1095 not out, or, 3 years of love

there are things about you that are almost unbearably
good, like how when you say ‘sphinx’ – to describe the way the cat
rests upright over your arms – you merge a ‘c’ with the ‘sph’
sound so that it is almost germanic, as though you were saying
the word ‘sphincter’ with a textural emphasis – sphincter is indeed
not a casual word – (both words come from sphingein, meaning
‘bound tightly’ – though not, it would seem, from german but from
latin via greek – and this is a very nice connection to discover here)
or – and this is a sensual choice to make – you say the word
‘demon’ with a small thuddy ‘d’ on the end, as though it were
too much a temptation not to  echo the nub of ‘almond’,
itself a nicely finished sound, a plug, a stop, a cork.

uttering

a stocktake of things to say, listed on newly sheafed piles
‘it is my right, my rite, my desire to speak like a goat’
there are few reasons rather than this one to need to use a noun
i’m thinking here of the german language, and childhood.
there are many very impressive ways to groan a point across
like to say, ‘yeah, but… i just… but…’, that last word like a drummy
punctuation, a thing that was always discouraged in language,
putting it on the end like a plug or a soapstone book-end, shaped
like a pelican – one inverted leftwards and one rightwards – and
then falling into someone’s arms and speaking right up into
their throat (as if you were their voice box) and saying very unusual
and untruthful things, like ‘no!’ and ‘i didn’t!’ and ‘i don’t know!’

new solipsism

as many of you know, on the twenty-fourth
of this eleventh month
my role as myself will be up for re-election.
i hereby pledge the following election promises:
to my lover, i promise to be forty-percent more sassy.
i will add a further fifteen minutes to
our weekly love-making time,
i will be twice as effective in quashing anxieties,
and i will be less abrasive in respects
to your sleeping habits.
to my cat i promise to begin a ‘pet revolution’,
to my neighbour i declare the beginning
of a ‘ladder of witty greetings’,
to my flatmates i will impose a zero-
tolerance approach to floating
poos left in the toilet bowl, and to
cat hair and loud noise and crumbs.
to my parents i promise thirty more
phonecalls per house per annum
and downward pressure on surliness and
childishness.

the poetics of liveliness

my review of the material poem has been published here at jacket magazine.

or a thousand tiny wires, or hairs

i’m remembering a time when i had thought the words
but had never said them aloud – on the subject of these
things that should be said from time to time, or never –
and then it came the time to say it and the words were
a texture i couldn’t understand – like okra or fibreglass –
and you were very quick to laugh at the performance of
me – mouth crawling with hairy grubs – trying to say small
so-and-so things to you

how many fingers am i holding up?

i’m typing this with dully blurred eyes.
maybe it’s better this way, not to focus
like blades on words and their form and
the way they knit tightly into permanent
positions. this way, they are light and grey,
shifting imperceptibly and making sluttish
geometry.

(i don’t know whether i’d consider last night’s
dinner a real dinner. it’s a classification that
troubles me greatly.)

& the oh-so-beautiful

this is the stuff of nightmares: imagine if he,
a body so unreal it is countless small holograms –
some red, some green, some blue – was sent to
jail for a crime he hadn’t actually committed (in the
textbook sense, which is, of course, the only
sense that matters here) & his life was limited
to daily affirmations & soliloquies of revelation,
the brunt of many taunts, the rich boy with the
impossible hairdo & a back-catalogue of impregnation.
no, it is far better that these things be resolved in
a playpen of courtroom humdrum led by solicitors
who are swoony peahens ready for blood:
defending the good state of california & those who
dream of justice & redemption

[this is]

tearing & shredding. the jesus-like man starts to destroy all his plaster-of-paris doppelgangers. and he’s raging atop small mountains of sweet potatoes. there’s a whole collection of things to be cleansed and purged, a whole wooden room full of plaster to be smashed. and then, hours of sleep to recoup, curled in a wet noodle on a pile of dust and shards.

*

what is happening. (that’s not a question, by the way. what is happening, as in, [this is] what is happening.) there is tearing & shredding, in that order.

wet smells

there are two things next to my bed: one, a half-full cup of steeped ginger chunks in a tea cup; and two, a sprig of the season’s first jasmine bloom, picked five days ago. both these things are stinky in the finest sense – their smell is deep and pungent, sweet and acrid, filling my sleep with memories of the body.

the ginger is a familiar bodily feeling, that of sickness and tight throats, the heavy sideways dozing that happens when half your head is drained of mucous and the other half is holding it all at capacity. this mucous is solid, shifting with the squeaking pressure of tectonic plates. the ginger is a heat felt right down at the back of the throat, a wet and pleasant heat.

the jasmine is the smell of warmth too, warm evening spent tucked into the roots of lantana, hidden, eating the meat from cold chicken bones and swatting the large, blood-dumb mosquitoes of early spring. these were nights that were long and unknowable, nights that started with mustard coloured skies, nights that brought a new colony of foetal guinea pigs, birthed in small wet beans in a cage, mostly dead by morning. (it may be a dramatised memory, but the jasmine in this image is wild and all-encompassing, covering the weatherboard and growing deep into the kitchen cupboards and the bathroom tiles. the smell was too wonderful and it elicited such a quick breath that the bloom month was spent in a dizzying state of hyperventilation).

slug courtship

there must have been a time when we would have found it nervous-making to see a pair of slugs wrapped together in copulation (scientific discourse refers to the getting-to-know-you stages as a ‘courtship’, but to me it looks like one slug eating another slug out) and producing what looks like a string of decorative bluebottles. in fact, these slugs hang from the bluebottles (which remind me of plasticy windchimes bought from market stalls and taken down because of atonal, clinky sounds) as they wrap together in slugfuck. here, upside down, they exchage their genetic information and make more slugs. yes, there was a time, the time before these slugs, that we were dry-throated, and we liked to avoid such ideas, because they were bad ideas and we were nervous people. we had never sat down and really talked over the potential benefits of two slugs in ecstasy sharing their codes of differentiation: the way that these things bring together any mating couple as a sign of camaraderie, a nod of knowingness. the way that knowing how slugs love each other brings us closer together, links our desires with the bluebottle strings.