Tag: prose poetry

What they don’t tell you

Prose poetry in three movements

What they don’t tell you (movement one)

…is that you’ll be clutching at the edges of life, ripping nails clean from your nail bed, leaving bloodied fingertips too wet to grasp ledges. What they don’t tell you is that it’s a loss, nobody tells you that you’ll rake the fur lined, dust coated carpets for powdered residue, that you’ll sneak into friends’ bedrooms just to hold their prescription Endone in your hands, just because…

because there is hope in the holding.

What they don’t tell you is that instead of poppy seeds, you’ll be downing opened bottles of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay, three months opened and more vinegar than wine, that you’ll be eating when your body is not hungry, grease drenched burgers and cardboard fries, but that there is more than one type of hunger. And you’ll run by the river, through muddy, waterlogged grass, around and around soccer fields until your knees lock in protest and the lactic acid paralyses your calves.

That when you can no longer run, you will crawl home and lie on your rug weeping, that the weeping will collect in a pool around your foetal form. What they don’t tell you is that sobriety is grief-stricken, a period of mourning.

That gear was a life partner that held you,

and that person is no longer there.

What they don’t tell you (movement two)

….is that your skin will curl and break, that wounds will weep, and an infection will break, that the compulsion to create will seep from your body. Boils will open and pus will leak, and you will write in a way that you have never written,

in between students and clients, on office note pads, with scratchy ballpoint pens, on pizza take away menus and envelopes screaming overdue bills,

you’ll write

in a grasping, clutching way, and you’ll be driven to sound, to rhythm, to the edges of life, that your ears will sharpen to your violin, attune to the hidden notes on that fretless instrument you play. That your ears will recognise that B is shrill, stern like an old school ma’am, that D is resonant but calm, a yogi and

these are moments you don’t crave opiates,

moments of softness or heart, your cat’s paws on your chest for instance, a friend who buys you Thai chilli basil tofu and steamed rice for lunch, and laughter,

yes laughter, untethered.

What they don’t tell you (movement three)

They use the word clean, but that’s a misnomer, as though passing a drug test means your body is free of the impurities and that’s not true,

the body remembers.

cells remember.

And how can they not remember flesh breaking and heart calcifying and a child running to the corners of breathing so nobody can break her further

Flesh and bone hold your own trauma and the cells your parents’ and grandparents’ trauma. And what do you do with this epigenetic fate?

You pick up your violin and play the saddest of scales, D minor, the musical key for dirges and laments until your neighbour bangs on your ceiling and you stop, but the knowledge is there. You’re working out how to live with the library of knowledge trapped in subcutaneous fat, you’re working out how to hold yourself when gear was the only love who knew how to hold you.

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.

beauty

“what do you like most about her?” you ask

and his brow furrows and his face tightens into a pensive line

“her braces, ” he replies, 16 and certain

also today your friend demolishes a wall to rescue a trapped kitten, five weeks of tortoiseshell fluff and squeak and

your coworker shares her hidden drawer of Cadbury chocolate for those times of internal screaming

another friend sits in the rain and captures water droplets on winter magnolia blooms

and later you’re in a car with someone who feels like safety and together on Canterbury Rd in peak hour

your voices harmonise so there is space for both breath and laughter

and today a kid who has screamed and cried and thrown Lego at the wall for a month looks at you and smiles

for the first time.

day

well inshallah, the shop keeper says, when you shape your face in sympathy and say maybe the day will improve, she has a cervicogenic headache from a stiff neck and she’s alone with the spices today, no one will help, and the headache is bad, terrible-

and you’re only buying frozen okra today, because breathing is expensive, but your mother raised you to survive so you scour the ethnic supermarkets, Lebanese, Greek, Vietnamese, and when you return home, you harvest the green chilli from the plants that have turned to twigs and you pluck the calamanci from your tree and you call it calamanci because cumquat is an ugly sound in your mouth-

two days ago the doctor, he told you no, your heart isn’t dying quite the opposite, and you said what about the chest pain, what about the fist wrapped around my heart with all its grip strength, squeezing and he said well if you can run to the river like you do, then your heart is fine and your blood pressure is superb and your lung capacity is outstanding-

your heart is not dying.

inshallah, god willing.

this is what you know how to do. run. you run to the river, and you keep running so your chest breathes freely and the cormorants swoop to the river’s surface and there are butcher birds in the casuarina scrub, and you keep running-

inshallah, god willing –

the august winds usher the chill but there is always enough sunlight in Sydney even though it’s our turn to flood while other nations burn and you run to your tree that breathes upon the riverbank, the Moreton Bay Fig, whose branches swoop upwards and down and whose buttress roots shelter all the ground dwellers, invertebrate, vertebrate, human.

you run to her because you have many jobs in this octopus world of juggling, of hustling to death, but this is one job that doesn’t exhaust you, custodian, cleaner, protector-

you protect her from your world, as best you can, protect her from the world that makes fists out of hearts, and you pull plastic bags and plastic bottles and glass bottles from her body and inshallah your tree must breathe, she must not suffer under human refuse, she must never know suffering as you do-

Lightnoise

Sydney is obsessed with illumination. Fireworks when smoke encircles the city, old growth forest turning to charcoal. Light that dances on still winter buildings. Air that burns in the chill.

After the plague, people slide from beneath their doonas, step away from their streaming subscriptions and wade through the throng of crying infants and their parents, who are also crying. Inwardly.

After the plague they stand in the winter winds to watch colour move.

How many migrating moths fall to the ash covered pavements, seized by their own epilepsy, their inner compass broken?

That’s Sydney.

After the plague.

How contagious its lights, its movement-

frenetic,

garish,

intrusive.

After the plague we must keep moving, even if the sound of light invades the silence and

Give me stillness.

Let the sky breathe.

Leave the architecture be, let the buildings slump into night’s cocoon.

Let it be.

One woman

And now, I think I can play in 6/8 slip jig time, though my bow slides out of its third lane and is maybe a bit too scratchy for classical, but might fit in, for folk, for trad music-

there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune, the story is as much technique as the ornamentation, the slides, the rolls, the double stops-

I can almost play a double stop now, so it sounds like two violins are playing simultaneously

when really it is just me, one violin.

One woman.

You always said I was magic, a witch.

This wasn’t an insult, you said.

So, there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune and I can do that. I can tell stories. Of how I started playing beneath the paper barks, under magpies and currawongs, listened to music from the West Coast of Ireland, Counties Clare, and Sligo, and no I won’t forget Donegal where the fair folk still emerge in the gloaming-I can tell you that I listen over and over until the music merges with my bones and I feel a rhythm moving through me, and the rhythm,

the rhythm,

brings stories and though I live on stolen land-

I can tell new stories.

I can do all this.

You said I was a witch.

It wasn’t an insult, but maybe a warning?

I am one woman, with rhythm moving through her.