Lacuna

I dreamt of my shadow, a roving menace last night. My shadow: a trickster supermodel. My shadow in a skin tight full bodied unitard and a balaclava. I kept snatching it from her and wearing it for myself.. she, unmasked, would run away down forgotten hallways. The hallways of some messy suburban family home, beige walls and dark brown skirting. She’d come back around and make love to me. Surprisingly.

You and I, we sat by the water’s edge back then. It’s been a long time. Fire flies nip at the resins of our aged suffering.  I push you away back into the darkness from which I found you. Aghast with resentment and tired of the game. It’s easier to hate you than it is to love you now, in a silent empty room. I look out at the flowers in death bloom. I exhale the resins of our aged suffering and I pool out across the moss’ tactile touch, open handed and full of vapour. Liquid life nectar and praise pouring into and out of my mouth hypnotised erotic.

Wild wind remains

It’s so soothing watching the dark shadows of these gums dancing above me, pitched against the grey of this cloudy night. Communities of leaves precariously suspended on their little scrawny twig limb branches. Every time the winds pick up, all my senses alight. He is omnipresent, force incarnate, this wind. He is all consuming, all knowing, forefather of times of old, this wind. He is enveloping us all simultaneous, symbiotic; the leaves, the rock, the wind and I. The birds in their hollows, the ants on their scent trails, the spiders in their webs. We’re all dancing in unison on the rhythm of this wind. And it’s a force in me, that is a wild in me. That is a known mystery in me. Etched in the bones of my ancestors and in the celestial ashes of my unborn children. It is a mystery in me that does not sleep. It’s where the weeping resides.. the screams and the bellows, the ecstatic moans and gasps and giggles and sighs. The animal sounds of this; the wild wind unsheathed.

She takes off all of her prison clothes and stands naked on the cliffside, saluting the night with the grief of a sense body awoken. From a deepened slumber, where all of her brothers and sisters still lay; idle and restless in the grottos of suburbia. Tossing and turning in their longing for the wild wind.

And to my beloved I give to him only my ugliness now. The protector of my grief in all her wretched tattered rags and gnarled metal weaponry, rusted and eroded from centuries of battle. I give to him only my ugliness now, his eyes blind to my light. For as far as the tales that I’ve been told in my time, they’ve all ended in engulfed in flame ferocious. What more perfect a way to push love away? Ahhh and here she proclaims.. as the line rings out to silence.. But silence does not wholly exist here in this living world. With the crickets and the breezes and the rustles and the low hums of distant roads. Little exoskeleton vehicles holding lives unknown. In this stillness here, where she feels love to have turned away already, too many times already, again and again. An outward spell, she casts in the direction of a great infinite of unknowns.

And all time will pass, just all things will pass and everything must converge. So while she, in her fury, thrashes about in retaliation, in the foyer of her fevers.. Her fevers, of pierced anguish sunken old and deep in the bossom of her home. A sore loser. Putrid stench of loved lost in chains. Something still remains.. low down in the soil, stirring.. unfurling. Waiting to be born

Storm cloud

I wait here by an open window with an empty box of matches.
I wait here for my sweetheart.
I wait here by the howling wind and the turning soil.
I wait here for my sweetheart.
Sky breaks open and pours all over us; hungry land and heaving trees.
Sky breaks open and rains down her grief.
Sky breaks open and we’re naked to the sunrise. Hidden behind a blanket of storm cloud.
She smiles and all the birds sing.
I wait here and breath in deep.
The marred and twisted child needn’t seek refuge in the arms of a blindfolded middle class.
The marred and tortured  child need not seek refuge in the arms of man.
The marred and battered child need only seek refuge in wet soil aplenty.. and dark and brooding storm cloud..
that houses a fury of wildness
that beats in visceral gut
that manufactured this disease.
Spoonfed wildness, creator of birth, of bounty and vicious beast.

11th floor

There’s an ominous hum reverberating through these desolate parts. The floor is wet.. damp. These concrete tunnel walls; cold. The smell of dank mildew is immersive; it seeps through my respiratory system, deep into my bronchioles and capillaries. 

The hum gets louder the deeper I get.. rattles my mildewed capillaries. The water alongside is a river flowing black.. plump with the juices of unknown places.. contents unknown. I’m reminded of a familiar phrase that I always tell myself when darkness looms: “Wherever there is negative space darling, there is infinite possibility. Fear itself dwells in the shadows, but by following love and light; by utilizing one’s inner flame.. true transformation awaits. Everything beautiful is, afterall, born from darkness..” 

 

“What was the equipment you used to hold the load down?”

“It 10 had dogs and chains”

Dogs and chains

Dogs and chains

Dogs and chains

 

She walked in through the 11th floor, sunlight beaming on the glass with morning dewdrops. She tripped over a jarrah log laid out in the middle of the hall. She landed on her palms, arms straight. Collarbone cracked. She got up, she dusted off her doll’s dress. 5 dogs at the eastern side of the 11th floor barked at her. 5 dogs, 5 chains.. barked at her from the eastern side of the 11th floor. She wore her grief on her hips, she hissed back at them.. eyes adrift. She dusted off her doll’s dress, she wandered further up the hall. 

 

Worm piece

Look at you! All covered in dehydrated food waste and dirt, adorning yourself in the twinkling fragments of ripped up cardboard and eggshells.. Slithering around like a wild serpent sexualized in coffee grounds and tea leaves.. All lathered up with mildew and manure.. Look a you flex! Look at you gobble! gobble gobble gobble. You f**king worm!

On poetics for change

I was listening to a great podcast about the rewilding of language( Speaking the anthropocene ). Something that started tapping deeply at my heart a few months ago.. Like.. perhaps all the grief that comes through in my words, that are in essence reflections of an unconscious depth.. Yes, there is my own “isolated” lived experience and the unconscious of my own “separate” life and self, but there is also the collective of ALL that is living.. And of the great heaving wound of nature herself.

So when i think about rewilding language I think about it as a kind of  reconfiguring of our system for explaining the world around us.. Reconfiguring it to incorporate LIVING landscape. A form of poetic protest in times of ecological crisis in a way. Eg by replacing the word ‘environment’ with something like “living earth’.. you breathe life, spirit and substance to something to reflect an organic reality that our current system continually strips back year by year. A current language systems whose nature terms are consistently becoming extinct as a reflection of the times we live in, but also a system that (aside from stemming from centuries of oppression) is innately built on structures that sought control and power over nature. As man over his wild nature, his passions, his emotions, his deep rooted desires, man vs beast.

“Nature is our environment”.. Just as a room or a house is our environment, in this detached sense it could almost be material possession in a way.. not living and breathing and alive with spirit in and of itself, not pure majesty and harmony of parts in its own right.. but also an integral part of the very functionality of us as individuals and as a collective whole. The very foundation on which we are built, that influences our very capacity to exist, to breathe, to do anything under the sun. It’s the blood in our veins, the cells in our blood, the blood in our hearts and our brains that let us move our thumbs and have the capacity for self awareness.

It’s as if language were this rigid structure of confines that holds nature hostage but for the magic of poetics. And thus poetics need to step the fuck up.

pitter-patter

You’re alright, everything’s normal, nothing untoward, you’re walking down an empty city street, barren night life. Glossy corporate facades aplenty. Couple of people nearby doing their people things; crossing roads.. speaking spoken language to one another. You’re alright, nothing unusual, you’re also doing people things.. Walking down a street.. blinking.. breathing.. nothing out of the ordinary. livid experience set to some kinda variation of the banal everyday.. You sit down. heart explodes. No reason. Heart exploded all over the bench. Bloodied butterflies with wild flapping bloody wings emerging from a flesh body husk. Bloodied bench. Heart exploded. That’s that. Done. Dust off your shoulders and your funny looking hat, pick up your legs and your oversized suit.. haul your open chest trunk cavity down through the street.. Butterflies fluttering overhead.. Raining heart blood all over you in little spits.. a-pitter-patter pitter patter

Movie Review: Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mon) by Fritz Lang 1927

(Published in VHS magazine, independent print release, Perth, Western Australia, April 2019)

In lieu of the Event Horizon Telescope making it possible to get an image of a black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy.. and the woman that was behind it happening, again shining a light on women’s contributions to science throughout the years. Also given the recent resurgence of space exploration films that have been popping up.. I decided to take a look back on a lesser known Fritz Lang film ‘Woman in the Moon’ (Frau im Mond).

You’ll likely know Fritz Lang for his influential 1927 masterpiece ‘Metropolis’ with its spellbinding design that paved the way for almost all modern cinema, but ‘Woman in the Moon’ was his quintessential space exploration film from 1929. The story was adapted by screenwriter Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife and creative partner at the time, from her novel; ‘Rocket to the Moon’. Here, the basics of rocket travel were presented to a mass audience for the first time, thus the excitement and thrill of such a quest is undoubtedly conveyed through it.

As much as it is an important historical document on the intersection of art and science, it’s pretty slow moving with many a romanticized subplot which culminates in a film that is far too long as per today’s standards. Silent film isn’t always easy viewing, particularly if it’s not laden with the dazzling effects and later experiments in score that can be seen in the likes of ‘Metropolis’, But nonetheless, this film (like many examples of early cinema) acts as a beautiful window into the eyes, minds and hearts of the people from that time. Of all the wonderment and imagination surrounding the possibilities of technological advancement and space exploration that was on the horizon.

A melodrama of scientific speculation with a twinkle of espionage, it is by no means a scientifically plausible account, despite having technical advisors (including a rocket scientist) commissioned by the Studio… the creative splendor of it overshadows any technical misfirings as per all that we know about the subject now. Ultimately it was still a highly influential product of the Space Age.

Much of the contents and technical details including the design of the rocket itself led to the film being banned in Germany from 1933-1945 by the Nazis, due to similarities to their secret V-2 project which was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile developed as a vengeance weapon. The V-2 rocket later, oddly enough, became the first man-made object to travel into space in 1944.

There is an innocence and a romance to this vision of space travel though, as one would expect from a film created in 1929, 30 years before NASAs giant leap. It follows a young entrepreneur, his partners, a professor and a villain (whose resemblance to Hitler in certain shots is strong to say the least) on their journey to the moon. Rooted in the manuscript of the archetypal crazed wild eyed visionary professor who formulated a rocket design and a hypothesis on the mineral contents of the moon. You know.. just the age ol classic human endeavor to rape and pillage nature’s stores.. but with ample romance.

There may not be any solid references to a lunar deity, much to my dismay, there is however a divining wand, a lunar atmosphere, a dark pit into infinite nothingness, speculation on what exists on the Dark side of the Moon (that had me researching whether Pink Floyd ever did actually tell us), the funniest depiction of anti gravity, a classic love triangle and a little mouse.

Equipped with all of the characteristic traits of early expressionist cinema; from exaggerated body and facial expressions (to convey and emphasize feelings or intentions in the absence of audio), high contrast/dramatic lighting effects, simple editing and references to the intrinsically modern problems of self-reflexivity, spectacle and identity that existed in Germany’s war years.

There were times I wanted watch it with elements from the score of last year’s ‘First Man’ with it’s rickety analog sounds to accentuate the absurdity of it all but the piano sufficed. If you can sit still, endure some slow points, then give it a gander. It’s a sweet film from the days of yonder.

Oh! I almost forgot. What did Pink Floyd say was on the Dark side of the Moon? “There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark”. It’s a metaphor for darkness, the darkness (or different ideas) that can destroy all the positive emotions and ideas that are a part of humanity. In effect the darkness represents insanity. But like in reality the light portrayed by the moon is really an illusion.

Friday lunch time

I’m tucked into an outside crevice of this cathedral like a lil mole rat.. a nerdy lookin’ kid.. about 19 years old, baseball cap, pink shirt, skinny black pants.. starts walking past, real slow.. edging side to side as young men do.. slips outta my periphery… dunno whether he spotted me or not but he runs back super fast.. scales a wall and starts breaking out in mad parkour all over the joint..

The disheveled schizophrenic on the grass. Same age, black eye and a mouth full of blood.. wakes up from his slumber.

The breeze scales a frontward facing facade, spiraling around a wandering security guard

Call of the dragon

I walked into the supermarket, I looked at the dragon.. fruit.

I scaled the refrigerated shelving of grape and berry and melon..

I got up on to the top of the refrigerator. I ripped off my shirt

I jumped off the refrigerator. Bending my knees upon landing..

I picked up the gourmet lettuce. I threw it to the ground.
I picked up the spinach.. I threw it at an old polish man.
I picked up the chicory.. I put it in my mouth.. I masticated it.. I spat it out.
I picked up the chard.. I threw it upward in the air with total abandon..
I picked up the iceberg lettuce.. ripped it to shreds.. stuffed it in my pants..
I picked up another iceberg lettuce.. and did exactly the same ..
i continued to do so til my fancy Italian pants were packed to the brim with cold wet iceberg lettuce..

then I did it..

I waddled out.. I did a backflip.. then I waddled out… I did a front flip then I waddled out.. I did a cartwheel.. and another and another… The lettuce crunched loudly with every motion of my body.. then I waddled out.. out into the sunshine..

I wilted beneath the midday sun

My second skin wilted beneath the midday sun

And I rejoiced.. for everything made sense again