Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: writing life

  • love in public

    I saw two girls, two women, long-haired and standing round bags, close together on the subway and talking American. The train jolted round a corner and the girl nearer me fell against her lover as if accidentally, snatching a kiss as she fell. The lover was displeased, detached herself, stood gazing out at the striped blackness underground. I supposed that the kisser maybe felt, hey we are so far from home, we are safe here, and nobody knows us. I supposed the kissee felt, now: none of that, people are looking, we’re in public, we’ve got to lock it down.

    I saw two men, two boys, in their middle-age running a bubble stall from a bucket on the crowded square. It is Saturday night and everybody is out. The incredible din. The shrieks and the rumble. A high bus goes past with no lid on its upper storey, crammed with tourists taking pictures who crane as their bus turns a corner then turn their backs, gazing ahead as though now none of this any more even exists for them. The bubble venders are busking, they have two long poles joined by a slack rope and a slightly shorter string, so that when they have dipped their poles and pulled them out and separate them slightly, one string pulls tight and the bubble forms and drifts up into the spangling dark. They must have newly learned this skill and are not very good at it. In between they sneak gasps off each other’s cigarette and the younger one resumes an endless phone call that has now been going for half an hour. I saw one family after another stop to take advantage of the play, their little children grasping after the bubbles to make them sprinkle into rain and the two men gallantly entertaining, letting each child take a turn on the poles, not even screwing up their faces when one after another the families left again, throwing no coins in their yellow hat.

    I saw three girls in their teens chase a boy clear across the square and they were shouting at him, something, all of them laughing, the boy bolted over and collapsed at my feet as the three of them pelted on him and tore him down. They had him there on the stones screaming for mercy, his laugh interrupting him: he asked me for help in Spanish but I said, No, indeed, in English: You probably deserve it, I am going to sit here and take your picture. And I did and the old man in green on the table behind met my eye and we both smiled, in our different languages, a rueful smile. I saw Spring arrive, suddenly it seems across the span of only three or four days; all the delicate trees along the walkways are blooming and shimmering in the light.

  • writing hardily

    Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so insecure that she would need to explain her movements to a stranger when it sank in – as she sank in, to the bench seat opposite – what it was that she had said: “Ich komme gerade vom Büro, I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” The funny thing was she was clutching her mobile phone like it was a huge reefer she was about to lift on the ball of the hand to her lips, and the flickering of her screen had caught my eye and momentarily bothered me, before I caught myself and realised how insane it was to resent someone for poring over their screen while I pored over mine. She was staring at me across the room, I raised my shoulders and spread my hands. “Was, denn?” She called the waitress over and repeated her complaint in the exact same words: “I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” Around the flower arrangement she pointed me out. The waitress shrugged helplessly, her face relapsing from an attempt at sympathy into a foolish smirk. What could she say? I let go the sward of ideas I had built in the air as they demolished themselves and dissolved in the face of such tiny, such concerted ill-will, and took out my notebook again and tried to let my gaze fall into the precise point of the middle distance where happiness and contemplation and, it sometimes seems, poetry lie thick on the chilly air like leaves on the ice. I told myself this place – a “literary cafe” attached to a bookshop – would not exist if not for writers like me and took up my pen again and foraged on.

  • Kaffeewitzenkraft

    We tried out a new coffee house, on our bicycles. Actually it was an old cafe, one of Brisbane’s earliest, in a dingy nook at the entrance to the gold-crusted cinemas on Queen Street. However it’s been done up like an ageing aunt, trussed in striped golden paper and with those little dinky tables too small to spread a newspaper. He ordered his coffee and I ordered mine. I was put off by the newly-renovated smell but rooted to the spot by the Abba album they were playing – the actual album, the whole thing, the impeccable swirling piano and harmonies. We stayed to listen.

    One coffee seems never enough. I’ve fallen into the maw of first world greed. I stood up and wound my way back to the counter, the guy pouring showy, almost effortless lattes one after another. He had an Olympic flag of empty white-mouthed cups and was swirling them full rapidly. Another coffee? he asked, seeing me standing there watching. I said, Yes please. Decaf –

    He finished for me. “Extra extra hot with some honey on the side.” Yes, I said. “And do you want another of the espressos?” No, I said: He hated his.

    I always hold my breath, risking a joke against a stranger. They might not get it. They might decide to stiffen and feel attacked. The last customer might have been horribly rude. He swung away from me to open the till and as he did so, a great guffaw of laughter like a cough came out of him and he fell forward from the waist, laughing luxuriously. Phew. I went back to our tiny table and told my partner, in barista world my kind of coffee would be “a suburban why-bother.”

  • possum off

    Pissed on by a possum as I was lying in the hammock. Cat sprang out and stalked off, tail in air. Possum continued climbing the branch, tail in air. This was after I had already been bitten by a sharp mosquito that turned out to be claw of cat perched on nearby kitchen chair on the lawn to tell me, let me in, I want hammock, you gotta lift me up. Now the three of us who momentarily were linked are sundered: life goes on.

  • collective noun a couch of potatoes

    I have no depth and everything within me is shallow and small. I waste this only thing time. I spend it as a charity on stultifying trivialities all pettifogging at the window’s pain like untrue love. I show off and on again. I’ve nothing. Not even that nothing. Only what is left by boiling too many bones too long: mostly, scum and smell and the evaporation of beauty; mostly, strong dark waters no one would drink, but for their health.

    I sit here, boiling far too many suns. But only as they fall across the water, winglike, saving daylight. Using words like jewels to deflect my nakedness and shame. A continual dinning sound like tinnitus, bling! bling! bling! Body fat and gemstones, a clattering cup’s old soup. Using time like words which can be flattened silent to the page. A couch of potatoes. A combine of harvests. A chapel of waysides. A nun of that.

  • smaller than you might think, vaster than you might imagine

    I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and I carouse the seaming waves, always looking out for something that can survive the dark salt water, that can breath underwater and emerge intact and stronger, softer, something that breeds new life like a manatee mistaken by desperate sailors for a comely mermaiden.

    I use this pen for prose, ideas, letters, postcards: everything except writing poetry. Poetry I find can tend to purple and bruise when handled too finely. It needs plainer tools. I write it like a shopping list, unafraid of whatsoever cravings might find their way onto the page there. I know that like tormented fruit plucked over by too many hands the cliche and banal trueism will rise to the surface, overnight like cream or over many weeks like flaws on a false politician, and I can pick it over and scour it out and glean from it that which is manifest, worth its weight in oranges, weighty but not too weighty, worthy.

    All writing of poetry is worthwhile, we ought never to stop ourselves in the initial act. It’s got to be good poetry, though. It’s got to be rewritten. Real and true. You have to be able to jettison those ragged phrases that wear out their welcome in the mind, the ones you tend to mumble over on the final read-through. Poetry is more infested than perhaps any other art form with pretenders who use its name to shield their cowardice, their apathetic shouting, their lame attention-seeking, their emotional lies. Overstatement, fancy language, lack of conviction, boring ideas or endless self-description buried in ornate and impenetrable prose (yes, prose) – it’s all being displayed under the name of poetry and I think that puts a lot of people off. I think if much so-called poetry were performed under the name Songwriting – a related art we mostly tend to feel far more confident in judging – people would fold their arms and tip their heads, say, “You’ve not been playing guitar that long, have you?” Or, even worse, “I don’t believe you mean that.”

  • bathitudes

    I was so tired. I rang my mum. We rarely speak. I said, it’s me, I just wondered, are you out tonight? Only I’m feeling so worn through, and I want to have a bath, I thought maybe I could use yours but I’m feeling antisocial, I just want to be in the water.

    Mum said, We are home, your auntie’s here, but I can explain to her you don’t feel like socialising, come round and just hop in if you like.

    I rolled up a towel and piled into the car. It was one of those stately nights in the sub-tropics where the clashing leaves have stilled and the screechbirds are all sleeping, only the runnels of little fresh breezes disturb the grasses as they roll across the ground. At my parents’ house the lights were on upstairs. I let myself in and turned on the taps. Ran up to say hello and give my aunt a kiss: this is the same Christian auntie who once told me when I disagreed with my mother that I was possessed by the devil. “You look so beautiful,” I told her. My mum gave me a plate and some candles in little tin bowls. She gave me a box of matches. My father was watching tv and didn’t turn, though he said goodbye to me as I left, an hour later.

    The feeling of sinking into a vessel of hot water. Of being only “a vessel sunk in a much larger vessel.” The feeling of peace: at the same time blood’s horses drum like a nearing army through the passageways of my heart. The heart leads its merry crew all over my body. It leads away and it lures them back. I lean back and close my eyes, candles flare on the outside of my lids, the all but too hot water rises on my chin. The tap drips. It drip-drips. It drip-drip-drip-drips. I am the only one alive in this valley of slow heat, I am guarding the entrance to my heart, hearing the horses.

    When the water got too hot I climbed out, trembling, and stood on the mat to wrap myself. Letting myself out the side door I came onto a dark cave formed by the verandah’s overhang, shelved between two rows of bushes, the house next door almost non-existent in the greenery. I lay back in an old cane chair and let the heat steam off me into the cool dark night. I thought about a song I had written long ago. Back in the bath I began to sing it to myself. One feels like a child, singing privately in the bathtub.

    “Sailing by/with colours high/and feathers to the knee,” went the song. After a long time I got out and dried myself, gathered my pen and the densely-scribbled Vietnamese restaurant receipt off the closed toilet lid, blew the candles out all at once. I put my clothes back on. Hot, hot. Calling up the stairs, “Bye! Thank you! Good night!” I escaped the house. Escaped all houses. My little truck was a vessel for mountainous voyaging, a bark that fears no storm. We drove home. We crossed the bridge, where my grandfather died. On my windscreen I carried all the lights, each one by one briefly flared and weightless, and then gone. The cliffs above the city were sentinels still, peopled by large rigid flowers of the porcupine bushes that shoot up into the cloud, by a late-night climber carrying his pack, by people desultorily talking. The pool of night left no tone untuned and no thought furrow fallow, no mere impossibility implausible. Back at home at my own house I parked out front under the long palms. I was weak with the water and with the depth of the night. Now I can sleep for a thousand years, now.

  • gardening clothes

    We went out to a swanky bar without getting out of our gardening clothes. It was quiet til a busload of people staggered in in some serious clobber. One of them came up to us and said, “How cool is it possible for two people to look as they drink their beers?” She was drunk. She looked me up and down and then told my companion, “Only five people in the world can wear dungarees – and she’s one of them.” I said, “Did you all just get off a bus or something? Did the cinema empty? Where did you all come from?” She pointed with her handbag. “Her – and her – they’re twins – it’s their 33rd birthday, we’ve been drinking in the park.” “66!” I said, because I am mathematical like that.

    Afterwards we watched them taking turns to take selfies of each other. Can you take a selfie of someone else, can you even take a selfie at all when you’re not actually in it? Turns out you can. You just point any device at a group of made-up people and then watch as they instantly assemble themselves into sunny, close-headed groups. Everyone has a smile they can keep for ten minutes at a time. All the girls have long, straight glossy hair. They fall into varying heights, so that every face is seen, and it doesn’t matter how long the papparassist has to fiddle with his device, they’ll wait unmoving. “Australian women,” said my companion, dourly. “Somehow they all look like Jennifer Aniston.”

  • exactly right like Goldilocks

    I was working in a cafe today for the first time in a while and the woman behind me had an extremely carrying voice. I had sought out a quiet corner by the fountain to write and she came along borne on her throaty rolling laugh, which she brought out every time the good-looking, shaven-headed maitre d’ came past, and sat down to wait for her friend. The friend arrived. The coffees were brought by a Japanese waitress who spoke in a very high, girlish voice, anxious to please. The throaty lady responded to this waitress in her own high pitch, the kind of friendliness that lacks warmth and is in fact sharply dismissive, “Ok great! Thank you!” Then they settled down to conversation and I was reaching the end of my narrative by now and her voice interrupted my thoughts, lazy me, I couldn’t help it.

    Her favourite word was “Exactly!” She used it twenty-three times. With emphasis, and pronounced “Igg-ZAK-ly.” I pronounce it rather that way too, more of an “egg.” Exactly, she would say when her friend finally got to talk, exactly. ExACTly. Her second-favourite was “Ab…so….LUTEly,” drawn out in a way that seems sexy in a tired way to me, almost mechanical. So much affirmation, so much praise. She was like the world’s best world-champion good listener, only louder. Her voice was still ringing in my ears as I walked away. Under a fig tree I ducked into a shoe shop to turn over some suede pair of green things for men, and the sales guy came up and we chatted. We were telling each other how hot it’s been. I told him how the Berliner I brought with me couldn’t grasp it, how he said, I’ll just wear my jeans. “We arrived in December.” “Oh, no.” “I told him, you will NOT want to wear denim, in Brisbane in the summer.”

    He told me his bedroom has no windows. “Wow,” I said, “that’s hardcore.” “I know,” he said. “But then – you couldn’t open a window anyway! Because of the mosquitoes.” “Iggsackly,” I told him, “iggsackly.”

     

  • his scarlet-helmeted warrior

    I had a pen name, once, after I wrote two excruciatingly awful romance novels thinking this would for sure be my road to steady income. Submitted them with great condescension to Mills & Boon and they wrote back, saying (and I paraphrase) “We wouldn’t publish this shite even if you paid us.” I was so disappointed cos I had this great name all worked out: Kenya Madresson.

    However I am proud that one of those trite novels was written in a week. I had flu and was down and couldn’t get anything done. Said to myself, I bet I can write a book in a week. So I did. Three terrible chapters every terrible day. This was when I was 26.