Author: myfwilliams

The options after return ( non-fiction in progress)

Suicide is always an option for me. It is certainly not the most favourable. But I am a woman who likes to anticipate all possibilities, I must note the points of ingress and egress. Yes, I need an escape route. I am cursing myself for returning here, to this place of jagged, curved beauty, to this place of fear. Only a person inflicted by Thanatos, the death instinct, enters a poem into a competition in her hometown. A town she has avoided for 12 years, because of her mother and all that her mother entails. What am I, but someone who flirts with liminality? The hometown writer’s centre publishes my poem; I agree to read at the launch. Rather than using my pen name, they publish my actual name on their website. I don’t blame them; the Arts is not funded in this country. They are understaffed by overworked volunteers. A quick google search and you could trace me.

Thinking of you makes me suicidal.

Feeling hunted, I return to the place that birthed me in fear. It is a narrow place, nature dictating where intruders can settle, a strip of land between escarpment, between mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I have learned from the fearful place that there is always an escape. The sea will always take me, and the headlands will oblige, if I ask. A few loose rocks and the cliff will release its cargo.

This strip of land is beautiful, in the same way that the violin is beautiful, with its curvatures and jagged edges, depth and tone. If I stand in the correct space, I’ll find the natural harmonics, the precise piece of earth that vibrates. And here is the hope. If you find me, let the earth take me instead. This is my plan. I will walk past the Norfolk Pines, those pencil point ones denuded of needles, those ones that house generations of cockatoos, trained in the art of fried food thievery by the incorrigible seagulls. I will press wet sand between my toes and watch the patches of sea twist brown and green and blue. The water will have me before I ever return to you.

What is wrong with me that I am terrified of you? We share DNA. You birthed me. How can I fear a person who is half of myself?

Sacrifice

What does she want but to charm
the swallows and make the trees dance,
Almost Orpheus, but a woman
with an instrument,
not from heaven, but Hades.

A sacrifice is needed.
Take them. An ovary and an eye, she whispers,
Let me hang beneath the banyan tree
Almost Odin, but a woman,
I am used to hanging
I am used to bleeding, she says.

But first suspend her from that leafless tree, 
With grandfather’s beard draped upon 
Its branches, like chain mail of fallen soldiers
Where currawongs perch, crow-like but flightless
Dismember me, she says.
I am used to it.
In time, I will reassemble.

If you stay too long in the sea (poem in progress)

If you stay too long in the sea
The mermaids will take you, her cousin said,
a bored babysitter, fourteen.
Reluctantly, she exited, four and in love
with wave texture, 
sand texture
in love with all that
reliably rose and fell -

If you walk on the cliff rocks alone
The men will take you, her mother said. 
Instead, she brought a kitchen knife
and clambered along capricious cliffs
Seventeen, in love with all that was
Predictably harsh, in love with a
A cadence of crest and crash.

If you bring a towel, 
We’ll be more comfortable, the boy said.
Twenty-one and agreeable, 
She lay in the private cove 
Hidden but exposed.
Twenty-one and watching beyond him
Wanting the salt on her skin
Her body submerged
As the shallows caressed her. 

If she leaves now, she thinks,
She will arrive before the families 
Thirty nine and sensible she arrives at dawn
Seeking solace, she wades into the rock pools
A hermit crab peers from its jagged crevice,
Watching, not judging
as she floats on her back
as the rising sky blinds her
and the ocean holds her.

Beware enforced merriment

I hate this time of year, particularly the time of year between Christmas and New Year. It seems to be a fallow period, where nobody is expected to do much of anything. Either that, or we’re encouraged to party, lest the incoming year be worse than the last.

I made the mistake of taking time off. A non-writing writer is a recipe for madness. Hopefully, I am beginning to emerge from such madness. Before Christmas, I finished the 3rd draft of my novel. I decided to take a week off to let the novel rest (kind of like letting bread rise overnight), but I found myself cast adrift without a project to anchor me.

So thank goodness it is now the 2nd January and I can walk away from the week of enforced idleness and the pretense of merriment. This week off has made me think about how important creative life is to our souls. I have certainly sacrificed for my art, but in many ways it is not a sacrifice at all.

This morning I found myself spreading half my toast with vegemite and the other half with jam. Don’t try it, it’s not a good combination. But over the past six months I have only been working in paid work for 2 days a week, so of course I am broke. I worked 7 days a week, 5 days writing and 2 days in paid employment. While not having enough money to buy jam, or pay for bus fare, I don’t think I’ve ever been as fulfilled.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I would happily return to an age where a wealthy benefactor paid writers good money to compose sycophantic plays or too long poems in their name. It is difficult living in an age (and country) where the arts gets little funding, and the choice is often one between financial comfort and artistic expression. Hopefully, I will find a balance between the two one day.

But I guess my message here is, don’t take time off from your passion/obsession/project/opus/campaign just because people tell you that you should rest over the holidays. Of course, recharge if you desire it, but don’t rest for the sake of resting. If you are a mad obsessive like me, work is rest and rest is work. For mad souls like me, we need our projects in the same way that we need water.

Protection song (a poem in progress)

I am still working on this, but wanted to share the first verse.

The violin is what you play 
when you can’t sing.
Red backed fairy wrens 
know their mother’s song
before they hatch 
to protect themselves from
birds of prey. 
The violin is what you play
when your mother didn’t have a song for you,
but you’d like to find your own 
Protection song.

voiceless speech

The craft is a challenge,
but those who severed her tongue
left her hands intact;
in time her fingers self-cripple with
bow,
brush, 
needle,
nib.

“Talk why don’t you just talk!”
they scream with impatient tongues 
that pummel like fists.
Silent, she turns away.
A conversation is not a competition.
and she is battle sick.

Dexterous and nimble,
this is how she speaks:
stitched ciphers and threaded testimony
type,
tone, 
texture,
tension. 
There are many ways to whisper-
this happened and I exist.

Things that writers do to write better

1. Accuracy and realism

So, I am trying to learn the guitar. Not because I want to learn the guitar that badly, but one of my characters plays the guitar. What does rock n roll sound like in prose?

Honestly, I don’t like playing the guitar, the strings hurt my fingers and I keep trying to hold the guitar neck like a violin fingerboard. The frets are meant to make things easier, but it makes the fingerboard look like a complicated chessboard.

I prefer the violin, which I’ve been learning for 4 months. None of my characters play the violin. Maybe they should?

My neck hurts.

2. Read widely.

Virginia Woolf said that if you read a book a day, the words will flow out of you. I’m juggling four novels for inspiration.

A publisher told me that I should also read genre fiction to learn how to keep the plot moving.

I’m reading Dickens’ Little Dorritt, Grenville’s The Secret River, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Steven King’s The Institute.

The words are flowing from me all right.

So now I have a child with telekinetic abilities, living in 19th century colonial Australia speaking Harlem slang. None of my sentences are shorter than 8 lines and I have too many semi-colons.

Nobody wants to read that shit.

My head hurts.

3. Focus.

I need to finish this draft soon. I also have a day job and I need to get another day job that pays for my cats, and for more books. And for a new bookshelf to store the new books.

But there’s Netflix, Stan, Disney Plus, ABC iview, SBS On Demand… We live in a golden age of streamed television.

Plus, there’s the baby beanie for my friend’s son. My friend has been waiting on it for eight years. I really should finish it soon.

I really am learning the violin. There’s so many ways to sound crap on the violin. I should practice.

Everything hurts.

The Wayfarer

Soul weary. She feels it all.
beneath her worn sneakers and too high arches, 
a quickening. The earth’s arrhythmic pulse. 
They who follow her shallow footprints
gouge their own eyes and 
plead congenital blindness.
Along the cobbled path,
she becomes reluctant mother
to adult children.

Soul weary. No annual or 
compassionate leave to grieve
ecological collapse, her country a crematorium for
marsupials and monotremes she never knew,
folding into burned scrub, while birds fall
featherless into a reverse phoenix fire,
each species’ death
a faded footnote 
of Anthropocene history.

Soul weary. They call her way-shower instead 
Of wayfarer, 
But they’ve always pronounced
her name wrong, those who plug
their ears and cry deafness.
those who follow but forget they have feet. 
All she ever wanted
was to travel buoyant
in a worldspace so dense 
that any light is victory.

Soul weary. Let her rest a moment, 
let her crawl into the undergrowth of the casuarina 
cathedral, a dying mammal seeking solace 
in 
a 
narrow 
space.
And may the Cormorants 
and Great Egret, which sit atop this pine steeple
wake her from deathless sleep.
Otherwise, let lichen spread skin-wise, 
let blood turn to algae
and fungi cushion her feet.

Near the tidal river

For my friend, N.

brotherfriend, she met him near the tidal river, where the jacarandas break their bloom.
he sang her Presley and Sinatra and told her of the fall-
skull-side, Broca-Wernicke side, 
brain space where words are born
after the fall and his syntax silenced and 
morphemes 
meandering.
he couldn’t speak but could sing Summertime, 
because you always remember your first
song. 

brotherfriend, she met him near the tidal river, where the terriers piss on her
buttress root stage, and the magpies munch worms in their paperbark stalls.
he watched her from his Tarago, 
but it wasn’t that sort of watching
and it wasn’t that sort of van and he chose his words
as though tasting, moving from mouth roof to tongue tip 
to lip so she caught the words in her eyes long before hearing
sisterfriend with the fiddle,
I didn’t want to disturb.
brotherfriend, she said, I was born disturbed,
beneath the sclerophyll sky, 
the air here is free
take a seat,
sing wordless for me.

brotherfriend she met him near the tidal river, where the mangroves swallow 
second-hand breath
he used to have nouns, 
abstract, 
proper, 
collective 
they used to hang from him and slide slipshod into speech. 
clever was a mask made of words, quick as the blue tailed wrens,
brotherfriend he sang to the aged, 
the dopamine deficient/ amyloid plaqued
brain dying,
-I bought him this before he passed. I can’t remember its name, three strings
 I’m leaving Sydney soon and I’d like you
to have this-

sisterfriend novice fiddler, joy junkie (connoisseur)
sisterfriend she walked from the tidal river, where the wordless gather in sound
because the jacarandas break their bloom 
and the terriers mark their trees 
and the mangroves gift them air and 
sisterfriend she walked towards heavy heat and bitumen boiling,  
a dead man’s dulcimer speaking
simply 
against her
sweat coated skin.

Not our 9th symphony (apartment clang)

For Jaki

Listen neighbour friend,
Not our ninth symphony but a song cycle,
Where the whimper becomes a roar.
You bring the wind and I’ll bring the string. 
Come dance a jig, waltz, Charleston,
move slowly, move quickly, just move.
Play andante, allegro, just play
in time or out
Off-key or not-
don’t stop
don’t stop.

Come neighbour friend,
You bring the wind and I’ll bring the string. 
Rouse the feline chorus with a disquieting whir. 
And we’ll play as we dance over moss coated pavers, 
spring planters and silent doors. 
And if we fall let us rise, 
If we can’t play, let us sing.
If we can’t sing, let us shout.
This is not our 9th symphony so
let our whimper be a roar.

Like that, neighbour friend.
You move the wind while I move the string.
This is not our 9th symphony,
And our whimper is a roar.
Two four, three four
four four-
Keep playing, keep dancing.
Drown their war words with soul song.
Drown their shatter words,
their bludgeon words.
All those weapon words that fracture the air.

For more poems from The Fiddle Series, please see the Poetry tab on the left. https://word-upon-word.com/a-cry-for-help-unsolicited-poetry/