On the markets I ordered a cup of coffee under canvas, under trees. The fig trees in Brisbane are extraordinarily broad and they spread lumpy dragon roots as well as branches. “What name shall I put that under?” he wanted to know, and I said, “Toby.” The man looked me over thoughtfully. His eyes were bright and shrewd, his face seamed and gnomish. “Toby,” he said, almost spelling it out, as he wrote it down letter by letter. “That’s my coffee name,” I confided. He let out a shout of laughter. “That’s a good one!” “Uh, thanks,” I said. He said, “See, I’m retiring, and today is my last day.” “Oh, well!” I said, brightening. “In that case, congratulations on a working life well spent, I have no doubt. Here, let me shake your hand.” I stuck out my hand and we shook. He explained, “It’s just that it’s so great for something completely new and fresh to happen on the last day. I was not expecting that.” “My name’s hard to spell,” I told him, “it’s Cathoel, and I don’t like being called Cath. So if you had hollered out ‘coffee for Cath!’ that would have pissed me off.” He was laughing again. “Thanks, Cathoel. I’m so glad you showed up on my very last day.”
Author: moseara
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riverfeier
Saturday night festival of explosions, fireworks and low-flying fighter jets scamming the river. I was standing behind five dark rows of people. Festive. Restive. Everybody chatting. The city stood lit up behind its bridge, then the fireworks started. Without hesitation the crowd bloomed like a field of poppies, dozens of tiny, high-held screens. Disbelieving, I looked around. Everywhere people were holding up their phones at arm’s length like you would hold a small child to show them a marching band. It was impossible to watch the world without seeing it onscreen and multiplied, as though we were standing in a broadcast instead of our lives. A girl near me held up her phone for so long that when the fireworks died the blokes behind her asked, “Aren’t your arms getting tired?” She tucked the screen in to her chest and began seamlessly typing and scrolling. No pause. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” I thought. “There was, and there still is, but who cares.” Watching her mouth tuck itself in at the corner I translated, out of the dim bitterness of my heart: At Riverfire. Amazeballs, you shd see it. Luv u Brisbane.
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supermantra
We were on the markets when a tiny, white-haired lady came up to my partner and offered him a brochure. “Save Victoria Park!” she said. He is two metres tall. He looked down at her with his arms full of leafy vegetables and said, very gently, in a deep voice, “I will.” “Oh, thank you!” As I watched, her whole body relaxed. She believed him. She laid her hand trustingly on his upper arm. From the juice stall behind us Bob Marley was still singing, One love… One heart, a song he started singing forty-odd years ago and he has not given it up yet. As we drove home we both had that song caught in our heads. I said, “That lady! She looked up at you so sweetly. ‘Oh! It’s Superman!’” He laughed, singing, filling in the lyrics he didn’t know with only a slight hesitation: “One love, one soul…” “One love, one groove…” All the vegetables nodded on the back seat whenever we went over a bump, frondy and inviting and waiting to be sliced for German soup.
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lies over Baghdad
Yesterday I entered into a conversation with someone asking, Why don’t the moderate Muslims speak out against terror? I provided link after link as her evasions & demands grew more particular. Those were Americans, how about an Australian. Oh but that’s an Australian woman, why aren’t the Muslim men speaking out? Oh, that was a young man, why don’t we hear from the Muslim elders?
She discredited the testimony of one peace-loving Muslim because he was ‘wearing a Benneton t-shirt.’ I gave her a string of direct links to the Islamic Council of Victoria, the Council of Imams Queensland, and finally His Eminence, Professor Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, Grand Mufti of Australia, who said: ‘It is utterly deplorable for extremists to use Islam as a cover for their crimes and atrocities.’ At last she wrote to me privately. ‘I feel my heart filling with hate. Am I missing something? Why can’t the moderate Muslims speak out?’
This plea from a stony-minded racist unable to hear direct replies which undid all her questions moved me. We must respect one another as human beings, no matter what. I left her with yet another google search turfing up dozens of investigative essays on the media’s stolid determination to ignore repeated denouncing of violence by peaceful Muslims, and turned away. Now: watch here as our Minister for Education deflects accusations with one ruse after another & the Opposition calmly, continually answer and defeat him. At the end of this mash-up his voice is heard, trebly and childishly gloating: ‘My comments get on the telly, yours don’t! You can’t be heard!’
This government, this media are arrogant and they lie. Their arrogance and lies are damaging our climate, our community, our minds. The real jihad is the assault on our planet’s liveability, sidelined by these posturings of hatred. Read widely. Think deeply. Speak out.
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a doll, soused
In my pajamas at 6pm: pajamas are my favourite clothes. The phone rings. It’s a woman I spent a recent evening immersed in, such kinship, a friend who’s an acquaintance, we hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. We used once to live in the same tiny village, an island in the centre of town. “I’ve just scored free tickets for A Doll’s House, it starts at 6.30, I can pick you up on my way.” “I’m in my pajamas.” “Or you could meet me there.” So I dive through the shower and go.
La Boite is in a playground of festival furniture, large swings built from slabs of ply painted black, projections onto a huge white screen, an outdoors bar. Under the stars. Too late arriving to be let in for the first act I take my ticket and wander. “Go up the back and read the secrets people have posted,” the lovely usher tells me in a whisper, “you can write your own secrets on a typewriter, get your nails done, get your palm read.” My friend has disappeared and gone inside. I buy a glass of wine in the pallet bar and carry it over to the palm-reading shed and read the wall. Some of the secrets are so lurid surely they must have been confected for the occasion – I can’t believe such a dark confluence of dramas has wandered past this tent, during the week of this festival. It’s my turn to get my palm read. I hold my hand out. “My name,” says the beautiful man in a top hat, “is Tawdry Heartburn.”
The greatest drag name in all the world. He flexes his fingers round mine and asks questions. Strong, long thumb: do you like standing alone? Emotion line is deep in your palm – Oh, I know, I say – and it runs straight up this finger, the seam of intuition. Broad-handed people are across lots of areas of life. “It may be hard to finesse so many skills.” He drops his voice and confides something of his own. All the stars pricking their way across the roof of this white vinyl tent stand to attention like satellite dishes, I imagine, flowers in the dark sea of night. Salt sea polyps.
Afterwards he draws out of his holster round the forearm, black leather, a brand-new fresh emery board. On the back is stamped his website name: this is his card. I go over to the theatre and go in. The stage is made from pallets and the second act is starting. My friend and I take seats right in front, where we can see, and be shouted over by the five actors who have each dyed their hair some lambent colour, as Ibsen insisted.
Did Ibsen really write this way, a string of almost uninterrupted, seamlessly joined cliche? “They’ve rewritten it a bit,” my friend confides, in a whisper, and I whisper back, “Lord, I hate the theatre.” But the game comes down darkly upon us and snatches us away. At the high point where the spare actors rush out of the wings and turn the stage round like a carousel, breath is caught, time is hung. Then in the interval, climbing our way out of the palace of dark attention, I look back and see the immediate blue glow of a dozen screens. Something has happened on facebook, on twitter, on email while I’ve been gone. I’ll stand and suck my thumb, smallest and dearest of my own limbs. I will, I do.
The music at the end is dense and scoring. It has a three/four beat behind four/four that drives it like a wagon. I stand up with everybody, groping our way back to our feet. Behind me is a face I’ve not seen since New York, a pianist who played on my album. We stand exclaiming, his date is impatient, I turn away and go over to the swing. My friend has gone to have her palm read, she says: I must go meet Tawdry. You will love her, I predict, fearlessly psychic now my palm is read. I lie full-length on the biggest swing under the scaffolding and let my heart hum its own earworm melody, unable to predict the night, sweet and buoyant waiting for the drive home, ready to greet myself, itching for paper, for a typewriter, a studio, for all New York. And Brisbane shines at night, that’s when it’s best and beautiful. Thanks Ibsen for the enduring ideas. Thanks West End for the villagers. I am tired and I drive carefully, the lion on my steering wheel yawns at me all the way home.
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the bouncer in his castle
Sat for half an hour watching this bouncer refusing entry to a drunken girl who had evidently no ID. She tried to show him all her tattoos, including one on the base of her ankle, talking earnestly, presumably explaining how could I possibly have so many tatts, and not new tatts, if I was underage? She pulled out a limp, folded ten-dollar note and tried to hand it to him. She leaned on him and cried. The bouncer was an Islander man with beautiful soul in his face. He held her upright and pretended not to see the ten-dollar note she waved at him. Every time she showed him a tattoo or pulled out her purse to try him with her ATM card he attended, patiently, to what she was saying, refusing to let her drag him into an embrace, smiled, seeming amused but not at her expense. A student of humanity. How I loved him. It was a solid half-hour before she gave up and wove off down the street on her patent white heels, and by that time the flaccid ten-dollar note had made several more appearances. Inside the club two rival brides were dancing with their bridal parties, not actual brides but brides-to-be, each wearing a white veil over a stripper dress and one of them dancing with an inflatable, naked, anatomically correct groom who gradually deflated as the night wore on. When we left I saw one of her bridesmaids clutching him, just half a man now, sitting dispiritedly in a corner nursing her umpteenth umbrella drink. I stopped on the way out to thank the bouncer. “Man, you and your colleague, you are really generous, kind, patient people. I saw how you dealt with that little girl who wanted to come in and was crying. You were really good to her. I was watching you.” His eyes were bright and he smiled hugely. He said, “You know, I was just talking today to Lifeline and I realised, my sister died four months ago today.” “Oh!” I said, touching his arm, “I’m so sorry.” “It’s ok,” he said, “she’s in a better place now, she was a heroin addict.” “Oh, god,” I said. “That’s really sad.” He kept smiling, his eyes liquid. He gestured up and down the street. “You love the people, you love the life…”
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up in the smoke
Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, stoned, could not readily distinguish between these two states: thus I’d be sailing along with a belly full of sailing wind, writing some glorious new tale that had never in the history of Man been told before, and my mind would go: hang on a minute, is that really how you spell epiphany? Or I would look up hours later to find I’d been bogged down somehow in the endless researches or adminiaturism, a smaller and narrower form, a kind of thinking that is usually available to any poet when they’re not stoned, when they are bored, or when they can’t actually come up with a new poem to write. It was frustrating and I’m glad not to inflict it on myself no more.
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dusk, dusk, dusk
The strange screeching of tropical birds spurling into midnight’s blue sky at 6 o’clock, as the night gathers like a dew, forms like a band, a marching band of strange and unaccountable, uncountable, nasty-beaked bird, weird big birds, glossy little birds, green birds and brown. Brisbanana. You are utterly the weirdest, my sweet suburban love.
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stolen man
An African guy who lived in the apartments near me had the warmest smile always courteous and would wait on the pavement if I walked behind him so I could go by was taken away by police, five weeks ago I think, and the pot plants on his verandah are dying and now there is no cooking the evening meal on his tiny barbecue and no whistling to himself and singing as he pegs out his wash, always neatly, always pairing the socks, alone.
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super moon to the rescue
A knock at the door when we finally trudge home, carrying our groceries, exhausted. It’s the darlingest neighbour in the world. “Oh, hi!” “Hey Cathoel. Just wanted you to see the last supermoon.” I have gasped and clapped my hand to my mouth. “Oh my god!” He is telling me, “It was even better last night. But,” confidingly, “it’s pretty good tonight.” I am still gazing at the moon. “Fuck!” I say without meaning to. It has just sailed up coolly from behind a giant building. It has the sky to itself, apart from a few pilot fish like lesser boats milling round the giant sleek swans at the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. My neighbour tells me shyly, “I love the moon.” He is wearing ugg boots and a pair of work shorts. It felt like summer today, suddenly, but it grew chill as it grew dark. When we set off to the shops an hour ago I had to laugh: partner in his ugg boots, me still stubbornly wearing sandals. “The pessimist and the optimist set out on a shopping trip together,” I told him, to make him laugh too.
At the supermarket we saw a display of premature mince pies. They were packaged in festive red and green with silver holly. September, October, November, December. I spoke to a man with a trolley full of plastic bags about whether he might ever think of bringing his own. A look of weariness passed over his face. He explained what I couldn’t know: They use them again. His particular household – the boy gaping silently from behind the flowering trolley – has special exemption. Circumstances. Babies. “We have a baby at home who uses disposable nappies.” I felt the sinking in my heart, could say nothing. He said, kindly, shifting into higher-pitched Real Estate Voice, “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure it’s helping.” You see, it’s different for me. I am selfish. I am lazy. I got my own reasons. We got a baby at home using disposable nappies. God knows you could never wrap those in, say, newspaper. I was blinking back tears and had to run outside to collect myself. When a pair of ugg boots appeared inside my line of vision I looked up. He was blinking, smiling, holding out his hand weighted down with the shopping sack rendered from old cement bags. We walked home and took refuge in our house and then the neighbour winkled me out and now the suberbmoon glides up this grey concrete sky as though drawn on an invisible string. It is blond and impervious to smaller, humbler craft, like the frantically blinking jet plane cruising low toward the harbour. It is better than anything you’ve ever seen. It just is. If you’re alive right now, run outside and look up.