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.
Tag: nightfall
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crepuscular
As the evening creeps across the land/groping its way towards us like the bleeding protagonist stabbed who refuses to die/darkness is a promise/like cousin cool/do you promise? I have sweatered so much this day I can jumper no further.
As coolth lays its stealth in a beam lowly under the trees/we stagger out/of the shopping mall carrying strawberries and tomatoes in my hat/swung by its string, a bonnet punnet/and all the trees/little and large and oblivious to cars one hopes/lay their shadows down/long on the green evening grass like ballgowns’ trains/everything wonderful cool beneath the branches/one by one the skateboarders pluck their boards out of the water and go home.
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exact same clothes
Landsakes, do I feel cute. I helped someone out with some really boring writing work and feel all neighbourly & useful. We decided to celebrate with a beer. I had opened my two storage boxes (for posting back to Australia) and after months of wearing the exact same clothes ~ same jeans, same orange jumper, same ratty old Tom Waits~as~Jesus t-shirt ~ had dug out my ugg boots: ugg boots! And also a pair of huge dungarees: dungarees! So me and Tom Waits and the dungarees and ugg boots set off for the beer shop. Berlin is twilit. The streets are damp and swishy. Two guys were arguing at an Indian restaurant trestle and the end of their table said, in thick black marker pen, I love you. I loaded up four pockets with beers and came back with my friend’s dog whom he had dressed in honour of my new old clothes in a natty neckerchief. We were the wild West. Which is tame in this town. This looping, roaring, sprawling, sunbathing, dog-loving six-storey city.
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knifegold
An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.
One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.
Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.
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like lamps
Just now walking down the street the most miraculous small experience. It’s growing dark and the shop windows glow like lamps. I came out of a side street full of bars and cafes onto a shopping strip thronged with parcels. Among the clots and clumps of other people approaching from the opposite direction I met eyes with 10, 12, fifteen, twenty strangers: we each of us looked into each other seriously, momentarily: and it felt like we exchanged between us something palpable. Sometimes the early dark and gloomy days here crush me unbearably. Other times it feels like the civilisation that has built itself here and endured and spawned so many writers, so much beauty, so much music and art, says: we have woven something here. We light our lanterns as the cold closes in. We endure and turn our endurance into a survival and our survival into a flourishing life. We defy you, winter! We defy you, death! We defy you, lack of meaning!
Even as I think this I am wondering, too: is it not in fact death, and decay, and winter, that give meaning to life, and evolution, and spring? Seems like it is and I am only too frightened within my own mortal mind to see it.
