:thereisalightandawhistle:

Sometimes mid flight, what you really need is a sturdy shoulder to lean on. In order to get some shuteye. Take my 9pm flight home from Queensland last week, for instance. I was exhausted. As in, well & truly beat, gone-for-all-money style exhaustion. Gone for all Rinehart's money, even. I'm sure you appreciate that's a reasonable degree of lassitude. Irrespective of the fact I'd had a relatively easy week, munching sushi & ice-creams with one 18 month old godson & occasionally burping his five month old bro (and fellow godson), I was utterly annihilated.

My flight up was a godsend. The supremely camp check-in clerk expressed his resounding approval of my early-AM airport attire by rewarding me with wonderfully cushy seating… ipso facto, I scored the entire front row in which to luxuriate like the eight-foot goddess I most certainly am not. You can understand my disgust, then, when discovering the seating arrangements for my long-awaited journey home to the Melbourne frost. Unlike my dream run up, this time I found myself wedged alongside Australia's Most Woeful. And his equally impressive mate, Next Top Moron. In their very own instalment of The Amazing Race: Alcoholic Annihilation At Altitude. AA of another kind. Forget Straight Outta Compton - we're talking Fresh Outta Frankston. Or Beaudesert, or Blacktown, or Dubbo, or Rockingham. And any other hideous, dentally deficient town you care to shake a Bundy can at.

Mike Whitney could well have lobbed in the aisle, in full 'fro-haired glory, to host a scintillating episode of Who Swears Wins, and it wouldn't have seemed out of place. Between talk of their weekend "banging broads" (HONESTLY), and "sorting out" the "Cavill crew" (I imagined an equally illiterate mob of Ed Hardy-clad meatheads, squaring up from the wrong side of the Indy-500 track), they also managed to throw some conversational morsels over their sizeable trapezoids from starboard to port. In my direction, that is. I could barely contain my scorn when asked whether I wanted to partake in one of their drinking games. Having to bear witness to it was enough, I'd have thought. Not the case. They were rather insistent, until the point at which I let slip the word "fuck" in sheer exasperation. Well, weren't they incensed. So began their concerted effort to prove they could find more ways to use the word than I could. I was too exhausted to teach them otherwise, but my WORD how I could have schooled those two beefed-up punks from here to kingdom come.

I'm not sure how much of a judgmental bitch I was when I boarded that flight, but upon disembarking, I could have gone toe-to-toe with the Shannen Doherty motherbitch in Heathers, and comfortably taken that she-witch down. In lieu of any more descriptors I can throw out, I'll give you a visual. One I feel screams ear-shattering volumes.

(G-C-B. Which I'm told stands for Gold Coast Boys. The numerals dancing beneath are 4218. Postcode for Surfers Paradise. Naturally.)

A week has since passed, and I find myself again perched at the boarding gate like the reigning queen of aviation evil. Praying my Monday evening service will be full of too-important-for-small-talk business commuters. Who want little more than to stare solemnly at their window shades in a collective silence. This isn't long-haul people.

(G-C-B. Which I'm told stands for Gold Coast Boys. The numerals dancing beneath are 4218. Postcode for Surfers Paradise. Naturally.)

A week has since passed, and I find myself again perched at the boarding gate like the reigning queen of aviation evil. Praying my Monday evening service will be full of too-important-for-small-talk business commuters. Who want little more than to stare solemnly at their window shades in a collective silence. This isn't long-haul people.

:slowdancenorhythm:

In heartbreaking waltz

To this clumsy massacre

I see him hewed to a human husk

I want to take away the haze of his enfeebling pain

To seal over his hurt

And in a submarine send it

To the ocean bed he’ll never reach

I want to catch his cascade of tears in a goblet of gold

And one day baptise him

With a beauty he is now blind to 

I want to howl with him

Lay with him

Stay with him

Until all of this abates

I want to free him from this sentence

Of self-imposed exile

A man drawn and quartered

Contorted and cornered

Maculated by a tide of fate & fury

I yearn for the day he is liberated

From the turgid malaise

I want to show him a still-frame

Of himself in coming years

Taken at a time when he smiles unprompted

Feels deeply

Is giddily in love

Whole again

Transfixed by the ebullience of life

I want to shine a light into his heart

Massage it gently until it beats the will to live

Rather than a dull automation

I long to spare him this demon

For a quickening agent

To absolve his interminable affliction

By fuck he is broken

:vapors:

I walk in to find

You lose your beautiful mind

Fingers spill all over your face

I see you not seeing the light

I see you give up your last fight

A single ray becomes a fragmented spectre

I burst in in time

To watch you drown your poor harrowed mind

I will not stay for the slaughter

I cannot stay as the vultures feast

I leap up too late

As you whittle away

The fraying edge of your heart

Leaving only a jutting lip

Falling away to a baleful precipice

I show up in time

To find you lose your only true way

You flicker like an ember in a sandstorm

Heavy as a bag of dust ground from the marrow

Of your demons come to pass

You turn cold

Not the you I once knew

You draw a ragged breath of uncertainty

Begin your laboured descent

A selective fall from grace

I watch you disappear

I know you’ll be back

Even now

I hope you come back

:aspectacularlie:

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Lying is withholding. It's shirking the reality, obscuring it, keeping even the tiniest of personal minutiae concealed. And, at which point you finally admit the lie, you concede unhappiness. In a situation, in your fellow man, the third party. For the most part, in yourself. 

Some kind of major unhappiness created the lie, caused you to lie. Fed that lie love and grew that lie strength. Housed that lie and bathed that lie, groomed it and pruned it, and fostered it and cherished it.

And then the reality sets in. You not only lived with that lie, nestled comfortably alongside it, but you lived that lie unequivocally. You embodied it, imbued it, became it, took ownership of it. Invested time unto it. You breathed into this lie a spirit. The fact that you dressed up your lie and gave it a name and carried it with you on outings one-and-twenty means you perpetuated this great vilification.

What's more, it means I will never again know whether you are telling a lie or a truth. Or whether you in fact know which is which of your own self. Wicked is the web you have woven.

Sometimes darkness is the truth, and the only thing to set you free is light. Sometimes, though, light cannot break for the fury of the lingering storm, the twisted folly of its keeper.

image : ying ang

:tidaldeluge:

Lay down your ragged head

Here beneath my quivering fear

To concede defeat

Is at times the only way forth

Let pass this torrent

Water

Under a tired old bridge

Surrender that turbulent heart

Raise up those empty hands

Dispense with your weapon

In absolution lay repose

There’s so much

Water

Under a decaying bridge

For whom the bell tolls

Not yet apparent

Pale threads fray in homage to the fissure

Do not resuscitate

It’s too much

Water

Under the bridge

Once the dazzling big picture

Now strangled in a deathlock

By a frame too obdurate

Faces stifled by time

The river floods

Water

Bursts its banks

image : chris mcconville

:achromatic:

Sometimes the questions are too much. The thoughts one length too consuming, one level too exhausting, one degree too debilitating. Sometimes the mind condemns the body to physical paralysis, subjects its chemistry to chaos, asphyxiates the heart into a thick and suffocated silence. From the alchemy grows a pernicious anarchy.

Sometimes it’s the slightest of things: a familiar gesture, an avocado sliced just so, a rainbow sunset painfully alike a former rainbow sky. The breath catches in your throat, ragged and shallow. A particular pair of boots. A throwaway comment from a taxi-driver, harking back to the days of yore. Your body flattened and forlorn against a rapidly spinning earth, vertigo long revoking the freedom of forward motion.

Sometimes it’s the eye falling on a date now passed; the mind casting forth kaleidoscope memories all and sundry.  It’s the notion of your future renounced, your past erased, your present slain. Your happiness extinguished.  The summer garden weeded before the flora has come to bloom. A diary flipped open to an unfinished entry, the pen still smarting from the warmth of its master.  A canister of film perished by morning’s first light, precious moments now exposed beyond repair. A future unknown, yet a mind still wondering, regardless. But a future is a perennial unknown, a past a poisoned chalice.

image : ying ang

:tideline:

Communication

Conjugation

Adulation

Dedication

Veneration

Inclination

Affectation

Revelation

Mutilation

Elimination

Disintegration

Isolation

No explanation

Alienation

Trepidation

Devastation

Lamentation

Realisation

Resignation

Abdication

Excavation

Reformation

Cultivation

Elevation

Affirmation

Growth

:thechrysalis:

She spins her cocoon

Weaves the layers thick around her

Inch by inch

Fostering a cushy thickness

Loosely at first

Building a delicate shell

Layer upon layer

She who hungers

Who ploughs and sows and reaps and bides

She who bears the glacial brunt of bodily rime

And withstands the capricious change of season

Who reserves the right

To be three parts hot

And six parts cold

She who plays animal kingdom

In the glorified and giddy human realm

Turns bilious beast upon threat

The tightened strain of her falsetto shrill

Disarming in alacrity

She who lay in wait

She who is

With seasonality comes change

Firm footed in the conviction of her own love

Yet blithely unaware

Of the magnetism of her newly engorged marrow

Be it a hegemonic push

Or an overtly oppressive pull

Influenced by stimuli one way on first glance

And another on reinspection

She is doggedly plagued

Finally assuaged

My heart isn't always consistent

But it's always right

It never fails me

And that's more than I can say for you

Because you've failed me enough

And fuck you if you can't abide that

Because I no longer abide you

image : ying ang