We Taught the Night.

We taught the night a thing or two

About love. We fought. You hit me

With the palm of your hand and

I traced the shape of your back into the sheets.

We screamed.

You covered yourself up –

First in a nightgown, then in

The darkness. I fumbled for the light but your hands

Were already cupped over it,

And the sad grin of the scars on your fingers

Stopped me from reaching out. We fought for ownership of

Music, beauty, leaves and trees while your room

Nervously rearranged itself around us

Trying its best to keep out of our way until we

Lay in the centre of a stranger.

Your sweat caught itself in the air

And hung lazily around our bodies. We taught

The night a thing or two about love

And when we were done we both knew the

Night would not forget us soon.

And at dawn we sat naked

By the window and tried to remember

What the sun was supposed to do next.

Soft Young Words.

Soft Young Words.

I woke up this morning

To see two birds side by side

On the branch by my window.

Their heads black, twin yellow beaks

Like two scored lines on a page,

Their bodies tense and young,

Ready to take off at the slightest

Gust of wind.

Two perfect birds

As perfect as the last two syllables

You spoke to me.

Morning Promises

Morning Promises.

The morning makes promises with

The meaningless dance of our bodies in the

Orange light –

The way your arm slips through mine

When I bend to put on my socks,

Or the way my hand finds itself in the small of your back

As the kettle hums to itself, absently.

This morning makes promises as our

Bodies slowly and gently work

Around each other, a new sex that

Gives birth to a quiet kind of life

That stretches like a road of smoke

Before my patient feet.

This morning makes promises

With your smile, and the waiting cup

In your hand.

Maybe this time it says.

Maybe this time.

I Want

I Want.

I want to pick the sunshine from my teeth.

I want to find little

Silvery smudges of the moon

In the creases of my newspaper.

I want every single hour to be filled

With useless pretty little things

Like the edges of your mouth when you smile

Or the wet crunch of the rotten apples

Hitting the patio.

I want every day to begin in the golden sunshine

Of mid afternoon

And I want the night to stretch like the ocean

So that when the day is done

We can walk together,

Strip bare

And slip into the rest of our days.

Eulogy by Smoke.

Eulogy by Smoke.

-Written after the bushfires of February, 2009

What is left after the fires?

What do we hold in a handful of

Ash?

What prayer is heavy enough to

Close the eyes of the dead and

The dying?

When flame has gone -

When bodies have planted themselves in the soil

Like seeds waiting for a new

Burst of rain –

What then?

What then

But a place not even poetry

Can fill?

What then but a desparate

Attempt to forget,

To pave over? To rebuild?

But smoke does not forget.

And as our hands desperately work

To fill the places flame left blank

A single rising plume of smoke cuts a line in the sky

And disperses.

Let this be the eulogy

No human tongues

Can utter.

Horse

Horse.

She told me when she was young

Her horse had run onto the tracks –

Too young to have learnt about trains

Or metal

And had died,

Snapped clean in two by the bigger

Stronger metal machine.

And it is this image, perhaps above everything –

A soft brown horse charging towards a steam train –

That keeps me loving her.

Thank You

Thank You.

Her boyfriend, Will, is about to break up with her. She senses it in the way he moves; the way conversations sour over nothing; the way she wakes in the middle of the night and sees the space that once held his body empty, finding him sitting at the dining room table, staring into space. She has loved Will for the last six years, and now he’s leaving her life. He hasn’t said anything - nothing specific - but she can already see him reorganizing his priorities. He’s emptying out the space that once held all of his love for her. She says, one Saturday morning, “let’s get a coffee,” and he says, “you go,” and stares into space. It is happening in slow motion. It makes her feel sick, sick to her stomach, and she can’t even comprehend the enormity of the sadness yet. That will come later. For the time being, she’s in the shadow of this Great Sad Thing, and she’s biting her thumb, and biding her time.

Because it’s all making her feel like she’s going crazy, she decides to meet up with an old friend, Mary, who she has not seen in at least a year. Mary sounds pleased on the phone, eager, promising news. They choose somewhere to have lunch. She hangs up. Will is over in the other corner of the room, and she waits for him to ask who she was talking to. But he doesn’t.

Mary looks beautiful, even more beautiful than she did when they last saw each other, and she moves with the grace of a dancer, even though she isn’t one.

“Actually, it’s funny you called me,” Mary biting her lip a little. “Well. Not funny. Just…A coincidence. I was going to call you, anyway.” Mary looks away, her blue eyes searching for some distant point in the horizon. “I’ve got cancer,” Mary says, and her voice doesn’t break at all when she says it. It hangs well in the air of the restaurant. Strong, and definite. Mary says, “I’ve got cancer in my bones.”

She doesn’t know what to say. She shakes her head, once, twice, and then feels herself starting to cry. Mary looks sad, but resilient, like a rock in a great expanse of water. Alone, but not lonely. She touches Mary’s hand, and when that is not enough, she begins to cry.

And it is as she is crying that something comes to her, suddenly. It is a thought. It is what she could only describe as an ‘opportunity’. Suddenly, in her head, a scenario unfurls. This evening, she will go home. Will sitting there, in the living room, waiting for her to walk in the door. And when she does, he will rise, bad news hiding behind his lips, and he will clear his throat and he will say –

“Let’s talk.”

But she will not let him. She will say, her voice breaking; “Mary has cancer.”

And Will’s face will derail. He will be lost for words. He does not know Mary well at all; only from old stories, and awkward conversations at parties, but he knows the significance of the wordcancer. And he will console her, as she cries, and he will cook for her, and listen in comfortable, open silence – unashamed – as she describes Mary’s strength, and the exact depth and breadth of the cancer in her bones. Later, he will even take her to bed, laying her gently in the sheets. He will say something like,

“let’s sleep,”, and his voice will wash over her like music. And he won’t smoke, because it would be obscene to do so, and he will leave the computer switched off, dormant. He will lay with her. And maybe that will be the moment. No, not maybe. She is sure of it now. That will be the moment of closeness that catches him unawares. That closeness he has cut himself off from over the last few months – he will suddenly find himself becoming the man who loves her, once again. It won’t just be the physical act of being that hard pressed against each other that changes his mind. It’ll be thereal closeness too, the closeness of lovers when their love becomes transparent. When it becomes hard, like glass, and uncomplicated. He will look down on her, and that closeness will flood his heart; she will be asleep, or pretending to sleep, and he will gaze down upon her face, and this uncomplicated love will seize him by the throat.

She looks up at Mary. She is still crying, but less so now, the tears streaking her make up.

She says, “Mary…” But Mary cuts her off.

“That’s alright,” Mary says. “Honestly. It will all be okay.”

She looks at Mary’s strong, powerful face. She has been given a gift, in this moment, she has been saved, and she has to bite her lip, really bite it, because all she wants to say to Mary is something so simple. So essential. So true.

All she wants to say is thank you.

Friends

Friends.

Anna is the one talking. She says:

“D’ja know, P.T. is like, finally cool again?”

Miguel is plugged into his ipod, sorta: one bud sits in his ear, the other nestles itself in his lap. It kinda looks like an umbilical chord lying there, I think to myself, or a snake, or a…The metaphors drain me. Wait – or an abnormal sperm, ready to puncture an egg and spawn a child without legs, without eyes. But then I think no, what it really looks like is one half of a pair of headphones.

“What’s P.T.?” Arnold asks, bravely. Questioning Anna’s constantly evolving slang is dangerous business. Arnold’s wasn’t always Arnold. He used to be Jean-Paul. But the mundane is cool again and Arnold is a hipper name than Jean-Paul. He changed it through deed poll.

We have another friend – born of hippies – whose name was Cyan Glitterbug. She changed it to Jane Stevens. She works at an organic bakery now. Her boyfriend’s name is Dirk. He changed it. Used to be Cerulean.

“Duh,” says Anna. “It stands for public transport.” She snickers, and flicks a stray lock of hair from her brow in a gesture that is practiced, considered. ‘Duh’ is cool again all of a sudden, which is weird, because it’s a 90’s thing, and the 90’s are no longer in, although they were for yonkers. ‘Yonkers’ is not cool, which is why I think it, rather than speak it.

“What?!” Miguel bellows. His music must be loud, but I can’t hear anything and I’m sitting right next to him. He puts a cupped hand to his ear.

“Take your headphone out then, yeesh,” snaps Jane 2. Jane 2 is actually our original Jane. But we liked Cyan better than her, so when Cyan became Jane, Jane became Jane 2. She hates us because of this. She hates us with an intensity that was at first rather chilling, but now is the source of much amusement for us. She’s my roommate. She never gets invited to anything, but she’s always here.

“What are you listening to, anyway?” Pete wants to know.

Miguel doesn’t answer. He just throws Pete a ‘phone, and Pete plugs himself in.

“It’s nothing,” Pete says, confused. “I mean, there’s no music.”

“It’s John Cage, you pleb,” Miguel drawls. “He was making a point about – y’know – whatever. So it’s silence.”

“Then why were you shouting?” Anna asks.

“What?!” Pete bellows, catching on. Anna is the easiest of us all to make fun of, but she’s the one we fear and respect the most. She had a cancer scare last year, and the thought of losing her propelled a number of us into deep existential crises we have only just recovered from.

“Please mind the gap,” comes the tinny voice of the announcer. He is obviously ethnic but none of us are racist, so we do not acknowledge – even to ourselves, privately – that he is ethnic. We have gotten very good at making the issue of race invisible. It is one of the things we congratulate ourselves on.

“So, birthday boy,” says Miguel, clapping his hands together and craning his neck to look at me, “you excited?”

I nod. The Plantation – tonight’s destination – is a kale and quinoa joint that literally every single site I visit has declared THE PLACE TO BE. A few nights ago, I had a dream about a plate of kale. I didn’t eat it or anything. Just kale. Just a plate of kale.

“I do not think there are any circumstances under which it is right to discipline a child in any way,” Anna is saying.

“We talking physically disciplining?” asks Pete.

“What?!” bellows Anna, and though this joke is so unbelievably not funny, we all laugh. I don’t know about the other guys, but I am laughing because there is a businessman looking at me from the other end of the carriage, and there is something in his gaze that says he envies our youth, and our beauty, and our friendship, and so laughing would only make him more envious, and although that is a shitty thing of me to do, I laugh and I laugh.

A few days ago Jasmine, the girl who serves me my daily skim latte, was not at her usual place behind the counter, and there was a spotty teen standing there instead, and this upset in routine was so drastic that it came to feel apocalyptic, and the feelings of dread it stirred in me were only exacerbated a few days later when I discovered that she had been hospitalized with an ailment cocktail made up of anemia, digestive upset, scurvy and stomach ulcers because for three months she had eaten nothing but chicken feed as part of an art piece/social experiment designed to bring to light the terrible treatment of animals bred in captivity, and she is sick enough to possibly die, and I bought her flowers but never sent them, because I didn’t know where to send them – didn’t know the hospital, didn’t know the ward – and they are sitting in my apartment right now, withering, dying.

“The rights of children are actually -  you know, actually – more important than the rights of adults,” Jane 2 is saying. I know that Anna shares this view too but as we all feel mildly disgusted by anything Jane 2 says or does, Anna immediately and vehemently begins arguing with her.

I look down at my hands. I am suddenly terribly interested in my hands.

“I hear that blueberries are actually bad for you,” says Miguel, to no-one in particular, and suddenly, I am seized with the desire to stay on the train when we pull up at our stop. I will just sit where I am, staring straight ahead, and the guys will try to talk to me but I will ignore them, and they will have to choose between trying to communicate with me and going to The Plantation, and I know – I just know – that they will choose The Plantation, and will slip through the closing doors, leaving me here, defiantly and brilliantly alone.

“How old are you, anyway?” Jane 2 asks me. The rest of the group take a collective breath.

“Jesus,” Miguel says. “You don’t know?”

“You live with him, Chrissakes,” snaps Anna.

“He’s twenty five, gawd,” says Pete, wrong.

“He’s twenty,” says Anna, also wrong.

Miguel turns to look at me.

“I thought you were twenty three,” he says. “I remember you saying clearly that you were twenty three.”

“Yeah, two years ago he said that,” says Pete. “Two years ago that is what he said.”

“How old are you?” asks Arnold. I look into his eyes. They are exceptionally beautiful. For a long time I wanted to be gay, partly so Arnold and I could go out, but mainly so I could have something to rail against. I was fourteen when I discovered that, as a straight, middle-class, white male, I had no cause to rally behind. One of my high school obsessions was a non-fiction book I borrowed weekly from the library. It was about the Black Panthers. I don’t think I ever actually read the book. I just looked through the pictures. I looked at the marches. I noticed how close to each other everyone was standing. I thought about that a lot.

“I’m twenty seven,” I say. The words feel like marbles rolling around my mouth. My therapist once said the source of all my problems was my vanity. I countered by telling him about the six African children that I sponsor. He told me that using the children as evidence in an argument about vanity was a vanity of the worst kind. I came home and cancelled my sponsorship. I still think about those kids. I had a dream that I visited them, bringing gifts of mock chicken steaks, and we roasted them over a fire and gazed across the savannah.

“Jimi Hendrix” was twenty seven when he died,” says Arnold. He puts air quotes around the words “Jimi Hendrix” for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.

“What point are you making?” says Anna, not unpleasantly, genuinely interested. Anna is a Conversation Expert. She delights in tangents, and has an excellent ability to propel casual statements into philosophically and ethnically interesting territory.

“None, really” says Arnold, not realizing that in saying this he has disappointed Anna on a most fundamental level.

“Kurt Cobain, too,” says Pete.

“How come famous people don’t die of like, regular things?” Jane 2 asks, gazing out of the window. “Like, I had a friend: her mother died by getting her ring caught in the toaster. Or, like, my other friend: her aunt got killed by an automatic door in a supermarket.”

“Whojeewazzy died when her scarf got caught in the wheel of her car,” Miguel says. “Strangled. Dead. That’s kinda regular.”

“That is almost the exact opposite of regular,” says Pete.

“Who’s whojeewazzy?” says someone, whoever.

Miguel shrugs. “I don’t know. Movie star.”

“Well, what movies was she in?” Jane 2 wants to know.

“No idea,” Miguel says. “Literally the only thing I know about her is that story.”

Anna has been bent over her smart phone. She looks up, slowly, and something exists within her expression that sends my heart pounding.

“Christ,” I say. “What’s up?”

She shakes her head.

“I don’t know –“ Anna manages. “I don’t know.”

She sighs. The whole train should be quiet for the news that Anna is about to deliver, but it’s not, because the fucking businessman is talking on the phone, and I shoot him a look, and we lock eyes.

“Is using the poop emoji considered flirting?” Anna asks, quietly.

I am still staring at the businessman. We have moved past the boundaries of socially acceptable stranger based eye contact, but here we are: staring. And then, for whatever reason, we stop staring. He looks out of the window. And that is it. Done. Hardly worth mentioning. Not worth mourning. I look back at the group, who are all glued to their smartphones now. I pull my own out of my pocket. Looking at our phones is not anti-social: how can something be anti-social when everybody is doing it? Indeed, it is Jane 2 who seems anti-social when she breaks the silence, and says:

“Cage free is organic but organic is not necessarily cage free,” Jane 2 is saying, and although I know what each of these words mean, they do not make any sense to me in that order.

Our stop is approaching, so this is it. I prepare myself.

“Come on doofus,” Anna says affectionately. I look at her. I stare into her eyes. And then I rise. I leave a person who looks like me, has my name, but is different – fundamentally different- sitting on the train, and then I follow my friends through the open doors.

Y For X.

Y For X 

Meaning to say x, I said y. I realized the mistake a moment too late, and my face flushed red. Blushing too was inappropriate. In order to rectify the situation, I said y when really z would have been more acceptable, and was met with undignified silence (s). Thinking on my feet, I combined a self-depreciating anecdote containing a pop culture reference (g within m) with an attempt at physical intimacy, masked as an accidental touch of the elbow (i, masked as q). When this too, went down like a lead balloon, I panicked, following this with a semi-serious curse (a), and a hearty chuckle (b), hoping that b would counteract the possible negative implications of a - balancing each other out like two halves of the perfectly formed equation that they were, in some general sense, a naturally occurring copy of  -  or at the very least, working in conjunction, to create an entirely new meaning, c, which, although not independent, could in its way be interpreted as the beginning of a new line of conversation, C(a). As may be obvious by this stage, C(a) was where I had always meant to direct the conversation, and indeed my earlier gaff (y instead of x) was a misdirected attempt to lead myself to that point, (in theory, y leading naturally leading to k (k being a sweet romantic compliment) for her to then come back with a repeated k, enhanced by the introduction of  f (f being a broad, but powerful reference to some pleasant moment in our shared history,) to which I could draw the connection between f and x (hoping, in a best case scenario that x (x being the argument put forward that we should admit our undying love (l) for each other (to clarify: x being the argument, l being the actuality) ) and f would become completely entangled)  –meaning that C(a) could be reached as pleasantly, subtly, and romantically as possible.

Unfortunately, due to their proximity a (the curse) and b (the hearty chuckle) served only to enhance the negative interpretations of each value, which is in itself a mathematical truth (a positive integer multiplied by a negative integer will always become negative in value), something that I should have realized before I had even opened my mouth. I.e. a became -a2 (i.e. vulgar, unpleasant, aggressive,) and b became -b2 (i.e. self serving, obnoxious.) In response to this, she came back with a sarcastic (e) mimicry of my –b2: a heartbreaking  e(–b2), (unfair for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being I wasn’t aiming for -b2, I was aiming at b, and such a mistake should have been noted and forgiven in a person with all the qualities of generosity (g) and understanding (u) that I perceived her to have).

To her e(–b2) I had no immediate response, and so fell silent (s) but unfortunately by this stage, even my silence was filled with meaning, which meant that s became –s, and, as it became worse each second it was allowed to continue, it could more accurately be described as  –s (s x s ). I became aware that the increasing value of s was lethal to any future line of conversation, s holding such negative value that anything it touched would wither (e) and die (d) (remember, the interrelationship of positive and negative values, mentioned above), meaning that even hours later, if I ever wanted to bring up c(a) again, it would have become – c (a), or even worse, s (-c(a)). Drawing on my last reserves of energy, I came back with b (chuckle) in conjunction with a reference to s (s1), followed by an actual s, used for comedic purposes, followed again with a repetition of g within m (“remember that time…just like Katy Perry) hoping that I could somehow make reference to s in a lighthearted, vaguely self-depreciating but ultimately brave way, thus bringing it into the open and reducing its negative value – in short, leading to b + s1 + s + g(m) = c(a) (and definitely not s(-c(a))

She looked at me for a long time. What followed was not s as we had used it before – not s for comedic purpose, nor s as a necessarily negative value– it was a new s. A silence unlike any I had ever heard, as though some great and powerful composer had written an empty new absence of sound solely for this moment, and I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I was stumped. When this new silence was finally broken, it was broken by her, broken with a sentence fragment (k +s) and all she really   said is,

“I don’t know how to say what I want to say.”

And whatever I had been going for, whatever final equation, flew out of the window, and everything drifted from my hands. 

Three

Three.

There are two people sleeping in my room,

and together we are the parts of

three people who used to love each other.

The room is quiet for a moment until

He starts talking to himself, as I have heard him do

Many times before

And perhaps sensing something, her sleeping

Lips join him, both of them throwing up their

Unconscious voices towards the ceiling, and to where I sit

By the door.

For a moment their stillborn words fight for survival

In these close walls

Until quite quickly, he stops

And she returns the silence

A few moments after.

We are three people, much later, who used to

Love one another.

And now two of us have created something,

With voices lining up like the breathing of a child

Lining up with words on a picture book page.

And now one of us

Is too tired

Of things like this

For him to sleep.

Poetry.

Poetry.

Poetry is just an acknowledgement of

Beauty.

Which is why

Most of my poetry

Is about

You.

Music.

Music.

Any piece of music about you

Would have to be so quiet

And so beautiful

That the only fingers that could play it

Would be those to have touched your body

And first stroked the strings

Of that much greater instrument

That makes all other noise

Fold up

Like the petals of a flower.