The sound of his thoughts

My fingers stopped mid-word over the keyboard when the poet and recovering addict slurred, “No use planting daisies in winter, surely they will wither before the end of the year.” I looked across my desk, searching in his face for what I could not find in his words. His eyes struggled to stay open and his lips quivered without the reassuring aftertaste of a voice. I made inquiring sounds from the back of my throat.

“Continue typing,” he merely said, “I will tell you everything.”

I looked again at the unfinished draft on my screen to find my spot, and waited for him to continue. But after a silence too long to be a reasonable pause, he softly proclaimed, “I find the sound of your fingers dancing over the keyboard very soothing.” I did not expect this, I did not want this. I was terrified by the sudden onslaught of memories flooding my consciousness. “Keep typing, please,” he said, “I could fall asleep listening to the music you make of my thoughts.”

I started to protest. I did not know what to write. I muttered under my breath, “Cause and effect. You cause, I effect." I was merely to formulate his story into a meaningless two-dimensional black-and-white to present to a black-robed figure sitting in judgment of you, me and sundry. But I found no way to penetrate the blank stare of his eyes. They only drooped further, and with his frail hand he gestured for me to go on. He was growing more contented with this newfound sound of this thoughts, more captivated by this rhythmic something that was inspired by him, because of him, but which was not his.

So I presumed to fill out the story of his life. I typed and deleted to retype even if I did not know what had happened to him; I wrote even if I did not know what he had done; and I made music of his past, his thoughts and his life even when I ran out of words.

Train announcement #5

Passenger in the red shirt, please be advised to take your fingers out of your mouth because when you almost lost your balance making your way to the seat after the mass exodus at Wolli Creek, you made a fumbled grab for the unhygienic handrail. Suffice to say a bunch of screaming kids were spotted earlier burying their hands in grease-bucket fish and chips on their way to the aquarium. This has been a community announcement, caring for your dust-free and sterile existence.

Train announcement #4

Passengers, please note that this train has decided not to stop ever again.

Train announcement #3

Passenger in the third carriage, fifth row from the back next to the aisle: please be advised that I have a surveillance camera trained on you. Yes, you.

The duck's tail and other emptiness

I have yet to see the core of me dying. Even as I burn the duck’s tail and watch it melt into the earth, I have no wish of turning. Is it the faraway tree you see? Is it the slow-motion capture of the reckless splatter of dark unsweetened tea? You post-construct your reactions as if they were instinctive. Now it comes as second nature and you don’t even know who you are. Tear it down forever more and never be receding. I have no wish of turning. I only have to go faster than the speed of light.

They pull in their belt one extra notch after another to keep from feeling the hunger in their empty stomachs, so I spend all my time walking with my arms crossed firmly over my chest to squeeze it down, to keep from feeling the tightness tugging at my empty heart. I cry and you threaten to bring in the men in white coats. I don’t mind, as long as I can ask them to wrap the strait jacket around my chest three times and pull tight one notch after the other.

Is the shadow upside down, or do you just have your shirt on inside out? Don’t sit there propping up your chin with your upturned palms; adjust the earnestness lopsided on your face and smile at me as I strike the match against the side of the box and hold it ceremoniously to the tail.

Train announcement #2

Passengers are reminded to admire the deep immeasurable chasm between the train and the platform.

Train announcement #1

Passengers please note, for trains to Maladjustment please proceed to the end of platform 3. First stop Ineptness, followed by Obtusefields, Gross Incompetence, Some Wit Hill, Some Naiveté, Foolish Park, then all stations to Maladjustment. A brief stop may be made at Flash of Brilliance, time-permitting, but that’s not guaranteed. The local time is three-thirty-two one lazy mid-afternoon. It has started sprinkling, please take extra care when stepping off the train onto the platform.

I keep tripping as I walk in your shoes

I keep tripping as I walk in your shoes. I thought it obvious that I had an urgent need to nudge the stars into columns and rows – even before all this madness. But I suppose you have always believed you know me better than I do. I must tell you that a fading naked apparition set adrift a weeping kangaroo on a plank of wood towards a uniformed man in a cage. They all said he had a digital camera in one hand and a machine gun in the other. The man has since been discharged, though feign death he did.

I put a pillow over my face for an hour and a half but I might as well be a thieving liar with a hidden trait for escape. All I want to do is run away. Shut out, then shut in as I have done before. Because however much benefit you genuinely believed your chosen course of action would bestow upon me, I can tell you there was none. I want to dig a hole, six feet deep as it is wide, and bury myself. Then in the dark, I shall slice open my chest, gnaw at my heart, suck on my intestines, curl into myself, and wait for death. I never said I was perfect. You should know that by now.

What I forgot to remember #2

Long ago whenever I couldn’t sleep, whenever hallucinations moved and rose from the earth like giant obelisks from under my feet, I dared not close my eyes. If I closed my eyes I would see epileptic patterns and swirls flashing against my eyelids, inducing gut-tumbling nausea beyond reason, beyond relief. So when I was too scared to sleep on that straw mat hidden under the house, when I dared not shut my eyes, you sat up with me.

When you sat up with me, the clouds reflected the lights from the traffic thirteen floors below onto the papery skin of your face and the watery hollow of your unfocussed eyes. From behind you came the glow of a red bulb casting a dull sheen of blood over the wall, streaming over and struggling to fill the shadows created by my scratched-out flakes of paint in shapes and sizes matching the psychotropic delirium in my overheated mind.

I clearly saw you moving the thick air surrounding my body with a crumbling straw fan to cool me from feverish unrest. And then, from high above, far down below, from the right of me, then from the left just outside the reach of my outstretched arm, you sang a folksong, some lullaby, in a voice barely above a whisper. You sang in words I could not comprehend, though I knew the first word of each line was connected to the last to form a continuous food chain of the world. You sang showing me how to whip into line the disparate and scattered chaos, ordering for me all that was meant to be.

I wish I could remember and understand enough to see clearly the thread you weaved, but the older I get the more they tell me, and the more they tell me the more I don’t understand. And as much as I do not understand, as much as they affirm, by the crushed can, by the sunrise, and by the gap between the crusty lands, the blissfulness in willful ignorance, I have not yet found any such corresponding serenity.

What I forgot to remember #1

Long ago you showed me the way to the house in which you were born. You started from the sea and honked your way into the oncoming traffic on a busy highway. It was the third exit you took as you ignored the city lights, and I laughed when we lingered in the roundabout around and around. Did you say to go over the bridge? Or was it better to go past the park where you and your neighbours played in the rain, forming the mud under the swings into shapes resembling the food on your plate? We drove for a long time, in any case; that’s all I remember.

Mindless evacuation #37

I.

I am hopeless sick of these same.
I am fed up weary of these same.
I am tired, invariable, unalterable.
unchanged unchanging
unbroken unbreaking
These same all same pedestrian
These same all same unrelenting
all these same words carved in stone
all these same words set in a kiln
stacked to the brim amongst the bricks
one cup over another
runneth over and over
the waxed foot of the clay
where you scratched your name
stoked by a passionless blaze
fired by thousand degree flames

II.

Still, none of these mine.
Not that phrase.
Not this stop.
Pages and pages refusing,
Standing in a spelling bee-line,
sweating and stuttering
then ask for it in a sentence stalling
to spell out the shallowness of life upheaving
to covet the misfortune of others dejecting.
The trite, the corny, the blue-veined cheese
Yank it out of me. Pull.
Grab it before time runs out.
the words the phrases
the sentiments the sentinel
before the plains
before the plains entrapping.

A whimper

I do not like hospitals. Too many people have gone in but never came out. Or they came out less than they were before they went in. As for me, I hyperventilate at the doctor's deadpan explanation of the difference between arteries and veins. I need to sit down, even though the lecture is directed at the patient next to me, whom I have never met before. By some misfortune we lie next to one another through a thin sterile curtain, staring up at the same sorry ceiling, counting the same black dots on the vents as the doctor injects the same infected needles into our bloodstream in perfect symphony. So I shudder and whimper, quiver and hum, along with the loveless child’s wail wailing with a dying fall at the end of the corridor.

Not the first time I let my cries bounce off hospital walls, and not the last. One night many years ago my father carried me on his back and lied to me about where we were going. I ended up at the hospital with bruises all over me. The doctors looked at my mother with suspicion and middle-class disapproval, and threatened to call the police if she did not provide an adequate explanation. But all she could do was cry.

Even back then I could not stand the daily injections. I pretended I needed to go to the toilet each time the burly nurse approached my bed with a giant needle. I would hide in the small cubicle for as long as I could with my shorts around my dangling ankles, panicked and locked in against all the world.

The last day I was there, I knew I only had to endure one more time the prick of the needle deep into my skin, but still I couldn’t do it. I asked to go, then begged, then threatened to wet myself. Then I did the only thing I knew to do, only thing I have ever known to do, which was to run the hell away into the last cubicle right up against the wall and slam the door loudly behind me. But the nurse, filled with fuming fury, ran after me shouting “You little shit!” and kicked the damn toilet door open. She pushed my head down between my knees and against the dirty green of the toilet door. I struggled helplessly against her hold and tried to pull up my shorts from shame.

But all I could do was quiver and hum, shudder and whimper, as I felt the sharp jab of the needle and heard the sound of the sweat from her forehead freefalling a perfect '10' into the toilet water, narrowly missing my arse.