neglected

conference in melbourne, tedious rashed affliction, uni work, etc etc.  this makes me tired, and takes away the things i feel like i could put in here.


i'd like to say that words were the best of me, but i don't know what best means.  i tend to think my bookshelf was/is; it's built and shaped and molded with just the right number of cracking fissures to make it charming, and enough solidity to keep it standing.  if i were to introduce myself somehow, i would do it with my books - sweeping arm around them, polishing them, leaving them glistening.  it's cleaner than i am, it's more of who i would like to be. there is an element of concealment i've never be able to manage.  a 'mystery', a sort of complexity, rather than a stripped heart on sleeve bluntness that i wield like a clumsy sword.

i am fantasising about making my apartment beautiful. i want to grow potatoes.  i know, they are cheap, but i would love to do it, dig them up and get the dirt under my nails.  there are little paper lights in the loungeroom, and i want to hang them from my walls.  i want them draped and sagging around the apartment.

there is a constant push pull inside of me. the gentleness i wish i could have, the slightness, the wider eyed beauty, the reaching out, and a butterfly sitting on my fingers and a pause, and a mysterious smile, and i remain like that, an enigma, cats resting on my lap, a puzzle to be solved,  and yet, and yet, i end up being this over inflated flesh to be taken at will that races off and feeds it to anyone.  and i don't know if i want to be either, or if i can be either.  i feel like the 'dance drink screw' refrain of common people in my head, dance drink screw, dance drink screw, round and around like horses on a carousel rising and falling.  and then i try and pull back to control it, because i just don't want to sleep alone anymore, and i want honeysuckle and free roaming bunnies, and drawings of botanical illustrations made into wall paper, and ahh shit i don't even believe in anymore.  and i'm afraid of the dark without you next to me, i thought, and then i opened my eyes, and i don't want to be a pretty girl, a maiden fair, because i an not a pretty girl, and i'll never be like that, no matter how many muscles i pull trying to fit into the sweet little floral dress.

i don't know. enacting whatever parody of self i want to take out to play confuses me. it's a game, a puzzle, and i have no sense of how to fit together some image that will move me anywhere, or if i should be 'genuine' or if it's even possible to be genuine.

if i could roll myself back to a point before i became, well, filthy, would i?  it's not that long ago really that i'd never taken drugs, or had sex outside of a loving relationship.  it's a matter of a few years that i pushed the skin i thought i was in out, and reformed myself into a parody of the narrow line i used to be.  and you can't quite go back. i can't sew the marriages back together, or pull memories from night after night after night in alleys and goonbags and up trees and down streets and in the rain, and i would not trade this filth for the world because i love it. it feeds me more than the cottage does, because it takes me away. 

in other news, i found exciting cider, that tastes like strawberry, and i have a blog about being a librarian that even i can't bring myself to read.

pottering

i am reading the guardian, as i always do, in love with most of the articles. i adore that newspaper. whenever i feel low about the world, or the internet especially, i turn to the guardian to have some faith restored.

i am, Uncommonly, bored right now. unusually bored. infuriatingly bored.  sinking skin crawlingly bored. this is a symptom. i know this.  i know you well.

semester crawls on. one essay left, on the Dewey Decimal System. what sort of librarian cliche is that?  chew of my LEG for god's sake. i just want to TEAR things into shreds, it is like there are bugs crawling under my skin right now, that growling prowling scratching feeling of a cat left inside all day.

saw an amazing show monday night. laurie anderson. lou reed. meltbanana. boris. bardo pond. i could go on. the sound growled through my body and i felt alive and calm and taken down and under until i was re-written. it made me deplorably pleased.
only now, i want more of that sort of pleasure.  and it is so dry here, so dry and sandpaper-y and rough.  there's something to be said for 'making the best' but i just cannot keep making things up anymore. i am not a magician, and i am not out of this world. i want to be drunk on the earth, and clamber up church towers and i want to fall off things until i bleed it out, this desire, red into earth. not violently, just engulfing until i cannot breathe.  

extra-ordinary frustration

small factors added up. no internet at home. (thus lack of posts, my iPhone toting reader/s).

i am waiting, stasis, in this repulsive town, tapping toes, watching sand, slip slip, waiting for gravity to take me. reading trash, watching money dust around me, eating broccoli, drinking beer, soft red fringes, sleeping (always sleeping) endless frustrated twitching, come ON, now, come ON....

but i'll get there. i know that. i am happy, just frustrated. moving, slowly.  escape route delayed a few months, still waiting.  letting some sense of that grinning stomping joyful creature i am seep back into me, and i stand tall, and i take in air, and i gather back everything that hungry hollow ghosts stole out from under me, day after day, more and more gathers below me.  and i will get free of this, oh yes. i will.

winter

canberra winters always end up shuddering over the top of me before i realise they are there. i am sitting waiting, waiting for the cold to end up taking me under.  at the moment, there are leaves up to my knees on the side of the road. i love that too; i walk through them, i wade and kick, and run, and have them crunch underfoot.  light filtering more and more through the trees as the leaves fall away, less and less, and yet the sun does less and less....

i find that one of the stranger things. the sun in brisbane is heavy and heady even in the middle of winter.  you will sweat, heavy and hot, wade through the humidity not leaves, the feeling of the heat on your arms, the smell of the air when i walk down brunswick street, treading water? treading over the cement on the sidewalk... near the cliff face, near the trees, oh you can stand on it and see the fucking world unfold in that river....

it's been since, november? october? since my last visit... my old haunts have shifted - my favourite cafe, a place i practically lived in for a few years, has shut its doors. my old friends have new lives in new places.  things change. it's the way it goes, over and over again. that comforts me, actually, i like that things are not static, and i go back, and it's all different. the place, my last year in brisbane which was glorious and wonderful and mad and fun, and silly, well, that world's as dead as the person i was then is. it's passed away, hand over hand, into a new placement of people. you can never go home again. it never is home again. 

and i am not settled here; the streets are sanitized, but i can feel a humanity, a warmth in them. i am still looking for an out, and i have found one - a job that fits all the necessary things i need to apply to an institution that's not mine - and maybe, well, i'll do it.  things are slowing, and it's time for a change. my feet itch, i am hungry, my palms are open, open open, and i want to drink the world up. of course there is potential here, but the quiet, the streets, the wideness of the streets have done me in. the lack of frottage on streets with strangers just trying to struggle to work, the smell of the air... i want a city to open me up and bleed me dry for a bit.  and not just little interludes. i want it to take me again, something new, somewhere new, anything, just shifting off again... 

and yes. it happens again like this.

you cut her name into your heart
you burn his name into your arm
cast out the pig you kiss as love
heaven is closed for now you are alone

this too, this too shall pass away
this too, this too will pass away
listen, Steven is singing to you
the pain of life you wipe away

a reason, that fine gray ash shall
recall these days
inquire
the serpent
to become a rag of a dream
interred
you arrive
and you wave as if she could care
but she can't
nor can you
the relinquishing and a flickering
out of loss

this too, this too shall pass away
this too, this too shall fade away
listen, Steven is singing to us
the pain of life you wipe away

perhaps depraved is who you are
why not?
depraved at least you're not alone
overcome by the truth you face that you can't
get up or look up
at the moon
without throwing up and it
stay the same all the time
lie and wait
it stop again like a bee
it will die
when it stings you once
and its small bee's head will fall off

this too, this too shall pass away
this pain will pass away
listen, Steven is singing to you
the pain of life you wipe away


oh oh oh, it always sneaks up behind you like some dirty black dog, like some silent angry cloud, like some wet sheet on your head, like a dream, like a dream, like a dream...

there's sweat here, it's hot and enclosed and my shirt is sticking to me, and my hair is coiled into ringlets from the heat and i am letting go like i am fucking a stranger drunk, and i am yelling lyrics, and i am jumping my fist in the air, my lungs hurting, my tongue bitten, my thighs light, my arse pressed against bodies against bodies and crawling arms around and over me and under.

impossible feeling

i sat against the glass window pressed face against glass, listening to xiu xiu on the bus.  there were more cows than i could count blurring passed me, impossible exchange, impossible exchange.

i will stick to leather, and i will listen, and it feels like my heart is being forced out of my ears. only realising this sneaking up on me as i am there, sticking to leather, and fuck, where did this come from? where the FUCK did this come from? 

it's always dug into my heart that first point of contact when things start to fall into place, or away. and this one, elizabeth? this is unusually stupid, even for you.

care to?

afternoon heat, post work, sitting on my bed with my shoes still on. i'm feeling slightly too full after eating too much at a work afternoon tea.

the last few days have been eaten. i find the internet eats my time all too much - i just sit here and all of a sudden it's been absorbed like pouring water into a bucket of milk. i can't see it anymore. i can't see my face. and i am hungry.


and i am edgy at the moment - starting to feel itchy under the fingers again, it's sliding under my flesh and under my breath and under my time, feeling this need to move, to do, to go, to find, to ... dig holes in things just so they leak. it's an uncomfortable feeling, ants in the brain? ants on my mind. little black crawling dots moving very fast, purposefully, but i don't know where or why. i just know, i need to move. but i don't know what to do. it's frustration; this odd static feeling that grows in this repulsive town and spreads out under me and i lie on it and galllommmphf it takes me up and down.

i guess if i read, it might slow things down. it might give me something resembling discipline. i'm waiting for my enrollment kit from csu; i'm finishing my masters in order to make myself employable in a Real City, like melbourne. somewhere that, when i wonder what to do on a thursday night, i run through the one cinema, the few generic houses i could be in, and flat screens where i watch other people do things. and i'm tired of that. i don't like the screens.

right now, i'm drawing bunnies. i don't care if my 'art practice' (and that's an inaccurate description, i feel, it's giving it too much credit) consists of drawing bunnies. it's something. i'm drawing, at least. kind of.

flesh

specifically cooking, stinking, charred, heavy scented flesh.

i am a terrible vegetarian. i struggle at it endlessly, fighting between morality and my desire to eat it. i have no moral reason to eat meat, and plenty of moral reasons not to eat meat. whenever i think about it, i feel ill to the bone at what happens - the violence perpetrated against non-human animals, the body of suffering by creatures that, were i to know on an individual level, i would like. it's not about Eating Meat Being Natural. it's about - is it moral? is it right? is it something i am comfortable doing? and it is not. though it's a lot harder when you are surrounded by people eating meat.

on a brighter note, i went to Bowral today. this is a town in the southern highlands of NSW full of bookstores. and some cute little cafes, and pretty things, and trees and hills and soft grass. and bookstores. i restrained myself, considerably, and walked away, buying only four books. that's quite amazing for me. one was an early 20th century collection of shelley's pamphlets which looks lovely - beautiful soft binding.... and other things i've been after for awhile...

excitingly, my copy of the wonderful Sexy Bodies - The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

edited by the wonderful Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn - had included in the back a magazine clipping of a recipe for gingerbread cookies, and icing, and ideas for a family Easter. pretty brilliant.

it's re-ignited the desire for academia, looking at my collection of divine books on gender and culture and semiotics. i feel hungry for study, i feel hungry for writing and learning. this year, if it is the only thing i achieve, i am going to resolve the gutwrenching anxiety university study makes me feel, so i can go on, and write and write and study and say what i need to say. however i need to say it.

in other news, Librarything now has all these extra awesome features. this is not good. all i want to do tonight is go through, editing it and tiding records, scanning covers and doing those sorts of fun things with my saturday night. Because. I. Am. Awesome. i sadly am... wary of linking from there to here, just due to the fact that my librarything has proximity to others.

pleasure

On a soft pillow
I will lay down my limbs

Sappho

i am having a crisis of faith, which is hard when you believe in very few things.

it is not a crisis i can verbalise, or pin down. because maybe you cannot let something in when it won't stop moving.

i am tired, and i want to lie down for a long, long time, until moss grows and bones soften. and then, i will wake up. and then, i will feel alive again.

my voice will catch in the back of my throat when i finally go to sit up and then, and then, i will lay down my limbs, and they will soften.

my vision is soft around the edges at the moment. things are starting to ghost up and coil in on themselves; our skin flaking off like bark each day, scales from our skin cells, dusty snow. and things turn around, and live come out of it, and meaning comes out of nothing, and we see something, sometimes, that makes it worthwhile. and it is close enough to grasp, almost, but too far away to hold. just that tiny inch too far away to hold properly.



i get a nasty itch sometimes for something... something tangible to consume me and take me away. some sort of visceral madness to overcome the flesh, and run away with me. life with this cinematic glow from moment to moment, glistening, jittering, present. sometimes, some things, some places, and it clicks into place. and then i move slightly, and it all slips away, and the cards slip out of my hand onto the floor and i let go, and i drop them, they fall face down, card after card, and i just don't know if this is the last time i will pick them up now.

the streets are so clean here. the trees are articulate in a way, down the streets, soviet. and they don't take me away. they don't drag me down, bury me alive, and make me forget how to remember how to forget.

coastal

to the beach, good folk. i am going on holiday by accident, in a house of people, room to room, too much booze is likely - i am taking books. tempted to remove some software from the Boy's iPhone to keep him of the interwebs for a few days. but i like him, so i won't.

sand, and little rock pools, salty water and that itchy under-the-skin feeling from the ocean. sleeping somewhere different, with people i don't know well, sand walk dark beach times, rolling over and over.

poetry. auden, larkin, borges, sexton, sappho - am taking them with me for the holiday.

quiet and distance from this repulsive town.



these are the things that Kill Me....

i am taking monday off work. monday will be a break in something for me, and i am glad that i won't be here. and i'll be celebrating on tuesday. it's the little things, the ones we are waiting for, that are not quite victories, but spaces, and places where we can again feel free again.