What happens when the weather wrecks your plans

Owen T liked to see that things were always in their proper place. There was most certainly a proper place for everything, even things that did not initially appear tangible enough to manifest themselves in a concrete physical location. Whilst he walked through Bristol’s streets (in the St Pauls vicinity) - on a date most likely just before the 18th of January, but just after the 16th - he noted that the communal bins introduced for household waste were not quite evenly spaced and made a mental note of it. Later that day, he placed all the people that passed him in a coherent and logical order, according to the hue of their woolen jumpers. The problem occurred, of course, when it began to rain, and everyone’s laniferous garments, which were tied up to their necks, wept deeply down their bodies, until the pavement was a multicoloured frenzy. Everyone was left standing gray. Then Owen T sighed and began the whole business again. This time he ordered people by height, which he thought was much more sensible.

At the counter with fish lips

The time was two o'clock. Evidently it was in the afternoon, because no one writes about things in the morning.

There were two, and the counter stood between them. As she (her) made with him (he) that calculable verbal interchange; some nouns mixed up with verbs and adjectives, he wondered if these varied articulations were discharged just to fill up empty space. What else was there to fill? Her salmon lips routinely lunged open and shut; the tongue and jaw acted their parts in the way that one expects them to do so. Across the glass that thing, some ordinary thing, was exchanged for paper money. There were more words to be had.
"See you later," said the fish lips. "See you some other day."
"Yes," he said. "See you then. See you sometime that day."

He had thought about telling her she was pretty in that uniform, then had decided she was not.

Phosphorescence

There was pointing at buildings and a knowing glance, a nod and a smile of shared knowledge, as if a few years of sitting passively behind a stern, fractured desk had imbued us both with an infinitely superior depth of perception. There was a box of used paints and some good firm brushes. You, the previous owner, had only made abstemious use of them and had little appetite for dilution. There were measured steps, taken arm in arm, down a rocky road. There were no figures of speech, just literal rocks scattered across gravel.

There was the story of an American teacher whose heady southern voice was as thick as the austral inner of her thighs. She liked porn and Italian high renaissance art. Her elbows cracked with the weariness of repeated gesticulation, after nights begging austere security guards in earnest for permission to bend the rules. She had done it for a whole year and was just about to relinquish, until one night she was ushered in quietly through an unassuming doorway. She lay on the cold tiled floor of the Sistine chapel, worn well by the tired footprints of check boxing tourists, and watched Michelangelo's frescoes light up like candles over her head. There was no other sky.

He and I, we both, we two, we came to a doorway amongst the night's blackness. There was a lock and a key and a staircase that wound around just as far as you would expect. There was a studio and thirty seven abandoned easels.

I took a break. I had a breath. I breathed it deeply, until my lungs capitulated. I went outside. I came back inside.

Then there were we two and nothing at all. Us in the studio, us on the top level; where layers of semi congealed paint caked on top of one another, and eventually collapsed under the weight of the Mississippi bordered midwest. The air was clogged with the cries of fractured completion and disbelief at the lead transferral making its way from the wood of the desk tops to us. There was morning and foggy air thick with residue. There was a man with his pigeons and it was done.

Muffin (the owner)

Doris waits, I'm on hold
My formulaic appeals for your ears
I'm sorry for these slight and sudden disjunctions

The ache of my spine: an edit

I broke my spine today, or at least it feels as though it were today. It makes all the things I used to do almost impossible, especially getting about to all those important appointments, here, there and nearly always via bus. Things don't look so professional when you roll determinedly to your morning meeting with the clipboard clumsily masking-taped eighteen times around your chest, for fear of loss. Yes, my spine was quite vital in enabling the performance of those daily tasks I used to have. It supported my whole being. It arched neatly upon request.

I'm in the living room now, there are high ceilings and some generic family portraits and a thin veneer of dust upon the little tables near the lounges. The room is rather big and so my thoughts are uncontained, they float around through the doorways and across the beige painted walls. The silence hits, the inaudible engulfs. It dawns on me that not only is my back snapped, or my spine, or whatever, but my ribs feel dismembered like confetti. The organs underneath are robbed of that fundamental, drumming beat, a snare against the left hand side.

How did I do it? A hammer split the chord, short and sharp. He held it a little uncertainly at first; tapping gently across my white, pale skin as if testing the waters. Then he mustered all his might, heaved a little, and thrust it down until I shattered.

The Reality of the Thing
When I close my eyes and the domestic surrounds dissipate, there’s a city of clouds (both layered and convective) ready to embrace. The air will inevitably absorb all that water hanging about and the mixture, in all its brilliant parts, will rise to the heavens. And yet it’s your face that usurps my attention, emerging ugly from the mass of frozen atmospheric crystals and pasting itself over my eyes. It’s your face (stretchy skin, pulling taut). It’s the carving of our names; it’s the shatter of my spine. It’s the birthday gifts in tidy bags. It’s the checked shirt; it’s the collared tee. It’s the nightly runs. It’s the quips and wit. It’s the last thing I think of. It’s slowly and it’s surely. It’s all the words I’ve ever written, all the letters planned. It's you smashing at me with your bright new hammer. It’s the shredder turned to maximum. It’s the whiteout in my hand. It’s the wetness on the cheek. It’s the pounding in my ears. Yes, it’s all these reverberations. They’re getting louder, indistinguishable. I want to cut off my ears, or blast them empty. Van Gough did that didn't he?

I want to dive until I'm dry, I want to shred off my skull. Unfortunately that would prove a little difficult, since I can barely move my shriveled, fetus-like figure off this infernal living room rug.




A slightly edited version of The Ache of My Spine was published in conconversation, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music publication, in Issue 2, 2011.

In chronological order, H and then Lee

Cost omitted
Nightly
Wrapped up in cars like tight old cons
a well worn track home
she serves us nicely, doesn’t she?

Twist, twist, twist
an interior pit
Night shakes the bull ring nose, quieter still
Your pleasures are insatiable, aren’t they?
no need to be nervous, I’m here
till whatever later might feel like