mouth wooed her

"Then I should like to ask you about it - about love and what it meant to you. Perhaps then your eyes will hold more than beauty, perhaps they will be stern and wise and they will answer: poverty has played so great a part in my life that it has choked love. Now I neither cry nor laugh. I have never been able to struggle for love, because the struggle for bread has consumed all my strength.'

- Walter Scheonstedt, The Girl from the River Barge

dinner party lists

everyone has one. this is mine

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Elsa Schiaparelli
Fred Hollows
Grace Abbott
Rudolf Nureyev
Sophia Loren
St. Augustine
Ryan Adams
Nagi Noda
Mark Twain
Eudora Welty
Max Ehrmann
Dash Snow
A.A Milne
Steve Earle
e.e cummings
Mary Kingsley

and that's that

come back 1987, all is forvigen

working on it...

Part 4: Our Very Sleep Is Action

To climb this mountain would be to defeat it; to conquer that which is not ours to tame. So we sit at its feet in our own humility and shit and tears and let it be the vanguard of the living, the protector of our briefly mourned and swiftly forgotten pathetic souls

Part 3: Asymmetry

The fact that you showed up said something. Something I couldn't decipher but could sense perhaps might be good, that it might be a gesture inspired by gratitude, or a misplaced sense of duty, or at the very least some dim sense of guilt. But not love. I had realised long before that it had never been love that had drawn you to me, and I was proud that I had come to that realisation on my own.
There was a sheepishness in your manner, the way took off your coat. A sheepishness that gave me a magnificent sense of validation - a precious, silent victory that I held tight.

But as the light faded so too did the feeling until it was a circling, voluminous nothingness, an apathy that drained me of all other emotion.

Part 2: Slow

That day last summer, during the height of the bushfires, I came up to visit you for the first time in a month. The sun was crimson and the air thick with smoke and recklessness, lending the day an apocalyptic mood. The beach was empty. I remember trying to think of things to say. When the sun finally surrendered to the night, which was late, you drove me home and we decided not to put any music on in the car.

It was two months before I remembered those long forgotten dreams, and in the split screen of the mind, was struck by the realisation that it I had lived our day at the beach before. That time and space were the inventions of children, like imaginary friends.

There were other times too. Climbing those rocks at your father's farm (you in the red woollen jumper), the weekend we painted our bedroom. Not deja vu, not mind tricks. Days lived before they were.

And now here I am, alone, with these real imagined dreams turned memory turned ghosts. Variations on themes I never asked for and still cannot understand. Some myth born of my DNA and destined to remain lodged in here forever - just enough to make it hard to breathe - and, were they to be somehow removed, would be quickly replaced by shadows.

Notes From The Books I'll Never Write. Part 1: Lethargy

I had dreams about you years before I met you. Not the aspirational, hopeful kind - I mean nighttime, sleeping dreams.
I was young, perhaps in my second last year of high school, and still years away from feeling the whiplash of first love, the untold depths of its fissures.

Four nights in a row I slipped into the vividness of those dreams. The first night, we were at a beach - or perhaps a desert - sitting side by side on a steep, scorched orange dune. The air was heavy and laced with exotic, unspoken thoughts. The thrill in my bones a religious experience.

The dream was like a still from a movie; we just sat, untouching, side by side. It was the rare sensation of being quite still and yet unmistakably humming with energy. On waking - it still dark outside my room - I remember catching the distinct sensation of being a newborn baby, so recently an inhabitant of that other world, and still so intimate with its secrets.

Hold on to what is good
Even if it is a handful of earth
Hold on to what you believe in
Even if it is a tree which stands by itself
Hold on to what you must do
Even if it is a long way from here
Hold on to your life
Even if it is easier to let go
Hold on to my hand
Even when I have gone away from you

I hope that I am only ever 85% sure of anything

It's cool, baby, and I'm not even there.

I have nothing to give you except for the way I see you. What could I be but other?
The mirror of other.
the magnetic edge of other, which they would call desire.
And cares not for your expectations
Or mine.
But for the incomprehensible.
If we get there, it could be paradise.
If we don't, it can't be helped.
The economy of desire is measurable but not immutable.