I have been sitting on this beach for days,
mind a hollow womb for the worthy child to grow within
who will eagerly greet the future with an aurora borealis smile.
Now I am only mothering an empty sadness,
which renders everything impotent that allows me to concieve.
All I am capable of is staying here,
staring into the horizon with eyes unseeing,
waiting for an orange globe which never sets or rises,
as heavy silt of the past washes to the shore
coating my naked toes in its grime.
When we first fell in love I had stalker tendencies.
Facebook perving:
“Wow he gets drunk a lot.”
“He’s obsessed with the invention of lab grown meat?”
“Oh my god she is so much hotter than me.”
I would watch you,
as you slept or cooked me dinner or got undressed to shower.
Every morning through the window when you left,
striding in your tall way up the pavement,
two stairs a time on the overhead bridge,
walking walking walking away until I couldn’t see you anymore.
I would lie back in bed and marvel at how happy I was.
Then I would get to work as soon as I could to talk to you online.
You didn’t feel real,
nothing felt real for a while.
My favourite Aunt told me this:
Always be with someone who loves you more than you love them,
and I was afraid because that wasn’t happening.
I wanted to be around you all the time,
laugh at your jokes that took me a while to grasp,
I wanted to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with you,
I wanted us to lie next to each other dreaming,
and wake up after you so that I could tell you straight away
about the other dimension I had been in while you were gone.
I wanted to be with you.
It was terrifying watching you cross that overhead bridge,
every step you took away from me made the colours I saw a bit dimmer.
I would be waiting for you from the moment you left,
to come back and make everything neon again.
I never knew when you would return but you did,
walking walking walking across that bridge with your powerful walk,
tripping down the stairs to the concrete and me waiting at the window.
Stalking you.
Amazed that you wanted to belong to me and be around me just as much,
you wanted me to be happy with you,
you wanted to exchange half of your soul for half of mine.
I told you a while ago about how I watch you from the bedroom window.
Yesterday you told me I was a liar,
you had looked back from the pavement below,
over and over you had looked back,
but you hadn’t seen me watching you.
I replied: I am not a liar,
I just don’t watch you anymore. It’s different now.
When you cross that overhead bridge you haven’t really left me,
I can still feel you there until the instant your unreal skin is under my palm again.
She was standing in a puddle of water,
waiting for an electrical storm to come.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, she didn’t hear me.
Rain was beating down on her upturned face.
“Get back inside the house!” I screamed.
The sky was flashing so I tried to drag her skinny arms,
but all she did say was “I’m washing it away, I’m washing it away”.
As long as I can remember, my mother was bruised.
sometimes there were only tiny bruises,
like ignorant ink-saliva ants had bitten her around the neck.
Other times she was bruised on the inside,
and some of the blue-black gleamed through her eyes.
These times it could stay within her for days,
and a sheen of sadness would block her from vision.
When the storm sounds would come,
I would sit with my back against the door,
listening and wishing that I had the courage to stop it,
but I never would.
I always knew when it was coming, though.
She had bought the wrong detergent,
or spent too long getting me from school.
She had dressed too provocatively for work,
or replied a little too rudely.
One day lightning under her skin left thin slashes on her wrists.
She had been crying in the bathroom for an hour,
but his voice was so loud that he didn’t hear it.
When she came out it was the first time I had seen
anything but bruises mark her delicate skin.
I thought that I would rather have her bruised than struck by lightning,
I didn’t realise that they might have the same effect.
I hated him but I was so afraid.
The last time, he threw a glass ashtray at her.
It shattered next to her head like a crash of thunder,
trapping her against a wall completely defenceless.
I told her then that she needed to leave, and she did.
My mother has not been bruised by a storm in 5 years,
now there are only diamonds around her neck, that sparkle in her eyes.
Yet when I am falling in love I find myself vigilant,
ears sensitive to the sound of approaching thunder.
I will never be with anybody whose voice is too loud to hear my cries,
I will never be with anybody who will leave me more bruised than sparkling,
and I will never be with anybody who leaves me standing in a puddle of water,
lit with the reflections of a coming electrical storm.
Completeness.
There is always going to be a little part of me missing…
in my mother’s womb from her last push,
under my sister’s fingernails from our fights,
a pool of tears my best friend has collected,
and a fragment of my soul with the man I love.
Love.
Most of the love I’ve had in my life I didn’t know was there
until hindsight hit me like noon sunlight.
The teacher who said with conviction “Deborah, you are enough.”
My sister always giving me the last chocolate chip cookie.
The first time in 19 years my dad came to see me on stage
and my mom’s packed lunches that I used to give away.
These events were love, and I remember them gratefully.
Do I also exist the same way in somebody else’s memory?
Memory.
I am made up entirely of memories,
sketches of people who have been around me
and meant enough to become some of who I am,
living cells of the past growing inside me.
They pump through my heart valves,
dance underneath my membranes,
sometimes they evaporate from my skin
to make room for more important ones.
Memories are everywhere,
carried in the smoke from a forest fire,
passed from tongue to tongue,
rustling like secrets in trees,
or hopping from one generation to another.
One.
We are actually one massive being, overlapping to infinity.
Six degrees of separation and one degree to a shared moment,
memories with each other kept for later,
bits of other beings changing the way we think, believe, act, speak.
The spaces that are left in me;
the parts that are missing are filled with somebody else,
and that’s all we are – other people’s fractured reflections,
coming together to make each of us whole.
Whole.
Then the day came that you asked
“Give me your hand”
but I was afraid.
“Lets run to the end of the earth,
and jump off the edge so the
sun can take us into the sky.”
But I was afraid so you grabbed me by the wrist
and we ran and ran and ran to where we were going
but however far we went,
the sun was already too high to reach.
So we stood on the ground
staring up at where we would never be.
Lying in your queen-sized bed
on the floor of your
pint-sized room,
enclosed by walls and
pockets of silent space
filled with the words
my splitting chest
could no longer take,
I knew I had to say it.
But it took another day
of building my secret
from the bricks of
5.30am clocks and
countless jumbo Asahi cans,
collected sand on
the bottoms of bare feet,
and bursts of laughter
shooting through a soundtrack
of computer speakers.
I kept it inside me
until a frozen moment
nakedly hanging out of
the bedroom window,
puffs of nicotine
spiralling out of control
from my swelling mouth
which took the words
“I love you” with them.
Then your arms around me
pulling tight from behind,
a searching nose
drunkenly buried in
my nest of wild snakes
which reached out to
hold you closer and
not let loose,
to envenom you with
some addictive poison.
We toppled,
down into an
unbreakable clutch
which needed
nothing further in perfection
but four words
I might have heard
in harmony with my own,
different from the
word which you moaned,
reverberating through
all the air remaining,
waiting to be filled.
“Duuuuude…”
I suppose I am grateful
you said anything at all.
Just a normal conversation
during intermission.
Trace my line of vision
as I recall an event
like no other
the way each event
is different,
but this one
in particular,
with a man
i’ll remember.
We dangle lit cigarettes
from fingers which
did not find their way
to animated mouths,
gathering grey as
paper and tobacco
burn to ash.
I speak to
clever brown eyes,
a T-shirt and trousers
deserving no mention
or notice.
I produce words
From my lips
as I always do,
until I am kept quiet.
On this occasion
by the two feet
I was talking to
wearing not a pair,
but two different shoes.
It made me confused.
Enough to stop
Mouth open, mid-thought,
and move my pupils
Up and down,
back to start
before I said,
baffled.
“Why are you wearing two different shoes?”
Accusatory.
Not understanding.
“Why not?”
Challengingly.
Truthful.
Why not indeed?
Why not indeed.
If I place myself
at a time when I believed
that things can last forever
that time would be
what has already gone.
which is why in this moment
sitting across from you
backlit from the slanting
late afternoon sun
across the rooftop cement
of an expat-centric coffee house
you look like a stranger.
Hello, we said
hello with our bodies and faces
against each other’s for a bit too long.
Hello, we said
as I was unable to look you in the eyes
for the same length I used to,
facing each other across soft pillows,
with alcohol-induced desire across dancefloors,
locked gazes across smoke-filled rooms.
Hello, we said
How was your weekend?
How was your month?
Unfamiliar questions after
years when we always knew
exactly what time
we would finish work
or the plan for
dinner or
hanging out the washing
or our next holiday.
Hello, we said.
An invisible sheet of glass between us,
like the glass which separated us for a year,
through which we spoke,
and through television screens,
as you just waited for me
to come outside and
see the world anew,
you steadily next to me.
Hello we said after the
six month-old goodbye,
prolonged as we extricated
ourselves from each other’s grasping fingers,
not ready to let go
but having to eventually
because it could never be,
because I couldn’t sacrifice my youth
for a premature family,
because I wanted to know.
And I didn’t know.
But you never know, do you?
Yet THIS, I am sure of.
All of my experiences,
all of my existence
to this breath has told me
that things never last forever.
So there is no reason to try
pushing them over the edge,
because they will fall
and break into an infinite
number of pieces which
cannot be put back together again.
Which is why
now I say hello and goodbye
to many others.
To many souls and
many skins and many hearts
which I choose to fill
with pieces of my own,
but never whole.
Because whole means forever,
and the only forever I had
is the stranger sitting across from me.
I wrote this after a surreal meeting with my ex who has been most prominent through my many relationships. I miss him and I loved him with all my heart but I had to find other things. I saw him after a month of abstinence and it felt like I didn’t know him anymore, and that I didn’t know how we would ever be friends. I wrote this a couple of weeks ago.
Where is my voice-
Have you seen her?
I cannot find my voice.
Have you heard her?
The first time she
made herself known,
I was but an infant
milliseconds old and
out she came from shallow
in my chest to dance upon
the ears of the
delivery theatre,
my mother, my doctor,
with her shrill sound,
Unafraid.
Where is my voice-
Have you seen her?
I cannot find my voice.
Have you heard her?
I remember how
I looked upon
her joyful noise
a few years past
in the
cacophonous playground
surrounded by
all the friends I used to have,
as she was
bouncing off the
sand and sky,
perched upon a
yellow rubber ball,
not another laughing child
able to catch her.
So I ask-
Where is my voice-
I cannot find her.
Perhaps she got lost
one night when
darkness blinded her
and a dirty cloth
muffled her screams.
When nobody heard her
come to any good use
when she wanted to be heard
most of all,
so it didn’t make sense
to be heard again.
Perhaps that is when
my voice decided
to not come back.
This was written for a student in one of my classes who did not speak. It could have been for a number of reasons, but they would all have been negative. That made me unhappy, because I think with intervention and care she would be open again. October 2011.
If a single seed is what I’m given,
This is what I’ll sow:
A filigree of organised ink
Upon a blank white page,
A canvas for the creation of
A voice come to fruition
From conflict, unrest, unrested.
If all I have is a piece of wood,
From a fallen tree
Upon sprawling dilapidated grounds
Full of colour and art,
This is what I’ll carve:
Grooves of a nation’s seabed,
In the middle of a contested ocean.
A billow of viscous liquid
Darkened with the pigment of greed,
Rich drills pummelling deep into the earth
To break it apart and gather
Richness from its well,
A bucket seven, eleven, till heaven-fold
Full of money which won’t all go where it should.
If all I can use is one word,
This is what it’ll be:
Injustice.
The tonnes upon tonnes of
Wet wealth piped to the wrong place,
Potential left unused, underutilised
Refined by foreign intervention,
Funding decorations to
Already existing infrastructure,
Already existing buildings,
Already existing schools,
Already existing hospitals,
Already existing, already existing, already existing
When all that exists in the home of the gold and beautiful people is
Dirty streets, old cars, thin children receiving
A useless education and
insufficient sanitation.
If all I could dream was a final dream,
Staring into the face of this independent being with
An endless ocean and an orange smile,
Swaying palm trees that dance with
The entrancing tradition of
Giving love with the body and spirit,
So open, hearts exposed to a stranger like me
A traveller who was there to help but
Received much more,
If all I could dream was a final dream,
I would imagine this:
Equality,
Safety,
Provision,
Longer life,
Happiness from within
which shines through on the
face of this living thing,
beauty that everyone can see.
If all I could exhibit was one last photograph,
This is the picture I would take:
Everything I have seen,
So everyone would know.
If I could do one last thing,
I would have to choose
between so many.
In the few moments
Before the sun sets,
This is for Timor Leste.
I wrote this during a trip to East Timor after realizing how hard it is for a poverty-stricken country to pull themselves out of their ditch when their natural resources are not fully profiting them. We attended a discussion with the Minister of State for Natural Resources and I received insight about foreign intervention in the processing of gold and oil. September 2011.
