This was a year I saw the sky as a space where fingers play and make up worlds, mine included.
It was the year I navigated interrupted lines alone, and towards the end, together without permission. It was the year I arranged words with clarity and intent; the year of A+ in English; the year of settling on the next step.
It was the year of strength, and the small construction sites I visited most weeks to build it.
It was the year of pages being turned, and thought-up inkwells spilled for the pleasure of metaphors.
It was a year I returned to roots, and found them growing within me, nurtured by my journeys to and fro.
It was a year that taught me until the last day that I am enough.
This was a year I saw myself as a space where heart plays and joins together everything.
What shall I play for you? I'm grateful that the lessons we most need to know are taught to us in an artful living of our now. This is a Christmas on a bed, with a pillow bounced off the wall, unsuspected wrapped gifts, bowls of food, chairs backed with Santa hats, adrenaline and jitters and the word love a few times.
We learn not to think back, not to read the transcript of our past like a royal decree, but to embrace and thank as if all that has had to happen to appear this now from the inchoate realm of its possibility, was written in illegible ink, so all we could do is roll up the parchment, and hold onto it for a while to remind us of the here, of the now; God, and not being able to piece a miracle together despite its already complete.
wiringin a battering of desks boxes clutter firecrackers accidents in front of our house behind a wall poem ordinary people in beds heads on pillows pills in jars house movement ten thirty seven shit ready to come out curry stain yes to firetrucks
close eyes close. on the cusp a laugh laughed out with its arms widely soaring
we are about a land and a sea inside one throat
we are home and the soot on our feet intrepid, come from curious brushes
where the nearest scratches of the sleep are splayed we have come muttering signs that, here we rest our strings here we bow and here we hold hallelujah
when through the window a square of sun looms, it ties into the leaning hairs of my arms; holds me there on my bed to watch the zoo of rain dangle to the earth somewhere below.
when the clouds close over like eyelids, i wait for the wink.
it comes (i don't know what it looks like)
a girl wears her brown hair on a window sill; her eyes i barely see through the weald of my forearm. her gaze tangled in the earth below is stuck to ferns of steel or bodies simulating life on sidewalks.
each blink she reconfigures the columns of cells at the back of my head.
a corridor full of holes (if we can say that) there are pairs of eyelids hanging here and closed doors with dark lines underneath.
it's grim, i said, but it is a matter of perspective, and thankfully i was willing to swap so that my collection could stretch from one end to the other.
we slide along the carpet every morning, our snail antennae retract at a poke from the sun.
It's been a few months since I last talked in this manner. This is a voice, after all, a particular inflexion of my vocal chords; a deliberate accent. I remember sitting on my childhood bed with my back against the wall on the other side of the world. It dawned on me that this was a way of voicing how I feel that's more confusing for me than other voices. My words glide into each other and there are too many sentences. It gets crowded. It dawned on me that I could be more deliberate and align my words in a way closer to how they seem to draw in my own thinking. Less prepositions and logical syntax. Less questions about whether how I really put things fit how they sat in my mind. They didn't. This is a way of communicating that's supposedly clearer for people; it is not so for me. My words are knotted and ideas and images are tethered by wisps and inchoations. In my mind, time does sit, and so the rhythm of keep-going that prose suggests is an altercation with the physics of language in my own conception, for my own purposes. I don't own them of course, but I am making a distinction. I do not understand things, it seems. I stand by them. They happen, and I am here.
A where-wolf in the thrashing bushwalks of the freely-forested dreamt-up world. It's probably true that by manipulating language, by making concepts, re-making concepts, shattering consciously the categories that language offers us, we come closer to being mechanics. Figuring things out. This is a bottle. This is a nose. This is a nose-bottle. A bottled nose. A something we figure out, we image. No it's not real. Yes, it is really. Reality is an art, not the other way around. What I have accepted as 'the way' or 'the real' is just a figuration that could be something else if it is figured elseway. What am I doing? Figuring. Fashioning. Making. Newing. None of it is 'a' thing, but 'any'thing instantiated. Doing so makes me. It puts in touch me with the wording of me. I could be me, but I am something else. The verb to be separates. Punctuation marks. Short sentences drive points home off the cliff. I read back and a tendrilled worry inside me is felt. It slides on the edges. I don't make sense. What is the sense in writing something that does not make sense? It is a fashion of reality. It is as real as the real, but its story is unfamiliar. I bet it could become familiar if one wished to familiarise oneself with it. The syntax makes me feel guilty as if it should all be clear. Writing 'poetry' is easier for me, really, because there's less expectations of clarity, there. More anythings go, really, but even that isn't totally freeing. I write this for it to be seen. I write this so that you can see it. And that is the same thing as writing this so that I can see it. I put it out 'there' and that makes me feel validated. You don't have to say a word - I already know what I want and it is a trapdoor-kind of choice to keep it from myself (because I already have it, knowing it). I keep it there in brackets and build a frame around it that becomes a house. I live there, in want, waiting for an architect to knock down the pillars and the wooden panelling. No, really, I live there because I can make it appear like I do, and that's good enough an illusion for me to play with. I write this because I am playing. I think I live like this because I am playing and I can't justify stopping. The little boy I mention in the past three years and whatnot of this blog and writing, he who is anxious, scared, is an instance, a possibility, a reality. He really likes to play, and he enjoyed playing victim. Now I know he was playing, and sometimes I do enjoy keeping that up, forgetting. I have to forget, to do it. This is probably the 'thing' I wanted to get by writing this, after the words. A point of okay, of saying I choose to forget. I choose not to remember. This is my going concern/conifer. Imogen Heap's lyrics: "So how do I do normal? The smile I fake, the permanent wave of Cue cards and fix-it gears, Can't you tell I'm not myself? I'm a slow motion accident lost in coffee rings and fingerprints. I don't wanna feel anything, but I do, and it all comes back to you."
whoever you are, you who are here. I feel you in this way
again, I am found in conversation with here: there are cars and there are people and i wish i was tall so that i could touch all the trees. but my mind is preoccupied with past thoughts, with the two elastic years wrapped around [you i] so much that raindrops like to draw the veins of my hands on bus windows. going home feels like circulation, because there are no crossroads. i like listening to houses move and the road outside be smeared by tyres that evaporate. i forget and am reminded; i forget. there goes the sun down tickling the back of leaves and the giddy light catches between my eyelashes. there is enough slithered through to twist you upside-down and -up again. then i have to blink a few times roll back the film stretched over irises unstick you from the negative.
the rain hits me in the face. collects upon it, a spoonful of dots marking where i have been your fingertip drawing a constellation. when you look up, you watch the glow worms you put there wiggle, my skin a cave painted by your eyes, my stalactites a gallery of sculptures your nostrils chip away at as they hover, they a pair of twin dragonflies exploring. they uncover me, wiggle their wings in salute making my walls scrunch into curtains ready to be drawn.
for being a ship and asking for wind for your sails, for navigating without a map the crowded hillsides and rough streets that pass for a city of twenty-two years and some and for slipping a note to him laying siege to lay still and look in the brook with a stream, under the canopy of now, i thank you.
he has nails in the woodwork and it's when one looses that a splinter hits, i forget and am reminded by you that brackets come in pairs, and without the other, one is left to be a wish on a cheek.
I am on two momentae. The surf is on. Beginning with an ending, ending with a beginning, this is what I mean by riding a wave onto another wave. This cannot be the work of my thoughts, I conclude, but here I am. Steady(ing).
In the end we're gonna say we were just floating around like champagne corks, eventually hitting the ground then be lodged back in. We'll say that's us, holding contents in the bottle, and we'll be content on a shelf to be arranged with dust.
This creative thing, i don't have permission for i don't have the authority to engine it, and what happens when i turn my palm upward is that i notice the estuaries at knots with my forearm, a map of the vitality needed to write This. i don't have a trail of footsteps to follow where i imagine i'm heading in fact, i don't even know where ahead is. all i see is This thing slippery between the fingers coiling and grasping from within the gashes of my brain. turning over an abyss i get to expect my eyelids to close like lids over bread bins and open a less-than second or hours after to the same space as if it's just been captured on film. click and it's a trail of crumbs disappearing in the desolation of everything behind. i don't see it. This, no remains.
in twos pieces of a conch shell pressing into what could have been the window , a shore from which a pondersome look stretches, taking in a life of plankton somersaults in unpocketed grasps, grasps, grasps at
in twos the dangling curtain ribbons squeezing into a present, tense but firmly shut darknessings wherever there is room to crash upon hundred million forevers of approach of approaching
in twos surgery lines cuddle asphalts railings shiver while bridging comingclosers, left with two sails afloat, is, there tatters there tatters
she's weird. not proud of her address, projecting into the microphone her spider limbs. the applauding stampede behind her teeth an auditorium for me in the front row. gouged in her lower lip she has me all and over eyelids drawn cranium side-wound, enjoying.
a true teacher starts his student to do something and doesn't know where it's going i want to, and begin, true poets lead no one unawares it is nothing other than awareness that poets that is, creators of all sorts seek. they do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be an art. something necessary, no. only possible. and wherever he ends up, that is, when he decides to stop and locate himself he will be there, having begun about to begin.
i am listening to the way the stones eat next to each other under me, my sound of stepping. i am confused by the red echo of the many dots on the green carpet, measled there looking at me as my pupils are trying to slip away noiselessly to branches, or grass, somewhere green then dart back unnoticed - quick before the magnet meets me, of their eye sockets, telling come, come out into the tumbling gears and working cogs of being interested in sex - join us here! the white fields demand the red veins to extract, then! a shoot at the low of my back as i am patting the ground, my alien proboscis exposed to the onlooking two satellites. i recognise these space machines, but do not know how to impress buttons into them without covering up the holes. i am listening to the way the stones sit next to each other under me, quiet. i am feeling now the surface of the planet just as starlight thumbs across it like turning a page, but for the countlessth time, the writing has not changed. i am seeing the starlight park its pats of assurance on the shoulders of cliff faces, brushing away eroding tears. i am listening to the way the stones wait next to each other under me - what are you waiting for? tell, tell! i, crossing, try, look me no longer at.
cleverly arranged lightning, three little pockets of bird hanging from it, exceedingly beautiful in their wait
for closed sound shurikens inside bricks inside pylons that hold up the bridges who wait
as people in pairs of socks (sliding doors opening out as sockets) tremor, their lip friction shaking the suspenders/
before they can know; a tumble takes a shadow, napes it to the wiring for the beaks to come pick at to undo (fervently) the knots in the absence of light.
Herewhere started with a shout of bright thenthereweres. Tomorrow is a Sunday out of the Bi ble and men's ends are going to press on pews dividing up duty in to concerns caught in cried-out candlesticks clenched.
clenched paper droughts, this is. even though ink connects seas to mouths, the fingerdrift that traces through continents is mis sing
signs from a heap, chords around typewriters I sit here lilypad; take a jump and sprocket into places that aren't yet wistful: unyet made with unyet made bed frames and unyet made wallpaper inspiring unyet breathed out gaseous humanities, us planets made of toads and organised socketry.
shake your hands, I'm with gravity I might take up storey buildings and day over to mendicancy in frames remindent of somewhere you can knock to hear an echo.
sound little prints of heroes riding south on shadows mowing the grass
used saccharine contraptions, these fulls in mouth cavitying principles down boulevards of second hands ticking
and figures waking up clocks with a halving palm down on twelve, losing count of morning sidewalks
they tick over flavours of coffee on the register and sit as cups and spoons awaft they hope in whisks, plated soluble trajectories from ceramic lips to ceramic sequences inspired by busy nostrils.
irregular bubble wrap domes hived together adrift in sink empty swaps with the skin slipping off for the unfilled dotted line pencilled in by my brain mouth: change toothpaste, like change shampoo and have bald cells with toothy grips remain after day halves brushing. where dentures used to be, lacunae
slight lights peppering off in the paved of the road between the
painted silly rectangles ants get confused about following trails sneezed down by the hardy.
have a thought coiled around a filament holding on with its many fingernails
want to give it a back to stretch out onto and dot and number and then get the many little legs to feet a trail to be as quiet as possible on, in pursuit.
so often told you, am just that presence being rained on
I felt so happy when I opened my umbrella this morning to that newspaper ink smell layered in the trenches at the far ends of my hands
leaps from crying closed insides into the curves of falling dots onto puddles I am scribbling just by looking at the shadows hanging underneath. to their heads, rushes to consider whether to miss life's buses.
traveling with the circus offers new ways to measure centimetres between thought-outs and the colourings of my heart pencil; the territory of pines is one from one side of the train tracks, then when the train passes again it blooms into a forest of possibilities
i come to discover each place is a local branch of life, and banking with each account is something that cares for something
i was asked to put my money back into the roots where i was born, so as to stop the rotting and the felling of possibilities but that's not what is happening.
instead canopies are crowding in eyes seeing rivers as snakes clouds as dust-trails of great migrations trains as neuron signals humans as sieves through which black watermelon seeds don't pass
but rain does, slowly : permeate walls dampen to the touch and it makes people cold, scarves and gloves colder
all the while the train shakes through the forest inside this is that so-globe and brings me back to where i left off with an extra ring drawn right in my centre.
traced by a finger on a bedroom wall listening to an othersea ripple inside a piano
a thread from open ceilings pull down more and more pairs of baby shoes, dotting the skies at night are trails of lessons arriving to be born, the calendar says we've been picking up-tied laces, wrapping our fingers in them and walking the air. washing lines have fallen under the light of so many pairs that our laundry has heaped onto a comma between us. you have to admit though, it's not the pile it used to be - what with all our upgrowing we've outgrown many of them
a little pause for breathing
1,5 because a full stop doesn't flutter in the wind coming from the lips of the other earthface, because it doesn't have a dripping coat hanging from the line to dry
. . .
ladybug trails ready to evaporate; behind us is dry and drying concrete, fields covered in wildly growing grass
ahead, the earth's a roiling something that we just haven't found yet that we may need something other than baby shoes to reach
now, we lift from the comma to each other's eyes and we see ourselves a little bit floating.
The elements have passed through here, elements that i think are invisible to me, but not quite odourless, because i get a minuscule whiff of something else, something that evades the pointed weight of my finger. It has rained, and snowed. It has dawned, then dusked. It has dayed and nighted and eclipsed, and i, distantly na(t)ive, have put my departed hand in this pocket of earth, feeling the grooves of racinations: a favourite activity perhaps because this hand keeps clutching, pulling, feeling a weight give, then come up to the surface with clumped dirt, warm, yet no root. It knows there's something there, it just can't quite hold it. And i feel some sort of sadness in me, though not an abstract, but a pre-sentiment, somefeel umbral, about that clutching. I've been in Romania for nearly three weeks, and tried writing my feelings down, but the words i want to use are not the words i can use. I want to use Romanian, but i realise that my grasp of Romanian has diminished, perhaps limiting my ability to use it to comprehend, for often i'm not so aware of connotations. And i'm thinking that this place isn't one that can be translated for grasping in another place, like New Zealand, nor can that place be brought here.
It's more accurate than i initially thought, to say that this is a different world. It's constructed differently. That perhaps has to do with the language itself, the story of it and its own impact on the place it is used in. I struggle to imagine a Romania built using the English language. It would be something else. And i struggle even further to imagine it because i note grinding linguistic edges that creak frictively when Romanians use English. Globalisation, advertising, capitalism, other tions, ings, and isms, have collectively chipped at the imaginary body of Romanianness, probably boring holes into it (sockets?) and allowing hybrid beings/double-citizened beings like myself to fit a little better. But the electricity, the communication that passes through such channels, doesn't find the same solitude of journey, of understanding, of clarity, as it would be if it were Romanian spoken to a Romanian, or Englishman to an Englishman. This probably means that the Romanian no longer exists, if it ever did. Pithy English phrases and instantiations of Fuck leak into friends' Romanian, pooling into a sense of gone-by, a sense that visitation has happened during the night (from aliens) and in the morning, they find they are able to communicate slightly more efficiently. I wonder whether they feel probed anywhere.
With my own language use, it feels like i have been probed and taken away for ten years for testing in a corner of the universe, and then brought back here to test-drive my capabilities, and the implanted intelligence. Shortly, i'll be ported back to Middle Earth, where that intelligence will serve causes there, but it seems somehow like my being in Romania is a programmed/expected spike in the machine, a want of return, back to, back to then, subsequently met by dissatisfaction, by an inability to compute happenings here within the framework developed back there. That feels sad. The robot can feel things. So returning, doesn't really strike me as returning, but rather retuning, and in this, coming to terms that, not living here, not forming the mindset of here, i'm not able to comprehend it, to figure it out and feature as data in it.
Perhaps if i'd kept up Romanian... but Romanian away from Romania is not the same thing, as i'm now bridging that French away from France is not the same thing. French being closer to Romanian though, i perhaps subconsciously saw merit in learning it back when i chose to study it in high school, in 2005.
I've been reminded several times to remember my roots. All i have so far been able to do, though, is to feel them underneath my feet, something i'm far less able to do in New Zealand. There is a quiet happiness in knowing that the roots are here, but being unable to hold them. I tell people: New Zealand doesn't feel like home, and Romania doesn't feel like home, either, and i let that thought dangle in front of me as i say it, watching it curiously float, aware that it can easily get tangled in conversation. I further say that i don't feel at home anywhere, but i wouldn't say that i am homeless. In Romania, i feel something. Something i perhaps cannot put words to, something that does not word. Emil Garleanu, an author, wrote a book called "Din Lumea celor care nu Cuvânta" which translated, means "From the world of those who do not speak." This book is about animals, if i recall correctly, and it contains stories about animals, with animals. I'm interested in the last word of his title, "cuvânta," which means to speak, but more concretely refers to wording something. Cuvânt means word. And i want to say that the feeling of home that is underneath this particular earth, one that is everywhere here, in this place, its connotations i recognise, its corners and wall faces, its gestures and quotable troubles, its air and airwaves, is something i'm probably not going to be able to cuvânt to anyone, not even my double-citizen self. To end, i word this: the 'i' graphemically represents my being with some pointed accuracy. The bottom 'stand/base/body' remains steady and holds up the 'head/ornament/globe' which floats above it. The head is separate from the body, though they are undoubtedly linked. Even though my head has been constructed double-hemispherically, both here and there, it cannot grasp the piece of earth below it, wherever it finds itself. What it is doing, however, is enjoying the air and gravity that's holding it, sculpting it, eroding it.
Ironically, figuring out where i am is a bit like scratching the bottom island jutting out of my chin, hoping to unearth the cables that tie it to the ground. Maybe they will have been labelled with bar codes, numbers, the names of proprietors, addresses to corners in unvisited rooms since Communism. Maybe it falls down to smoke listening over land, unnatural to my nostrils but grazed on thirstily anyway. The reason i pick up the pages is that the sense of deciphration tickles.
There are several versions of the line that you can draw. i am bi an unfoldin, tapered as a wick child waiting for its saluting blaze. there was a summer on that hill.
i didn't let the piano finish, now it has to start again.
so es i sei, i am bi an unfoldin in the world, sitting thinking about whether i should be sitting while sleeping with part of myself tucked away. it doesn't look like anything, if you're asking. here's a question: have you ever wondered what the world would be like if there were just shadows, and no peaks nor pencils to cast them. just silhouettes and witnesses noting surfaces as they creep along the sun, which would exist, so as to cast.
the piano just started again,
and an uphilling grace that pushes me to encounter. imagine a world of paper, you fall into it and the folds and creases soften your gravity, and you amble through, folding the world as you go looking for where you're going. you look back and see a long trench marking where you have walked, a long way from hope and aspirations. this world just holds your attention and the attention you paid to where you were going. it learns you as a crane, as you fold.
this time the piano finished
there's the contour of the keys, a long white set of teeth in a stuck jaw that manages to voice its concern by being pressed into its gums, and we take that for melody, you and i. we take that for beautiful. but i think i'm finding something else, bi this unfoldin: the question whether i am inside the unfoldin. the air is perfumous, slowly condensating on the walls of my nostrils and my ears are whispering the breezes of the chattering songs. i'll find questions, when i'm asking questions as i am now, bi this unfoldin. i find myself wondering whether i should be in motion, shifted
then there's a silence, and my awninged eyelids want to fall for the night, so i resume my place bi the unfoldin, from where i'd never left but through door's thinking, and i continue to wander
Signifying is more like pushing a paper boat on a fountain bed, ripples outwarding edging whoknowswhere shores (and less like closing a fist tight enough that nails sculpt the palm
Meaning is pointing in the general direction of the horizon, spanning a string (invisibled the length of one corner of the eye to th'other. Tying one ripple's end to understanding, one to naught, and passing it between teeth, chewing each getting-at, (metaphorically and getting stuck
You can also find me on tumblr at http://hyphonowlet.tumblr.com/
Thank you for your presence and readership. And upon leaving, may you take a pocket of stillness with you, and a smile within, to share with everything.
