This getting older
It feels like confidence and
Competence and clarity
And yet it looks like
Mechanical wear and tear
– betrayal by the body.
Category: Self
Body Pains
My knee aches today
But not my heart, that one is
Pumping baby, like
I am ready to face this day just right after this coffee…
the artist
breathes air between the tip of a finger and a canvas.
Last Encounters
I was looking at her. I said I think I may be having a heart attack. She told me it was anxiety. She said she had Googled it. I believed her, there had been many nights of broken sleep and high heart rates. No seriously I said, my chest hurts. My throat hurts. And no, […]
Love just yet
A time when so much lay ahead And you lay in my bed When we were young And not yet old Battle Scars Life None of it set in just yet Just a thank christ we had met.
Charactery
They bottleneck In my throat It aches: I float away. They break bank – And flood me: Rapid pulse The current It takes me.
Running
Of late I feel I am running from, and I am over it. It is exhausting and I have blisters. I don’t even know if these metaphorical saline bubbles are on my heels, my toes or surrounding my soul. I just know that my own desire for escape has given rise to a game of […]
Don’t feed the dog
If you animated grief I reckon it would be one of those dogs on the beach in Thailand. The kind that hobble along a few meters behind you, and sleep at the window while you relax in your air conditioned, German owned, ‘nouveau riche’ Thai operated concrete Villa. He would be the one you made eye […]
circulate
I roused to almost wake and thought: My veins, I want to feel me in my veins To flow through my heart and breathe Oxygen through arteries into my self.
Who is that?
Once you know you have food, shelter and a fair chance of not being shot at by militants (either voted in or not) you have the luxury to climb further up Maslow’s pile of rubble and check out the view. That would be you and I, standing there, because lets face it, I have the time and resources to be writing this crap and you have the equal luxury to read it.
Whilst granting it as a privilege, the question of who is that ? (who am I?) is pretty important, and having the time to pause on it, I have to say it’s pretty bloody hard to answer. I have been searching for the right response in a cardboard box of black and white photographs recently. I haven’t found it, though. I have a sneaking suspicion that is because photographs capture images, not identities. And then my question is why don’t photographs tell you who you are? They lay clues for sure. But they only help jog your memory. And only if they are the right photographs. This month I have stared at many wrong ones. Take this image, for example:
I have no idea who these people are. My Dad was a photographer, and this is one of the thousands of images he has kept. It could be his first friend in Australia, Brian Rycroft, marrying his sweetheart Shirley (they are still together, by the way). But having never seen Brian, I could be wrong. It could be a stranger, who paid Dad to photograph his engagement. Or birthday or something. And then this one:
Nope, no idea who this is either. Did she have children? did she leave her husband for a woman? is she alive and is she well? was life a struggle? who gave her the horseshoe? I have found photographs of people I do know, including photographs of me. I must say though, that I look upon them in much the same way, with the same questioning curiosity. They look like photographs of someone that I might have been, had I grown up to be me. Sounds deep and a little fucked up, yeah? It is. I am. Just a little. But at least I am looking. I dare you to open that box of photographs one Saturday, with the rain falling outside, and the dog sleeping on her mat. You’d be surprised how foreign you can seem, in black and white.
