Delicious

The berries brought on the madness but the people ate them anyway. They couldn’t help it. The berries were delicious. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner; billionaire, beggar, and babe – the people of the planet gobbled berries by the fistful, desperate and craven, cramming fruits down their throats frantic always for more more more. And the fruits themselves! Winking diodes clustered like inverted pyramids; dew drop orbs, crystalline translucent – twisted aloft to the burning orange sun would elicit alembicated hues of indigo-violet-vermillion; peering deeper now, beneath the skin, a complex shadow-play of Rorschach shapes; veined spore tangled and billowing like nebulae unfurling. They were mesmerising; ensorcelling; a vortex. You could never have just one… But the real pleasure began when lips met flesh in heady lust and stained teeth tingling with that first electric shock pierced release in a sudden jet the wild, abstruse epiphany of taste as tongue now alive with vibrant violent shockwaves of delight swallowed into the body a trill of pure deliciousness. The fruits were like nothing else in the history of the planet. Tiny morsels of moreself; heady drug and body of the deity; canape and seven-course-meal; resplendent tea and redneck moonshine: whatever the imbiber’s appetite the berries provided in abundance. Well. At least. The illusion of... For you see the more the people ate the hungrier they felt. And the more they imbibed the more ravenous they became. They gorged! They ravaged! They munched and chewed and sucked and swallowed. They clutched by the handful and gnashed with mouthes open, juices squirting down both cheeks, eyes glazed at the sundry pleasures of the glut, the frenzy, the feast. Yet were they satisfied? Did they cease? Did their endless appetites sate? No. They were hollow. It was like eating bubbles. Even as their stuffed stomachs were crammed and bloated their wailing moans rose as one in a pitiful chorus of perpetual hunger. They awoke reaching for berries. They fell asleep with berries staining their pillows. The fruits grew wild through the planet, tangled up brickwork in the cities, vines strangling the ruins of their once-peaceful metropolises, and yet the people died of starvation. From whence the berries sprung nobody quite recalled. And yet in a few short decades the berry-eaters could not remember a time before; if you were to ask them, they would have said they’d always eaten the fruits. They forgot how to cook. They forgot the names of their favourite meals. They forgot the words for eggs, for milk, for rice, for chicken, for table, for kitchen, for menu. They forgot cuisines, and so they forgot their cultures. And as their bodies became frail and withered and suffered from lack of nutrition, as their minds broke down, the people cared little. The berries brought on the madness, oh yes, and the people ate them anyway. They couldn’t help it. The madness was delicious.

At the Bazaar

The photos were good. He could tell that. But there was something else, too.

He studied the picture which so transfixed him. Coca-Cola sign - trademark red and opalescent white - badged upon a sky of shocking, ozone blue. Edging the frame, the canyon-coloured brick of a service station to which the sign was fixed and beyond: a parched highway stretching unto endless desert.

Restlessness stirred.

The image was set in a thick, matte red frame with a fluro yellow dot stuck to it. $15. He didn’t have the money. 

He lifted the photo from the table in both hands, delighting in its weight and heft. He turned it over. On the back, in looping, elegant pen: Montana, USA, 1994. He would’ve been ten, maybe even nine. How old would she have been?

He looked again at the photographer.

She lingered in the shade back from the stall, face partially obscured by a floppy, wide-brimmed hat. She wore a light dress, for the day was hot. He couldn’t tell if she returned his look, or if her gaze was turned upon the trickle of folk who’d somehow stumbled to this cranny of the bazaar. He was the only one here and he was conscious of how long he’d been studying her photos without offering to buy any. Others had come and gone. She’d smiled nicely and made some brief hellos in French-accented-English. But nobody had stopped long. She seemed not to care for making conversations or sales. She allowed them to drift and she continued to observe, cat-like.

He believed she was considering him. He didn't know why he thought that. Normally, this would have embarrassed him. But there was something else keeping him here. And he needed to know. The restlessness was stronger than his shame.

Abruptly, she moved closer, into the sunlight, until they were separated only by her display. Her movements were awkward, as if unsure of her intentions. She met his gaze. 

‘This one you like, oui?’ She questioned, uncertainly.

‘They’re all good,’ he stated, eyebrows drawn together in concentration. He looked at the Coca-Cola photo again, still held in his hands. ‘This one is very good.’ He heard the truth and the confusion in his voice, the restlessness pooled and resonant in his chest, stretching out to the photo, to the photographer - the unasked question of, why is it good?

She laughed, nervously. ‘Oui. Uh, this one, I like also.’ 

From beneath the darkness of her sunhat she peered at him. ‘You are an artist also, oui?’

He paused, then nodded, ‘I write.’

‘You have travelled?’

He looked at the distance stretching in the photo he held, at the many distant lands arranged across her table. He shook his head.

‘You must,’ she asserted. ‘For artists, travel is essential.’

‘I want to go to England. To Europe. Next year - when I’m- I’m half-English. I can get a Visa.’

He heard his youth, his eagerness. Her smile did not change. He wanted to keep speaking, to say everything, anything, to ask a million questions about her art, how she knew – if it was the same as how he did, sometimes – he wanted to talk about the want. He felt that he was walking a tightrope. He felt that every word must be carefully considered. He felt he could make no error.

‘There you are!’

His mother’s voice broke the reverie like a twig beneath a boot, breathless from the hill as she said, ‘I’ve been waiting at the car, I thought you’d gotten– oh.’ 

He saw the photographer's mask fix, saw her shrink into the shadows of her hat. Felt his bony limbs in his t-shirt, his braces pressing against the inside of his lips, the too-hot sun on his skin.

His mother smiled at them both, then peered at her son, at the image he held.

'Oh that's lovely. Do you want it? Do you have enough?’

He felt the photographer observing.

‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘No.’

His mother began searching through her handbag. Without looking up she asked, ‘Do you have change for a twenty?’

The photographer politely smiled. ‘Oui.’

Others had drifted to the stall now and were browsing. The photographer floated to her moneybox in the shade. She bade hellos at the new arrivals. A neighbouring stallholder made a comment. The photographer laughed.

His mother pulled out a twenty, gave it to him. ‘You pay for it,’ she whispered.

The photographer returned, face hidden in the shadows of her sunhat. She held out her hands. He passed her the photo. She slipped it into a brown paper package, sealed it with translucent tape. He passed her the twenty. She returned him a five dollar note.

‘Did he tell you that he writes?’ Brightly asked his mother.

The photographer handed back the photo, looking at her other customers.

‘Oui.’

pit of sound

i fell into a pit of sound and hovered on vibration
the demons there they swooped around and shrieked their indignation
yet reckless i persuaded violently my integration
now heart and soul chew vibrant death and mull manipulation

In Hunger of Words

i have been at war with myself. something in me wants to quit; or else having now summited the pinnacle, scans the ganzfield horizon only to find an echo in the soul that whispers, "Is this it?" i am in want of meaning. i am in hunger of words. i crave a quiet cabin in a nook somewhere with paperbacks and pens and parchment and the effortless quiet that seeps in between the floorboards on frosty mornings while waiting for the kettle to boil.

we went walking to watch the roos go bounding at twilight. a man came stomping down the road toward us dressed all in black with a walking stick that seemed wrought, not found. a large hound, sleek and muscular and at ease with its own presence in the world trotted ahead to snuffle about in someone's yard. the man wore tight pants with a hooded jacket that looked suitable to the weather, which was growing cold in that way that the early days of autumn have. his hair had once been dark; was not yet grey. there was something Mediterranean about his features. olive skinned. weathered. angular. a long beard that was not unkempt, and grey-white-black, reflecting his hair. his eyes were dark; they did not shy away from us. there was recognition; travellers on the path. he greeted us, then whistled for the dog to come, which it did, in its own time. they slipped away into the crepuscular haze. i wanted to be him; hermit of the tarot. i craved what he had secured.

everyone finds their own way through, i suppose. what will be will be. how much longer am i to persist at this mirage? sometimes i feel as though the universe is poised upon me. egocentricism, probably. and yet...

will we, won't we. will we, won't we. will we... 

...it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter at all.

temper, temper, tempest

 Temper, temper, hold yourself

 

    Your heart

    It quivers

 

The soft, downy fur 

of a calf, bare

against the wet 

& hidden damp 

of late night

Spring,

Storm receding

        or rolling in

 

Caught between 

one thing 

with two names

Cryptic Calisthenics

Every morning during the mid-morning coffee rush I watch from behind the espresso machine as the elderly Asian woman glides out laps of University Square.

Wiry hair pinned beneath translucent green visor saluting the sky, tan foundation all thickened and cracked - past serious students and prosaic professors she hustles, tongue-pink jumpsuit whistling like sneakers sliding through piles of dry leaves, arms and wrists tossed and flicked lazily up and out in some vague gesture of a cryptic calisthenics obscure in origin.

Around she goes. And around again. Every morning.

Each time she passes she turns her head to the cafe. We make eye contact, me from behind my coffee machine, her from beneath her visor. We study one another.

She always matches my gaze, eyes as bright as sunrise. Over the heads of scholars thronging, frowning, nodding, pondering. I grin. And she grins back.

This is how I come to suspect we have both lost touch with reality. Clearly, we are happy.

Open sesame

I lived inside a box in my mind
And somehow I found a door

When I opened it up, I realised
There was never a box at all