Wild Sovereign Development Site

Author: moseara

  • that lamp

    I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and windy we light the lamps tagsüber. Near the beer factory is a tiny art printer who lays on canvas and on fine rag paper people’s photographs and paintings. We left the lamp on at home and went out. He showed me some of his work. He opened a drawer and let me roll some of the beautiful paper in my hands.

    Nearby is a tucked-in kind of cafe which you can barely see from the road, it is screened. Inside is like a secret fish tank. The chalkboard says You like cake. We make cake. Cake CAKE. We ordered cake. “Eighteen fifty,” said the guy. Cake is expensive. I said, “Now that was a very good year.” “Huh,” he said. We sat down and went over the book I am bringing to print this week: page after page of it, is it still beautiful, does it still hold. You’re looking for the tiny cracks and nail holes that let seep gradually the water. At the far end of the place a handsome man lay back in his chair. Stroking lazily his little device. He didn’t lift his eyes off it. His daughter dressed from head to toe in pink ballerina costume lay in a pile on the concrete playing dreamily with blocks they have stacked down there, singing and rousing on herself. She was in her own world, he was in someone else’s. Two men came into the cafe and I heard the guy recycling my pale joke. “19.90,” he said, “now there’s a good year. You’d be finished school, out into the world…” Behind my back I could almost hear them gazing at him blankly. I felt bad about the failure of the wordplay I’d transmitted, as though I had set him up.

    Later the night turned out fresh and enchanted, so strange, those nights that bring home the spirits from the deep sea and the mountainside. I lay in the hammock between two large trees, watching as the wind rustled and tumbled like cities through surf, down to the bony ground again and again, carrying in itself everything whole and real, everything breathing. This month I don’t know if you’ve noticed but again the full moon was full or albert full for days and days. This always feels like some kind of special benediction to me, as though we have been given a treat, like we have pulled off a trick somehow and gotten away with something.

    I should end there but there is something more to say. You know the night? In the night if you lie in a hammock you are in the air, you’re in the water. I gazed up, mostly with my eyes closed, into the depths of the tree, the sparring webwork of the lazing bed, the night itself drawing its fleece across the stars. It felt like one of those nights you could climb up into, curled as I lay curled, and the night would heal itself round you seamlessly and simply carry you away.

    When I came in my partner called me over to his screen. He loves the new. He wanted to play me a piece of music, piano music. We were silent, listening to the climbing sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, I said, it’s beautiful. He said, “It’s the first piece of music not composed by human~” “What?” I stood up. I think I was shouting. “Why did you play me this? Why did you?” “What’s the matter?” “Why do you show me this stuff?” “I thought it would make you feel good! It’s not scary, it’s just beautiful. Listen how lovely that is.” When someone who understands doesn’t understand: the world is a cyborg desert already. I said, “I can’t take it. I can’t live in a world where machines compose music. I can’t live.” An ache spread inside my chest, despair, hopelessness, rage. Within me I felt the impaired moon, the night, the thoughts of serene pursuit drain like soap scum away. Poke the pearls and they are merely bubbles, evaporating, the >plink<. Someone let the plug out of the sky and I felt all the buoyancy of things drag slowly down, my heart is hot and sore and sleep seems more oblivion than restorative hammock in a sea of quiet leaves which sparkle like near stars.

  • shop where they sell bottles

    I went into the bottleshop and found the most approachable face. A guy from Canada. I told him, I only drink red. Ordinarily it’s cheap. But I want to spend maybe four dollars more and buy a wine that’s gonna make me go: That is why people spend money on wine.

    His eyes lit up. An enthusiast. He asked me what we were eating tonight and what kinds of wines I liked. He guided me down to the back of the shop. Underneath the shelves of botrytis they had an opened box. This, he said, this you will like. It totally over delivers.

    At the counter I got talking with his colleagues about how I was trying to educate my palate. The blonde girl shook her head. That’s a great idea, she said, except… You were happier before? I guessed. She said, brushing his arm, We were just talking about this. How learning to appreciate French champagne ruins your palate for ~

    I interrupted. Ruins your life? Yes! she said, nodding emphatically. Or, I suggested: short bursts of happiness interlarded with long eras of works you don’t want to… Yes, she said, that too.

    Outside the shop the night had ripened like a blue-veined cheese. I passed a heavily-muscled man who wasn’t short but looked it, because of his thickened build. I was dressed in a long wool skirt over my pajama pants and he was wearing gym shorts. As we came towards each other we both tipped our heads back to see the sky, its golden flukes, its beckoning well of pale blue. Its sense of light being backed by the dark, like a painting on velvet.

  • suicide: it’s the silence

    Every time somebody private or prominent dies by their hand, there is a rush of resentment, frustration and grief. Responses like this one begin to appear, many of them driven by the feeling I remember… People who care about people point out that those among us who are most sensitive, empathic, engaged, and gifted, who do the most good to humanity, are exactly the ones who most suffer from sadness and grief at the cruel state of things, from informed fear about our future, sometimes from the tendencies to depression and psychological disorders that can make self-murder seem like a life-saving relief. I know these feelings from my own history. I remember the frigid isolation of knowing there was no one I could make myself known to, who would listen and not judge, not dismiss or undermine or cover over or muscle in on my fears. When is our tipping point? How many bears on the ice? How many island nations with intricate shell currencies and hand-carved feathered cultures nowhere replaceable? How many languages, how many artists? How many species of feathered companions improbable, exquisite, helpless and lost? How many species of humans do we hand over to this convention of closedness, given that we each represent a wild, fresh, unknown, exotic, unprecedented breed, a new world of thought and invention and insight, a whole world of humanity written in one daft pinhead. How much diversity are we prepared to throw under the wheels of industrialised life before we wake up and embrace each other? I look into the heart of me, my beloved, my closest friends. Any one of us could have been lost to our own isolated sadness and guttered hope. In my mind these thoughts gather, forming a single phrase: the silence is killing me. How much more vivid bold planet do we junk before we really wonder where we are going to live? How many more sweating, cursing, loving, ridiculous and delicate people do we sacrifice to depression, anxiety, exhaustion, loneliness and plain sadness before we are willing to talk about one another’s pain?

  • alone at last

    I have this really long poem which I have rewritten decisively – indecisively – thoroughly over about four or five years. It’s five pages long and it’s called Reaching for the Remote – about our longing despite celibacy for gods. Did I say celibacy? I mean atheism. This poem is one of three reasons the book I completed six years back cannot yet be published. It’s infuriating. I love the book. I want to hold it in my hand. Its title strikes me as genius, listen up: Comb the Sky with Satellites, It’s Still a Wilderness.

    The other two reasons are a poem called We and Yet We, about colonialism, which I rewrote yesterday and think I may finally have wrestled to the mat, and the cover, which is made from salvaged cement bags, which I have sourced and designed and all of that only I cannot find anyone who can print in full colour on this brown-paper surface. Anyway today I dragged out all six major versions of the poem. I set them all side by side on my tiny screen. I made a big pot of tea and banished the cat. I set to work. Mumbling aloud and compiling slowly like an ant dragging large crumbs of earth these ideas which stand larger than I do, weaving them all in the way they seem (today) to best speak for each other. Like a entire school called before the headmaster and no one will dob anyone in. Anyway I’ve done it. I read it three times. My eyes are swimming, my brain is numb. I think I have completed it, I’m so pleased and relieved, now the book can go ahead. Or it could be just today. You know how you need to leave things several weeks to be sure they aren’t playing tricks on you.

  • a strange moustache

    Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” “What?” she said. “Queensland Poetry Festival. We have this fantasy that my poetry book & my CD will be out by that time but I think…. it’s not going to be both.” She picked up my loyalty card and said, “Hey! You’ve got a free one here.” Instead of throwing the full card away she passed it back. “You should keep that.” It had a bright yellow postage sticker on it, for tracking an overnight bag. “Ok,” I said, “but I think you better stamp it anyway. Just in case I try to come back and claim that free coffee again.” She said, dryly, “I think I might recognise you.” I said, “Wearing a fake moustache.” We started to laugh. “Dark glasses,” she said. She said, “I think the cup might give it away.” I was lying on the counter, laughing. “So if someone turns up,” I gasped, “in a plastic moustache – and a big hat – and dark glasses… and a shonky foreign accent – ‘Chello. Do you haff ze decaf?’ – I have to confess that might be me.”

  • buried in something

    Waking up on a hill in Brisbane when the sky is white and high, like the city is buried in something. Who can have buried us, where have they gone? No other city has contact with us today, we are a city-planet wandering in its walls. I feel my house like a boat, we are an ark, we are going down the river. Going down. The water drains from the tub. Dragging my hair away from its roots, sucking the spine. I’m in memory of pelting-rain days when it seemed all the tropics had visited at once, the lawn drowned, the garden disappeared, the dim loom of fence line was like a city of spires on the horizon at last when you gaze up the coast, I’d scarcely have heard the phone if it rang and there was only ever me and these small cities luminous in my mind, me and these paints and guitars, me and these pages. Like a cathedral high white sky makes my thoughts small. Closed into my own narrow boat on the gangway jostled with other boats to market, brimming with scented fruit, we gain the free dire deeps of the dark ocean and know it is under us by the change in sounds: engine noises. Confusion of shouting. Blessed quiet comfort of the day. Inside my vessel. Beside a fireplace in my mind. Tending a habitat. On which I fry and dissect things. As a child preparing perfumed essences from the walled garden in which we lived I knew: if you stir in a little of everything, peace rises in the jar quiet as a round gas.

  • drawing from life

    Went to my first life drawing class in eight years. Boy, was that challenging. For one thing, the models were clad rather than naked and I had never tried to draw drapery before. Also, they were never still. The organisers of this local class had asked a hairdresser who operates across the road to bring his barber’s chair and give someone a haircut, on the dais, so that we could sketch them. He had mutton chop whiskers down the one side of his face and on the other temple the tattoo of a flame, which very much resembled a matching sideburn. When he took his shirt off for the longer poses people gasped. Rioting pin-up girls and 50s bathing beauties disported themselves on shoulders and back. I fingered my unpierced earlobes uneasily. How do people get up the nerve to do that to themselves?

    Our barber seemed to regard tattoo decisions as some kind of impulse buy. He pointed out one and another that he had thought better of; one arm was almost entirely blacked over to rid him of some ‘tribal’ tatts he no longer wanted. He’s going to get it drawn over again with white ink. I didn’t know you could do that. His hair was immaculately waxed and the volunteer, once done, looked natty too. Gorgeous boys. I was drawing and drawing. Trying to get the hang of it. Remembering snippets my last teacher had told us: like, Don’t draw the outline, the outline doesn’t exist. Draw the bulk, the heft, the volume, the weight. Because we were seated in the round people ended up as backdrops in one another’s drawings. At the break everybody got up and circled, pointing out pieces they likes and taking photographs. Slowly it dawned on me some of our efforts would be mounted on the group’s Facebook page. Last time I drew, phones were not smart. Facebook didn’t exist. There was no one to hear you in space when you screamed with frustration at the immense difficulty of the line, that doesn’t exist, the weight and the heft, which must be almost felt as much as seen, and the flicking sound one’s eyes make reading the page and then the figure, the figure then the page.

  • some delightful stranger

    Some delightful person left a little note in our letterbox this week, thanking us for something we had not done.

    It is wrapped in a glossy little gift box hot pink with white polka dots, which folds open like a Chinese takeaway. There’s something so satisfying about those boxes. Inside is a mess of silver glitter, a note, and half a dozen transfers which are intended as play tattoos. One says, backwards:

    We accept
    the love
    we think
    we des
    erve.

    Another has a Day of the Dead skull drawn on it with flowers round the bone. The note, when I unfolded it, read:

    “Thank you for being so kind this morning when I parked in front of your house. I was running late & had nowhere else to park, your kindness was appreciated! Have some temporary tattoos for your kids!”

    It is a strange feeling to be thanked for someone else’s kindness. But I loved it. I wish I could get hold of this stranger and put them in touch with their real recipient. Only as I write does it dawn on me the obvious thing to do will be box it all up again, glitter and all, and deliver it to my lovely neighbour, who likely is the real fairy godfather. It is such a lovely sensation to open the crackling box, spill glitter on my toes, read the cutely lettered note and know that some person did some other person a small, meaningful favour and that other person noticed and appreciated it, and has gone to some trouble to thank them.

  • can he floss: not so sweet

    I was seeing this guy once who got comfortable enough to start flossing in front of me, thus revealing his ingenious method: he’d extract the string of floss periodically and holding it still taut between his fingers, sniff at it. Possibly the most repulsive act I’ve ever seen in my life & I could never kiss him again, the relationship foundered. Anybody got anything grosser? And do I really want to ask this question?

  • my god, I’m so drunk

    My god, I’m so drunk. What happened is: it’s all Diamond Dave’s fault. What I mean to say is: we went out to see him play. We were walking and on the way several bauhinia trees stretched themselves across the cyclone-wire fence of a local public playground, I pulled them down towards the ground and took half a dozen flowers, thinking: I have never seen Dave play, I can throw these to him on the stage. In the pub.

    The pub it turns out is, like, the happiest bar I have been in for several years. There were six people in there when we came in, plus a barmaid whose long slender legs had tattooed across the hem of her leather skirt, “forever young.” “If only she knew,” I said to my Berlin companion, whose height people in public places remark on. But fuck them. Dave’s number one fan came reeling up to us and gasped and let his hand fall open like a slow present. “You!” he said, “are like the new Jerry Hall. Oh. My. God.” I was laughing. “When I die and I finally get reincarnated… I wanna come back AS YOU.”

    My darling bought us a beer. It was a German beer whose name the scribbled bar girl could not recognise when he pronounced it the German way. “Oh,” she said, “Doppeldingsbum.” Our friend Diamond Dave, or so he claims (“Is that really my name?”) was playing covers as though his life hung from them. I felt ashamed, abashed, totally awakened at the sound, I had never heard him play in all those years we had been friends and yelled into my companion’s sweet ear, “He’s just a natural born rock star!” He was. He is. The bar filled with revellers. Some of them were 21 and some were 62. The bald guy making eyes from across the bar began to dance as Dave poured himself into “Love is the Drug,” an exquisite cover, absolutely defined again by his rolling bass.

    Probably my favourite song for the night was the Sunnyboys, “Alone With You.” Lord, was I dancing. That just never gets old. And then Dave struck up something of Elvis’s, can’t remember what it was, oh! “Hound Dog”! and the bald guy across the bar left off leaning and started slowly grooving. Like he was wearing a hole through the floor. I strode round to join up with him, sashaying good, and we both sang it out as people do who love music and are perhaps drinking, who knows, it’s the Valley. A whole pile of people poured in. There were two gigs upstairs and one in the back room. “It’s a labyrinth,” said my friend when he came offstage. I left my beer standing there and the man I’d been dancing with bowed with his hands, like Thai masseurs do, “Thank you, lady,” he said, “thank you, love.” Later on he turned up at my elbow saying, “Can you introduce me,” and then grinned into both our faces, saying, “You are suited, you look right together.” He told my boyfriend, “She’s a great girl. I mean! She’s super great!” But I let my beer stand and went out to explore the back. It was noisier. Death punk vibe. There was the girl with cherry bomb hair and long black leather jacket. There was – hey! Dusty Anastasiou waved cheerily, next on the bill, I promised I would go see them play but then my boyfriend threw an accidental beer over me, I forgot. Anyway we slunk home cold and reeking of alcohol. “I can’t believe you threw that over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Falklands veteran who told us all his archaic and sad, tired, unpleasant history and by his side the little punk boy whose girlfriend, fiery-dyed and fearlessly tattooed up like a Maori warrior queen, sang along every word with some Nirvana song I’d never heard of, such is music, the shared ecstasy and the narrow individual dream that takes up all the moors and can encompass every wonder, every effort, every thing. I came home stripping off my beer clothes and barely knowing anything, deep in the serenity, close friend to a rock star and light as lager foam in my soul, on my feet, all down the front of me, wherever you’d want to be: the music has always been there first and is what guides us, canary singing in the coal mine, “You’ll be safe here, you’ll be sweet.” Good night, canary dear. I love you.