elegy (the birds)

a footpath finch squashed by some footpath fiend.
a mangled mass of feathered innards.

some small grey unidentifiable.

a featherfluffy flatness, ironed on the road like bubblegum.

a bus which ploughed a duckling train
- what could i do? said the driver, brake? and cause an accident?
(this one made headlines)

waterbirds skimming at headlight height across the road. a four wheel drive and a wing thrown wide in sudden distress. as we drove by a duck lay limp in the gutter and i sobbed so much mum stopped and walked me back. to save a fragile life too late. it died quickly, mum reassured me, birds always do.

balloon three.

i am wearing a dress that is like a lampshade and a hot air balloon and a ballgown all at once.

i want to bubble it out and attach a basket beneath and float away on the evening breeze.

over the sea. over the sunsparkles of its skin and the blue depths of its brooding. over its gritty rind. then i'd let all the air out and settle on some lonely pier or flaking rowboat, and watch anemones dance in the tide.

threeweek.

i think i will become a hermit.
i will learn a new language and write in fresh-wrought phrases.
till some earth and murder some vegetables.
allot my hours.
and write letters from my solitude.

little spillage.

a slow tumble of something long constrained is gathering within me. each day teases out a little more, a sentence, a paragraph, words springing ever-quicker to my fingertips, as if they were seeds, dormant inside me and by tending them they have sprung to vinehood, unfurling vigorous tendrils inside my being.

florid, prosy tendrils.

it is a sense of small miracle.

i am off to a party. girding my loins. i'm not sure exactly what that entails but i like the sound of girdlement. a little constrictive. a little saucy. slash sexy.

old sock.

i was gnawing away at a friendship today. gnawing and needling as i put out the washing. sharpening my teeth. we sparred, giggling and parrying, storming and snorting convulsively. i thought he would be angry at me. but i guess it's just that kind of friendship. the kind you can grate away at and manicure your claws on because you're bored, and know you'll go back to normal once your hackles have settled.

i do miss the delicacy of fragile feelings. i think i am the old sock of all his friends.

balloon two.

i am collecting. words on my wall. books. ideas.

i feel balloony. suspended in slow slow expansion. an endless inbreath of other people's thought pressing against the membranes of my mind. i cannot even breathe out yet. i wonder if i will burst. if i can withstand this self-imposed onslaught of information. if ever i will find some way of expressing this gargantuan Inexpressible which is swelling in my skull.

i saw a long-ago friend who asked if i still ate vegetarian out of economic necessity. i told her i was a vegetarian for animal rights reasons. she made a noise of vague disapproval and i ran headlong into the barriers of her Normal Universe.

penance (the boy)

neither life nor location have permitted of late. i am doing my penance with late-night types and flagging eyes.

a boy has infected my sanity. he has stolen my words and whichever ones are left me will not rest on a page until they are his. i am a stranger to this, this beingful longing, this woozy, achey, syrupy desire for another's body. what spell did he weave, that night of blue light and sexy song, when he prowled my peripheries and i loathed him a little?

curds.whey.

i need to springclean my head. it is a repository of all things dusty. decaying facts and useless trimmings, sagging connections and frayed ends plaited in boredom. i can't think for all the fug.

: i am strewn about in pieces. all fragmentary. i can't understand my reflection. so compact. i feel scattered about the space, outside of my body, my thoughts tiny breaths of intention puffing about the world. if mirrors told true i would have an obscurity about my outlines, little tuggings of skin and blurrings of thought dissembling me in a thousand directions.

homogenisation, is what i need.

daphne.

she is my new darling. cream-framed two-wheeler with dusty spokes. i spent a day throwing names at her in the lounge. monique. eva. marguerite. audrey. delilah. they bounced off, old-fashioned glamour girls littering the floor. i began to despair. until daphne; daphne!

(presents for daphne: a basket. some brakes.)

today i listened to a foreign philosopher rant about kant. he pronounced it karnt. "according to kant, we can't..................." and hazydozy with sleeplessness, all i heard was cunt, cunt, cunt.

the chattel.

there is a clause in our lease regarding the property and its chattels.
there was one chattel. a cactus in a terracotta pot. a faded ribbon about its rim. it has been knocked about, hated, used as an ashtray, never watered. yet still it lives. i think i will use it as a christmas tree.

white on bitumen.

a blogbot got its mandibles into my fledgling prose.
a blockbot locked me out.
an unlockbot - which was really a person, an unlockbod - logged me on at last.
(silenced by a blogblocklocklogbot.)

i have a new typer. sleek, blackshelled, with timid keys yellow to the touch. its presence is a challenge: a prose a day. never to be pilfered from challenge part two: an online prose a day. location permitting.

i have been preoccupied of late with the footpath men. white on bitumen, eternally stepping, their legs wide scissors, i seem always to stand in their crotches. their vacant, sexless crotches. yet still i worry. about voodoo. about light-fixed men coming alive in the gloom. about the weight of a foot in a groin.

one such man has been re-endowed. a penis has been drawn in its proper place. also one in his hand, one near his invisible mouth, and one in pursuit from behind. as if the manhoods of all his predecessors had sailed towards him in the force of their attraction.

cranes.balloons.

this is for my oracle/ballerina/sparrow. who thinks so much less of her prosings than she ought. who drew me to these online keys. love.

i abandoned a talent many months past. a secure, hardy talent which i had moulded myself around. it defined my edges so i wouldn't have to myself. only when i left it behind did i discover the humblement of other people's belief in me. of people seeing diamond possibilities in my fuzzy-edged delirium. the undeserved faith takes my breath.

all i want to do is make cranes and balloons.