the slighted spirits away, or the unsavoury sort of ancestor, the kind that raped himself into the family tree, and if you’re living in lean times save the rice grains and bribe the local Tom to wait at the door

forgo the pedigrees, the Siberian, Norwegian, Persian!

listen, Filipino cats are good Christians and dutiful, they’ll trick the devil, and if the devil comes to your doorstep, the cat is your sentinel, all riddle speech and slight of paw-

you can enter if you count all the hairs on my body

and when the cat won’t freeze for the fur count,

the lore demands Satan seeks souls elsewhere, perhaps in a household that keeps dogs-

you’ve got cats, of course you do, you’re single and forty and therefore an unquantifiable threat and yes you could manage the devil yourself, haven’t you always sorted these things out? You could coax the tuxedo to the window,

place the calico at the door.

today you’re wanting white rice, and you’ll share some with the errant spirits because life is hard on any astral plane, besides you’ll all feel better for some fat rice, high GI short grain or jasmine, soft grain clouds, starch bowls that feel like love instead of satiety, and this is what you think love is,

carbs that switch to sugar and nestle in the forever belly, and

when you lived with your aunt who was not really your aunt but your mother’s lover, the rice cooker sat pride of place, electronic hearth, and heart

and that night before your mother took you to the Philippines to murder your stepfather’s girlfriend, you ate at the Australian Chinese take away that sold crinkled McCains Frozen chips deep fried in lukewarm oil, but you chose the egg fried rice with salted ham and tinned corn and peas, because your mother was too livid to cook, and you were eleven and this counted as a treat in a regional Australian town.

Even still

it’s not safe to drink water from the sky anymore,

and the soil is laminated in plastic.

even still, the egrets have returned to Cooks River

and across the Tasman the Waitangi has human rights

the plagues won’t stop because the tundra is melting,

because the not-us creatures are homeless and searching.

even still, the winter wattle is in bloom, and all along the estuaries, yellow scrub grins.

and we are a treadmill species moving not moving

even still you see lorikeets glide across campus, nesting in the cabbage tree palms

and when they ask you where do you see yourself in five years ten years

how far on the treadmill would you like to have run, there is the only the treadmill

‘even still,’ you say, ‘I will step into the empty space beside the machine

where do I see myself?

Beside a reborn river,

playing Celtic reels

and speaking soft sounds

on sacred

ground.’